Part 17 (1/2)
My face is flushed and sweaty, and hot tears fill and sting my eyes. I want to wipe the tears away, but my right hand is unavailable and the best I could hope for from my left hand would be a poke in the eye with a spoon.
”I want to go back to my room,” I say, my voice cracking.
”Come on, let's finish this first. You can do it.”
”I don't want to. I don't feel good.”
”She doesn't look well,” says my mother.
”What doesn't feel good?” asks Martha.
”My stomach.”
Martha checks her watch.
”It's almost lunchtime. You think food will help?”
No, I do not think a c.r.a.ppy cafeteria lunch will help.
I shrug.
She checks her watch again.
”Okay, with the time we have left, how about you walk back to your room with your cane and your mom, and I'll go get you an early lunch and meet you there.”
That sounds great. I'll spend the next twenty minutes walking a length of corridor that should take me thirty seconds.
”Helen, will you help her out of the sling and guide her back to her room?”
”Sure,” says my mother.
Martha eyes my hand still clutching the spoon.
”I'll get you some soup.”
My mother works my right arm out of bondage, hands me my granny cane, and we begin the journey back to my room. I have no more positive att.i.tude. No more fist. No more fight. I have no interest in accepting or accommodating. I have a brain injury that has not healed and no promise that it ever will. I used to have a full and successful life. Now what do I have? I have a granny cane in one hand and a spoon in the other. And three more days.
”I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S WRONG, Sarah,” says my mother.
We're now back in my room, my mother in her chair, me in my bed.
”I'm fine,” I say.
”This is great news. It means you're not in medical danger.”
”I know.”
”And you'll see, you'll do much better in your own home.”
”Uh-huh.”
I am looking forward to saying good-bye to this place. In three days, I will have been here for five weeks, and I never wanted to stay one second longer than I had to. I won't miss this uncomfortable bed, the weak shower, the coa.r.s.e towels, the bland food, the pervasive smell of hand sanitizer and disinfectant, the gym, the miserable view of the prison, Martha. I especially won't miss the creepy nocturnal hospital sounds that shake me awake and hold me wide-eyed and unsettled every night-the moans of unbearable pain, the panicked and wild shrieking of someone waking from a nightmare, probably reliving whatever gruesome accident precipitated admission here, the coyote wails of the young mother deprived of language and her newborn, the code blue announcements delivered over the intercom carrying their unspoken, chilling message that someone-maybe someone in the next room, maybe someone with a brain injury like mine-has just died. No, I will not miss this place at all.
But I imagined leaving on much different terms. According to the scene that I've been directing in my head for weeks, my exodus always went something like this: With joyful tears in everyone's eyes, I would hug and thank each member of my medical team for their role in my full recovery and promise to keep in touch. Then, accompanied by the theme song to Chariots of Fire and while waving farewell with my left hand, I would walk with confidence and without a cane through the lobby, which would be packed with applauding therapists, physicians, and patients. The staff would be overwhelmed with pride, the patients would be filled with hope, and I'd be an inspiration to everyone. At the end of the lobby, the automatic doors would peel open, and I'd step through into a clear, sunny day. Into freedom and my old life.
And, conveniently forgetting that my car is in a junkyard, I even pictured driving myself home in my Acura. Sitting in my room now with three days left, involuntarily gripping a spoon in my left hand as I wait for Martha to come back with soup, exhausted from the embarra.s.singly short and granny cane dependent trek down the hallway, I feel beyond ridiculous for ever constructing and then believing in such a far-fetched fantasy.
”And I'll keep helping you with the therapy,” says my mother.
This is not an offer or a question. It's an a.s.sumption, a foregone conclusion. I stare at her, trying to figure her out. She's wearing black elastic-waist pants tucked into black imitation Uggs, a white cable-knit sweater, black-rimmed gla.s.ses, dangling red Christmas ornament earrings and lipstick to match. I can still see the young woman that she was beneath the makeup and old age on her face, but I have no actual sense of what she looked like in between.
I remember the shade of peachy pink rouge she used to wear on her freckled cheekbones, her favorite powder green eye shadow, the wisps of fine hair by her ears that never stayed in her long ponytail, how her nostrils bounced in and out when she laughed, the sparkle in her pale blue eyes, the smell of her lipstick (plus or minus Marlboro Lights and Juicy Fruit gum) that lingered on my mouth after she kissed me.
I'm pretty sure she stopped wearing any makeup or doing anything to her hair after Nate drowned. I know there were no more nostril-bouncing laughs and no more smelly kisses. But I have no specific memory of what she looked like or how she changed after 1982. When did she start getting crow's-feet? And how does someone get crow's-feet if she never laughs or leaves the house? When did her hair begin turning gray, and when did she cut it chin length? When did she start wearing gla.s.ses? When did she quit smoking? When did she start wearing lipstick again?
And I can't imagine that she has any specific memories of me and what I looked like or how I changed after 1982. She didn't spend even one of the thousands of tedious minutes of the last month sharing nostalgic stories of my childhood. Because, for the most part, after 1982, she didn't witness my childhood.
After burying their only son, my mother then buried herself in her bedroom, and my father buried himself in construction work whenever he wasn't at the firehouse. While my mother did nothing but feel the loss of Nate, my father felt nothing at all. Stoic and emotionally distant before Nate died, now he was emotionally gone for good. But physically at least, my father eventually came back to his job as my parent. He mowed the lawn and took out the trash, he did the laundry and the grocery shopping, he paid the bills and fees for my after-school activities. I always had food on my plate and a roof over my head. But no part of my mother ever returned. And it was always my mother whom I needed most.
She didn't notice if I went to school wearing dirty clothes or clothes that were two sizes too small. She didn't attend my soccer games or parent-teacher conferences. She didn't guide or comfort me through the year and a half that I obsessed and lost myself over Richie Hoffman. She didn't tell me about safe s.e.x or good s.e.x. She forgot my birthday. She didn't praise my perfect report cards or celebrate my admission into Middlebury or Harvard. She preferred to be alone after my father died when I was twenty, and she didn't welcome Bob into what was left of our pitiful little family when I was twenty-eight.
I suppose I resembled Nate enough to be a constantly throbbing reminder of inconsolable grief. I suppose I can understand, especially now having kids of my own, the paralyzing horror of losing a child. But she didn't have one child. She had two. And I didn't die.
My childhood after Nate died wasn't easy, but it made me who I am today: strong, fiercely independent, driven to succeed, determined to matter. I'd managed to put my past behind me, but now my past is sitting in the chair across from me, telling me she's going to be sticking around. She feels me studying her. A nervous smile tiptoes onto her red lips, and I want to slap it off.
”No, this is it. I'm going home, so you're going home. Everybody's going home.”
”No, I'm staying. I'm staying to help you.”
”I don't need your help. I don't need anyone's help.”
Martha is now standing in front of me holding a lunch tray, eyebrows raised.
”If I need anything, I'll ask Bob.”
”Bob asked me to stay and help take care of you,” says my mother.
I stare at her, voiceless, an unleashed tantrum pounding its fists inside my chest. Martha and Heidi met without me this morning and decided that I'm leaving in three days, and Bob and my mother met without me who knows when and decided that I need taking care of and that my mother will be my caretaker. Betrayal and helplessness kick and scream as they sink into the deep, dark layers of my gut, where, even having lived there once for years, they don't feel at all at home and can't remember the way out.
”Since when do you care about me? You haven't cared about me since Nate died.”
Her face loses all color but for her red lips. Sitting in her chair, her posture a.s.sumes a heightened stillness, like a rabbit sensing danger, readying to run for its life.
”That's not true,” she says.
I would normally back off. We don't talk about Nate or my childhood. We don't talk about me and her. I would normally choose to say nothing and eat my soup like a good girl. And then she would continue to be the good mother and wipe the broth that will undoubtedly dribble down the left side of my chin. And I would be the good daughter and smile and thank her. But I'm done with this charade. So done.
”You never helped me with my homework or boyfriends or going to college or planning my wedding. You never helped me with anything.”
I pause, armed with a thousand more examples, poised to slay her if she tries to come at me with a reinvented history.