13.

Wednesday

For two days, “Wednesday” had been the buzzword—the day on my

doctors’ lips when it came to describing my chances. As in: “We hope to
see some improvement by Wednesday.” And now here Wednesday was,
without so much as a glimmer of change in my condition.
“When can I see Dad?”
This question—the natural one for a ten-year-old whose father is in the
hospital—had been coming from Bond regularly since I had gone into a
coma on Monday. Holley had been fending it off successfully for two
days, but on Wednesday morning, she decided it was time to address it.
When Holley had told Bond, on Monday night, that I wasn’t home
from the hospital yet because I was “sick,” he conjured what that word
had always meant to him, up to this point in his ten years of life: a cough,
a sore throat—maybe a headache. Granted, his appreciation of just how
much a headache can actually hurt had been greatly expanded by what
he’d seen on Monday morning. But when Holley finally brought him to
the hospital that Wednesday afternoon, he was still hoping to be greeted
by something very different from what he saw in my hospital bed.
Bond saw a body that already bore only a distant resemblance to what
he knew as his father. When someone is sleeping, you can look at them
and tell there’s still a person inhabiting the body. There’s a presence. But
most doctors will tell you it’s different when a person is in a coma (even
if they can’t tell you exactly why). The body is there, but there’s a
strange, almost physical sensation that the person is missing. That their
essence, inexplicably, is somewhere else.
Eben IV and Bond had always been very close, ever since Eben ran
into the delivery suite when Bond was only minutes old to hug his brand
new brother. Eben met Bond at the hospital that third day of my coma and
did what he could to frame the situation positively for his younger