Me Again (9 page)

“Five, then seven, then five?” she asked.

I had memorized the sound of that phrase too, which enabled me to say, “Yes, that’s the combination. Did I do it right?”

She read the poem again, concentrating hard. Then she looked up and said, “Yes.” Her voice was very soft. “You did it.”

“It’s not very good,” I said.

“It’s perfect,” she said, almost whispering.

I smiled, not faking it this time.

Finally Rebecca cleared her throat. “Thank you, Jonathan. This is very special.”

We looked at each other a long moment. It was time, and we knew it.

“Goodbye, Rebecca.”

She smiled instinctively at the sound of her full name.

“Goodbye, Jonathan.” With that she turned and walked out. While I braced for the now familiar plummet of my heart, I heard her voice call softly from the hallway.

“See you Tuesday!”

This got one last bounce out of the cardiovascular pogo stick. The ascent was nice, but I dreaded the fall.

Chapter 10

L
EARNING HOW TO USE EMAIL on a computer had been hard enough for me. Figuring out what to actually say in an email was turning out to be damn near impossible.

Dear Rebecca,

How are you? I am fine.

God, what drivel. I used the Backspace key to delete what I’d written, and tried again.

Dear Rebecca,

Did people start emails by saying
Dear such and such
? I wasn’t sure. I gathered email was considered a less formal medium than letters written on actual stationery, which I believe Rebecca called
snail mail
.

Hey –

How are things?

No. I just wasn’t a “hey” kind of guy. Again I held down the Backspace key, watching the letters disappear like the dots that Ms. Pac-Man ate in that coin-operated game in the vending area.

Rebecca –

Hope you’re doing well.

Better, and it used her name, which I figured she would like.

Oh, hell with it.

Dear Rebecca,

Yes. That was how I’d start out. I mean, if she didn’t like it, I could pretty much depend on her telling me, right?

Dear Rebecca,

It’s been pretty quiet since you left. As you can see, I’ve managed to log into the email program (is that what you call it – a program?), which I offer as proof that you are indeed a good teacher.

I hope you’re having a great time. It must be great to be home.

I looked at my words, musing that it must be great to know more adjectives than
great
. Oh well, I could go back and revise this before sending it.

Let’s see – what’s new here? I’m getting better with my walker – I barely use my chair anymore. Your old trainer has a new patient, a young woman whom he ignores as thoroughly as he did you. And of course, Leon is eyeing her with dishonorable intentions.

I smiled, recalling Leon’s leer.

“She’s a fine looking woman,” he pronounced when his cohort Bruce entered PT with his new charge. “But not as fine as that Rebecca chick used to come in here. Now that was one righteous lady. Even if she was kind of funny in the head.”

I decided not to elaborate on Leon’s assessments in my email.

I hope I’ll get a chance to see you when you come for therapy on Tuesday. I’ll make every effort to make room for you in my busy social calendar.

I looked at my lame attempt at humor. Knowing Rebecca’s tendency to take everything very literally, I drummed a staccato rhythm on the Backspace key once again.

If I’m not in my room, you can probably find me either in PT or the cafeteria.

I stared at the screen for a long time.

I miss you.

Was it proper to say that to a married woman? The fact that I had to ask myself that made me conclude it was not. I deleted it, and went for a lighter approach.

It’ll be great to see you – it hasn’t been the same since you left.

I simply had to buy a thesaurus, and see what entries I could find under
great.
But that was more like it, tone-wise. I didn’t want to write anything inappropriate. Hell, for all I knew she shared her email with her husband. I hoped Big Bob wouldn’t have a problem with me calling her
Dear Rebecca.

Suddenly this whole message seemed like a bad idea. Maybe I should wait until I heard from her. Let her set the tone of our correspondence.

If she ever wrote to me, that is. She was back home, with her husband. She was Outside – that’s what everybody who was stuck here called the world beyond the hospital.

She had a husband, a house, and friends.

She had a life.

Why the hell would she waste time being a pen-pal with a guy who couldn’t count or tie his own shoes?

I deleted the message.

Referring to the cheat sheet Rebecca had printed out for me, I got ready to log off the computer. That’s when I noticed there was a new message in my Inbox – and it was from Rebecca!

She had been writing to me at the same time I was writing to her. Knowing this sent an odd thrill up my spine.

I opened the message, which was entitled
its me
.

hi jonathan -

im home and its weird. and i dont really know why. bob is being nice. extra nice really. but thats what makes it weird. i feel like i should be nice to him since hes being so nice to me. but i cant help feeling he wishes i was like i used to be.

im trying to but its so hard. i dont want to disappoint him. but i dont know how to make myself talk different or act different or feel different.

i know i dont write so great so this is extra hard to try to say in email. but youre the only person i know who gets how weird this is. so i hope you dont mind me writing to you.

i think ill be showing up on tuesday around 2. if you dont know what that means ask Leon or somebody. but its after lunch. ill see you then ok?

sorry for the bad writing. like i said thats hard for me and i dont know why. but i hope youll write me back if your not too busy. i miss talking to you about stuff.

bye,

Rebecca

It took me several minutes, but I finally figured out how to print an email. For some reason I wanted to hold this message in my hands. To be able to take it back to my room with me, and re-read it whenever I wanted to.

I know, this was pretty pathetic. I was acting like a lovesick teenager, over a woman who liked me mostly because I knew what it was like to be brain-damaged. Christ, I was becoming a Jerry Springer guest.
Brain-damaged cheerleaders and the coma victims who have crushes on them.

No, this was not good.

Still, I couldn’t wait ’til Tuesday.

* * * * *

“You have a visitor,” the voice on the phone said.

A visitor? Today?

Crap. I had been so sure this was Monday, not Tuesday. Although timekeeping was certainly not my forte, I thought I had been doing pretty well at keeping track of what day it was. This was all wrong – I wasn’t ready. I was in my most ragged warm-up pants and a T-shirt badly stained from my earliest attempts to feed myself. I’d been saving my nicer clothes – such as they were – for Rebecca’s visit tomorrow. Or was it today? Crap.

“Mr. Hooper?” The voice interrupted my self-reproach.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “You can send her up.”

“Um, it’s a he, Mr. Hooper, not a she.”

Who the hell was visiting me, if not Rebecca? My mother had already stopped by that morning, and my father never visited by himself.

“Mr. Hooper?”

“Sorry. Send
him
up, then.” A brief glimmer of acuity prompted me to add, “Er, can you tell me his name?”

“Brandon Cox.”

“Okay... thanks,” I replied, then hurried to change my shirt, wondering who the hell Brandon Cox was.

I decided to meet him standing up, so I propped myself up on my walker just inside my open doorway and soon heard the sound of approaching footsteps. In a moment, a man about as tall as I imagined Big Bob to be peered into my room. But this man was big in every way, most notably in the midsection.

“Jon-Jon!” the man bellowed, holding out his right hand. I shifted my weight awkwardly on my walker to free up my right hand to shake his. His grip was warm, strong, and unpleasantly moist.

“Brandon?” I replied, retrieving my hand and finding it was now slippery when I gripped my walker.

“I knew you’d remember me,” the man said. “Teddy said you’d forgotten a lot, but I told him
bullshit, he’ll remember me
. Christ, look at you. You must have lost forty pounds. Damn, I need to have me a coma!” He patted his gut, sheathed in an expensive-looking suit jacket.

“Uh, you want to come in?” I asked, backing my walker up to make room for him.

“Yeah, let’s see how they’ve got you set up here,” the man said, striding past me. “Not bad, not bad. Is this all covered by insurance, or are they soaking you for it?”

“Um, insurance, I guess.”

“See, I told them we were being too generous with the benefits. We’ve cut way back on that with new hires.”

“New hires?”

“At old fistfuckers.”

Nothing this man was saying made any sense to me.

Seeing my expression, he said, “Hellooooo? Fisk and Tucker. Come on, Jon-Jon – you mean you don’t remember us calling it that? Christ, maybe Teddy wasn’t kidding.”

I was getting better at piecing together conversational clues, in an effort to spend less time looking like a moron to other people. From this brief dialog I was deducing that I had worked with this man and that he knew my brother. Then I remembered the name – the first name, at least. Teddy had mentioned a Brandon who had helped him get started at my old firm. This must be –

“Yo, Jon-Jon. Anybody home in there?” The man was waving a hand in front of my face, jarring loose a memory of nurses and doctors doing the same when I first woke up.

“Sorry,” I said. I pointed to the lone chair in the room. “Please, have a seat.”

As the man lowered his bulk into the chair, I seated myself on the edge of my bed and contemplated my guest. Everything about him was big – his head, his hands; even his teeth, bared in a phony-looking smile.

“Long time no see, eh, Jon-Jon?”

“At least six years,” I said, feeling pretty confident I wasn’t wrong.

“Six years. Jesus. What was that like? I mean, did you dream?”

The question caught me off guard. I dreamed most every night, but could never quite remember what I dreamed. I wondered if I had six years of dreams stored up somewhere in my mind. Probably behind one of the locked doors.

“No,” I said. “It was like I was just switched off during that time.” That was as apt a way as I’d found to describe what I’d been through.

Brandon frowned. “And now that you’re switched back on, I hear there’s some stuff you don’t remember.”

Immediately I suspected Teddy had briefed this man on my “math issues.”

“Yeah, I’ve got some rough patches in my memory,” I said, pleased with my own gift for understatement. “But it’s all coming back.” I was puzzled by my apparent ability to glibly lie to people I instinctively didn’t trust. While it might be a handy survival skill, I wondered where it came from. Was lying one of my skills in my previous life? Or was this some new twist, like my left-handedness?

“Man, I’m glad to hear that,” Brandon said. “You and I have some history together, Jon-Jon, and I was worried that you might have forgotten it.”

He didn’t seem to realize that I didn’t remember him, so I chose not to clue him in.

“A lot of it is still pretty foggy,” I said.

“Yeah, well, six years in a coma – that’s gotta throw a wrench into the works.” He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair, revealing a ring on his right pinky. What was it with men from Fisk and Tucker all wearing pinky rings?

Brandon leaned forward in his chair. “Listen, Jon-Jon. I need to know if you remember our, uh,
working relationship
.”

I noticed that he was starting to sweat, but it wasn’t at all warm in my room. I tried to remember if Teddy had told me anything more about this guy, but came up with nothing. I decided to take a shot at some improvisation.

“Well,” I said, “I haven’t forgotten who was the boss, if that’s what you’re wondering.” I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, but hoped it would prompt him to reveal some more information. And I was again surprised at how easy I found it to lie.

Brandon shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not talking about you working for me,” he said, answering that question for me. “I’m talking about the little, uh,
arrangement
we had on the side. Just you and me.” He gave me a little wink that made my skin crawl.

Then I got it. My God – did I used to be gay?

Wait a minute. I had a girlfriend, right? I fought to maintain my composure, and opened my mouth, hoping my newfound gift for spontaneous bullshit wouldn’t fail me.

“Just to make sure we’re on the same page,” I said, not sure where that cliché had come from, “why don’t you give me
your
take on that
arrangement
we had.” My next step was going to be to confess that I didn’t remember him at all, but I wanted to get to the bottom of whatever involvement I’d had with this creepy character.

Brandon looked around the room uneasily. “Mind if I close the door?”

Most of us in this wing left our doors open during the day, a habit I’d fallen into. I gestured towards the door. “Go ahead.”

With a grunt Brandon heaved himself out of his chair and lumbered over to the door. He went so far as to poke his head outside the doorway, scanning the hallway for would-be eavesdroppers. Then he closed the door and returned to his chair, where he arranged himself at great length before speaking. His forehead was now shiny with sweat.

A single thought pulsed repeatedly through my head: Please don’t be my former lover. Please don’t be my former lover. Please don’t...