The Power of Testimony

20 || ALL BUT NORMAL
refocus. He found himself in a small room. Looking down,
he saw a bandage on his hand. An ER nurse came in.
“You’re okay to leave. Your parents are here to take you
home.”
John followed his parents to the car, to their home, and
to his bed.
At the Gilvin house, the phone rang just before nine o’clock.
The girls were almost in bed, their thoughts full of the cows,
horses, and cousins they would play with at Aunt Beulah’s farm.
“Mrs. Gilvin?” the voice said. “There’s been an accident.
Beverly’s at the hospital. It looks to the doctors like she has a
blood clot in her brain. She’s sleeping right now.”
“Oh, God, please,” Betty said, and she and Russell rushed
to the station wagon.
The packed suitcases and their owners would not be
going to Kentucky.
Bev lay in a bed in the intensive care unit looking like
her normal self except for an abrasion on her forehead and a
cut under her chin. An IV protruded from her arm, and the
doctors had given her a tracheotomy. Otherwise she simply
appeared to be asleep—​not bruised, not broken, not seriously
harmed.
“It looks like she’s just knocked out,” the doctor said,
somewhat unhelpfully. “We should know more in three days.”
A specialist was brought in, but in the hours and days
that followed, everyone seemed mystified by her condition.
Several times the dire phone call came.
“Mr. Gilvin, you should probably bring the family in. Bev
may have a short time to live.”