We walk into the hospital and everywhere smells like those big popsicle sticks the doctors shove down your throat when you have strep. We walk into the hospital and everything is very clean and neat and unfriendly. People with jobs to do hurry around. I can tell just by being next to those people that they don’t really care what’s happening to anyone, not in the way that I care. My mom guides me around with her hand on my back; first through the E.R. doors, then to the nurses station. The nurse she’s talking to would have been pretty if her face weren’t carrying the weight of what she sees everyday. My mom guides me around with her hand on my back, from the nurse’s station to the elevator to the ICU. The children’s ICU. I wonder what “ICU” stands for.

We walk into the hospital and through all those doors that swing both ways and we finally get to a room, a big room, with a crowd. Not the kind of crowd that makes me breathe short or the kind where too many strangers casually touch me in a way that makes my brain want to pop. The kind of crowd where everyone is still. The kind where everyone is equally spaced apart. The kind where everyone is quiet. The kind where people cry and the other people ignore it. The kind where people stand and listen to beeping. The kind where people stand and watch—try to watch— traces of brain waves on a little machine.

We walk into that room and through the crowd to our equally-spaced place. My mom takes her hand off my back and leans down to me. I don’t remember what she said, maybe nothing. The room doesn’t feel right, with painted animals on the wall, painted animals to try and distract or make happy the kind of children who cannot feel that way. We walk into the room and take our place, and my mom moves her hand and I see G.G. laying in a fancy bed. I know the bed can raise and tilt and call people and warm and lower its bars. I wonder why I can’t have a bed like that; they seem fun. Why do the sick people get fun beds and not me? 

We walk in and we see G.G. laying in the fancy bed. He looks like a small brown island in that white room. A discolored egg yolk. He looks like he always does, but asleep. There are long, drapey pieces of gauze wrapping his head. There is a tube taped to his mouth and a tube taped to his stomach and a tube taped under his gown. I can’t tell what’s wrong.

“Can’t we wake him up from his nap?” My mom turns to me sharply but the look in her eyes is not sharp; it’s watery. “Isn’t he taking a nap?”

My mom guides me with her hand on my back through the crowd, the unusual kind, to the other side of the bed. People shift down in line like penguins do to make space for us. I see the drapey gauze still, and it still looks normal. I look at my mom. She guides me closer to the bed. It’s harder to see now, because I’m small. All I can see is the bar. My dad picks me up. I look at G.G. I follow the drapey gauze from his left ear and up and over and then I see it. A soft, draped crater the size of a baseball.

“What’s under there daddy?”

He whispers into my ear, “Nothing, pumpkin.”

“Nothing?”
“Just his brain.”

“Not his hair?”

“No, pumpkin. Just his brain.”

“Why didn’t they fix it?”

“They have to let the brain breathe, it’s taking up too much space right now.”

“Oh,” I say, not understanding, but accepting.

The crowd stares at the little brain screen. The line has been flat for however long he’s been in here, a long time now. There’s a blip. Margaret stiffens. George looks up and sees the screen. Margaret says something to him real quiet and he leaves the room.

I think of the story my mom told me a few weeks ago, of why G.G. isn’t in school anymore or coming to swim anymore or to dinner anymore or to Sunday school anymore. There was an accident. A George-done accident, which made me think it was suspicious, seeing as he had happily let me drown. A few years ago he had watched us swim in Barton Springs. I got stuck under a rock and pumped my fist for help, as Jodie, our swim teacher, taught us, but he laughed from the shore. Don’t be a baby, kid. You’re just fine. Someone else’s mother helped me out of the water. I threw up into the stream. 

There was a George-done accident involving a rented Pontoon boat—not his usual speed boat, which may have prevented such human error. George was driving his rented Pontoon boat filled with friends I never knew he had when G.G. “slipped” right off the front. He got out a few screams, of course he did. He knew how to swim. He knew how to float. He knew how to scream for help, he knew how to pump his fist; Jodie taught us a long time ago. George noticed after the fact. Removed G.G. ‘s body from the water, saving him from any wet drowning but far too late to avoid watching out for little brain waves on an omnipotent screen.

George rented a pontoon boat for his fake friends and ran over his son with it, his little brown yolk body going unnoticed in the water. Pointed pontoon versus a six-year-old’s skull.

The nurse comes in, the one that would’ve been pretty, and confirms the blip is, in fact, brain activity. The crowd changes. Not to hope, but to relief. That’s what they’ve been waiting for. Any sign of life.

My mom guides me out of the room with her hand on my back. We never return to the hospital.

*

My mom picks me up from school at lunchtime. The kind of pickup where the principal comes to your classroom and speaks to Mrs. Nixon and Mrs. Nixon goes white like the hospital sheets and then you’re in the car with your crying mom. I’m not sure how, but she explains to me that G.G. is gone.

“Gone like Keaton?”

“Yes, gone like Keaton.”

I can still hear my mom bargaining in my mind—he just had a return of brain activity. Just! He woke up and blinked those long, dark eyelashes one more time and then was gone the next day. Simple as a fact.

Me and my sister and G.G.’s sister were in the church choir. We practiced weekly after school in a “classroom” up in the church attic. Technically speaking, it’s not a great place to sing. It was stuffy and smelled like old communion wine and had no openable windows and was practically sound-proof and too small to hold even one set of risers. Absolutely no acoustics. We stood in a straight line, the ten or so of us chorus kids. Most of the tiny room held boxes or racks of dusty choir robes, robes too big to fit us but we wore anyway, in the name of the Lord. The hemmed 60-inch sweep of the robes bunched up on the ground like a giant leg of a bell bottom, our tiny limbs sinking in the sheer amount of fabric. I longed for one of the adult robes that had satin stitched around the collar and down the front, but I was too young, too far from god to deserve a ribbon. Part of our “obligation” as part of the church’s choir was performing at holidays and events. You know, all the Christmas shows and baptisms and funerals and the special Wednesdays. I don’t remember our choir director or any of the other girls, just that shit room and those monstrous robes.

We sang every Sunday, as church choirs do. It was my favorite part of church; not the part about praising god through song or even the singing itself, but the part where we got to experience the entirety of the service from a special vantage point. I could look at everyone in the crowd and see glowing faces or people on their Blackberries or kids playing with the same coloring-and-stickers kit given to those children who are taken to adult mass with their parents instead of pawned off into Sunday School. We got to watch. I loved watching. You can learn so much from sitting in a crowded place and shutting the fuck up. People actually expect that from kids—“be seen, not heard.” I learned early on that people kept secrets in their purses and in the lines on their loafers and the little furrowed ridges that form around their frowning mouths. There are secrets in the way people fidget with their jewelry and secrets in the way they take their breaths and the kind of boats they rented. I learned that you can learn anything you want if you overhear the right stranger’s phone call or catch a distinctive fracture of a glance between two people. I learned how to tell if peoples’ tears are real or if they’re stifling a big sigh. Knowledge is power. I started to collect it everywhere.

There was an event. There was going to be an event, a special occasion, and we had to sing in those black hole robes. We stood up perpendicular to the altar on a slightly elevated stage covered in red carpet that did not make me feel like a celebrity. It reminded me that we were always standing in puddles of Jesus’s blood.

There was an event and we were singing some hymns that I can’t place but I remember singing in my head voice a lot, an easy task for any singer who has yet to hit puberty. I was singing and people were coming in in a weird way. Not the way they usually came in, in huge numbers and talking and laughing and blessing each other and hugging and shaking hands and kissing. There was an event and we were singing and the people were filing in evenly and quietly and looking away from the stage and the front pews where my parents sat by Margaret and George and Crockett. My dad was staring at his knees. My mom was crying quietly and holding Margaret’s hand. Margaret was looking straight forward, not seeing a single thing. She flinched whenever George touched her. Crockett cried quiet, shameful, teenage boy tears. George stared at his knees. A real-life chiasmus if there ever was one. 

We’re singing and I’m stretching high into my head for notes as I stare at the same blankness Margaret is. I’m not really sure where I am, besides in a church and on the stage. Everyone is finally sat and the choir sits too. The pastor or whatever you call the guy who speaks at events like this begins his spiel. I don’t know what he said, but I know that when he stopped and gave us a moment of silence I started to choke. 

I hadn’t noticed the bubble forming at the bottom of my trachea, but I noticed it coming when everything went silent. Suddenly I was staring directly at the center of the stage where a large black and white portrait of G.G. resided on a craft store easel, a wreath of flowers circling his face. Center stage: a child-size coffin. I was trapped underwater in Barton Springs again.

I’d never seen a child’s coffin before. Hope was cremated, I think, after dying of leukemia when we were 3. I don’t know what they did with Keaton, after not waking up one morning when we were 5, but I never saw a coffin. We’re singing on the altar stage in front of a majority of our congregation and I can’t think about anything else but throwing myself over his small, boxed body like a mourning ancient Greecian widow; I long to rake my fingernails slowly and deeply through skin from my forehead to my frown, permanently marking myself as one once loved.

The choking starts to come up in hyperventilation and I feel like I’m drowning again. Always drowning, over and over and over. Finally I burst. Belabored yelps start escaping from my missing-tooth mouth. Brighton shakes my leg but I can’t wake up, snap out of it. The yelps turn to wails and I notice some of the mourner’s faces looking at mine. No. I do not want them to be learning from me, knowing my secrets. I couldn’t keep it all in, the stark aloneness I was beginning to feel. Where had all my friends gone? Did I do this to people who loved me? Kill them? 

Embarrassment, stronger than the panicky grief, started to overcome me. I had to make a survival choice: flight or fawn? Flight. I startle straight up, right in the middle of the service, fight my way through the children’s choir, then the adult choir, then past the preacher and down the two stairs and directly into my mother’s arms. Margaret looks at me, disgusted. My mom ushers me out, hand on my back.

I strip off my all-consuming robe and am about to panic take off my dress when my mom stops me. We didn’t speak at all. I just stood there, crying into the blooming leaves of a crepe myrtle. I needed relief from… whatever was happening to me. I knew it wasn’t right to feel like this, act like this; I could see the worry in my mother’s eyes. Maybe it was kinship. Or fear that she recognized in me what she so denied in herself.

I’m standing there, sobbing at my own apocalyptic state, watering the crepe myrtle. My mom watches from a safe distance, knowing I just needed time to purge it all out. She told me once she went to a seminar for “women who feel too much.” Was I feeling too much? 

A single bee flew from the fragrant pollen of the tree’s flowers and up under the frilled rim of my baby blue dress. It planted its stinger directly into my belly button, through my tights. I let out a small scream. My mom rushed over.

“Pumpkin, you have to keep quiet, they’re still in there.”

“B-B-But, but, there was a BEE. A bee stung me!”

“Where? Where? I don’t see anything.” She looked over my arms and legs.

“In here.” I pointed at my belly button.

“Under your dress?”

“Y-Y-Yes!” I pull the hem of my dress up to my neck and pull down the belly of my tights. A small red welt. My mom runs her finger over the bump. I yelp.

“Well, you’ll have to wait until we get home to get that stinger out.” I pull up my tights and drop my dress back down. Calm. Suddenly, calm. Calm until after the service and calm when we got home and calm when they pulled the stinger out. In that moment, I learned something I wish I hadn’t: physical pain can outweigh emotional pain.

We spent almost all of our free time for the first eight years of my life with the Leibes’. Then we stopped. It wasn’t a gradient; our families’ love for each other didn’t fizzle. We weren’t separated by school districts or age interests. It switched like a light. On, then off. The Liebes’ stopped going to church because they stopped believing in god. We stopped going to church because they stopped going to church. Margaret and George couldn’t see me. Couldn’t come to our house and see pictures of me. They would see my face and think of G.G. They would see my parents’ faces and think of me and then think of G.G. Just like that, half of our chosen family, gone.

At least once a week, I wonder what he’d look like at 13 or 18 or 24. If he’d still be my best friend. If he would’ve been the man I was meant to marry. If he would’ve read my bad poetry and eaten my baked concoctions. If he would’ve ever stood up to his bastard of a father. If he’d be good at math. If he would end up liking cats even though he was raised with dogs. If he would be tall, even though he was always shorter than me. If he would tell me it’s okay to cry; that we wouldn’t turn out like our mothers, smothering our grief down. If he would grow up to be what he wanted, his parents wanted, what I wanted. I wonder all the time. I consider the injustice of a life taken at 6, or 5, or 3. If only he could’ve made it to 24. I did.

About the Author:

Kirsten Timco, originally from Austin, TX, received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in 2023. Her writing circles on coming to terms with past versions of the self and growing up with mental illnesses. She now resides in Brookline, Massachusetts and is working on two memoir manuscripts.

*Feature image by Francesco Giacomini on Unsplash