Will & I (10 page)

 

16

After three months the doctors started letting me go home for weekend days. The first outing was still a good week away when a skeptical excitement crept into my stomach. I had progressed by then to an electric wheelchair that I could power myself, and I could stand a little more, sluggishly shuffling back and forth from the bed to the door of my room. But I still couldn't bend my right arm, and I couldn't straighten the left. There's a natural tendency in stroke patients for the damaged arm to pull in close to the body, so my left stayed a little crooked, and I would find myself becoming aware of it around other people, and self-consciously trying to straighten it. My legs remained abnormally weak. I would try to stand, and it felt like something was physically fighting me. In the chair I could get around, but I avoided using it as much as possible.

“Now, you sure you're ready for this, man?” Candy said as she maneuvered the chair up next to my bed that Sunday morning, leaning over it and moving it along with the joystick.

I looked at her like she couldn't be serious. Going home was the major motivation for me now. The idea I'd taken shelter in at first, that I would soon magically wake up and be fine, had faded by then—it was almost completely gone—but home was still home. It was comfort. That was changing, too, of course, the way it would have been for anyone my age. Home had become both a refuge and a confinement. But I also wouldn't be going home in the same shape I'd been in when I left. I could no longer do the things I'd done last time I was there, and I knew this meant countless daily reminders of how much ground I had to make up. When I was in the hospital, it was possible to feel the stroke as part of the larger surreality of some exotic experience, but against the mundane backdrop of home, reality would be starker. Still, it was better. It was an escape. Or at least it was mine.

My father came driving up right as Candy and I got outside. He stopped parallel to the sidewalk and turned off the engine. He then stepped out of the car with his wide, camera-ready smile. “Okay, boy, let's get you home.”

It was the first time I'd been in a car, as opposed to an ambulance, in over five months. There was nothing to remind me of my incarceration. Simply sitting upright in a normal car seat while moving through traffic gave me an unexpected sense of freedom.

At home, while my father fumbled around getting the chair put back together, I saw that actually getting into the house was going to be a problem. The kitchen sat up about six inches higher than the garage.

“Wait a second,” my father said. “Let me get that board we used for Amanda.”

“No!” I said. “I don't need it.”

He looked at Candy and chuckled. “Just how do you plan on getting in the house, then?”

Without answering I backed the chair up from the threshold. I motored forward again, hoping the momentum would carry me over, but I simply banged into the little step. I then turned around and backed my chair up to the step and, helping with my arms, lifted my feet out of the footrests. With my feet flat on the smooth concrete garage I tried to summon enough strength to push down and lift myself up and over. But since my chair was motorized, it was heavier than a regular wheelchair, and I couldn't make it budge. After a few more tries, I conceded that I was going to need help. Yet when my father got behind me to push, I started screaming at him. I wanted Candy to push me, or rather, I didn't want to give him and his assumptions the satisfaction.

My father shook his head and tried not to smile. “Damn,” he said under his breath.

Once inside, the smell of home came over me. I felt nauseated. Howard, our bird dog, walked into the kitchen and immediately turned around upon seeing me and my chair. I doubt he knew who I was. If he did, he must have been even more confused.

My mother came in and said, “Hey, theya, baby? Your room's all made up for you.”

When I tried to go through the doorway to the hall, my wheelchair didn't seem to fit. I got angry. I stopped banging into the frame after a minute. Then I burst into tears. I hadn't expected this at all. Having this place I'd known so intimately suddenly turn on me made everything I'd been through and was going through an undeniable continuation of my past. My mother started crying, too. She pleadingly looked at my father, who I could tell was about to cry, as well.

“C'mon, now,” he said. “Stop that. See, it'll fit.” He wheeled me through with less than a centimeter to spare on the sides.

My room was perfectly clean and cold when I drove in. The sheets and pillows were immaculate. I felt like a prospective house buyer taking a tour. I got Candy to help me out of my chair and onto the bed. I asked her to leave me alone and to take my wheelchair with her. After she'd gone, I let my body fall back on the mattress and closed my eyes. I opened them after a minute and, before I moved or made a sound, I tried to imagine I was fine.

I started going home every weekend. The staff at the treatment center encouraged it. They said it would make my transition easier. My mother and father were coached on how to adjust to living with a special-needs person. I'm not sure if they tried to relay any of this instruction to Will, but if they did, he wouldn't have listened to a word of it. There was no way he was ever going to see me that way.

Weeks later, when I got out of the hospital permanently, I refused to let my father bring a rented wheelchair home with us. I knew I could get used to doing without one. I was already accustomed to everything about home except spending the night there. Candy would still come every day, and she drove me to therapy.

Still, my mother got together with my by this point numerous doctors and therapists and planned a little “suh-praz pah-tie” for me there at the hospital. My sister, who was a paralegal at the time and lived in a starter neighborhood near my parents, also attended. There were a lot of forced smiles and pictures taken, but there were also ice cream and cake—both of which I could and did eat. One of my therapists made a picture book for me, complete with a rhyming story that charted my progress from the beginning. It was very emotional for my mother.

Afterward, back in the kitchen at our house, she set her car keys on the counter and sighed with finality. “That's that.”

I asked Candy to follow me back to my room and turn on my computer for me. She did and said good night. I sat down, resting both of my hands on the keyboard. Slowly I began to type, using only the index finger of my right hand. I remember being impressed with myself, that I could do this, dragging my one hand around like a Ouija-board pointer.

I didn't think of myself as a writer yet. I'd never kept a journal, before the wreck. I'd always had a slight literary bent—a thing that set me apart from Will, that I liked English in high school—but writing came to me more than I to it, at a time when it was all but impossible for me to communicate verbally. In those moments of laborious typing, I experienced a sense of freedom that would have amazed anyone watching. I don't know what I wrote that night, but I know that it was the beginning of a new life, one in which I would no longer try to talk myself out of reality.

 

17

Shortly after I moved home, a friend from high school, a girl named Serena, asked me to escort her to a debutante ball, where she would be ceremonially “introduced” to polite society. Since I knew or was acquainted with many of the people we'd be seeing there—a lot of them had come to the hospital after I was first admitted (as had Serena)—I couldn't help feeling the night would be my debut, as well. I went to the barber beforehand and had the beard I'd been growing since the day of my stroke shaved off.

On that Friday morning my father called me back to his bedroom for a chat. “Have a seat, son,” he said, as he picked a tie off the door to his closet. He was getting dressed for work. He'd had polio as a child, and it left him with a hunched body and uneven legs. He was short with long arms, such that his wingspan exceeded his height. But he was also a good athlete before he started putting on weight. Without his shirt on, the curvature of his spine was more noticeable. It made me remember sleeping with my head against his back when Will and I were little.

As I lowered myself down onto the rolling blue ottoman, the serious, painful look that preceded what my father took to be a meaningful dissertation came over his face.

“I don't know if you've thought about how it's going to be from now on,” he said. “I hope so. But you do realize things are going to be different … There's just no way around that.”

He paused and put his hand on my shoulder, but I began to smirk. I knew he'd rehearsed this. He started to smile with me, but instead he continued. “Some people are threatened by what they're not used to. They don't mean to be, they just are.” He now looked like he might cry. “But you've got to realize that most people are basically good people.”

“Fine,” I said, “but why are you telling me this? Why now?”

He became defensive. “Well, with tonight being your first real time out, I thought I'd better warn you.”

“You don't think I'm always gonna be like this, do you?”

He hesitated and lowered his eyebrows like he was confused. “Nobody knows how far you'll go,” he said. “Look at how far you've come, and you weren't supposed to progress at all. It's open-ended, how much further you'll go.”

“But you don't think I'll ever get back to where I was?” I said. I had the breathlessness of peeling off a scab as I said this.

“Honestly,” he said, “probably not.” Then he quickly added, “That doesn't mean you can't have a full life. Look at me.”

Although this was to be my first time out in public for an extended period of time, it wasn't my first time out at all. Candy and I had stopped by the bank on the way to therapy one morning a few days after I moved home, and I decided to go inside with her. It took a while, or until I was no longer outside, to realize that everyone was staring at me, and what was even more disturbing was that those who weren't staring were obviously trying not to. Still, the most surreal part of it all was that no one would make eye contact with me. Of course, I had been looked at before, but this was different. I started to make a joke to Candy about hooking me up to a leash to walk around, but she was already in front of a teller doing whatever business we had come for. When I told her later about the staring, she surprised me by saying that she'd noticed it, too, but she didn't say she thought it was strange. Instead she advised me, “Tell 'em to take a damn picture, it'll last longer.” I tried to discount the stares as the reactions of people who didn't know my story yet, but the experience apparently made an impact—I didn't go out in public again before I went to the barber. Nevertheless, I genuinely looked forward to being around people I was familiar with at the ball.

The Birmingham Country Club, where the ball was held, had spared no expense. The valet drivers had on tails and white gloves. As they opened the car doors, they seemed oblivious to the fact that they were playing a very small part in a much larger production. Bronze urns with gigantic rose, gardenia, and
Elaeagnus
arrangements lined the entryway next to the porte cochere where you dropped off your car. Rose petals had been scattered up and down the long oriental carpet that led to the guest book.

We were among the last to arrive, and both dining rooms were full. Serena's father appeared from somewhere to take us to our seats. The noise level was high—I knew right away I wouldn't be having many conversations. No one could hear me. I wasn't too fazed by the stares we got as we wove in between the tables to our own.

During the meal, however, I grew frazzled. Apart from being able to have only the crudest yes-or-no conversations (along with the occasional question requiring a brief response, which Serena would then have to repeat for everyone else), I found myself disturbingly outside the general discussion. A sense of frustration overtook me, then threatened to become one of hopelessness. From the moment of our arrival, the continued avoidance of eye contact had been disturbing. Even some of the people who'd come to see me in the hospital looked away when I looked at them. What was different? There I was a patient. Here I was … what? A victim?

As if I didn't have enough differences telling people to stay away—I'd stopped wearing my sling for this very reason—when the few people who did come up to speak reached out to shake my hand, it was either a straight-arm handshake or I had to pick up my right hand with my left so my elbow would bend. Either way, that usually ended the meeting right then. That was also the first time that someone shook my fingertips.

After dinner, I saw one of my father's friends, a man I'd known my whole life and who had visited me at the rehab facility downtown. I felt at first a sense of relief as he made his way over to me, but before I could say anything, he introduced himself. I started to smile before I realized he wasn't kidding. When I asked if he was serious, he appeared not to understand and told me to keep up the good work. (Repeated introductions no longer make me think twice. I learned to expect them. This was in part a bad thing, because as a result, I came to depend on them. Now that I'm improved and no longer read as brain-damaged, people don't do it as often as they used to, but I have lost the habit of remembering names, certain that if whoever and I meet again, they will reintroduce themselves. I remember almost everything else about conversations, but not names.)

The debutantes and their dates lined up on opposite wings of a makeshift runway for the presentation. The announcer called out each girl's name, followed by that of her escort. The pair then joined in the center, turned, and walked toward the chairs that had been set up for club members and their wives. At the end of the runway they met the club president and his wife. After the girl curtsied to the couple, the president's wife would tie an amethyst bracelet around her wrist.