PART 2 — SIX MONTHS
I want to set out what those six months were, because the story that gets told about a child who saves another child skips straight from the ambulance to the inspiring part.
Jonah had two surgeries eleven days apart. He was in hospital for nine weeks.
He is what the consultants call an incomplete injury, which sounds hopeful and mostly means that nobody will tell you anything definite for two years.
He has some sensation and no reliable motor function below the level of it. He has a chair he can self-propel and he is fast in it now and he was not, at first, and the not-at-first was four months long.
The things nobody warns you about are logistical.
Our building has three steps at the front. Three. I have lived there since he was two and I had never once counted them.
The ramp took eleven weeks and a letter from an occupational therapist and two arguments with a landlord.
His school was fine about the classrooms and could not do anything about the bleachers, which is the only part he has ever cried to me about.
The nine weeks in hospital I am going to give four sentences to and then leave.
He was in a ward with five other children for the last six of them. He learned every one of their names and their diagnoses and their parents’ names within about three days, because that is who he is.
There was a boy in the bed opposite for eleven days whose mother came once.
Jonah noticed. He did not say anything to me about it until we were home, and then he said it in the car, and what he said was, “Do you think she had work?”
The part that changed him was not the surgery and it was not the chair.
It was the fourth week, when a physiotherapist called Bree got him upright in a standing frame for the first time and he could see out of the window, and he was so pleased that he cried, and then about forty seconds later he understood what he was pleased about.
He did not talk for the rest of that day.
He has been, since then, almost relentlessly all right, and I have said to two different professionals that I do not entirely trust it, and both of them have told me the same thing, which is that eleven-year-olds manage grief in instalments and that the bill arrives at fifteen.
I work at a distribution centre on the Kelvedon industrial estate and I do the four-to-midnight, and after the accident I went down to three shifts for four months and then back up to five, and my mother had him the nights I was out.
The money, since I have mentioned money.
There was no settlement. The driver of that pickup did nothing wrong. He was doing twenty-eight in a thirty and he had no chance and I have met him twice and he is fifty-one years old and he has not been all right either.
Our insurance covered what it covered. The rest came out of a card and out of my mother.
The bracelet was my grandmother’s and it was gold and I got two hundred and forty dollars for it, which the man in the shop told me was fair and which I have since learned was not, and I do not care.
Four hundred and eighty-eight dollars for two seats.
I want to say plainly why I spent it, because there were about nine more sensible things to do with that money and I knew every one of them.
Because for four months my son had asked for nothing.
Not one thing. Not a game, not a toy, not a treat, in four months of a nine-week hospital stay and a house he could not get into unassisted.
And then in the January he asked for one.
The five-year-old is called Sammy Pellow and he lives two streets over. His mother came to the hospital eleven times and could not get through a sentence on any of them.
Sammy has been to our place a lot. He is six now. He does not really understand it and he thinks Jonah’s chair is the most interesting object he has ever encountered, and Jonah lets him sit in it, and I have decided not to have a feeling about that in front of either of them.
