Beyond the Bear (15 page)

“Stay, Maya. Sit. Now stay. Stay.”

She stayed about three seconds, then jumped back down again. She wanted nothing to do with whatever that thing was in that bed. Or maybe seeing me brought back the bear; I’ll never know. I would have been heartbroken, but it’s hard to break something that’s already in so many pieces.

Maya’s reaction got me thinking about the last time I’d seen her, the last time I would ever see her, as she leapt off the trail, dodging the bear’s blow. The next time Jaha came to visit, the time had come for me to face up to that day. By then I was communicating on a dry-erase board.

“What happened?” I wrote.

Jaha sighed deeply. He had not been looking forward to this. He wished he didn’t remember, that he never had to tell the story again, that what he had seen beneath the T-shirt wasn’t branded into his memory.

“Are you sure you’re up for this, buddy?”

I nodded. I needed to hear it.

He shifted in his chair, hung his head a moment, then slowly raised it back up. Leaning forward, he reached for my hand and held on tight. He took a long, slow, deep breath, held it, let it go, then started in.

“We were waiting for you guys to show up when we saw this mama bear running down the middle of the river looking really pissed . . .”

He didn’t get far before my whole body tensed up.

“Want me to stop?”

I shook my head no.

“Dan, really, you don’t need to hear this right now.”

I did. I needed to know.

“Do you really want me to go on?”

I nodded my head yes. So he told me, minus the gory details. If anybody knew those it was me. It zapped all our strength getting through it, reliving what was the worst day of both of our lives. When Jaha finished, he hung his head without letting go of my hand. We held on to each other long after my lips stopped trembling and the heaving of my chest settled down.

Later, feeling more clear headed than I had so far, I allowed my mind to visit the good times, the before times. I was thinking of the kids I’d worked with, the bonfires at Max’s, the trip to
the High Sierra Music Festival,
the Galactic concert at the ski lodge, when it suddenly hit me like a needle screeching across a record. The night came rushing back to me in one gale-force, emotional gust. I fumbled for my dry-erase board:

“Where is Amber?” I wrote.

My mom furled her brow. “But Daniel, you said you didn’t want to see her.”

What!? Why would I say that? I would never say that.

“I do!” I scribbled.

“So you’re saying you do want to see her, is that right?”

I nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

My mom gave Amber a call. “Dan’s been asking for you. Would you like to come by?”

Amber’s eyes grew wide as she clutched the phone to her ear. She closed her eyes tight, then asked, “Would it be okay to come this afternoon?”

Amber kept a stranglehold on the steering wheel the entire thirty-minute drive from her place in Bird Creek to visitor parking at Providence. She got out of her truck, smoothed her skirt, and walked across the parking lot on wobbly legs. Inside the lobby she hesitated. She looked around, noticed a coffee booth, and made straight for it. She ordered a twelve-ounce Americano, not because she needed to be any more wired; she needed something to hold on to. She paid, turned, and walked through the lobby, past the volunteer at the information booth, past a frail, elderly woman pushing her skeletal husband in a wheelchair, past a high-heeled teenager with a baby on her hip, past other visitors on their way to and from the joys and heartbreaks of visiting loved ones in various beds. When she reached the elevators, she stared a moment at the buttons before pushing the one with an arrow pointing up. Inside, she pushed “2.” The doors closed. The elevator announced its arrival with a
bing
.

She stepped out and glanced up at the signs showing the way to the Progressive Care Unit. Light-headed, heart pounding, she gave herself a moment, then took a sip of her coffee, hooked her hair behind her ears, and headed down the hallway, her pace slowing the closer she got to the room number my mother had given her, which she’d scribbled on the back of a grocery receipt. She stopped outside my open door and glanced in, her eyes bouncing from my mom to my brother to me. Her heart seized up. I was sitting in a recliner next to my bed all bandaged and swollen and unrecognizable. She forced a smile and walked in.

“Hi. Nice to see all of you. Brian. Ann. Thanks for the call. Hey, Dan . . . it’s Amber.”

I turned my head toward her voice and mustered a small, dismal smile. She stared at the bulging bandages covering my eyes, or what had been my eyes. Brian cleared his throat. “Dan, we’ll be down the hall,” he said as he and my mother stood to leave. “We’ll be back in about ten minutes.”

Amber watched them go. She set down her coffee and walked up to me.

“Dan, I have no idea where to begin . . .”

I picked up the dry-erase board off my lap, scribbled on it, and turned it to show her. “Crazy,” it said.

Amber shut her eyes tight and bit her lower lip. She stared at the floor, then flung her head back up. “Yeah, seriously crazy.” She knelt down, facing me, and put a hand on my knee. I picked up my dry-erase board, erased it with a cloth, and wrote: “I am blind.”

Amber shook her head. “I know,” she said. “I know. I am . . . so . . . incredibly . . . sorry.” She rested her head against my leg and closed her eyes.

I turned my board back around, erased it, and scribbled another message:

“I’m scared.”

CHAPTER 13

Binoculars Are a Terrible Thing to Waste

It couldn’t have been more obvious that I was in no shape to
be in a relationship. I wasn’t even capable of going to the bathroom by myself. I was the bombed-out shell of the man I’d been, and had a long, long way to go before I’d have the wherewithal to start figuring out who the new one was going to be.

Amber had been grappling with that bitter reality pill since she first saw me in the ICU. Day after day she’d been dealing with the emotional vertigo of mourning the death of a person who was still alive. Emotionally strong enough to bench-press an entire city block’s worth of troubles, she accepted that this was the way it had to be. She stepped aside from her role as the new girlfriend and joined the ranks of others in my concerned circle of friends. She was just grateful to be back in my life.

My own emotions, other than bouts of paralyzing sadness, were still in a coma. I had so many overwhelming losses yet to confront that losing my relationship with Amber was just another added to the heap. Still, her presence comforted me.

I remember vividly the first time a glint of joy hacked its way through the cobwebs in my brain. A little bird smaller than a kiwi fruit did what pharmaceuticals couldn’t do. It came the day I received permission to go outside for the first time. My eyes and forehead were in bandages, and I was wearing my own clothes for the first time, too, when my brother and Jay busted me out of there. (My father, Steve, had gone home to his work and family in California, and Chris had returned to Oregon, but would soon be back.) With Jay leading the charge, Brian pushed me out of my room in a wheelchair with a rattling IV pole attached to the back. Out of the Progressive Care Unit we went, into the elevator, down to the main floor, and out a side door leading to a courtyard. Brian parked me next to a bench by a tree, set the brake, and sat down beside me, resting an arm on the back of my chair. As I lifted my face to the sun I heard footsteps approaching.

“Hey, guys, they told me I’d find you out here.” Amber knelt down in front of me and put a hand on my knee. “I didn’t want to miss this.”

Brian and Jay gave each other the look, and stood up.

“Hey, Dan, we’re going to go for a little walk. Need anything? You good?”

I gave a thumbs-up.

They left, and Amber sat next to me on the bench with her hand atop my shoulder. Then I heard a song coming from the tree above me. Out of instinct, I looked up. I lowered my head, picked up my dry-erase board, and wrote, “Chickadee.” I showed it to Amber, put the board back down on my lap, and held my hand over my heart.

A black-capped chickadee—
chick-a-dee-dee-dee
—is one of the easiest birds to identify by ear, but the ability to do so held huge significance to me. It was the first thing I accomplished on my own as a blind person. It was something I could do; I could identify a chickadee. I could still enjoy this little fluff of a bird that weighs barely half an ounce, with its black stocking cap and matching bib beneath its beak. I could still admire its ability to tolerate Alaska winters better than most people. Sitting in the sun, I could hear not only its song, but the flutter of its tiny wings as it flitted from branch to branch above my head. I had no idea whether it was true, but someone had told me they could see a tree outside my hospital-room window, and I had visualized that tree many times when I was feeling disoriented and lost, which was most of the time. It grounded me, believing it was there, peeking into my room, watching over me. That day, I knew the chickadee I was hearing was for real. Sharing its company was my first step back to the natural world.

By mid-August the time had come for my remaining eye to go. Although my doctors had known from day one that I would never see again, my family had clung to the hope that my left eye would survive and that medical advances might someday develop a way of hooking it back up to its optic nerve and restoring my sight. My stepdad had spent many hours researching the possibility. But the fact was, the eye was dead. It had to go.

The nights leading up to the surgery, I dreamed of my mother smuggling me out of the hospital. I dreamed of running out the hospital door and straight into the hands of white-coated orderlies.

In surgery number three, Dr. Rosen took out my necrotic left eye and filled the socket the same as he had the other, with an orbital implant covered with tissue and muscle and a conformer over the top, a place-holder for the prosthetics I’d be getting down the road—way down, as it turned out, on account of persistent swelling.

Some of the skin Dr. Kallman had tried so hard to save didn’t make it, either, including the upper left corner of my nose and the corner of the adjoining eyelid, leaving the titanium of my nose bridge exposed. He removed the dead skin and patched the area with a small skin graft harvested from a spot in front of my ear. He also closed up the worrisome wound in the middle of my forehead.

Kallman made it his mission to spring me from the hospital before my twenty-sixth birthday, which was coming up on August 23. I wouldn’t be going far. After a series of meetings with those in charge of various parts of my inner and outer anatomy, the plan was for me to move with my family into a nearby hotel for outpatient care, with regular visits from home-healthcare nurses and wound-care specialists. I worked hard to make that happen, doing strengthening exercises and sucking high-calorie Ensure protein drinks through a straw to supplement the nutrients flowing in through my feeding tube. I progressed from shuffling behind a walker to ditching the walker and using a long pole with a tennis ball on the end and my right hand to tap along the wall, always with training wheels—a heavy strap around my chest, gripped by a physical therapist, to break any falls.

The long-term plan was for me to go with my family back to California to continue healing and, at some point, enroll in a school for the blind. While I focused on what I needed to accomplish to be released from the hospital, a sorting of my stuff was underway at my place in Girdwood. Friends would have been happy to store things for me, but in order to move on in my life, I needed to let go of the one I’d had before.

I put Brian in charge of giving away or selling things I could no longer use. My camera, my video recorder, my TV set, my whitewater kayak, and some of my other outdoor gear.
My birding binoculars were already gone. Soon after my mauling, a Girdwood friend I knew mostly from jam sessions had asked my roommate if he could borrow them to use as a portal for healing the wounded energy in my eyes. Or something like that. His intentions were good, but then he just kept them.

I held onto my skis and, I’m not sure why, my mountain bike. I could not bear to part with my truck. I loved that truck. That truck had taken me to so many incredible places, on pavement, gravel, dirt, sand, and mud. I thought of it as my partner in crime given all we’d done together. Even though, obviously, I would never again drive it, I was thinking that if I paid for insurance and upkeep, I wouldn’t feel so bad hitting people up for rides since I could supply the wheels. It made sense at the time, anyway. Of my remaining possessions, what wasn’t sold, given away, or dropped off at the Salvation Army was loaded into the back of my truck for my stepdad to drive to California.

As eager as I was to get out of the hospital, I was equally anxious. I still had a stomach tube, a trach, and my jaw wired shut, although I’d been okayed to attempt a little speaking by covering the trach with my fingers. I knew I’d be banging my head on a regular basis, and worried about the damage I might do. Since I was nauseous more often than not, I worried about puking, never a pleasant experience, but taken to a whole new level when you can’t open your mouth. I worried about asphyxiating. I worried about it so much I asked for a pair of wire cutters to keep in my pocket.

On August 19, four days before my birthday, I was cleared to go. I dressed that morning in clothes that hung from my now-skinny frame, and settled into the recliner to wait. While Jay was getting my hotel room set up, my family loaded up the sound system, books on tape, and the cards and letters that had been tacked in layers to a corkboard in my room. Doctors, nurses, therapists, aides, and others who’d helped me pull through dropped by to wish me well. When it was time, Brian pushed me in a wheelchair out the front door and into the sounds of traffic, other people’s chatter, and a small plane passing overhead. He helped me into my family’s rental car, waited patiently while I fumbled to buckle my seatbelt, and off we drove into a world far different than the one I’d lived in before.

When we pulled up in front of the hotel, I reached for the door handle with one hand, the top of the doorframe with the other, and climbed out of the car. I took hold of Brian’s elbow and he guided me inside. Slowly. Walking was still wooden, exhausting, and painful. By the time I reached my room, I needed to lie down.

Everyone had made a pact not to mention the furnishings I’d passed on my way to the elevator, in a sitting room off the hotel lobby. In one corner was a stuffed grizzly posed in stalk mode, in the other, a Kodiak brown bear standing on its hind legs that was so enormous its head nearly touched the ceiling. We had permission for Maya to stay with me. After what she’d seen that day in July, my family thought it wise to bypass the bears and bring her in through the back door.