One week ago today I took my Saturday walk with Pam and we talked about the weather. It would be a fine day, we decided, for their annual Easter party and egg hunt. Not too hot, so the chocolate wouldn’t melt inside the eggs. But not raining either, we hoped, and not cold. It would be fine. It would be perfect. It would be fun.
The morning was neatly laid out. I got back from the walk at 7:15 or so; the whole family left the house for breakfast at Guglhupf at 8:30, and we enjoyed our pain au chocolat and coffee and juice until 9:42, when we left to take me to orchestra. While I rehearsed, the children played computer games in the sound booth of the church and Bill worked on the cable system. Rehearsal was over too soon for me, and I was already looking forward to Sunday morning and being in my seat and tuned at 8, ready to rehearse one last time and to hear how we sounded with the choir. But now it was just before noon, and we were off for home, where I roasted asparagus and Bill made hollaindaise, and Linda arrived with her Hoho cake just in time for the party.
Pam’s Easter party is always fun. She makes sugar cookies shaped like flowers and bakes them on popsicle sticks, creating a delicious and tempting centerpiece. Everyone brings something, and we had plenty to eat. Salads, ham and turkey, those wonderful little buns that you only get at parties, fruit salad. And then the egg hunt. They fill and hide over 700 eggs, staging two hunts so that the younger children have a sporting chance on their own before the big kids get their turn.
We watched from the deck. It was overcast, so we didn’t need to shield our eyes from the sun, and we laughed at the children finding some eggs and walking right past others. The Maxson’s hide so many that they don’t try to be entirely clever about it: eggs are just sitting there, right in the grass, easy pickings.
The hunt ended, and Emma Grace, Carlo and Guiliana joined us, Nic, Laura, Linda and some others on the deck. Apparently the next Hiding was going on, because most of the children were in the front yard. Emma Grace sat at the table and opened her eggs and ate.
And then it happened, that which none of us would have expected, but which we will wonder about forever after any time, every time, we step onto a deck. There was a grating noise, the floor shook, and I looked over toward the sound, where the floor of the deck met the house. The entire deck had come loose and was slipping down; the boards beneath the siding were exposed; the siding itself had splintered and the floor was giving way.
I thought it would stop. I thought it would freeze up, snag on something, that something had just slipped but that the tighter bolts, the real bolts, the bolts that meant business would catch on, would hold, would stop our free-fall of fifteen feet to the concrete pad and grass below.
But it did not stop. And I realized (how does one have time to realize anything in the truly split second timing of an incident like this?) that we were not going to stop, that we were most decidedly going to be dumped down on the ground. I looked down, and I saw the ground opening up below me. I saw the grass and the concrete in the dark underneath us and I knew there was no help. And I truly did have this thought; this is the exact thought that went through my head: “It’s going to be all right.”
Some time later I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back. I saw the pine trees against the grey sky and, off to the left, the flat platform of the deck standing, oddly, perpendicular to the ground. My head hurt, and my left foot. Bill was next to me, talking to me, urging me gently out of my sleep. Around me were noises that come in the wake of disaster: hurried sorts of sounds, and crying; the sharp, sudden conversation of the frightened; and very close to me a woman moaning and crying out so that I wanted to comfort her.
It seemed to me that the party had been over for a long time, or that I had been wanting to go home for a long time, and that the fall had happened a long time ago. I remembered the egg hunt, and orchestra rehearsal, and how very well things had been going so long, long ago, and I said, “I don’t want this to have happened.” I think Bill kind of chuckled, and he said he agreed with me. I thought I would go home; I had had enough. The party was over, after all, and my foot was killing me. But he made me lie there, and I heard the sirens in the distance.
It’s funny how you take stock of things. I had known it would be all right, and it was. Lying there, I knew I was fine. Yes, my head hurt in the aching, stinging sort of way that comes from whatever it was that hit me. But I knew my limbs were intact; I knew I had not broken my spine. I tested my fingers. “I wanted to play in the orchestra tomorrow,” I told Bill. At that point, I thought it was conceivable. My foot might hurt, but I’ve never once used it to play the violin. Who needs a foot on Easter Sunday morning, when you’re finally getting to play with the choir? It’s the Hallelujah Chorus, for crying out loud.
William came and knelt over me. I couldn’t make out his face; I couldn’t see Bill’s face; I couldn’t see Pam’s face when, sometime later, she was kneeling next to me where Bill had been, simultaneously trying to comfort me and her mother, who was moaning and crying out on the ground. “I can’t see,” I said to Bill, although I could see. I could see the trees, the pine needles clear and individually suspended there, the pine cones. But the faces were a blur. I could only make out the shapes of heads, darkened where the eyes were, ears on the sides, the color of a shirt. “Why can’t I see?” I said, and said again, trying to make my eyes see.
I lay on my back and gazed at the blur. I couldn’t see what Bill and William saw: the bodies lying here and there across the grass; Laura writhing and trying to get up; the blood pouring down K.C.’s face because she’d been hit with the deck railing; children unhurt and terrified, staring from a distance; the blood and scratches on Nic’s face, a nose newly broken; the dazed look of pain on Mark’s face when he stood stock-still after being pulled to his feet; the lemon-sized, bleeding lump on the left side of my own forehead. I tried to focus on the faces that bent over me. “I can’t see,” I kept saying to Bill. “Why can’t I see?”
That was a week ago now. We are through the worst of it, I think. Linda had her hip replaced that night; the ball of her hip broke right off when she hit the ground and there was nothing for it but to give her a new one. She is in rehab now, standing some and walking. Mark came home from the hospital two nights ago. He has plates on the spiral fracture on his femur and an elbow in a cast. He won’t be able to try walking until his fractured pelvis heals, and the only thing for that is time. K.C. had the staples out of her head this morning; she and daughter Jenny will both be on pain medication for awhile, waiting for their fractured vertebrae to heal. Rhona, Pam’s mom, the woman who moaned next to me, is back at her daughter’s house, riding out the pain for her cracked ribs with medication, having visits from the physical therapist. We went to see Laura in the hospital today. Nic was there; his nose looks fine, though he looks a bit drained. But they’ve repaired Laura’s three shattered vertebrae with bits of bone from her hip and she’s glad to be off morphine. Miraculously, the bits of vertebrae affected neither her spinal cord nor its protective dura, and she will walk again. Their daughter Guiliana suffered a chipped tooth; baby Carlo uses his cast, says Nic, as a weapon. The broken arm doesn’t bother him at all.
I hop around on crutches, grateful for the miracle of painkillers and awaiting, come Monday, the doctor’s word on whether I’ll have surgery for my broken foot. The lump on my head has gone down, the scab is almost gone. The skin around my eye is yellow from the bruise, but that will clear eventually. Nic commented today that it looked like dramatic eye make-up, is all.
Miraculously, Bill and Emma Grace were unhurt. There were sixteen of us on the deck, and they are the only two who didn’t need emergency attention. We have nothing but gratitude for that.
This morning we went back to Guglhupf for breakfast, taking with us my mother, who has come to help now that I’m an invalid. We sat where we sat last week, at the same table, but this time I needed two chairs: one for me, and one for my foot.
It was beautiful this morning. A high wind sent dark clouds flying over an otherwise clear sky, and the light coming through the skylights of the restaurant shifted and changed. It looked different than it had the week before.
Our neighbors Steve and Debbie came in. They had been at the Easter egg hunt, but were lucky enough to be off the deck when it fell. The day after it happened they brought all four injured families lasagnas with meat, even though they are strict vegetarians. This morning they stood at the end of our table, and we talked about how different everything seemed at that time, only one week ago. We’ve agreed to get together– everyone in the neighborhood who was involved, whether or not they were hurt. We’ve decided that we need to talk about it, and hear what the others have to say.
We said good-bye as I hopped down the stairs on my crutches, and I thought about what I said last week when I woke up: “I don’t want this to have happened.” I still don’t. I don’t want Mark to be in a wheelchair. I don’t want my mother-in-law to be in rehab. I don’t want Laura racked with pain, waiting for incisions and bones to heal. I don’t want Pam to be nursing her mother back to health. I don’t want my foot to throb, to have to balance on the other one, to have to wonder if I’m not remembering something because I don’t remember it, or because I’ve had a concussion and this is just the way things will be. I’m wishing that, tomorrow morning, I could meet Pam in the cul-de-sac, and we could go for our Sunday morning walk.
And then I think of the other thing I said, the thing Bill says that I kept saying: “I can’t see.” And I think that it’s very likely that I still can’t see, that I can’t see why or how any of this is good, or will be good, or will be worked together for good, or however that goes.
I couldn’t see Bill’s face when he sat so near me in the grass, but he was near me. I can’t yet see what can possibly be good about any of this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
