![]() I have no memory of the injury on her head my mind either refuses to note it or has erased it. I remember seeing the upper roof of her mouth, the pearly islands of her teeth. I watch as team members lift her arms and legs like she’s a sock puppet. In the center of it is Greta, stripped down to her diaper and pitifully tiny, her eyes closed and her mouth open. We follow into a corner room, maybe 12 by 12, with a table in the middle and doctors and nurses crowding around it. I hear someone to my left ask, “Are these the parents?” and some part of me registers the grimness of that designation: “the parents.” Up ahead, a paramedic waves to us urgently. There is a visible trail of crisis in the ER entryway, a smear on time leading all the way up the hall, and I feel us walking through it. We reach the security guard, and I say it again, for the second time: “Our daughter’s been in an accident, and she’s in the ER.” I watch his face soften I am already learning what happens when you tell people this news. We leave our car behind us in valet parking and run into the lobby. She reaches over and grabs my palm, her voice trembling. During the eternal drive up the highway, neither Stacy nor I speak in specifics. “My baby girl,” she cried, sobbing convulsively. I yelled this information over my shoulder to Stacy, who screamed instinctively. “It hit her in the head, yes,” Susan said. “Where did the brick hit Greta? Did it hit her in the head?” When I said the word head, I felt something break up my voice, an elemental thing I wasn’t familiar with yet. “Susan, please tell me,” I said, firmly and slowly. I could tell from her faltering response that she was struggling to connect the dots. A male voice cut in behind her, asked Susan something sharply. Her voice was fuzzy, disoriented, and we heard other muffled voices, paramedics demanding things of her. They told me she’s breathing on her own.” Susan had been struck as well, in the legs. Susan was in the back of a second ambulance, and Greta was in the first, already en route to the hospital. The scenario she described was still sketchy: There had been two chunks of brick there were paramedics on the scene. “Oh, Jayson, it’s so horrible,” she had said - her first words. We’d received the phone call from Stacy’s mother, Susan, only 20 minutes before. “Just don’t get in an accident!” he calls into our window as the bar lifts. “Please, she is in the hospital,” I interject. Cars honk as the pressure of the line builds behind us. He peers behind us at the empty car seat, confused. “Our daughter’s been in a serious accident,” Stacy yells to him. The man at the tollbooth tries to reckon with us, incoherent and hysterical and blocking traffic. The gate fails to lift as we approach and we almost plow through it. Stacy and I realize this only upon arriving at the mouth of the tunnel en route to the Weill Cornell ER. Even in print, I recognized the sickened wonder in her voice, her newly dawning understanding of the malevolence and chaos of the world: “It was like an evil force reached down …” Reporters interviewed the aide of the elderly woman who lived on the floor - the woman whose windowsill crumbled. She was struck by the simplicity of the predicament, the profundity of the call for help. The moment seemed lodged in her brain, my mother-in-law told us later. “Koko got stuck!” Greta exclaimed over and over. It was a live-action version of the kids’ show Chuggington, in which some talking train cars help their friend Koko get back on track after she derails. The two of them were chatting about a play they had seen together the night before. Greta was sitting on a bench out front with her grandmother. The brick fell from an eighth-story windowsill on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Photo: Art from jacket design by Jenny Carrow photograph taken by the author, Coney Island, 2015 watercolor by iStock/Getty Images
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