Stronger (21 page)

The other person with me at every event was Carlos, because the organizers always invited us together. He was always smiling, always wearing his famous cowboy hat. Early on, he had given me a cowboy hat just like his, but I never wear it. I keep it in a special spot in my room. Carlos wasn’t a drinker; he was a talker. He was a “Dad on Fire” with a simple message: love the troops enough to stop the wars. Many times, I would be chatting with Carlos when he’d suddenly disappear. I always knew where I’d find him: with soldiers. Carlos talks with every soldier he sees, especially Marines. His son Alex was a Marine.

Erin was more than happy to miss these events. People always asked for her, because she was well-known in Boston, but she didn’t like the attention. When she ran the last ten miles with the two men from Washington, D.C., she tried to run away from the reporters. She was often recognized on the street. Not as much as me, because… you know, the legs. If someone thought they recognized me, all they had to do was check what was going on below the waist. If you were in your twenties in Boston that summer, with dark hair and no legs, I bet it sucked. You’d keep being mistaken for Bauman.

Erin enjoyed the nights off when I went to charity events. Her life with me was stressful. The longer she stayed with me, the more she took over the tasks Mom had originally handled. She was my driver, errand runner, and reacher for things on the top shelf of the refrigerator. She emptied my pee cup.

“Erin,” I’d call, “I have a present for you.”

“Oh great,” she’d joke. “Still warm.”

She never got much sleep. I tossed and turned too violently in bed. I often suffered terrible cramping at night, probably because of anxiety, so Erin would wake up at two or three in the morning and massage my legs. My rubbings, we called them. But no happy endings. I was too sore, and my God, I ran hot. While Erin was rubbing out my tension, I was sweating like a monkey.

She also handled my schedule and worked with Kat on media requests.

“I’m not your social secretary,” she would say with exasperation when another publicist called her to see if I could make an appearance. “Why can’t you handle this?”

“Just tell them no.”

“It’s a charity, Jeff. For kids with cancer.”

“Tell them yes. I’ll definitely do that. When is it?”

“I have a full-time job, you know.”

“And I don’t have any legs.”

I’d smile when I said stuff like that. I didn’t mean it.

Erin’s mom, Lori, finally called me. I love Erin’s parents. They are the most low-key people I’ve ever been around. They were so respectful of our space that on the first Saturday I was in the hospital, almost a week after the bombing, I had to ask where they were. I was disappointed they hadn’t visited me.

“They’ve been here the whole time,” someone said. They had stayed mostly in the family area, making sure that Erin and everyone else, even strangers, had the support they needed. They knew my family was a circus. They hadn’t wanted to intrude on my time.

“Send them in,” I said immediately. “I want to see them.”

They had been like that throughout my recovery. Erin’s mom called her every Wednesday, to offer support, but she never pressured her. That’s why Erin usually went home when I had a charity event, because her parents gave her the space to relax. She needed to sleep, to exercise, to eat a home-cooked meal. She probably needed time away from her “mother-in-law.” Mom loved Erin, but it’s tough for your girlfriend to spend so much time in your mom’s five-hundred-square-foot apartment.

Erin and her mom often talked for hours, I knew, when Erin went home. They were very close. So I listened when Lori called. This was the first time she’d reached out to me directly, so I knew it was important.

Erin was stressed, Lori told me. I was putting too much pressure on her. Erin wanted to be there for me, because she loved me and she knew I needed it, but she needed to take care of herself, too.

She was exhausted. When she was home, she cried. A lot. She had so much guilt and anger. There were so many feelings pulling her in so many different directions that she didn’t know what to do. She felt like her life was out of control.

“I know you’ve been through a lot,” her mom said. “I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong. It’s just… Bill and I are here for you, Jeff. If you need anything, please call us. We will do whatever you need.”

“Move in with me,” I said that night, when Erin and I were lying in my bed together. It was a one-person bed. Neither one of us ever got much sleep.

“I can’t move in here, Jeff. It will only work if we have our own place.”

I had received my payout from the One Fund. It was the highest level, since my injuries were in the most severe category, and it was a large amount of money. Along with the money sent to my Facebook page, and other fund-raisers like the event at the Chelmsford Radisson, I had been given…

Well, I don’t want to say how much exactly. Let’s just say that at my old salary, I would have had to work at Costco for almost exactly two hundred years to make that much.

Thanks to Uncle Bob, the money was safely put away in a trust. It was conservatively invested, and beyond regularly scheduled payouts, I wasn’t allowed to touch it. If I wanted something larger, like a house, the trustees had to approve the expense.

That was the best way to assure the money would be used as intended—for my medical treatments and basic needs—and would last my whole life. I wasn’t worried that I’d buy anything extravagant. I’m not interested in that. But I might have been tempted to buy PlayStations for all those kids with “Bauman Strong” lemonade stands.

“Let’s get a small apartment,” Erin said. “In the city, on the ground floor, close to my office.”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s get a dog. Let’s cook dinner at home and see how it goes.”

I had told Erin moving in with Mom was only temporary, a few weeks at most. It had already been a month, but the longer I stayed, the harder it was to imagine moving out.

“Move in with me here,” I told her. “It will be so much easier for you.”

“No, Jeff,” she said, “it won’t be easier. Not unless I quit my job, leave my friends in Boston. But I like my life.”

“No you don’t. You’re tired all the time.”

“Well… I liked it before.”

I kissed her, and she kissed me back. We kissed for a while. “Move in with me,” I said. “You’re staying here most nights, anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Erin didn’t say anything for a while. So I rolled over, put my arm around her, and listened to her breathing. She was probably thinking of the worst that could happen, but I have no idea what that might have been. She shared with her mother, but she never really shared with me. Not her deepest anxieties, anyway. I was her patient as well as her love. She didn’t feel like she could burden me.

“I don’t want to quit my job,” she said.

“I can take care of you, Erin. I have money now.”

“I know. That’s what I’m worried about.”

29.

K
evin came by Mom’s apartment with a care package from Costco at least once a week. It’s strange to have your boss—and not just your boss, but the boss of your boss—show up at your house, but I guess, by then, Kevin was more than my store manager. “Sir” was out. When I called him “Heavy Kevy” now, it was more like the way I called Derek “Big D”—a sign that he was one of us.

He could never remember not to park right in front of Mom’s building, though. That killed me. There was an older woman who lived upstairs and stared out her window most of the day, and she’d always yell at him, “Who are you?”

Kevin would have his hands full: maybe a signed poster, or some day-old flowers for Mom, or some food that was too old to be sold in the deli but was still delicious. “I’m Kevin, remember? I’m here to see Jeff.”

“Well, you can’t park there. That’s reserved parking.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll only be a minute.”

Kevin never stopped supporting me, and neither did Costco. I hadn’t worked there in more than two months, but I was still part of their family. Kevin told me the regional manager for the Northeast still asked about me—he had visited me at Boston Medical Center—and still passed on information to Pennie, Stacy, Judith, and all the others at headquarters in Seattle.

It was Judith’s idea, in fact, to send Will and Byron, two Costco employees from the Seattle area who had also lost legs. The company flew them to Boston and put them up at the Colonnade Hotel for a few days. The Colonnade had donated rooms for the One Fund concert, and Kevin had become friends with the manager. Honestly, give that guy five minutes, and he could become friends with anyone. He and Uncle Bob—who were in many ways opposites—had become such good friends that they had started going to Red Sox games together.

They were even planning a Patriots football trip, too.

So Kevin picked me up in Chelmsford, and we drove to the Colonnade to hang out with his “good friends” Will and Byron, whom he’d met for the first time that morning. I wasn’t too sure about this meeting, considering the only thing I had in common with these guys was missing legs, and I didn’t really want to talk about being crippled with a couple of cripples. It kind of bugged me, honestly, that someone thought I would.

We met in the hotel lobby, then went to the samurai exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. I had been into samurai ever since the woman in Japan had sent me the small ceramic and cloth armor replica. It was a great exhibit, but I cramped up from sitting in my wheelchair so long, so afterward we went to an out-of-the-way lobby where I could lie down and stretch out. Byron can talk about anything with anyone, so for a long time we avoided the subject that was noticeably absent below our thighs.

Finally, Byron said, “What you got for scars?”

“Oh, I’ve got scars,” I said. I lifted my shirt to show him the foot-long surgery scar running down my stomach. It was an ugly red thing.

“I’ve got the same one,” Byron said. He lifted his shirt. Byron had my scar, but he also had eight or nine more, running across his torso.

Byron had been moving a load of lumber in his pickup truck. The load shifted, so he pulled over to the side of the road to adjust it. He had the tailgate down, standing behind his truck, when a driver high on heroin swerved off the road and hit him full speed. The tailgate sliced off both his legs, and the rest of his body went flying through the air and into a ditch. I couldn’t believe he was still alive, sitting here talking with me. He had been in a coma for a month.

“I was scheduled to be working that day,” Byron said. “I switched with a friend so he could attend his kid’s birthday party the next day.”

If Byron had been working, no accident. No matter the situation, there’s always a what-if.

“That’s nothing,” Will said, lifting his shirt. Will was missing an ear and had burns on his scalp, but that didn’t prepare me for the damage on the rest of his body. He had been asleep on a long car trip when his friend tried to pass on a two-lane country road and rammed into an oncoming car. Four people, including Will’s friend, died. Will was thrown through the windshield into the other car, which burst into flames. Let’s just say Will is totally badass for walking and talking right now.

“I’m luckier than you,” Will said with a laugh. “I still have a leg.” Will was only missing one joint. He was below-the-knee on the right side only, but I’m sure it still took him years to consider himself lucky.

“What kind of legs you got?” Byron asked me.

I told him about the Geniums. Byron, a four-joint double amputee like me, had the previous version, the C-Leg. “They will last about five years, maybe seven if you’re lucky,” he told me. “I have to have mine repaired all the time.”

“What do you do, run marathons?” I joked.

“No,” he said, “I ride dirt bikes.”

Byron lived in a rural area outside Seattle, near Mount Rainier. He had a wife, kids, and a dirt bike track in his back acreage that he’d built himself, with jumps and everything. He pounded his legs over those jumps at forty or fifty miles an hour. He was active as hell.

“I’m coming out there for some jumps,” I told Byron.

“Do you ride dirt bikes?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter, Byron. I can handle some jumps.”

We talked for hours, at the museum and then over dinner. We talked about anger. “I’m not angry,” I told them. “I’m just confused.”

We talked about pain, and how to manage it. We talked about frustration. We talked about family, and how hard it was on them, and how much effort went into making those relationships work. Will hadn’t been married at the time of the accident, but now he had a wife and five kids. He was working it! I don’t know if Will and Byron said it directly, but it was obvious that all the work they had put in was worth it. They had it hard, no doubt, but they loved their lives.

And in the end, that was exactly what I needed to hear. Even my best days were full of depression and worry. Anything could trigger an episode—the sound of a firework, a curb I couldn’t get over, a backpack strapped across someone’s shoulder. The feelings usually lasted only a few minutes, especially if Erin was there to soothe me, but they were part of my life now.