The Accident

"Cut it out, Cayela!" Shawn held his tablet above his head, out of his little sister's cookie-crumb-coated fingers. 

"Mom, Shawn isn't wearing his seat belt!" Cayela called as she wrestled against his right arm and leg. That was a new battle in the war that had been raging in the back seat since they had left their uncle's farm three hours earlier. Cayela had a bad time at the farm--mainly because their five cousins were all boys and their aunt and uncle were absurdly strict. Shawn liked the farm. It was the months of "Why can't you be more like Ethan" that always followed that he hated. Ethan was eleven--eight months younger than Shawn--and the most annoying kid on the face of the earth. Whatever happened, he was the first to tattle. He always sat with the adults at meals and provided them with a never ending stream of stories--always about  how good he was and how bad other children were, and Shawn's parents swallowed every word of it. 

Shawn drew his tablet back to eye--level just in time to see  the blue "Failed level 7" bouncing on the screen. "You made me lose the game!"

"I was playing first!"

"It's my tablet!"

The car suddenly swerved violently. Cayela shrieked, but the car quickly straightened, after coming within inches of the terrible drop on left of the car. 

"David, what was that all about?" Shawn's mom demanded in a rather shaken voice.

"A warning for two little children. If they want to get back to Red Deer alive, they should play the Silence Game for the next half hour." The Silence Game was Shawn's dad's invention. They would set a time--usually half an hour to an hour--to be completely silent. If you spoke, you lost. It was by far their mom's favorite car game.

Cayela clamped her mouth shut but continued to reach for the tablet. Before Shawn could hide it, his mother's hand reached back and snatched it away. Shawn silently protested in the rear view mirror, but his mom only shook her head and pointed out the window. Shawn sank back into the seat and looked out the window. His mom was obsessed with the beauty of the view, but he couldn't see why. After all, what was a mountain but a big lump of rock? He pretended to gaze at the scenery while his hand crawled up behind  Cayela and began carefully tying stray strands of her hair to the metal part of her head rest. It would only be a matter of time...

"Ow! Mom!" Cayela screamed. 

"You lose." Shawn grinned and got a pinch. He raised his hand to retaliate just as the car lurched and the tires squealed with a sudden breaking. He looked up just in time to see the semi trailer swing out to slam like a battering ram into their little PT Cruiser. He heard his mom screaming as the airbags exploded and everything spun upside down. He smashed into the roof of the car then collided with Cayela. Next thing he knew, glass was shattering all around him as he flew through the air. He caught a glimpse of the car flipping and rolling down the ravine just before he hit the ground with a horrible, crushing shock and everything went red then faded into blackness.

A buzzing, whirring sound invaded Shawn's hellish nightmare. He felt steady bumping of a moving vehicle and his dream came back in a rush. He screamed--or at least tried. His mouth wouldn't move and it hurt worse than anything when he tried to speak. He opened his eyes and that sent stabbing pain through his skull. Only his right eye would open and all he could see was misty blue. The mechanical humming was the only sound he could hear and it seemed distant and muffled. Was he still dreaming? He tried to move his legs, but he couldn't even feel them. He felt a distant, dull poke and pain in his right arm and everything faded away. 

When he woke again, he was lying on his back. The whole right side of his body was numb and his head felt like it had swollen t o twice its size. He stared at the ceiling. White. Ceiling. It's white. The ceiling is white. White.

"Shawn? Shawn, can you hear me?" An unfamiliar voice asked. Shawn tried to answer, but again his jaw just hurt and would not move. "Don't try to speak. Your jaw is broken. We've wired it shut. Just blink and I'll know you can hear me. Shawn blinked. Broken jaw. Broken. Why--It was real. It hadn't been a nightmare. They had gone off the cliff. What about his family? He struggled to speak again, the sharp pain sending tears to his eyes.

"Shh. It's okay. You're going to be fine. Right now, you need to rest. Your aunt and uncle will be here soon, The have been waiting for you to wake up." I don't care about them! Where is my family? He found the young nurse's face and tried with all his might to communicate his questions through his eyes. She just smiled one of those supposedly reassuring grown-up smiles and turned and left.  

Shawn lay alone, trying to look around the room. He could not move his head more than an inch in any direction, which made it difficult. On his right, the was  window with curtains printed with characters from Finding Nemo; a large brown teddy bear sat on the sill with a flowering plant in its lap. Closer to his head, an IV diligently dripped away as the machine beside it rhythmically beeped. It had a screen, but, from where he lay, he couldn't see what it said. On his left, he could only see the ceiling and the top two feet of a blue curtain. A TV hung from the ceiling at the foot of his bed, playing muted cartoons. He slowly, gingerly lifted his right arm to find the remote. It felt sore and heavy, so he held it up to see. A massive bruise ran from the shoulder to the elbow and scabbed-over scrapes covered the arm right down to the bandaged wrist where the IV tubing ended in a needle. He slowly moved his fingers. At least everything there was working as it ought. He found the remote and switched the TV off. There was no use trying to move his left arm. He couldn't even feel the muscles in his shoulder, let alone use them. He felt his face with his right hand. It was all so bandaged that he couldn't tell what the damge was. At least he still had hair where bandage didn't cover his scalp. But what about his family? He remembered being thrown out the window--he hadn't been wearing his seat belt. He desperately hoped that meant he was the worse hurt.

"Shawn!" His aunt's voice came from his right--just where he couldn't see her. She rushed around to his other side, and he saw the she was crying. "You're awake! Oh, thank God, you're going to live." Shawn stared back at her. Her relief was frightening. She grabbed his hand and started sobbing. Where were his parents? Why was it his aunt and not his mother holding his hand? The nurse assured his aunt that he would make a full recovery until she settled down. He had never been even remotely close to his aunt. This reaction was way over the top if it was just for him. Shawn felt tears stinging in his eyes. His aunt saw and leaned forward. 

"What's wrong, Shawn? Does something hurt?" Shawn looked around desperately. How could he communicate? "Oh--here," his aunt quickly unlocked her phone and held it towards him with the notepad app open. "write it here if you can." Shawn reached out. His hand shook horribly, but he managed to slowly spell out WHERE IS MY FAMILY.

His aunt looked at him sadly. "Oh, Shawn, I--I can't--the accident. You were the only survivor." 

For three days, loss and loneliness from his family's deaths cut slowly deeper and deeper into Shawn's heart, leaving a empty, charred void as they went. It didn't help that he was constantly sick, throwing up almost all the pureed food he ate. His aunt and uncle continued to visit him daily, though they spent more time talking to the doctors than doing anything with him. His uncle brought him a tablet so he could communicate, but it had almost no apps and no games at all. Not that he was feeling up to playing games. His aunt drove him mad, always sniffling and talking about "your poor parents". The worst was when she went on about how Cayela was so young that she would have gone to heaven, obviously implying that she thought his parents would not. Of course they wouldn't. There was no heaven. He had stopped believing in it about the same time as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

His oldest cousin, Travis, came to visit him on the fourth day. Travis was seventeen and newly graduated. He had a truck, a full time job, and had won a huge scholarship to study economics in the fall; his siblings adored him and his cousins had always regarded him with awe. 

"Hey, Shawn," Travis grabbed the chair and spun it around and swept himself into it. "How're you feeling, man?" Shawn glared at him and wrote nothing, so he went on. "That bad? Well, you do look like you've been through a war. The doctor says they're going to keep you here for another week--or longer if they see fit. Do you have anything to do with your time?" Shawn pointed to the TV. Travis looked at the slap-stick cartoon playing. "C'mon, you don't want to watch that junk. I brought you something." He reached under his chair and produced a stack of DVDs. They varied from Disney to war films. Some, he had watched, some he hadn't, but all looked interesting. Travis held up the last one, a movie from the late 80s about rival street gangs. "This one's good, but don't let my mom see it. She'll flip if she knows you got it from me."

OKAY Shawn wrote. He hesitated, then wrote: TELL ME ABOUT THE ACCIDENT. WHAT HAPPENED

Travis looked down, cleared his throat, then began. "Right. Okay, well, I haven't been to the site of the wreck or anything, but I can tell you what the police told us. Your car was rounding a corner and there was a semi--it was going too fast for that sharp of a corner and the box swung out. It hit the left side--the driver's side--and sent your car over a cliff. You weren't buckled and this was one of the rare--very rare according to the police--incidents where lack of seat belt saved your life. You were thrown out of the first roll--it was a slope, not a cliff, so you just flew out and lay where you fell while the car went on rolling all the way to in bottom of the gorge."

Shawn could feel his hand trembling as he typed in HOW DID THEY DIE. 

Travis glanced out the window uncomfortably. "You father died instantly," he said at length. "The semi trailer killed him. It would have been too fast for pain or even shock. Cayela--" he closed his eyes and swallowed hard. He clearly found it as hard to say as Shawn found it to hear. "The vehicle was completely flattened when they found it. She would have died within seconds of the collision, when it was rolling. Your mother was still alive when the police got there, thanks to the airbag, but she passed away during surgery a few hours later."

Shawn felt like he was going to be sick, but he reached out and wrote WHO FOUND IT

"The semi driver called the police. He pulled off at the nearest stop and was the first man on the scene. They say that if the ambulance had come ten minutes later, they would not have been able to save you."

Travis came by the next day, but only to drop off a few more DVDs. Shawn suspected that he had brought all the movies he had that didn't have car accidents in them. They provided some distraction, but Shawn found that the grief and pain of what had happened would just sneak up on him at random times, making him cry and, often as not, throw up. His nurse did her best to help. Her name was Carmen and, under any other circumstance, he would have quite liked her, but as it was, her bright smile and constant optimistic comments about his recovery just about drove him mad. He preferred Doctor Patel, a quiet, serious-looking Asian man with large glasses and a small voice. He didn't call Shawn his favorite patient or promise that he wold be "right as rain" in a few days. He simply emanated an air of sincerity, whatever he said. He was very professional, but not abrupt. Shawn liked to picture him in a top hat, with a little mustache, bowing as he opened the door for a lady. He was the gentleman type. Carmen, on the other hand, was like an annoying, constantly gushing grandmother, and the fact that she was only in her twenties made it even more irritating. 

It was Dr Patel who finally told him the extent of his injuries. Most--fractures, bruising, and cuts, would be fully healed within two months, but his  eye and left arm would not. His eye had had to be amputated, and his arm had been torn clean off at the elbow. After Shawn had gotten past the initial shock, he went on to explain that they could give him a mostly functional prosthetic arm. It would look normal and he would be able to lift things.

"You will have to learn to do somethings differently. There are therapists who can help you when you are ready, but you must be willing to try. It will be some time before you are able to function independently with one arm, but there are very few things which you will not be able to do.  And you will learn to function with one eye. You are not alone in this. There are many people who lose sight in one eye. The other compensates and, in time, you will not even notice the difference. You could get a glass eye if you want to look normal, but you may find it a little more exciting to get a patch--like a pirate. But that is for later. Your arm and face need to heal before we put anything in or on them."

Shawn slept better that night than any before it. He was horrified enough to learn the extent of his injuries, but the relief of finally knowing everything out weighed his horror. In the days that followed, he learned about ghost pain and the effects of severed nerves. He was feeding himself and sitting up soon. The days weren't so bad. His aunt and uncle continued to visit regularly, and his aunt had finally gotten past the stage of crying whenever she talked to him. The hospital was in BC, so none of his friends came to visit, but Travis stopped by every second or third day and his other cousins occasionally accompanied their parents. Even Ethan was much subdued by the circumstances--in fact, he was almost nice. Shawn realized that he preferred a bratty Ethan to a nice one, especially as the nurses always comment on what a sweet child he was when he came to visit. 

Author's Note

Is the accident too rushed? Or, for that matter, is it too drawn out for something that would take a matter of seconds?