The Stories We Tell Read online

  Officer Barker has barely pulled to a stop, and I’m running up the steps onto the wide front porch. In the moonlight, the white floorboards glow almost blue, reflecting the painted ceiling. I open the door and holler, “Gwen, Gwen.”

  No answer.

  I run through the front hall and upstairs to her bedroom. Damp air washes over me as pink linen curtains flutter around her open window.

  “Shit,” I say to the empty room. “Not now.”

  I plod down the back stairs and into the kitchen, just to be sure she isn’t there. The tea bag dangles over the empty cup. I sipped that tea, thinking Gwen was asleep in bed and Cooper was in Charleston. Such naïve peace. My head feels too full, overblown and crowded with fear. In what feels like a slow-motion bad dream, one where I can’t run or scream, I dial Gwen’s number and hear her voice say, “Leave a message.” I tell her to meet me at the hospital. I then dial Dylan—the boyfriend, the lacrosse player, the boy I can’t stand—and get his ridiculous voice mail. “Yo, I can’t answer, obviously. So leave a message, or don’t.”

  “Dylan, this is Gwen’s mother. Her father and aunt have been in an accident and I need you to take Gwen to Savannah Memorial immediately. Thank you very much.”

  God, I sound like my mom—so polite, so cold, when what I really want to do is scream. I grab car keys from the counter, then burst into the rain again.

  Officer Barker stands outside his car with his hands behind his back.

  The rain batters against my T-shirt and I’m soaked to the skin. “I forgot she spent the night at a friend’s house.”

  He knows I’m lying, but he nods.

  “I’ll drive,” I say.

  “I’d prefer you let me take you.”

  “I’m fine. I can follow you.” I jog toward the garage and punch the keypad code to open it.

  Thunder joins the grinding rise of the garage door, as if to say, Told you so.

  two

  It makes no sense. Willa and Cooper barely get along. The tension between them is mostly unbearable, unless Cooper’s on his second bourbon. I’m not sure they’ve ever been in a car without me.

  Willa—my beautiful, wounded sister, the tiny girl with the round green eyes. She moved to Colorado after high school and returned to Savannah just last year after a terrible breakup. She showed up, asking for a place to crash until she could “get her shit together.” “Of course,” we said, “we’d love to have you here.”

  Cooper and I stopped talking about it, but I know he doesn’t like having Willa only a few hundred yards away. My work and my sister are the two things he believes take my attention away from him, and in his worst moments, he reminds me of this.

  I follow the police car through the Savannah streets, gripping the steering wheel with tight hands. Streetlamps flicker dimly, as if sorry they don’t have enough power to penetrate the fog. The river is swollen as it pulses against the banks and shoves cargo ships against the docks. My heart rolls around inside my chest, a fast-paced somersaulting instead of a steady beat. Skidding on the wet pavement, I follow the police car under the awning over the entrance to the emergency room. The double glass doors open automatically and I run to the front desk, ask for Cooper, for Willa. The nurse stares at a computer screen for a moment before holding up a finger and turning to me. “Head down the hall. You’ll find them in the second and third cubicles on the right.” She points like a flight attendant.

  The ER cubicle is all silver and glaring, bright enough to make me squint. I can’t feel my lips; my hands shake as I push aside the curtain. I look in the bed for Cooper, but what I see is a mash of blond curls against the pillow—Willa. Beeping machines surround her where she lies on the narrow bed with rails high on either side. An IV tube hangs from a metal pole and is taped to the top of her right hand. A small white bandage is next to her right eye, which is swollen shut. A drop of blood seeps through the gauze, leaving what looks like a drop of red ink.

  Near the bed is a nurse with dark cropped hair and a name tag that says BILL STANFORD, RN. A doctor, short and brunette, wearing a white lab coat with one large iodine stain on her right lapel, stands beside him. Crumpled bandage packaging and discarded needles sit on top of a stainless-steel tray.

  I walk to Willa’s bedside and look down into her face. Her eyes are closed. “I’m her sister, Eve,” I say without looking at the doctor or nurse. “Tell me everything.” I take Willa’s free hand and wind my fingers through hers. “Where’s my husband? Is he here, too?” I turn to look at the doctor. Finally, the chaos inside me stills for a moment, my mind expectant.

  “I’m Dr. Lewis,” the woman says. “Your husband is in the next cubicle, behind this curtain. And your sister here…” She pauses before saying, “She’s stable. Her vital signs are good. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt and she flew sideways, crashing into the passenger-side window. She seems to have sustained a mild traumatic brain injury. We’re waiting on the last MRI, and we’re monitoring the pressure on her brain. There’s a slight bleed in the temporal area, which we will drain if need be, but right now it seems to be okay. We’re keeping her sedated while we monitor her situation.”

  “This?” I touch the edge of the bandage.

  “She has a small cut next to her right eye. It has a single stitch in it. Her brain injury is the most pressing matter.”

  “Temporal area. Brain swelling. Traumatic injury,” I say. “None of that means anything real to me. Can you explain, please?” My voice holds steady, but my body shakes.

  Dr. Lewis points to the side of her own head, above her ear. “This is the temporal lobe, and it’s where Willa slammed into the window. There’s swelling, what we can also call a concussion, but more severe. More like what we call a mild TBI—mild traumatic brain injury.”

  “What’s the difference between a TBI and a concussion?” I ask.

  Dr. Lewis places her hand on my forearm and then withdraws it. “We can have the neuro practitioner talk to you soon, but for now I can tell you that the difference has to do with how long she was unconscious, which we estimate to be about ten minutes. We should know more soon.”

  I point to Willa. “But she’s still unconscious.”

  “No. She’s asleep and sedated.”

  “Will she be … the same?” I whisper.

  “That is the thing with TBIs—we don’t know. I understand it’s difficult to hear me be so vague, but only time will tell with these kinds of injuries. She’ll probably be confused at first, but slowly we’ll understand more about how severely her thought processes and memory are affected. It’s not like a broken bone that we can see on an X-ray. I wish it were.”

  I touch Willa’s forehead lightly, so lightly. “She’ll be fine. She has to be fine.”

  Willa’s curls are mashed against her head and black mascara rims her eyes in a melted mess. “What happened?” I lean closer, my voice in her ear, my hand squeezing hers.

  “She grabbed the wheel.” My husband’s voice.

  I turn so quickly that I knock into Willa’s IV pole and need to grab it to keep it from falling. The curtain is open. “Cooper.” I rush to his bedside in two quick steps.

  “You didn’t want to come check on me?” he asks in a garbled voice.

  I stare at him, stunned into silence, knowing this is Cooper because of the eyes and voice, but everything is distorted in a globulelike mash of blood, bandages, and bloated flesh. I try to say his name but only a groan on an exhaled breath comes out. Then I find my voice. “I’m here. Right here.”

  He closes his eyes. “God, it hurts like hell.” His voice is full of swollen pain. He raises his hand to touch his head but then drops it again, as if it weighs too much.

  I bend over my husband, reaching for him, scanning his body for injury or missing parts. I kiss him once on the forehead. “What happened?”

  Dr. Lewis appears at my side. “Broken glass cut your husband’s face and scalp,” she states, as if this is the most obvious thing in all the world.

&n
bsp; “Are you okay?” A stupid question if ever there was one.

  “Other than this?” Cooper lifts his hand to his head one more time, a single finger pointing at the bandages.

  “No other injuries?” I ask softly, hopefully.

  “No,” Dr. Lewis says. “All else is clear.”

  “Clear?” Cooper tries to sit, but he falls back down. “I’m missing half my face.”

  “You are not missing half your face,” I say. I don’t know if this fact is true, because a bandage soaked in blood covers the left side of his face, and the tape yanks the skin tight up and around his head. I don’t want to, but I look away, turning to Dr. Lewis. “Is he missing half his face?”

  “No.” She readjusts the tape at his scalp. “But it is a severe gash.” She motions to his cheek. “This will require plastic surgery later. There’s also a shearing injury on his scalp.”

  “A bald spot,” Cooper says, and his voice is slow, slurred.

  “Pain medicine?” I ask Dr. Lewis, referring to his speech.

  She nods.

  I kiss Cooper’s right cheek, which gives no indication of an accident or injury of any kind. “His eye?” I ask her.

  “It’s fine.”

  “What happened?” I ask again.

  His right eye flashes open, murky and faded. “Is Willa okay?”

  “It’s her brain,” I say. “It’s swollen … bleeding.” My hand rests at the base of my throat, where the grief and panic form a cotton-clogging lump.

  “She wasn’t wearing her seat belt,” he says, as if this one fact explains everything.

  “Cooper.” I lean close, uttering gentle words. “Who was driving?”

  “I was,” he says. And then, as if everything is normal, he asks, “Where’s Gwen?”

  “She should be on her way.”

  “Where is she, Eve?”

  “She sneaked out again. I think she’s with Dylan.”

  “This has to stop,” he whispers, his eyes shut.

  “I know.”

  He brushes his hand through the air. “Were you at the studio?” This question an accusation.

  “Yes.”

  I think he’s slipping into painkiller oblivion, when he speaks again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help your sister. I wanted to help, Eve. All we’ve done is try to help her, and it only gets worse.” Angry furrows on his forehead smooth, and then he is asleep, snoring softly.

  It isn’t true, what he’s just said. We have helped Willa; she’s been doing great—working at the studio with me, writing songs, securing singing gigs downtown. Like I’ve always wished, my sister and my daughter are close, and they spend every afternoon together. Willa hasn’t been getting worse at all. I thought she was getting better and better—until now.

  I look to Dr. Lewis. “This is terrible,” I say, which is the truth.

  The doctor leaves, promising to check in shortly. That’s when the tears start. They well up quickly—fat, ugly tears that won’t stop. I touch Cooper’s cheek, and even in his medicine-induced sleep, he flinches. And just as I sit in the cracked vinyl reclining chair, Gwen bursts through the curtain.

  “Gwen.” I jump up to hug her, hold her close, as if to make sure that she’s safe, that she wasn’t in the car with them. “Where have you been?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says.

  “Yes, it matters.” I look past my daughter to the boy standing behind her. “Dylan, you can leave now.”

  Gwen reaches her hand behind her. “No, stay.” Holding Dylan’s hand, she walks toward her dad and pulls Dylan along like a towline. “Oh my God, is he okay?” She reaches toward the bloodied bandages but doesn’t touch them.

  “Yes,” I say. “Except for a terrible gash on his face.”

  Gwen stands next to her dad in too-short cutoff jeans, cowboy boots, and a white tank top.

  I step forward and place my hand on Dylan’s arm. “You need to leave.”

  He drops Gwen’s hand and nods. “Okay, Mrs. Morrison.” He holds his palms up in mock surrender. “Okay, whatever.”

  Gwen glares at me. “God, Mom, relax.”

  “Relax?” I ask as the curtain sways shut with Dylan’s exit.

  “It’s no big deal, Mom. We were just at his house, watching movies.” She takes a breath and then sees her chance. “Seriously … I mean, Dad and Aunt Willa are in the hospital and you’re worried about what I’ve been doing?” Her nose stud—a tiny sparkle—glints in the harsh overhead lights. “Can you at least tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t know yet. All I know is that they were in a wreck.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Yes,” I say. “She’s asleep right there.” I motion to the half-open curtain at our left.

  Together, we walk to Willa’s bedside and I repeat the information I was given from Dr. Lewis. Gwen drops into the chair next to Willa, taking her hand. “If something happens to her, I’ll die,” she says, all melodrama and raw emotion.

  I touch the top of Gwen’s soft hair. “I’ll go sit with your dad until he wakes up.”

  Gwen looks up at me. “Can I stay here?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  I return to Cooper and lean back in the chair, closing my eyes for a moment. Just one moment.

  * * *

  The raw light needles its way through my eyelids, penetrating my deep sleep. I open one eye—my left one—and for a thin sliver of a minute, I don’t know where I am. Somewhere far off, there’s a beeping noise, and it’s this sound, this monotonous rhythm, that awakens me fully, and I know. I don’t want to remember, but I do, one by one: Cooper, Willa, Gwen. I stand up to stretch, rub at my face, and drink from the lukewarm glass of water at Cooper’s bedside. A clock on the back wall reads 6:00 A.M.

  “Eve.” Cooper’s voice cracks my name in half, and I look back to him, take his hand. “Where is Gwen?” he asks.

  “With Willa, right here.” I open the curtain.

  Gwen is awake, brushing Willa’s hair across the pillow with her fingers. She turns to us, and I motion for her to come to me. Cooper flinches when he looks up at us with his one eye, and he reaches his hand up to take his daughter’s hand.

  Gwen repeats my plea from hours before. “What happened, Dad?”

  Cooper looks directly at me. “Please tell the nurse I need another pain pill.”

  I push the buzzer on the wall and speak into an intercom to inform the bodyless voice that Cooper Morrison needs a nurse and meds.

  “I was coming home from Charleston,” he says as I finish my request. “But the clients wanted to stop for a drink at the Bohemian. They’d heard about the rooftop bar, and we stopped there for a late dinner.”

  He pauses to touch the uninjured side of his face. “Willa was there, at the bar. Drunk as crazy. Bobbing around. She fell off the bar stool. I was praying she wouldn’t see me, but she did, and then started to walk toward us. I was with the Berns, clients I’ve been courting for months. They run a charter business called the Anglers. Willa had that look, that weird look she gets when you know she will say or do something embarrassing. I got nervous, so I went to her before she could get to us.”

  “No way,” Gwen interjects. “She doesn’t drink like that anymore.”

  “That’s what I thought at first, too, darling. I thought no way was she messing up now, when she’d just started to get it together. But it was obvious.”

  I don’t realize I’m crying until I taste salt at the corner of my lips.

  “So,” Cooper continues, “I talked her into going outside, and then getting into my car. But she was angry as hell. We were driving in that torrential rain behind Martin Luther King Boulevard and then up Twenty-fourth Street to Preston. She grabbed the wheel to make me turn around. The brakes seized up, we slid sideways, and the car slammed into a tree—a huge oak. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. OnStar called nine one one.” His voice breaks. “That’s it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “What for?” Gwen asks, shoo
ting me a terrible look, her eyebrows drawn down, her mouth pouted into a scowl.

  “For everyone.” I take Cooper’s hand and wind my fingers through his as if knitting us together. “You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to take her home. You aren’t responsible for her.”

  “It seems I am,” he says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am. I’m sorry I let her stay. I’m sorry she’s been such a…”

  “God, Mom, whatever,” Gwen says, and plops onto a metal chair. “She’s the one who’s hurt so bad. I mean, is she in a coma? What is going on?” Panic pushes at Gwen’s voice, giving it a strangled sound. “Is she going to be okay or not?”

  Gwen loves her aunt. She loves walking down to the cottage and sitting on the porch with her, loves hearing about Colorado and camping and mountain climbing. She clings to Willa as the only person who “understands what it’s like to be a grown-up without being a jerk”—Gwen’s words, of course.

  “Someone answer me. Is she going to be okay?” Gwen holds out her hands for an answer.

  “If you mean will she live, yes,” I say. “Her injuries aren’t on the outside.… It’s what’s inside her head they’re worried about.” I walk behind Gwen and touch her hair, which is pulled back into a messy ponytail at the base of her neck, riding down her back in tangles. She leans back into my hand, a gesture of childhood. I rest my head on top of hers.

  “This sucks,” Gwen says.

  “Yes, it does.”

  three

  It was only a month ago that we were featured in The South Magazine. Cooper and Eve Morrison, Savannah’s power couple. The beautiful people. The lucky ones. Cooper is from an old Savannah family. Cooper Morrison IV, the fourth generation of Morrison men to live on the family property with his wife and daughter. The article talked of how he broke free of the family business that built the family fortune to start out on his own creative project. Cooper launched Southern Tastes, an e-magazine featuring all things southern gentlemen. There’s the section on guns and hunting dogs, one on handcrafted lodge furniture, another on vintage accouterments. Each month, there’s a short story by a southern author. Of course there’s the obligatory cooking section, usually featuring a grill and large tools. Oh, and how lovely that his wife, meanwhile, owns and operates a letterpress studio specializing in the handmade. A juxtaposition that the journalist described as “romantic and interesting.”