Disingenuous

8. The Letters

2004

Jackson wasn't doing well. He tended to not remember bad things on purpose, but this bad thing seemed so instantly cemented. He couldn't do anything but see it on replay behind his eyelids it in its entirety.

At first, Jackson couldn't bring himself to speak at all. He'd sat in the hospital long after the bleeding had stopped, and he was completely mute. They couldn't even figure out his name or his age or anything about him. He'd read his own chart and found himself labeled John Doe. They hadn't bothered to look in his backpack, but he knew his wallet was in there somewhere. He was glad they didn't know who he was. He wasn't ready to be himself again. As long as he was John instead of Jackson, he could pretend it hadn't happened to Jackson at all. Jackson was okay. Jackson hadn't been bleeding.

He had a concussion where his head had hit the pavement. His gut had been sewed shut, and they were confident that the fact that he didn't have severe internal injuries was by the grace of God alone. Jackson threw up when they told him that, but they assumed it had to do with the serious blood loss so they didn't question it.  He had stitches winding up his forearm to pull the skin around the letters back together. They'd underlined the letters for emphasis and that long vertical slice had been the thing that almost killed him. Those long slices were very hard to fix. A kindly and motherly nurse told him that it all would scar badly and he'd cried shamelessly when she told him that because he realized the words would never go away. The way she'd hugged him and let him cry was perhaps the only thing keeping him together. It wasn't the sutures. It was her.

He let himself stay the entire night in silence. They filled him with medication from an IV that brought the intense pain down to a numb ache. Eventually in the dead of night the nice nurse came with a doctor and put something else in the IV. Jackson blinked at them twice and then fell into a quiet darkness behind his eyelids for the rest of the night.

He never had to call Carver because he'd been checking hospitals when Jackson hadn't come home. He was standing at the foot of the bed when Jackson woke up the following morning. Carver looked so weary and horrified. Jackson hadn't seen that look on his face since Carver had admitted to thinking Jackson was dead. This time it was worse though. Jackson didn't have to tell him what was under the bandage on his forearm because he already knew.

Carver didn't expect Jackson to talk to him when he woke up, so Jackson didn't. Instead he had stood at the foot of Jackson's bed and he'd told Jackson what was happening around him. He had told the people who Jackson was and his mother had been called. Jackson still had insurance, and that was a good thing. Carver had filled out paperwork for him. California had provisions to help people in an emergency anyways; especially for victims of a crime. He probably wasn't about to drown in medical debt.

A "hate crime" was what Carver called it.

At that point, Jackson broke his silence for one simple and half articulated inquiry.

"My mom?"

And Carver had known what he was being asked. He'd stepped closer to Jackson, and he'd put a hand on his shoulder. He spoke as gently as possible. "She isn't coming darling."

Jackson had wanted to cry. His eyes brimmed wet and his chin wobbled. Carver was looking at him like he expected tears to rain down, but he'd already cried so much that the sobs simply wouldn't come. He clenched both fists as hard as he could instead until his forearm burned and blood started to seep to the surface of the white gauze around it, but even that pain wouldn't make the tears fall.

They let him go home shortly after with a bag full of pills for pain and antibiotics, and a copy of a police report filed by the officer that that had watched Jackson be tortured in the street. He said he didn't intervene because he was outnumbered. There were laws to protect officers from that. The DeShaney v. Winnebago County case said so. He wasn't obligated to help. Jackson wondered how he reconciled that with the 13 minutes where he'd watched a teenager bleed out alone on the side walk afterwards. He wasn't outnumbered during that part.