Part Seven: Leo
He was in a curtained bay with a drip in his arm and a monitor and a breathing apparatus nearby that they had positioned as a precaution. He was propped at a slight angle and his face still had the remnants of the wrong color, the gray-white quality, but his eyes when I came through the curtain were Leo’s eyes — present, tracking, mine.
“Hi, buddy,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. His voice was careful, managing around the pain.
I sat in the chair beside him and I took his hand, the one without the drip.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
“Kind of a lot,” he said. “They gave me something for it.”
“Good.”
“Are we staying here?”
“Tonight, yes. Maybe tomorrow.”
He processed this. “Is Dad coming?”
“He’s on a plane.”
A small exhale, careful around the ribs. “Okay.”
I sat with him. I didn’t say anything for a little while. He didn’t either, which was unlike him — Leo was not a naturally quiet person, which was something I usually found both exhausting and delightful — but right now the quiet was right, and I held his hand, and the monitors beeped with the specific steadiness of machines doing their job properly.
“Mom,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Ryan did it on purpose.” He said it like someone who had been carrying the statement for a while and needed to put it down somewhere. “I wasn’t playing. He just kicked me and then stood there.”
“I know,” I said.
“Are you going to do something about it?”
I looked at my son’s face. Eight years old, in a hospital bed, his fifth rib fractured and inward-displaced, asking me if I was going to do something about it.
“Yes,” I said. “I already am.”
He nodded, the careful nod of someone managing around pain.
“Okay,” he said.
He closed his eyes. Within a few minutes, the medication and exhaustion pulled him under, and I sat with his hand in mine and listened to him breathe, each breath slightly easier than the last as the treatment took hold.
