Me Again (7 page)

She supported herself with one hand on her walker, and held a dress up in front of her on a hanger, a price tag dangling from its shoulder. The dress was definitely very eye-catching: it was the deep red of cafeteria ketchup, and seemed... well, rather short.

Reading my thoughts, Rebecca frowned. “I think my legs are probably too pale for something so short.” She turned to put the dress back in the armoire and said, “How about this other one?”

She pulled out another dress, holding it up for me to see. This was a slightly longer, more billowy affair, made of a black fabric with a light floral pattern. The black emphasized the darkness of her eyes.

“I like that one,” I said. “It’s not as flashy, but more... pretty.” Sort of like the Rebecca I was getting to know versus the one in the photos.

“Good, so it’s not just me.”

While she hung the dress back up, she said, “The red one seems more like something to wear to a nice restaurant or a nightclub. Not to go for a walk in the hospital garden. Oh, and speaking of going for a walk, want to see something?”

With that, she stepped tentatively away from her walker and picked up a cane that I hadn’t noticed lying on the bed.

“Look,” she said, again with that shy little smile. She began to walk slowly back and forth in the room, using only a cane.

“Rebecca, that’s great! I can’t believe it!”

“I’ve been practicing so hard,” she said. “Thank God the floors in PT are padded – I went down a lot. But I’m getting there, aren’t I?”

Her voice might not have registered her emotions, but her face did: this was the most light I’d ever seen in her eyes.

“Getting there? You
are
there,” I said, smiling helplessly. “You’re there.”

“I can’t wait to show Big Bob,” she said.

Not wanting to diminish her excitement, I steeled myself and replied. “He’ll be amazed,” I promised. “You’re doing so great. You’ll knock him dead.”

She plopped down on the bed next to where I sat in my wheelchair. “God, I hope so.” Turning to face me, she said, “Thank you for helping me with this.”

“Glad to help,” I said.

“It really means a lot to me.”

I nodded, unsure what to say.

After an awkward silence, she said, “Well, I better start getting ready.”

She struggled to her feet, leaning in close to me as she pushed herself off the bed. With only the cane to support her, it took her a moment to get herself upright and stable again. During that moment I took in her smell, fresh and clean. And I felt an ache in my heart, not unlike the feeling of loss I experienced when I learned about Rufus.

“When’s your husband coming?” I asked, regaining my composure.

“At three,” she said. “So I’ve still got a couple hours to get ready. I’ve got one of the nurses coming to help me with my makeup.”

She looked at me intently, again with that extra light in her eyes. “Then, when it’s time, instead of waiting for Bob to come up to my room, I’m going to go down and meet him in the lobby. Standing on my own two feet, with only this cane to help me. He’s going to be so surprised.”

Even with that muted, scratchy, vulnerable little voice, I could hear her pride.

“He’ll be amazed,” I assured her again.

Rebecca’s gaze shifted to the clock over the door. Picking up her cue, I said, “I’ll get going. Have a great visit, okay?” I began to wheel out of the room.

“I will. And thank you, Jonathan. You helped me a lot.”

“You’re welcome, Rebecca. Good luck.”

At the sound of her name she gave me one last little smile, then closed the door as I wheeled into the hallway.

“Knock him dead,” I said quietly, rolling towards the elevator. “Knock him dead.”

A voice answered me from my left, in words I didn’t quite catch. I stopped and swiveled my wheelchair in front of a door that stood open along the hallway, and saw a familiar face.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi, Mr. Samuels.”

The old man sat in a wheelchair by the writing desk in his room, which was set up just like mine and Rebecca’s. He was facing his open doorway, watching the hallway traffic as it passed by his room.

He smiled feebly with the side of his face that still worked and said, “Cheese rabbit, suitcase?”

I’d first become acquainted with Mr. Samuels down in the PT room, where he could occasionally be found working on very basic physical movements with his therapist. Already old and frail, his body had been ravaged by a severe stroke some time before my arrival at the hospital. Yet he maintained a pleasant disposition, despite aphasia having rendered him incapable of speaking in a way anybody could understand. Leon had said some of the hospital staff privately called him “Sammy Salad,” due to the jumbled “word salad” that came out whenever the man attempted to speak. Aware of how difficult even basic communications can be after a stroke, I chose not to adopt that uncharitable moniker, instead always referring to him by his proper name.

I nodded to him. “Sorry if I disturbed you, Mr. Samuels. I was just talking to myself.”

He waved a bony hand dismissively. “Hamster lightbulb,” he said simply.

Nodding was the conversational technique I’d found most successful with Mr. Samuels, so I nodded in his direction, then said, “You have a nice day, okay?”

His expression grew puzzled. “Zucchini?” he asked.

Clearly I should have stuck with a simple nod. Opting for a wave and a smile, I set a new course for my wheelchair and proceeded down the hallway.

Chapter 8

T
HAT NIGHT, after giving my dinner some time to digest, I made my way to the PT room. I was determined to get out of the wheelchair and into a walker, at least for short periods. But that meant I had a lot of work to do on my arms and legs.

Approaching the room, I heard the clank of weights, telling me I would not be working out alone. But the pace of the clanking was unusually rapid – somebody was exercising furiously in there.

As usual, the door was open, but I was surprised to see no light emanating from the room. Why would somebody work out in the dark? Then I remembered that there were numerous patients in the facility who had lost their sight – I often heard the tap of their canes in the hallway.

The steady metallic rhythm grew louder as my chair brought me nearer to the doorway. I wheeled into the room and felt along the wall for a light switch. Finding it, I flicked it on, bathing the room in the harsh glow of fluorescent light.

The rapid clanking continued, and my eyes tracked the source.

Sitting on the leg-press machine, pumping away at a frenzied pace, was Rebecca. She still wore her black flowered dress, but it was soaked with sweat and hiked up in an unladylike way to accommodate the machine. Her face was streaked with makeup and sweat. She ignored me, her eyes clenched shut as she chanted a series of numbers punctuated by short, panting breaths. I presumed these to be a tally of the reps she had performed. They sounded like very large numbers.

“Rebecca?” I said. No answer.

I tried again, louder. Still nothing.

Finally I shouted her name. This got her attention – she stopped pumping her legs and looked over at me.

I saw now that more than sweat was streaking her face. She was crying, her eyes wide and red in their sockets.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Are you okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question – clearly she wasn’t, so I said, “What’s wrong?”

“Me,” she said between breaths. “My dress. My hair. My cane. Everything.”

Wheeling close to her, I tried to speak in a soothing tone. “What do you mean? What happened today?”

“I worked so hard,” she said, starting to sob. “I got dressed up. I fixed my hair. Nora helped me with my makeup. And I walked all the way to the lobby, with just a cane.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Eight weeks ago, my left leg was partially goddamn paralyzed, and today I’m walking to meet my loving husband with nothing but a cane.
You
can’t even use a walker yet.”

I looked down at my legs, wishing I hadn’t worn shorts to work out in tonight. My legs looked pathetically weak and pale.

Seeing my reaction, Rebecca put her hand to her mouth. “God, I’m sorry, Jonathan. I know you were in a coma for years – that wasn’t fair. And you’re working hard, too.”

I started to reply, but she cut me off.

“But I’ve been working
so
hard. And does he notice? Does he appreciate it?”

Before I could answer, she said, “Not even for a second. First he tells me my eye makeup looks funny. Then he says my dress looks like an old schoolmarm. Then—" She paused to blow her nose into a towel. “Then, he says my cane makes me look like a...
like an old lady.
” She nearly hissed the words.

Another nose-blowing episode left a conversational gap for which I had nothing intelligent to offer.

“Not a word about the work it took for me to meet him in the lobby. Not a word about me wearing something other than a sweatsuit for the first time in weeks. Nothing about how hard I’m working, or how good I’m doing. All I hear is how I’m not like I used to be.”

Now there was a thought I could relate to.

“I’m so sorry,” I began. “I’m sure he didn’t mean—"

“That I look like an old lady?” she said. “Oh, he meant it. He tried to act like he was just joking around, but he meant it.”

“I mean,” I said, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” It was a lame thing to say, but I needed to say
something
positive.

“No, for that, he’d have to actually
care
about my feelings.” Rebecca took several deep breaths, trying to control her sobbing.

I said, “He was probably just joking around. Like you said.”

Rebecca looked at me, still breathing hard. “Is that supposed to make it okay? I mean, I think there’s a name for that kind of thing, where you say something mean, but say it in a way that if somebody complains about it, it makes them look like the one who’s being a jerk.”

There was a name for that. But like so much other information in my brain, it wasn’t making itself accessible.

“And for all I know, he’s right,” Rebecca continued. “I mean, I know I’ve changed. I don’t talk the way I used to. And I don’t always know what’s okay to say and what isn’t, so I usually end up saying whatever I’m thinking. Even if I’m not supposed to.”

She sniffed. “And I know I didn’t used to be this way – believe me, Bob keeps reminding me.”

With that she broke into sobs once again, horrible spasms of misery that racked her entire body. It was a terrible thing to watch.

“That’s one of the things I like about you.” I probably shouldn’t have said it, but there it was. And it was true.

“What?” she said, looking up, her eyes still streaming.

“You say what you think,” I said. “Most people don’t.” I thought about Teddy, who claimed to be thankful I had come back. About my mother, who promised my life would be just like it was before. People didn’t tell you what they thought. They told you what they thought you wanted to hear.

I pulled my chair closer to her. “I like that about you.”

“But I say stupid things. Terrible things.” She wiped her face with her towel. “I’m always embarrassing Bob with what I say to him, especially when other people are around. And I called you skinny, and gave you crap for not being able to walk.”

“I am skinny,” I said. “And I can’t walk.”

“Not yet,” she said.

“No, not yet. You’re right. I’m working on it. And I’m getting better. You told me that, and I believed you.”

“I was telling the truth,” she said. She sniffled loudly, and wiped her nose with the towel, now badly streaked with makeup.

“I know,” I said. “You always tell the truth – at least from what I’ve seen.” Without wanting to give away too much, I said, “Even when it’s not what I want to hear.”

I waited until she was looking at me to say, “I think friends should always tell each other the truth. Even when it’s not what they want to hear.”

With my linguistic skills, the statement took me a long time to make. But she waited and listened, and when I was done she held my gaze for a long time, her sniffles subsiding.

“Am I your friend?” she asked finally.

“I hope so,” I said. Trying to lighten the mood, I added, “I don’t give fashion advice to just anybody.”

I saw a glimmer of a smile, but only for a moment. She looked down at her dress, wrinkled and bunched. “Following your fashion advice got me told I look like a schoolmarm.”

“I don’t agree,” I said. “Do you?”

“I... I
like
this dress,” she said, her voice beginning to crack again.

“Me too.”

“But I don’t know if I’m supposed to.”

Seeing my puzzled look, she explained, “I’ve changed. A lot, apparently, based on what Bob says. I don’t act like I used to. I don’t feel the same about some things in my life as Bob tells me I used to.”

Before I could respond she stopped me. “No, listen. I know some of the things I say now are wrong. Not wrong like they’re not true, but wrong like... well, because I shouldn’t say those things. I should keep them to myself.”

Again she stopped me from replying, waving a hand while she focused her thoughts.

“So, what if the things I
feel
are wrong, too? I can fix my arms and legs. But how do I fix that?”

Now she looked at me expectantly. How was I supposed to answer?

I opted for honesty.

“I don’t know,” I said.

* * * * *

Rebecca and I fell into a routine of eating lunch and dinner together in the cafeteria most days. She didn’t do breakfast, I learned, but I needed all the fuel I could get to put some meat on my bones, so I never missed a meal. Besides, I had developed a perverse fondness for the amorphous yellow mass the cafeteria claimed was scrambled eggs.

I enjoyed our conversations – they gave me a chance to practice speaking. But that’s disingenuous; I enjoyed them mostly because they were with
her
. Yes, I had a crush on her, I’ll admit it. But there was nothing immoral about it, really. I had no notion of trying to win her affections – she was married, and I understood and accepted that fact. But this didn’t change how much I liked her.

And I’ll admit that probably much of what drew me to her was the empathy we had for each other. We each knew how it felt to be less than what we once were. And we each knew the sting of being constantly reminded of that fact.

“Cheer up,” Rebecca said to me at lunch one day. “That’s what he’s always saying to me. Cheer up.”

The “he” she was referring to was Big Bob.

“He keeps telling me how bubbly I used to be. I don’t even know what that means. What’s bubbly?”

I pondered this, chewing my grilled cheese. “Did you have to do any speech therapy?” I finally asked.

“Just for a day or two,” she said, “until they figured out that my bigger problem was writing, not talking. Why?”

“Well, I’m not sure if it’s what Big Bob is talking about, but I guess my speech therapist Patti is pretty bubbly.”

“Is she the one I see working with people with all those colored blocks and stuff?”

Patti used those blocks when working on shape recognition with her patients. “Yeah, that’s her,” I said.

Rebecca wrinkled her nose. “That’s bubbly? Do you like it when people act like that?”

I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “To be honest,” I said, “I can’t stand her.”

We ate in silence for a while, then Rebecca spoke.

“Did you go to college?”

“University of Illinois,” I said. I didn’t remember a moment of it, but I had absorbed enough oral history to know this fact.

“What did you study?”

“Accounting”

“But you can’t even count,” she said.

“I know. It’s one of the things I forgot.”

“Wow.” The look on Rebecca’s face showed that it hadn’t registered that her words might have stung me. But the funny thing was, they really hadn’t. I liked her candor. Hell, I seemed to like most things about her.

“So do you remember anything from college?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I only know I went there because my mother told me.”

“Bob talks about college a lot. That’s where we met.”

“Where did you go to college?”

“SIU.” When she saw me struggling with the acronym, she said, “Southern Illinois University. Not here – the Carbondale campus. My grades weren’t good enough for U of I, but a party school like SIU wasn’t that hard to get into.”

“Party school?” I didn’t know the term. Did they teach people to throw parties?

“You really don’t remember much, do you? SIU is notorious for being a party school. You know, a place where the students party more than they study.”

If I weren’t already accustomed to feeling like an idiot several times a day, I’d have been embarrassed. Instead, I nodded, and made some brilliant remark like “Oh.”

“I was a cheerleader, and Bob played football. He talks about those days a lot.”

I tried to picture Rebecca as a cheerleader, and failed.

“It’s weird,” she said. “I remember being a cheerleader. And I think I enjoyed it. But what I don’t remember is why.”

“Why?” Monosyllable Boy had returned, it seemed.

“Why I liked it. This is the kind of stuff that I get worried about – the stuff I don’t know how to fix. How do you change what you like and don’t like? I mean, I’m supposed to like cheerleading, right?” She paused to sip her drink. “And what happens if I like something I’m not supposed to?”

Looking at Rebecca, I knew exactly what
that
felt like.

“I don’t know,” I said, repeating what seemed to have become my mantra.

“Anyway, Bob talks about those days all the time. I asked him why, and he said he’s just trying to remind me of the past, to
help me heal
.” She drew quote marks in the air with her fingers to emphasize the phrase. “It’s like he thinks talking about how I used to be will teach me how to be that way again.”

Even though I reflexively hated every too-tall fiber in that man’s being, I felt I had to offer some defense. “My mother does that,” I said. “Shows me old photographs, tells me old stories.” I shrugged. “I think she’s just trying to help.”

“I know Bob is trying to help, too,” she said. “But I think sometimes he also likes to focus on how
he
was back then, too. He’s always saying
those were the best years of my life, Becky
– you know, things like that.”

“Glory days,” I said.

“What?”

“I heard a song on the radio about this guy,” I said, pausing to sip my iced tea while I formed my next sentence. “The best time he ever had was when he was young, so he spends all his time dwelling on that.” I remember liking the sound of the drums in that song – powerful and steady.