Free Me (bxb)

Part 10

They have to drive all the way to Poughkeepsie to go to an emergency room; Tivoli is still too small for a hospital or even small emergency room. Though Griffin doesn't remember anything else about his mother than that she smelled good, like cinnamon, he does remember coming here for all her appointments, surgery, and her death. A hospital was one of the places he never wanted to go to, and he wondered if his father shared the same sentiment as he did. But, when they got out of the SUV and started making their way to the emergency room doors, his dad showed no discomfort or sadness over being at the place he'd last seen his wife alive. Griffin tried his best to ignore it as well, and well, the pain helped a lot with that task.

He and his dad sat in the bustling emergency room for an hour and a half until a nurse finally calls for him. They're led through confusing hallways, to an elevator, and through more confusing hallways until they reach an area where Griffin is told to take his watch off and anything metal he had on and that his dad will have to wait for them out in the waiting area.
Griffin furrows his eyebrows and looks from the nurse to his father. "He can't come with me?" he asks the nurse nervously, digging his nails into his palm. He hates hospitals and the last thing he wants to do is go somewhere unknown all alone without his dad. He's hurt and he just hates hospitals so much. "I- he needs- why can't he come?"

The nurse puts a kind hand on his shoulder and smiles. She smells kind of like apples and cinnamon beneath all the chemicals of the hospital, and he feels comforted when a flash of his mother's frizzy hair and face enters his mind. "We have to go take an X-Ray of that arm to make sure it isn't just sprained. Unfortunately your dad can't be in there while we're taking the X-Ray because of the radiation. We'll be done in just five minutes and then you can be with your dad again, I promise."

"Don't be scared, Griffin," Tim says sternly behind him, and Griffin looks up at him over his shoulder. His dad's face isn't reassuring or really even kind, but almost like he's frustrated by his fear of being separated from him. "You're a big boy now. Just go get this done."

Since when was fear not allowed to be felt? Griffin feels scared a lot, and he's almost always nervous, but maybe that's girly to feel like that. He doesn't want to be weak or disappoint his dad because he isn't brave enough to even go into a different room to get some dumb X-Ray. He already has enough things going against him without being a scaredy cat added to his long list of issues and secret faults that his father can never know, and that Griffin has hardly even had the courage to acknowledge himself yet.

"Okay," he says after a beat, because what else could be possibly say? He turns back to the nurse that's looking at him with some weird expression on her face, and he takes a few steps ahead of her because he doesn't want to see her look at him like that. She eventually gains the speed to get in front of him, and she leads him to a dark room with a black table in the center and a weird piece of machinery hanging from the ceiling. He's seen a similar looking machine at the dentist office when he's getting his teeth X-Rayed, but this one looks bigger, scarier, and this time he's in a dark room all alone.

"Okay, Lukas, I need you to sit at that table over there for me," she says, and her voice is still kind and patient, much unlike his dad's. Without all the chemicals surrounding them now, he can smell her a lot better, and he wonders if his mother would have been as patient with him as this nurse is being. He wonders if she would have rushed him to the hospital without having to stretch out his arm like his dad was, as if he was checking that Griffin wasn't lying, or if she would have comforted him about missing his race instead of accusing him of being careless.

He doesn't have a lot longer to dwell on it because the nurse is gently ushering him to the table and sitting him down on a chair before settling a heavy kind of weird apron over his torso. He wears something similar at the dentist, and to be honest, the weight of it against him is a little comforting. It's almost like a hug or the heavy comforter he sleeps with during the winter.

"Now, Griffin, I'm going to have to stretch out your arm in order to do this. It'll be painful, but I promise you I won't let it go longer than five seconds. Can you trust me?"

He isn't too sure if he can trust her, but this is the nurse's job and she's at least treating him kindly. He nods at her, and she looks towards a window on the far wall of the room where a doctor is standing in another room. With a small nod, the nurse next to him reaches forward and places his injured arm over a specific place on the table before stretching it out, slowly and carefully. Griffin wants to cry, but he bites it back like his father had him do in the kitchen, and the pain lasts for what feels like minutes. But when the doctor and nurse have what they need, she immediately lets him guide his arm back to his chest and she gives him an apologetic smile. "It's unpleasant, I know, I've had to do it before myself. But you did very well! You didn't even cry, I'm surprised. Most boys your age actually do," she says with a cheeky little wink, and it makes him feel better. Maybe he isn't as weak as his father thinks he is; at least he's able to hold back tears when other guys his age can't.

"The hard part is over, I promise. I'm going to bring you back to your dad and have you wait in a room while we look at the X-Ray. If your arm is broken you'll get to pick a cool color for a cast, and if it's just sprained you'll have to wear a sling for a couple weeks." The nurse lifts the heavy apron thing off of him and the brings him out of the room and back down to where his dad is waiting for him. His dad doesn't look worried, and when Griffin is walking alongside him to the room, his dad doesn't say that he did a good job or anything. But Timothy Hoover is the type of man that believes no real man should ever show any signs of weakness. Griffin can't remember much at all from when his mom was alive, but he's sure that his dad used to be less strict and not as bad at communicating.

Griffin and his dad never talk. Well, not like the other guys in his class can talk to their dads or moms at least. Griffin has never gone to his dad for comfort or advice for anything besides motocross because he never felt that his dad would ever want to hear about it. His dad wasn't an emotional person, and he was just as bad at talking as Griffin was. Because of that communication between them was never good and Griffin can tell their relationship is getting more and more strained with each year.

"You two can wait in here while Dr. Bunnell and I look over Griffin's X-Rays. While you're waiting, go ahead and be thinking about what color you'll want for your cast," she says to Griffin right before she steps out of the room and lets the door close and lock behind her. Griffin sits down on the medical bed with the crinkly paper, and he and his dad just sit in the room in silence for a few minutes.

"What happened, Griffin? On your bike?"

"I overcorrected when I landed bad on a jump. Because of the snow the back tire skid and flipped the bike. I jumped off before it could crush me and I just landed wrong," Griffin said with a shrug, then looked up at his dad with his mouth in a thin line. "I'm not careless when I ride. Riders get injured all the time, and not because they're being careless."

"What was I supposed to think? You've been winning first place every race and you've already got potential sponsors. You're only thirteen, Griffin, all this attention can go straight to your head."

"But it's not," Griffin replies firmly. He's not cocky, he's confident, he knows the difference. He's not invincible or unbeatable, and he knows that. He screws up a lot and he has to practice complicated jumps every day or he'll get sloppy and forget how to do them. He's not a natural-born prodigy of motocross, and if he was maybe he'd be cocky about it, but he's not. He doesn't want his dad to think he is either, he just wants him to be proud of him and all his hard work.

The nurse and the doctor walk back inside the room before his dad can yell at him for talking back. "Well, bad news is that it's broken," Dr. Bunnell says instead of the nurse that Griffin still doesn't know the name of. "Good news is that it's just a small fracture and your wrist should be as good as new in just three weeks compared to a typical six. Did you decide on a color?"

"Just green is fine," Griffin says with a shrug. He's honestly more concerned about missing a total of three races while his arm is in a stupid cast, but he guesses it is better than missing six races instead.

Griffin sits patiently and obediently as the doctor applies his cast and listens to the nurse as she explains that they're going to be putting him on the lowest dosage of Norco for pain, and instructs Griffin to take one to two tablets every four to six hours as needed for pain. Because of the pain medication that they will be putting him on, they'll give him four days worth of school excused doctor's notes. Once the cast is securely on his arm, Dr. Bunnell writes out the doctor's notes and Griffin's prescription that he tells Tim he can pick up at the local CVS in the next fifteen minutes.