Centerville

Chapter 7

59 Chapter 7 On Saturday night, Jack Turnbow was still lying on a bed in the hospital’s emergency room. After being thrown when the hardware store exploded, he had been carried out of the fire by two other firefighters . His oxygen tank had fallen off, and he’d inhaled too much smoke. The ambulance ride had been sickening, and he had the dim recollection of vomiting as it pitched from one side to the other. Once they reached the hospital, Glynn Sheer, the firefighter he’d carried out, had been taken to the intensive care unit, while Jack had been placed on a bed next to a wall in the general emergency room. He had no clue now what time it was or how long he’d been lying there. They’d given him a painkiller and he’d slept for a while, then woken, then slept again. Through the curtains that were pulled around him, he could hear beds being wheeled past and the voices of nurses and doctors. Someone on a bed near his kept coughing, and farther away a child cried. “Officer Turnbow, would you like a drink of water?” someone said. A female voice, belonging to his nurse. He opened his eyes and tried to raise himself onto his elbows. “Lie still,” she said, and he felt her hand against his chest. “We still need to get you to X-ray 60 to make sure you didn’t break anything. Take this straw and sip a little.” He felt the pressure of the straw against his lips, then the coolness of the water along his tongue and teeth. Immediately, he became aware of a burning sensation in his mouth and throat, as if he had swallowed ash. “That’s good. Don’t take too much at once,” the nurse said, pulling away the straw. “I’m going to raise the top half of your bed a little more in case you start coughing.” As soon as she said this, he felt the urge to cough deep in his belly. At the same time, he felt himself clamping down as if trying to hold himself together so that a cough wouldn’t jar his body. His back hurt. He was becoming completely aware of this fact, and of the need to hold himself as still as possible. If he moved at all, pain pierced him. “Lie still and try to relax,” the nurse told him. “The restraints are to keep you from hurting anything, and you’ve still got the oxygen tube in your nose to help you breathe and an IV to keep you hydrated .” Jack looked at his arm and saw the tube feeding into it and a new fear spiraled through him. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to check on other patients. I think they’re going to take you up for the X-ray in a few minutes.” He shut his eyes when she had gone away. Bright overhead lights permeated his closed eyelids. The milky whiteness from them moved as if alive, swirling and undulating. Tiny lines of light stretched through the whiteness, and as he sank down away from himself, he became absorbed in tracing them. The more he focused on them, the more the fear of where he was and what had happened receded, and he was able to block out the sound of crying that came from a place he couldn’t identify. The only other time he’d been in a hospital was years ago, short- 61 ly after his graduation from high school, when his mother was in a car accident. She’d been taken to this same hospital, but it had looked different, seen from the vantage point of the waiting room. He could still remember the torn-up Pontiac, tipped over at an odd angle at the side of the road with a swarm of emergency lights blinking around it, and then the red ambulance light, seen through the windshield of his father’s car as they followed behind it. He’d sat alone in a chair outside the emergency room while his father went back to talk to the doctor. Later a nurse had walked with him to his mother’s bedside, where the doctor and his father explained that his mother had died. His mother rarely drove, and earlier that evening, Jack had kidded her...