Eli was in the hospital for another three weeks after he woke up, then in a rehab facility in Brewer for six more. He had a fractured pelvis, three broken ribs, a broken collarbone, and a traumatic brain injury that the doctors said would take months to heal fully. He had to learn to walk again with a walker, and then a cane. He had headaches, and some days he forgot words in the middle of a sentence.
But he was alive. The doctors kept saying it like it surprised them.
I went to see him on a Sunday afternoon at the rehab center, the first time he was well enough for visitors besides family. I brought him a small hot chocolate in a Mug & Muffin cup with a lid, and I set it on his tray table.
He looked at it, and then he looked at me, and his face turned red all the way to his ears.
“You’re the window lady,” he said.
“I’m the window lady,” I said. “Rosemary. Ro.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For holding up your line. Every morning. That guy Kurt was always so mad.”
“Kurt’s been paying for your hot chocolate for the last month,” I said.
Eli stared at me.
“Kurt?”
“People surprise you,” I said.
I sat down in the vinyl chair beside his bed.
“Eli, can I ask you something? Why didn’t you ever tell her? You stood in front of that woman for over a year, four hundred and twelve mornings by my count. You could have just pulled up to her window and said thank you.”
He picked at the edge of his blanket for a long time.
“My mom died owing everybody,” he said quietly. “The hospital, the electric company, the landlord. She was always apologizing to people. ‘I’m sorry I’m late with the rent. I’m sorry, I’ll pay you next week.’” He swallowed. “Then she got sick, and she didn’t go to the doctor because she was scared of owing more. And she died in that hospital owing thirty-one thousand dollars.”
“Eli…”
“And then this nurse,” he said, “this stranger, came out to the waiting room every morning for nine days and handed me a hot chocolate. A dollar twenty-five. And she never asked for anything. She didn’t want me to owe her. She just wanted me to have something warm.” He looked up at me with wet eyes. “Do you know what that’s like, when you’ve watched your whole family drown in owing people? To have somebody just give you something?”
I couldn’t answer.
“I didn’t want to pay her back,” Eli said. “I didn’t want her to feel like I was settling a debt. I wanted to give it to her the same way she gave it to me. Without her knowing. Without her owing me.” He shrugged with his good shoulder. “I figured if she knew it was me, it would turn into a thing. A transaction. I didn’t want it to be a transaction.”
“Four hundred and twelve mornings,” I said. “Seven dollars and sixty cents a day. That’s over three thousand dollars, Eli. That’s half your lumberyard money.”
“It’s a dollar twenty-five a day,” he said. “Nine days. It was the only thing anybody gave me that whole year.”
The case against North Woods Freight settled in August.
Thomas Ouellette didn’t have to file a lawsuit in the end. He sent Granite State Mutual a demand letter with the police report, the witness statement, the trooper’s citations, the driver’s cell phone records, which Ouellette got through a preservation letter and a subpoena, and eighty-four pages of medical records. The cell phone records showed the driver had been texting his girlfriend for eleven minutes straight, up until four seconds before the crash.
The driver, a twenty-six-year-old named Tyler Cullen, pleaded guilty in Penobscot County District Court to leaving the scene of an accident involving personal injury and to using a handheld device while operating a commercial vehicle. He lost his commercial driver’s license for five years and was ordered to pay $2,500 in restitution and fines. North Woods Freight fired him.
Granite State Mutual’s original offer was $15,000. The final settlement, approved by a Penobscot County Probate Court judge in a small hearing room in Bangor on a hot afternoon in August, was $975,000. That was nearly the full limit of North Woods Freight’s commercial liability policy.
Under Maine law, the judge had to approve it because Eli was still a minor. She read every page. Then she asked Eli directly whether he understood the settlement.
He was sitting at the table next to Bernadette, leaning on his cane, in a borrowed sport coat that was too big in the shoulders.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. Ouellette explained it.”
The judge looked over her glasses at Ouellette. “Counsel, how is the minor’s portion being protected?”
“Your Honor, after attorney’s fees of thirty-three and a third percent and reimbursement of costs, the net settlement to Elijah is approximately $642,000,” Ouellette said. “We’re placing it in a structured settlement and a court-supervised trust until his twenty-first birthday. Mrs. Thibodeau will be co-trustee with an independent professional trustee from Bangor Savings Bank. Any distribution before age twenty-one, other than for education or medical care, requires court approval.”
“Good,” the judge said. “And what are Elijah’s plans, if he doesn’t mind my asking?”
Eli straightened up in his chair.
“I want to be a nurse, Your Honor,” he said. “An ICU nurse.”
The judge smiled for the first time all afternoon.
“Approved,” she said, and signed the order.
