Everything was being done. That was the word. As I sat there in the waiting room beside Miranda, I found myself on the inert side of medicine, where neither heroism nor failure is possible, where time expands and ordinary numbers on a clock can’t register it. With every hour of coma the prognosis worsens. There are exceptions, even miracles, but they’re rare. And so we waited. The mostly blank walls, the stale odors, the unintelligible chatter, the sounds of beepers, the round face of the man with dreadlocks in the chair opposite me, and the queasy artificial light of the hospital had an almost hypnotic effect as we waited. For a while I stared at a torn, crumpled blue-and-yellow potato chip bag that lay beneath an empty chair, and then at the red cylinder of the fire extinguisher. The awful accumulation of meaningless sensory information became a leaden presence in my body that would have been boredom if it weren’t for my underlying hunger to know. Miranda’s parents and two of her sisters had arrived by the time the neurosurgeon, Dr. Harden, appeared, but he couldn’t tell us what would happen, only what had already happened. Eggy’s coma score was 10. Her pupils were normal. She had no broken bones, just a few bumps and bruises. She had been given Rocuronium, a paralytic drug, to keep her quiet, which had already worn off. A ventilator was helping her breathe. The CT scan had shown no contusions or hematomas, an enormous relief, but there was some edema, some swelling. Mild, he said. Still, he wasn’t sure what it meant. They wanted to err on the side of caution and keep checking, so they had inserted a catheter to measure her intracranial pressure, which at the moment was normal. He looked about my age and had the brisk, confident manner of an expert in his field. His tone was sympathetic, and yet I felt irritated by a bland quality in his eyes, which I later realized may have been simple exhaustion. Nevertheless, I knew the man saw what he was trained to see.

When they let her go in to Eggy in the ICU, Miranda saw something else. She saw her six-year-old daughter lying at a thirty-degree angle on a gurney, with a partly shaved head, a red-brown mess of Betadine around the hole that had been drilled through her skull. She saw an array of nameless monitoring equipment, lines and tubes and machines attached to her child’s face, arms, chest, nose, and throat. She saw the scrapes on Eggy’s forehead and the bruise on her naked arm, and she saw that her daughter lay in a wounded sleep, from which some people never wake. When Miranda returned, she was walking very slowly, her lips pressed tightly together, and as she neared us, I saw her list suddenly to one side and reach out to the wall to regain her balance. I stood up, but her father rushed in front of me and helped her into a chair.