Zack glanced up at the sky, wishing he had a father he could call for advice. He dismissed the thought and turned up Ruggles Street, thinking that tomorrow he’d head to Mass General Hospital’s blood bank, hoping they didn’t screen for poker.
His apartment was only a few blocks away off Huntington Avenue. But a cold drizzle began falling and chilling his face. Another few degrees and the road would be a skim of ice. As he pumped his way onto the avenue, he felt the wad of bills slide up his pocket. With his right hand he pushed down the lump to keep it from working its way out. But doing so left only his other hand to steady the handlebars against an uneven, slick surface.
In a protracted moment, Zack saw the fatal error. His front tire slammed into the jagged edge of a pothole. In the next instant—played out in weird slow motion—the front wheel snapped to the left, sending him flying over the handlebars and coming down dead smack on the top of his head into the base of the crosswalk lights.
In a fraction of a second, Zack was suddenly looking down from someplace above, seeing himself lying crumpled across the curb with his head at the base of the pole and his bike on its side, the front wheel at a crazy angle. In that sliver of awareness, he knew he was viewing things from an impossible perspective. And just as he tried to make sense of it, the moment blinked to total black.
2
Maggie Kashian was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang.
She jerked awake. The digital clock glowed 3:28 A.M. Panic filled her chest. No call after midnight was a good call. Not since that night thirteen years ago when she was told that her firstborn son, Jake, had been murdered by two homophobic thugs.
“Mrs. Kashian?”
“Yes?”
“Are you the mother of Zachary Kashian?”
She felt an ice pick pierce her heart. “Yes.”
“This is Kyle Kerr. I’m the resident physician at the emergency center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Your son Zachary is here. Unfortunately, he was in a bicycle accident and is in our intensive care unit.”
“Oh God, no!”
“The good news is he’s alive and breathing. But he sustained a head injury. He’s unconscious. Is there someone there who can drive you to the hospital?”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“We don’t know at this stage. But if you can get someone to drive you in, that would be good. If not, we can have the local police come for you.”
“How bad is he?”
“He has a concussion and there’s been some subdural bleeding which we’re working on.”
“No, God. This isn’t happening.”
“I’m very sorry to call with such news. But can you get someone to drive you here?”
She tried to concentrate on the question. The only neighbor she was close to, Ginny Steves, was away for the weekend. “No.”
“Then we’ll call the Carleton police.”
She agreed and hung up. Barely able to maintain control, she called her sister, Kate, who lived south of Boston, to meet her at the hospital. She dressed, and within minutes a Carleton squad car showed up in front of the house.
Maggie had only a vague recollection of the drive—sitting in shock in the rear of the cruiser, lights flickering, no siren, no conversation with the officer behind the wheel—her mind iced with fright.
Twenty minutes later, the car pulled up to the entrance of the emergency room. The officer escorted her inside to the reception desk. In a matter of moments, the resident physician, Dr. Kerr, came out.
“How is he?” Maggie said.
“The good news is that there are no broken bones, no damage to his spine or internal bleeding,” the doctor said. “We’ve secured his airways and stabilized his blood pressure. But he experienced trauma to his parietal lobe,” and he put his hand on the left side of his crown. “The CAT scan showed intracranial bleeding, so we performed a procedure to lower the pressure.”
“A procedure?”
“We put a burr hole in his skull to relieve the subdural hematoma.” Dr. Kerr continued, but Maggie nearly passed out at the thought of their drilling a hole in her son’s skull.
“We implanted a pressure bolt to monitor the swelling. It’s normal procedure for this kind of injury. We’re also hyperventilating him to keep his blood pressure augmented.”
“Is he going to have brain damage?” She could barely articulate the words.
“At this point, it’s hard to tell. But he’s young and healthy, and that’s in his favor. But we can’t get a full assessment of brain injury until the swelling subsides. We induced a barbiturate coma to lessen the activity. And we’ll be attending him aggressively to be certain that there’s no swelling.”
While they spoke, Maggie’s sister, Kate, arrived. They hugged, and Maggie told her what the doctor had said.
“I want to see him,” Maggie said. “I want to see him.”
“Certainly.”
“How did it happen?” Kate asked as they headed down the hall.
A Boston police officer took the question. “He was bicycling home and hit a pothole at the corner of Huntington Avenue.”
“He was less than a block from home.”
The officer nodded woefully. “There wasn’t any ice or snow on the streets, but this time of year they get chewed up pretty bad.”
They brought them into the ICU and past a few beds to a cubicle. When they pulled back the curtain, Maggie nearly fainted in horror. Zack lay in a bed, his face bandaged and tubes and wires running from his wrists, neck, and skull to a cluster of beeping monitors. An IV hung above him and a catheter tube ran down his leg to the other side of the bed. His eyes were discolored and swollen closed, and he was breathing on a respirator that was hooked up to an intratracheal tube. His right arm was also bandaged from the fall. For an instant, Maggie could not process that this was her son, not some unfortunate stranger. Then she broke down.
A nurse came in and put a chair beside the bed for Maggie. When she was able to compose herself, she rested a hand on Zack’s arm. “Zack, it’s Mom. I’m right here, honey. You’re going to be all right.”
“The good news is that he’s stable now,” the nurse said, “and his vital signs are strong.”
Maggie nodded. Then she whimpered to herself, “I can’t lose him.”
“You won’t,” Kate said.
“Zack, you’ll be fine. You’re going to wake up soon.” As Maggie said that, she had a fleeting flash of her getting him up for grade school.
Thirteen years ago, Zack’s older brother, Jake, was left to die in a pool of his own blood, his face reduced to pulp. He had been at a Cambridge club, frequented by gays, and was set upon in a dark parking lot by two brutes named Volker and Gretch who were high on beer and pot. Apparently one of the men had shouted slurs to which Jake was heard shouting, “Go to hell, asshole!” Then they were upon him. Because the only witnesses were a female cousin of one of the killers and then friends, everybody lied, claiming that the two were elsewhere. A slick lawyer managed to dismiss DNA analyses as faulty. After the acquittal, one of the killers said justice had been served, adding that it was too bad about Jake’s death, but that may have saved some little kid from sexual molestation.
Jake’s death had all but killed Maggie’s husband, Nick, who lapsed into a profound depression. Eventually he said that he could not go on with life as it was and renounced the world, joining an order of Benedictine monks at
