Late Friday night, when the anesthesia had worn off but Simon’s eyes were still closed, the doctor who now had a name, Dr. Miner, had Simon moved into the hospital room so that when he woke, his parents would be with him.
The Tabors watched Simon from vinyl armchairs once the color of bright sunflowers, now faded and cracked. They watched as the nurses monitored Simon carefully with their adept efficiency. And while there were no guarantees, as Dr. Miner continued to tell them when he checked on his patient, flipped through the chart, rattled the IV linkages, and placed his long surgeon’s fingers atop the chirruping equipment, Simon’s brain was fully functioning. And the news, in general, seemed to be good: his brain had not swelled, and Dr. Miner thought it unlikely that it would swell in the hours to come, and the blood tests showed that Simon’s system was free of alcohol and drugs.
“He is lucky not to have broken his neck, or his spine, that he will not be permanently damaged,” Dr. Miner told them.
Amidst all of his no guarantees, Dr. Miner held out hope that Simon would eventually wake and be absolutely fine, “Once we release him, he will be housebound, room-stuck, months of healing ahead of him to mend what’s been broken and split.”
However, it was now Sunday morning and why Simon had lapsed into something beyond mere unconsciousness, lightly termed a coma by Doctor Miner, was unclear. Renata and Harry listened and nodded. They asked pertinent questions and received middling answers. At the end of every visit, the doctor pressed his hands to their shoulders and left the Tabors to sit quietly, to watch and wait, to absorb, yet again, their teenage son having, perhaps, done something to himself.
The other stories in “The Rx of Life” were narrated by Nathan Felt, the two EMTs, the two operating room nurses, Judith and Louise, and Dr. Miner. Every one of them was greatly and personally, and in some cases existentially, impacted by the broken boy asleep for such a long time at Desert Memorial. In those spearheaded by the doctor and nurses, Ashby somehow made the medical terminology read like poetry.
In the third section, “Familial Truth,” the final six stories were narrated by Simon Tabor’s parents, Renata and Harry, his sisters, Phoebe and Rachel, the part-time housekeeper, Consuela, and his dog, Scooter. Each debated whether Simon intended serious harm to himself or not, and through all those prismatic interpretations, the Tabor family’s complex history uncoiled.
Harry had been a stockbroker who engaged in insider trading, and when he feared he would end up in jail, gutted, broiled, and eaten, he gave his ill-gotten gains to charities and packed up his family—then comprised of himself, his wife, and two daughters—and left Connecticut for Bakersfield, because it seemed that living in a city with stifled imagination would rein in his larcenous impulses. Now he was the guy who handed over insurance check payouts, the last best hope for people in the midst of terrible losses.
On the Friday Simon threw himself off the roof, the entire family was gathering to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. Phoebe, a lawyer, was driving in from Los Angeles, bringing with her a young man she described as her paramour, knowing that word would irk her mother, the paramour apparently some kind of prophet. Renata was hoping he was the kind of prophet who did not predict the future, but noticed the present. Rachel, working on her master’s thesis at the University of Washington and waiting to hear where the Peace Corps was sending her, would, Renata knew, arrive with her strange vibrations all seemingly connected to Rachel’s infatuation with Valentine, who was in her graduate program. It seemed possible to Renata that Rachel, who insisted on being called Rae, had not yet realized she was gay.
And at the quiet center of everything was Simon, the boy pale and waxy and still in his hospital bed.
“Bedside” began like this: