The Accident

She sat by his hospital bed and whispered that her name was Jeanie.  He hadn’t the strength to muster so much as a movement of his head in acknowledgment.  Infrequently he would open his eyelids but his glassy eyes would stare straight ahead at nothing in particular and then close again.  She would cry as the doctor and nurses came in and out of the room.  They would tell her not to cry and that he would be okay.

The black hair on the side of his head had been shaved off revealing a large scar with sutures running perpendicularly across it.  A vase of daisies sat at his bedside with a note that read “Get Well” on a pole beneath the petals.  His right arm was encased in a plaster cast and the left was covered in cuts with blood smeared through his dark arm hair.  Jeanie had brought him a fruit basket but it remained untouched.

After the ambulance had taken him away the police officers had told her that the man wasn’t carrying an ID.  At the hospital a social worker came to the man’s room.  She told Jeanie that the man was from El Salvador and didn’t speak any English and that he would probably be deported once he was well enough to go.  Jeanie cried when she heard this. 

It had been raining and it was late; Jeanie had worked a double shift and was tired.  The road had been narrow with a precipitous drop as soon as the single lane’s width ended.  There were no lights lighting the road and she may have glanced at the money in the passenger seat to see how much she had made.

She had barely felt the impact.  To him it was meteoric.  He flew from his bike into a ditch at the side of the road as her tires crushed his, bending the frame of his bike over itself.  She pressed her brakes as hard as she could, the rear end of her car skidding into the oncoming lane.  Jeanie called an ambulance as the man lay motionless.  She thought that he was dead.

Jeanie had stayed that night in the hospital waiting room to hear of the man’s condition.  She called out sick at work the next day and left the hospital to buy the man gifts.  That day she was allowed to visit the man’s room.  After that she wouldn’t come back to the hospital again.