Alive on Opening Day Page 3

  Maybe it was just the ordeal with Mrs. Bisler, or maybe it was because he STILL couldn’t remember what had happened the night before, but Dan had an overwhelming feeling of homecoming when his mother put her hand on the storm door and called out his name. It felt as if he were seeing her for the first time in a long time, and his sadness began to subside, though the source of his gloom remained a mystery.

  In spite of the fact he considered himself a full-grown man, Dan squealed and shot to his feet. “Mom,” he called out and ran toward the door, arriving in the entry way just as his mother stepped inside. She dropped her purse and jacket on the floor, wrapping her arms around him.

  “Oh, Danny!” she cried. “You’re really here!”

  Even though Dan was slammed with the same surge of emotion which moved his mother, he had no idea why. But the moment felt so much like a reunion he decided to just ride the wave for a little while, and both of them sobbed. It was the strangest thing Dan had ever done, but it seemed right.

  —

  Ten minutes later, when Dan and Clara had composed themselves and wiped away their tears, she led him back into the kitchen and told him to have a seat, which he did.

  “Have you had anything to eat?” she asked him, shaking her head as if correcting herself. “I mean, do you feel like eating? Are you hungry at all?”

  Dan had been awake about an hour at that point but had not even considered eating. Normally, he would feel faint if he missed a meal by a few minutes, but the morning had been too crazy for him to notice the gnawing in his belly.

  He nodded and smiled. “Yeah, Mom, I am.”

  She wiped tears from her eyes and said, “Hmm, how about some pancakes and bacon?”

  Dan raised his eyebrows. “And scrambled eggs?” he asked.

  Clara laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Yes, Dan, and scrambled eggs.”

  “And Mom?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “You have a story to tell me, don’t you?”

  She began to tear up again, and her voice was thick. “Yes, honey, I do. You sit down and we can talk while you eat.”

  Dan pulled his chair up to the table and watched his mother make breakfast. It was a scene that seemed resurrected from Dan’s ancient past. He asked where she had been that morning, and she told him she had been volunteering at the library, which is where Mrs. Bisler reached her. Clara said she had been spending more time at the library “since” … and she let the word hang. Next she finished with, “We can get into that in a few minutes.”

  She pulled a large plate from the cabinet next to the stove and loaded it high with pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs, with maple syrup and hot sauce as toppings. Then she filled a large glass with milk.

  Finally, she brought the food to the table and set it in front of Dan, taking a seat across from him. As he ate, she reached across Dan’s meal to tussle his medium-length brown hair and grabbed one of his hands in hers, gazing into his hazel eyes to begin her story.

  “Here’s what happened, Dan,” she said.

  Dan nodded, eager to hear the tale of his lost day, but nervous to find out the truth.

  Clara went on, “It was the night of the sectional game against Melville …”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Curve

  “Watch out for the curve!” David yelled to his son from behind home plate. Then he turned to his wife. “Not many high school pitchers even have a curve, but Jackson’s is pretty good.”

  Even after ten years of Little League and school baseball, Clara still didn’t understand all the nuances of pitch selection, but she smiled at David’s enthusiasm and played along. “Hope he doesn’t throw the curve, then!”

  David looked at her in surprise. “Well, if he HANGS it, Dan can take him deep. He just has to watch for it.”

  On the mound, Jim Jackson went into his windup and strode toward home plate to deliver the 2-1 offering. From his vantage point slightly above the field, David could see the pitcher’s grip and recognized the pitch as a curve ball. He flinched as it dipped inside, then watched horrified as Dan began his swing early and, by the time the ball was even with the plate, his son was twisted around facing away from the ball. A sickening crack confirmed what David feared: the pitch crashed into the right side of Dan’s head, and the boy staggered around his bat for a couple of seconds before dropping it to the ground.

  A moment later, Dan sprawled across the plate, motionless.

  “No!” Clara screamed, and David squeezed her knee for reassurance.

  “Hold on, Clara,” he said. “I’m sure Dan will bounce right back up.”

  But Dan didn’t bounce right back up, and when Coach Croft came out of the dugout several seconds later, David leaped over the empty bleachers in front of him and sprinted to the field. The small crowd in the stands were all on their feet, and David could hear a mix of whispers and gasps. Both Clara and Gabbie, who had been seated along the third base line, were calling Dan’s name as they made their way toward home plate.

  By the time David got to his son, the Eagles’ coach, the home plate umpire, and a couple of teammates were already gathered around. Together, they turned Dan on his back and shook his hands gently, trying to get a response from the boy, but his body was limp. Coach Croft grabbed one of Dan’s wrists, held it for a few seconds, and leaned in to put his ear close to Dan’s mouth. He looked to David and said, “He has a pulse, but it’s weak. And he’s breathing, but it’s shallow and jagged.”

  Then, turning to one of the players who had gathered around, Croft held up a key chain and directed, “Take these keys and open up my office, dial 0, and tell the operator that we need an ambulance. You got it?”

  The young man nodded vigorously and grabbed the keys, then sprinted off toward the building.

  Gabbie and Clara rushed onto the scene and poked their heads through the small crowd of boys and men, trying to get a glimpse of Dan’s face. Clara pushed her way through to her son and crouched down at his side, caressing his cheek. She looked to David, who nodded, and she moved in close to Dan’s ear and whispered, “It’s OK , honey. Mommy’s here.”

  Gabbie shrieked when she saw Dan’s face, prompting David to stand up and put an arm around her shoulder. He turned her away from the scene on the field and spoke softly to her.

  “Gabbie,” he said. “You need to calm down, OK? There is nothing we can do for Dan right now other than wait for the ambulance to get here, and carrying on like this will only make it harder for everyone else. I’m sure Dan is going to be fine, but only if we keep clear heads and do what we can to get him the proper help. Sound OK?”

  Gabbie took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes, yes, you’re right,” she said. “It’s just that …”

  “I know, Gabbie,” David said. “But I need to get back to Clara.” He pulled away from the girl and pointed to the stands. “Why don’t you go sit down until the ambulance gets here, and then we can figure out what we’re going to do, alright?”

  She nodded again and ambled toward the bleachers while David walked back to Dan and crouched down again to slip an arm around Clara’s waist.

  For 15 long minutes, David and Clara huddled around their son, talking to him and watching for any tiny movement. Clara stroked his face, and David told him stories from the current Major League Baseball season, about how the Cincinnati Reds would be in a dog fight all year with the Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League West crown. They did all this to give Dan some comfort assuming he even knew they were there, but mostly to avoid thinking about how bad he might be hurt and why it was taking so darn long for help to arrive.

  Finally, an ambulance from the Pickens County Hospital screamed to a stop on the driveway between the school building and the ball diamond, and the driver backed the rig up through the grass and parked along the fence, as close as possible to home plate. Two paramedics hopped out of the vehicle and hurried to the huddle of people in front of the backstop. Seeing them, David took his wife by the hand an
d helped her stand to the side.

  While one of the medics checked Dan’s vital signs, the other unfolded a stretcher in the grass beside the boy and began palpating his extremities.

  “Shallow breaths, and a slow, unsteady heartbeat,” the first said.

  The second nodded and said, “I don’t find any displaced fractures, and he isn’t showing any edema. Let’s get him loaded up and get a mask on him.”

  “What’s going on?” Clara wanted to know. “Is he going to be OK?”

  The first paramedic answered as they were straightening Dan’s body and moving him onto the stretcher.

  “We don’t know the extent of his injuries yet, ma’am,” he told her. “For now, we need to make sure that he’s getting enough oxygen and transport him to the hospital so the emergency room doctors can check him out more thoroughly.”

  “We’ll follow behind you,” David said and guided his wife away from the field. As the paramedics lifted Dan up on the stretcher to carry him away, Clara reached out to touch his arm and blew him a kiss he never saw.

  “Come on, honey,” David said, tugging on her arm.

  On the way to the parking lot, David stopped to tell Gabbie their plan. She wanted to ride to the hospital with the Hodges, but David reminded her that her mother would soon return to the school to pick her up. Meg Jordan would be panicked if she showed up to find Gabbie gone. Gabbie finally agreed to wait for her mom, but vowed to come to the hospital later.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Slow Motion

  The Hodges made the 10-mile ride to the hospital in silence, except for the screeching siren of the ambulance in front of them and Clara’s gentle sobs from the passenger seat.

  When they arrived, David angled their sedan into the visitors parking lot, and then the couple hurried toward the ER entry way where the paramedics were already unloading Dan and speaking with doctors. Clara started to call out to them, but David pulled her back and said softly, “Let’s let them do their jobs for a minute. We can follow them when they take him in, OK?”

  Tears were still falling from her eyes, but Clara managed to nod. Once the medics had handed off Dan to the physicians and moved the ambulance out of the unloading zone, David led Clara across the driveway and caught up with the doctors. As they approached, one of the physicians nodded toward them and went back into the hospital. The other turned to face them.

  “Dr. Parks!” Clara exclaimed. She had not recognized him from the back and through her emotion, but she was relieved to find their family physician on the scene to take care of her son.

  “Hello, Clara,” Parks said, then, nodding toward David, “David.”

  Parks grabbed hold of the sides of Dan’s gurney and wheeled it toward the hospital , where the other doctor and a nurse were holding open the front doors. “Come, walk with me,” Parks told the Hodges.

  David walked along on Parks’ left side, while Clara scrambled around to the right side of the gurney and grabbed Dan’s hand. She looked across her unconscious son and pleaded with her eyes. “Is he going to be OK, Dr. Parks?”

  “Clara, it’s just too early to know that with any certainty,” Parks told her. “What I can say is, he is breathing on his own, and his pulse is fairly steady, even though it’s slow.”

  “Why is it slow? And why does he have that mask on if he’s breathing on his own?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know why his heart is beating slowly, Clara,” Parks said. “That’s what we have to find out. And that mask just helps to make sure he’s getting enough oxygen. Even though he’s breathing on his own, his respiration is slow, too, which could lead to hypoxia — low oxygen levels.”

  David could see Clara was on the verge of coming undone, so he interjected. “So what do we do now, Doc? What’s the next step?”

  “Well, first we need to get an x-ray of his head,” Parks said, and he leaned toward Dan as they walked to get a better look at the right side of the boy’s face. “Looks like he got whacked pretty hard out there this evening, and we need to see what kind of damage he sustained. He could have brain swelling, and we have to find that out.”

  “Oh no!” Clara exclaimed. “What happens if he does have brain swelling?”

  Parks looked first to David and back to Clara. “Let’s not worry about that unless we have to, OK, Clara? For now, the important thing to keep in mind is, he appears to be stable.”

  Clara nodded, and the Hodges walked along with Parks into the first available exam room, where he gave Dan a more thorough inspection before accompanying him to radiology.

  The next several hours were a blur of tests and discovery, partial answers and new questions. By midnight, Parks had moved Dan to intensive care and was sitting in the waiting room down the hall, telling the Hodges what the hospital staff had found.

  Mostly, the news was good, Parks said. Despite the fact Dan had been knocked unconscious by a pitch to the face, he hadn’t sustained any broken bones.The x-rays did show deep bone bruising in both his cheek and his temple, and he would be sore for many days, maybe weeks. Depending on his pain level when he woke up, they may have to consider wiring his jaw shut for a time, which would mean a liquid diet administered through a straw.

  The force had twisted Dan’s neck around at the end of a swing, which surely strained it — he probably had whiplash — but there did not appear to be any real structural damage to his neck, either.

  The final piece of news, Parks told David and Clara, and really it was great news, was there was no swelling in Dan’s brain. There did not appear to be any bleeding inside his head, either, but Hodges warned them that sometimes these symptoms were latent — they only developed hours or even days after an accident, so Dan was not necessarily out of the woods yet.

  And then there was the bad news, which was why Dan was in the ICU and not curled up on the couch at home with an ice pack on his head, maybe sucking on a bowl of ice cream. The fact was, despite a lack of any sign of real, permanent damage, Dan was still unconscious. For now, Parks said, he was calling it a concussion because he could see a quarter-sized dark spot, a bruise, on Dan’s brain near the front right side, where the ball had crashed into his skull. It a was fairly common occurrence, and Parks suspected many athletes’ concussions which were never diagnosed at all.

  What was particularly worrisome in Dan’s case was, not only had the young man been out cold for hours, but his breathing rate and pulse remained depressed. In fact, they had actually slowed down since Dan arrived at the ER earlier in the night. Some of that may have been because the heart of the crisis was past, and Dan’s body was calming down, but it hadn’t needed to calm down. Not with a starting heart rate of 40 and not when he had been breathing only five times per minute. As he lay in his room down the hall, Parks told the Hodges, Dan was down to about four breaths per minute, and his heart rate stood at 35 beats per minute.

  Parks was concerned they may need to give him some help before the night was through.

  “What do you mean by ‘help,’ doctor?” David asked, worry creasing his face.

  “We’re going to bring a ventilator into his room, and I have a pulmonary specialist on standby,” Parks responded. “If he drops to three breaths per minute and stays there for more than half an hour, we’ll have to intubate him. Do you know what that means?”

  David nodded, and Clara began to cry again. Her mother had died of lung cancer 10 years before and had spent the last several years of her life in and out of hospitals, almost always attached to one machine or another. The thought of her son suffering through the same sort of ordeal devastated Clara.