I followed the paramedic toward the ambulance.
Halfway there, I looked back.
My wife was standing beneath the porch light.
She wasn’t crying.
She wasn’t yelling.
She was watching our son disappear into the ambulance.
Then she said, “You should ask him why he keeps crying when you hold him.”
I froze.
The paramedic turned toward me.
“What?”
My wife gave a small shrug.
“Nothing.”
The ambulance doors closed.
And for the next several minutes, all I could hear was our son’s breathing.
At the hospital, the doctors examined him carefully. I sat beside the bed while nurses checked his oxygen levels and watched him for any delayed symptoms from what had happened.
He cried when they examined him.
I nearly cried too.
Not because the sound frightened me.
Because it meant he could still make it.
My mother-in-law arrived later after being treated for the blow to her head. She sat across from me in the waiting area with an ice pack pressed against her temple.
