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She’s always known she’d get the phone call. That was the given. The question was when and how. Somehow she’d imagined it’d come in the middle of the night, jarring her out of sound sleep, under cover of darkness. Perhaps with the low rumble of a summer heat-storm providing the backdrop. She always thought it’d be Sam who’d call, maybe stoic, with barely-restrained grief or out-and-out sobbing. That’s how it goes in movies doesn’t it — nighttime, thunder, the remaining sibling making the phone calls?
She’s wrong on all counts.
It’s the middle of an unusually warm and sunny Tuesday afternoon in early May when her phone goes off — vibrating in her gym bag in the middle of a class. It vibes and vibes and vibes and then goes silent. A moment later it starts up again, knocking insistently against her plastic Camelbak water bottle. She unfolds herself from the downward-dog position with a murmured apology and a soft instruction for her students to continue their reps. She digs into her bag, embarrassed that she’d forgotten to shut it off, slightly pissed it ruined her zen, when she sees UNKNOWN flashing across the display.
“Hello?” She holds the phone to her ear as she steps into the hallway. “Who’s this?”
“Is this Lisa Braeden?” A deep voice rumbles on the other line.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“That doesn’t matter.” The voice is level, detached, almost devoid of emotion. “Dean needs you. He’s in a hospital.”
“Where? How? What about Sam?”
And she knows the answer before he tells her.
The hospital is located a couple of hours outside of Quincy, Illinois, in a tiny, no-name town that barely warrants a blip on Google Maps when she looks it up.
The voice on the phone tells her that someone named Bobby has the Impala and he’s taken it back to Sioux Falls and Dean shouldn’t worry but he could use a friend.
She doesn’t hesitate, reschedules her private and group sessions at the studio for the next week and cringes when she has to inform the YMCA that she won’t be able to make this week’s class and asks if she can switch with Jenny the following week. She’s yelled at and there’s much grumbling but in the end it’s done and Jenny takes it more than gracefully, offering to cover as many classes as she needs. She arranges for Ben to stay at her parents’ house for the week and throws a few things into an overnight bag before hitting the road.
It takes five hours with one gas break and two pee stops.
She doesn’t know what Dean was doing or who the stranger was and she doesn’t ask. It’s a slightly larger town than she’d expected to find him in, and she knows he doesn’t belong here — at this dingy, gray hospital that has a permanent cabbage-stew smell of sickness and sweat and dying.
The first time she sees him laid up in his hospital bed, the sight of his battered face steals her breath away and for a terrible, fleeting moment, she wants to either run or scream. If she hadn’t received the phone call that he’d been badly injured, hadn’t confirmed with the hospital and gotten his room assignment from the nurses’ station, she wouldn’t even know it was Dean. He’s unrecognizable with his disfigured left eye swollen completely shut — broken orbital socket, she guesses, taking a step further into the room — and his jaw three times its size and obviously wired shut.
She forces herself to take a deep cleansing breath, centering herself, visualizing herself pushing down the panic and fear into the black lockbox deep inside her, and walks to his bed, the rubber soles of her waterlogged canvas sneakers squeaking against the linoleum, leaving puddles in her wake. Outside, thunder rumbles. By the time she gets to his side, the terror is mostly gone.
“Hey.” She reaches out and places her hand on his forearm, offering contact. Up close, under the dim light of the wall sconce, his face is pulpy, soft-looking, and she adds possible fractured cheekbone to his growing catalog of injuries. She swallows hard.
Dean doesn’t move, doesn’t react to her.
“I heard about Sam,” she says finally, her voice choked and unexpectedly wet.
“C’mon, Dean,” Lisa says softly, pushing the straw against hermetically sealed lips. He doesn’t let it pass and she retracts the tall smoothie cup, holding it on her lap, She thought she’d gotten past this stage ages ago — back when Ben finally, finally, grew out of the terrible twos and began to eat his carrots and peas instead of flinging them to the floor. She lifts the cup again, fingers pinching the straw. “You gotta eat.” She feels tears sting and burn behind her eyes but she refuses to let them fall — she will not cry in front of him. She swallows hard. “Sam wouldn’t want you to do this.”
Dean closes his right eye — a slit surrounded by puffy, purple-black flesh — shutting her out, but he lets the plastic straw poke between his dry, cracked lips and past the wires holding his jaw shut. She can see his throat working, hear the slurp as he sucks up the viscous, bright coral-colored smoothie.
She unwraps one hand from the Styrofoam canister and palms his temple, stroking his short hair, not trusting herself to cause him further harm. He leans into her touch, relaxing incrementally, and a single tear slips down his discolored cheek. She wants to say something, to apologize for cutting him so deeply, for using Sam against him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she sits silently, holding the cup and caressing the back of his neck, listening to the straw scrape against the Styrofoam bottom of the cup, the hard gurgle as he drinks.
Finally, he stops and pulls away slightly, sinking back against the flat pillow. He cracks open his eye — the one that doesn’t have a broken socket and can at least see shadows, according to the day nurse — and there’s exhaustion and pain and grief there. She wonders how he’s even tracking.
“You done?” She asks softly and, at his half-nod, which is more of a roll of his head on his neck, she sets the cup on the wheeled bedside table. It’s a little more than half empty. “You did good,” she tells him. “Get some sleep.” She begins to rise from her perch on the edge of the mattress when he suddenly seizes her wrist in a desperate, viselike grip.
“Don’t go.” His words are muffled and almost unintelligible, but she can understand him if she stills and listens hard, despite the fact he can’t open his mouth or move his lips. “Please,” he adds brokenly, as an afterthought, talking clearly causing him pain. “Stay.”
She settles back onto the mattress, bracing her feet against the metal bed frame, drawing up her knees. “Not going anywhere.” She gives him her biggest, brightest smile as he lets go of her wrist.
On the third morning after Lisa arrives, Dean’s released, his insurance finally catching up to him.
“I figured you were a large,” Lisa says, sliding a pair of Wal-Mart brand black-and-white track pants over Dean’s feet and pulling them to his waist. He grips her shoulder tightly as he stands, wavering on socked feet. She’s satisfied that she’s guessed right when she unties the laces at the back of the hospital johnny and slips it off, wadding it up and tossing it on the bed among the tangled sheets. There’s a livid keloid scar in the shape of a handprint she does not remember seeing before but she keeps silent as she tugs one of the gray t-shirts from the three-pack she’s bought over his head and threads his arms through the short sleeves.
“Let’s get you out of here,” she whispers, lowering him into the wheelchair. He doesn’t protest and folds into it as docilely as any doll.
She releases the brake and wheels him out of the room.
They’re coasting down the highway, eating up Illinois blacktop when Lisa casts a glance in the rearview mirror. Dean’s curled up on the backseat, slumped half-upright against the cheap pillow jammed between his back and the door, leaning against the backrest. His legs are too long for the short seat; he’s got his right one bent at the knee, squashed partly against his chest, the left one spilling into the footwell. It doesn’t look comfortable and she suspects that they’ll need to stop soon for painkillers.
He’s quiet though, and part of her wishes he’d yell or curse or even grunt as the rear tire bounces over the edge of a pothole on the buckled stretch of road.
Courtesy of a broken nose, she can’t tell from his heavy breathing whether or not he’s asleep. She hopes he is, but she isn’t counting on it. Reaching into the sleeve strapped to her visor, she pulls out a mix CD of songs cobbled from Ben’s collection. She wishes Ben was with her now, to fill in the dead silence, to break the pall somehow. She slips in the CD and adjusts the volume.
AC/DC’s Back in Black blasts through the speakers and Dean jolts upright.
“Turn it off! Turn it the fuck off!” He cries, clamping his hands over his ears and she’s got the music off and the car on the shoulder of the road, far into the breakdown lane before he’s finished yelling. She unclips her seatbelt and twists around, kneeling on her seat, leaning over into the back.
“Okay. It’s okay,” she babbles. “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”
Dean’s still gasping, his breath hiccupping. She swings her leg over the center console into the rear passenger footwell and is grateful for the years of yoga as she climbs into the back, crouching over him. She doesn’t reach out, doesn’t touch, isn’t sure what to say that would be detrimental when—
“This is all wrong. It’s not supposed to happen like this. Fuck.”
“Shhh. Shhh,” she soothes. “It’s okay. I don’t mind. You used to listen to AC/DC with Sam, didn’t you?” Her voice is low and soft as she reaches out and rubs his upper arm, feeling the tense coiled muscles there.
There’s a pause and then a nod. Dean ducks his head but not before she sees the tears slipping down his face.
“Christ,” she breathes, realization sinking hard and immovable into her gut. “This is your first road trip without Sam, isn’t it?”
The question earns her another nod.
She keeps up the gentle rubbing, sensing that the contact is grounding him, helping him to relax. “The car’s all wrong, though, and I bet you never rode in the back, even when you were sick as a dog or bleeding out…”
A brief headshake and she smiles.
“…This is different enough, isn’t it? How about I put on some Billie Holiday or Lauryn Hill. Would that be better?”
There’s the tiniest of nods.
Then, “Sorry,” Dean mumbles, his voice raspy and wrecked, hampered by the wires, “Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole. You… you can put on whatever you want. Sorry.”
“Don’t be silly,” she tells him gently but firmly. “I don’t mind. I wouldn’t offer if I did. Besides, that was Ben’s. It’d be nice to listen to my own stuff for a change.” She inhales sharply. “You good? What d’you say we get back on the road?”
Dean swallows, nods, and sinks back into his corner. She pats his shoulder.
“Get some rest. I’ll wake you up in a couple of hours for more painkillers, okay?” She leans down and presses her lips to his hairline, one of the few places that isn’t bruised or fractured. His hair is matted, greasy with accumulated days of sweat and he is in desperate need of a shower, but she doesn’t care. She pulls back slightly. “It’s okay to not be okay,” she whispers. “No one expects you to be.”
She unbends herself, sliding back into a crouch on the driver’s seat, the steering wheel digging hard into her back. She watches him shift, grimacing in discomfort, and settle. She twists around, sitting once again and clicking her seatbelt into place. She readjusts her mirrors and turns on the car. Ejecting the CD, she replaces the jeweled disc into its slot and pulls out The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. As the strains of the first track fills the car, she turns down the volume until it is little more than background noise, low and soothing, and merges back onto the mostly deserted minor highway. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she catches a glimpse of the broken form sprawled across the length of her backseat that still, improbably, seems incredibly small and curled up.
“Let’s go home,” she says softly.
She gets Dean installed on the couch and sits in the dim kitchen, a mug of warm tea before her, and waits.
She stops Ben when he comes through the front door, relishing his quick, warm squeeze, the most he’ll give her these days.
“Ben,” she says softly. “Do you remember Dean?”
He nods seriously, picking up on her mood.
“Do you remember what he does?”
“Yeah,” his face lights up. “He fights monsters.”
She smiles sadly at him. “He was hurt pretty bad in his last fight. He won, but he’s hurt and his brother was killed. He’s going to stay with us for a little while, until he’s better.” She takes a breath. “Promise me you won’t ask him any questions about it.”
Ben’s face falls at her words and he swallows. “I promise.”
She leans forward, kisses him on the forehead before he can duck away. “Don’t worry. We’re going to take care of him.”
“Can I see him?”
“Sure. He’s on the couch. Don’t wake him up if he’s sleeping.”
She follows Ben to the doorway and takes in her son’s expression. It mirrors how she imagines her own must’ve looked when she first stepped foot into that hospital room. To her surprise, it smoothes out and Ben sits on the floor, close to the couch. And she knows Dean mustn’t be asleep when she hears him mumble something unintelligible that she doesn’t catch but Ben must’ve understood him because—
“That sucks. But Mom makes really awesome milkshakes.”
Later, he lets her lead him upstairs and draw him a warm bath. She washes his hair and tenderly dabs at the wreckage that is his face. He winces and lets out a whimper when she touches the broken bones and bruises. She apologizes softly and he stifles another moan as she gingerly holds the facecloth to his nose.
Then, when he’s out of the tub, she wraps him in a warm, dry towel and scrubs him off as she would a small child. He grips her with wet arms and tears make their way down his face.
“It’s okay to not be okay,” she whispers, repeating her words from the car, hugging him as he begins to tremble slightly.
She holds him for a long time, allowing him to tuck his face into her neck and hair and to use her as a pillar.
When he’s stopped weeping, she gets him back into the Wal-Mart clothes and he insists on the couch.
Dean spends the first week sleeping on the couch. Then, after that, after the fifth night of waking the neighborhood with his screams for Sam and nearly tearing the wires from his mouth, he joins her in her bed.
It doesn’t make the nightmares go away, not by a long shot, but she wakes when he whimpers and mutters, before the screams, and she cradles him, offering him caresses and sweet, meaningless whispers until he stops crying and sleeps again.
She never asks, but she’s sure they’re about Sam.
Dean heals slowly and the bruises fade. He drinks the smoothies and milkshakes she makes for him in the blender willingly. She’s surprised when he takes to the sweet-potato-and-orange creation she plies him with one evening, asking her in almost-shy tones if she’d mind making it again sometime. He draws the line at pureed asparagus and, tasting it, she silently agrees.
His favorites are still the sugar-laden ones with ice cream and butterscotch syrup, but she slips fruit into them occasionally.
The swelling goes down and the wires are eventually taken out and he looks more like the man who turned up on her doorstep again. He eats dinner with her and Ben, and begins incorporating himself into their unit.
And, more often than not, she comes home from the studio or the Y to find Dean and Ben watching Star Wars and Indiana Jones or sitting at the breakfast counter, working their way through the questions at the end of the textbook chapter. Dean’s extraordinarily patient with Ben, taking the time to go over and explain the concepts he struggles with and Ben thrives under the attention. Even his grades improve.
He always tilts his head to the left, now, and his forehead is constantly creased with concentration. He gets headaches and a trip to the optometrist reveals that he’s all but blind in his left eye, seeing little more than shadows and fuzzy shades of gray and light. His right is better than fine with 20/10 vision, and glasses and contacts are ruled out. Surgery is not an option, not without insurance.
When they get back home, Dean burrows under the covers and doesn’t get up.
She manages to bully him out of bed and into the shower after her morning session and when she gets back from her afternoon and evening sessions, she finds him on the couch, staring listlessly at ESPN while Ben’s stretched out on his belly on the floor beside him, reading Stone Fox for school.
Later, she tells him that they can’t live like this, that he needs to step up if he wants to stay; that nothing’s changed, that he’s been half-blind for weeks and a formal diagnosis shouldn’t make a difference.
The next day, he’s on the couch again, watching Cartoon Network with Ben, but the laundry’s done and folded.
Ben draws Dean out slowly. There are still days where she finds him inert on the couch and Ben reading out loud to him or doing homework in front of the television, but there are other, better, days too.
Once, after nearly a month of listening to Ben wheedling Dean to play video games with him, she comes back from a late-evening yoga session and finds them in front of the television in Ben’s room, massacring what appears to be zombies. Ben’s sitting on Dean’s left side and she can tell he’s got the two-player feature turned on. Dean tilts his head and picks off five guys in rapid succession.
“Awesome!” Ben exclaims softly. “Hold on, there’s someone coming up on your bad side….” And there’s the fake peow sound-effect of a gun going off. “There, I got ‘im.”
She bites her lip at the casual way Ben brings up Dean’s blind side, but Dean turns to Ben and flashes a quick, brief grin that’s gone almost before she registers it.
“Thanks, man.”
She backs away from the doorway, unseen, and goes into the bathroom where she silently lets a few tears fall in the shower.
The door flies open before her hand even makes contact with the doorknob and Ben’s there, worried and frantic. “Mom!” He grabs her hand and pulls her into the kitchen. Dean’s huddled in the corner, back against the cabinets, knees drawn up, chin tucked into his chest, obviously crying.
“Mom…” Ben repeats helplessly as she takes in the carnage of broken eggs, breadcrumbs, and tomato sauce. There’s even a half-gallon cardboard container of milk on its side, a wide, white pool spread on the floor, drips still making their way down the cabinet doors.
She takes a breath, smiles reassuringly at Ben. “I got it. How about you go in the living room until I call you, okay?”
Ben frowns but nods unhappily. “I tried…”
“I know. You did good, sweetie. I got it from here. It’s going to be okay.”
Ben slips from her side and she pads through the minefield of sauce, broken glass, eggshells and coagulating yolk. She finds a relatively clear spot next to Dean and slides down into a squat, resting her ass against her heels, weight on her toes. Hero pose, she thinks inanely.
“You wanna tell me about it?” she whispers, her voice loud in the silent room.
Dean sniffs hard and raises his face. He lifts one hand and smears away the tears. “Fuck, Lise,” his voice is wrecked, hoarse. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about the mess. We can clean it up. It’s not a problem,” she answers evenly, her voice calm and unruffled, looking over her shoulder at him. “What happened?”
Dean swallows. “I was going to cook dinner. But turns out you need two good eyes for that.” His voice is hard and bitter and he doesn’t look up. There’s a pause and then: “Why the fuck do you put up with me? I’m useless.”
Lisa inhales sharply. She knows she has to tread carefully here, that whatever she says will be taken at face value. “You’re not useless,” she answers.
“Lise…”
“Shut up and listen to me. You’re not. Do you have any idea how much Ben adores you? How much easier it is for me now that you’re here when he comes home from school? Just the fact that you help him with his math homework — which is so far over my head I wouldn’t know where to begin — and make sure he gets ready for bed when I have evening sessions is huge, Dean. God, with you here I don’t have to worry about him being home alone or if he’s getting his homework done or what he’s eating for dinner or if I need to stay late… That’s because of you, Dean.”
Dean looks up at her and there’s disbelief and tentative hope warring in his eyes. “H-he makes it easy. He’s a good kid.”
“Yeah, he is,” she smiles and it quickly falls. “But he’s still a kid.” She takes a breath. “He shouldn’t have to raise himself. You do that, Dean. I can’t ask for more.”
Spring turns into summer and soon it’s almost the end of July. And Ben’s little league team makes the finals.
“Please, Dean.” She hears the note of a whine creeping into Ben’s voice and she knows Dean’s about to fold. It’s one of the things she loves best about him. “Just come. Mom’ll sit next to you and I’ll have Jimmy’s dad sit near you. He keeps all the scores anyways. I promise it won’t be a big deal, you’ll see. I want you there.”
“Ben…”
“Please?”
There’s a slow exhale and then a squeal.
The game is kind of lackluster and Ben’s team loses pathetically to an obviously far more superior team. Still though, it’s worth it to see the look on Dean’s face. For a moment, he seems almost happy. As though he could fit into her world.
She keeps up a running, useless commentary until Dean silences her with a kiss and tells her to quit telling him what he can already see and just give him the damn score. Jimmy’s dad overhears and moves onto their bleacher and takes over the play-by-play.
During the eighth inning, she catches someone staring at Dean and she throws her a stink-eye and the woman glances away too quickly. There are no further incidents.
Later, when they are sunburned and sweaty and greasy with sunscreen applied too late, they go out for ice cream with the team.
Dean fields a minor meltdown from the youngest player; he takes the kid aside, away from his teammates, and bends to his height, talking in low tones. She doesn’t hear what he tells the kid, but after a moment, the kid nods, sniffles, and blows his nose into Dean’s handkerchief before going back to his friends. Dean returns to his stool and swings himself up besides her. She leans over and kisses him on the cheek and he smiles.
It’s early autumn but still feels like summer.
She’s fitted along Dean’s side, her head resting against his shoulder.
“Can you give me a ride to the bus station tomorrow — the one in the McDonald’s parking lot? I’m going to Sioux Falls. There’s something I need to do.”
She nods. “Yeah, okay.”
She tugs away and rolls over to her other side, blinking hard. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she’s pressed up against him in three hours, skin-to-skin, teasing away nightmares and holding him as he shakes apart with the force of his silent, suppressed sobs.
She drives Dean to the Greyhound station and sits in her bright blue Toyota Echo hatchback as he pecks her on the cheek and promises to come back, that this is something he has to do. She watches him walk out to the bus, backlit by the glowing sign, the yellow arches of the M rising high above the barren, cracked asphalt, and he doesn’t give her a backward glance.
The next several days are long and she’s surprised to find herself bereft and lonely without Dean. She scolds herself for being stupid, that he’s made his choice. It still doesn’t make the suddenly-too-big bed feel any warmer at night.
On the fourth morning, she pads down the stairs and she sees a form sacked out on her couch, socked feet propped up on an armrest.
She peeks around the couch and sees him sleeping. His face is pale and drawn with exhaustion and sorrow and there are dry tear tracks on his cheeks. She decides not to disturb him, covering him with the fuzzy brown fleece blanket draped over the back of one chair, and goes into the kitchen. She pulls the overflowing trash bag from the plastic container and opens the door to the garage.
The light is still on and taking up most of the space is a car covered with tarpaulin. She can see rubber tires peeking out and judging by its boxy, lean shape, it’s Dean’s car.
She punches the automatic door opener and goes outside into the humid heat and dumps her trash into the barrel. On her way back in, she touches the car reverently through the cloth.
When she goes back through the living room, she sees Dean’s lying awake.
“Hey,” she whispers, going to his side and standing to his right. “Welcome back. You okay?”
“Promised I would be.” He gives her a slow, sad smile and reaches out, resting his hand on her thigh. He tugs her in, pulls her down and kisses her. It is hot and tender and passionate and salty-sour from his tears but she can sense Best Night Of My Life, Dean somewhere beneath everything.
She pulls back, smiles, “Yeah. You did. C’mon.” She holds out her hand and he takes it, trailing her upstairs to her — their — bedroom.