Crash (10 page)

21

Reentry

Almost a month after the accident, Neil asked when he could go back to school. He had not yet had his follow-up appointments in Boston. He had one scheduled with the neurosurgeon who had seen him in the hospital and the orthopedist who had repaired his broken leg. Those were still a couple of weeks away. I assumed we would get their okay for Neil’s return at those visits. But Neil was definitely improving day by day. He still had headaches, and his memory was not sharp. It was a struggle for him to read and recall. But he was able to remain awake most days. He could do crossword puzzles for short periods of time. He managed stairs with one crutch and had moved back into his second-floor bedroom. I didn’t see any reason Neil shouldn’t be allowed to try at least a part-time return to school. The semester had started without him, his last before the start of college. There would be a lot of catching up to do.

I called the school and spoke with the principal and the dean of Student Life. They agreed that Neil could return with a note from a doctor. I called his orthopedic surgeon in Boston, who faxed me the letter that same day. The school officials picked a start date later that week and scheduled a meeting to ease Neil back into his day. A lot had happened while he’d been gone, and the faculty wanted the chance to prepare him. I appreciated their efforts.

Reentry. That’s what they called the meeting that launched the process of Neil returning to school. The name reminded me of those splashdowns in the early space program where a Gemini capsule would come hurtling down to Earth and plunge into the Indian Ocean. There it would bob helplessly until a helicopter hooked it with steel cables, hoisting it out of the water and dropping it onto the deck of a fighter ship to lie like a defeated flounder.

Reentry. Maybe the word was actually appropriate.

Neil and I got up early to get ready for the meeting, after which Neil was to attend a couple of classes. Then I would pick him up, an abbreviated day for him. The 10:00 a.m. time was chosen purposely so that the rest of the students would be settled into their day, the halls relatively clear and safe for travel for a boy and his walker.

Neil and I hadn’t set an alarm clock in a month. He showered listening to the same song he always did, a song by They Might Be Giants
,
Trista’s favorite band. One line talked about a bag of groceries expiring on the supermarket shelf. It always reminded me of Trista, certainly taken before her time. I wondered if Neil thought that too. I wondered if that was why he listened to that song, over and over, every morning. For weeks now Neil had been hobbling around the house in nothing but sweats and T-shirts. Now he balanced his crutches under his arms and fumbled with buttons and zippers.

It was still January, but the cold snap we were in the night Neil was hit and during our hospital stay had passed. Soggy puddles of snow replaced the treacherous chunks of ice on our walkway. Neil hadn’t been out of the house since we’d carried him down these stairs over three weeks ago. He didn’t even look up to take in the day. He just carefully surveyed the outside stairs. No handrail. He tucked both crutches under one arm like he’d been taught in PT and used my shoulder as the railing.

He negotiated the stairs and threw his crutches into the backseat. I followed with his collapsible walker; I thought the walker would be more stable for him. He climbed into the front seat, book bag on his lap. I hadn’t driven Neil to school since he was little. Looking at him now I remembered the young middle school boy with the science project, a carefully constructed replica of a fourteenth-century lute made out of cereal boxes, rulers, and rubber bands, all balanced precariously in his lap. A proud smile lit up his face. How much had happened to him since those grammar school days; how much innocence had been lost.

The meeting took place in a conference room outside the principal’s office. Seated around a long oval table were the principal, the dean of Student Life, the school nurse, a guidance counselor, and all of Neil’s teachers. Some stood up and hugged Neil awkwardly. I understood that professional gray zone: They’re the teachers; he’s the student. But his loss was monumental, and they had lost someone too—and that had to be acknowledged in some way. Introductions were made, though I already knew most of the people in the room.

The first order of the day was to prepare Neil for some of what he would be seeing in the school’s corridors: tributes to Trista, bulletin boards with photos and letters, a giant red heart painted in the snow in the school’s courtyard. The principal put a sack of letters on the table that his fellow students had written him. Neil just stared at it; I swept it onto my lap. Neil sat, stone-faced, his eyes getting that glazed-over look of not wanting to hear this information; his jaw clenched as if resisting the urge to tell us so. I wanted to reach under the table and squeeze his hand, but he was too far away, so I just closed my eyes and mentally hugged my son.

The next agenda item was academic. The team had decided that Neil’s grades for the semester would stand as they were at the time of the accident. He would be “medically exempt” from midterm exams. His calculus and physics teachers suggested he take the AP exams at some point, but no one was rushing him. None of us knew at this point how Neil’s brain injury would affect his abilities. Neil, who had gotten a perfect eight hundred on his math SATs, would now need extra help, modifications, and accommodations to finish the school year.

Then the reentry team offered him physical help: a wheelchair, a “book buddy” to carry his backpack. Neil politely declined. He seemed anxious to be on his way, away from these adults and back with his peers.

The meeting, one that so many had prepared for, ended. It had taken all of about fifteen minutes. Still, I was grateful for the support, glad to know that all these caring grown-ups would be watching out for my son.

Neil swung his book bag over one shoulder and steadied himself against the walker I had insisted he use. He pushed it in front of him step by step, but found it slow.

“Can you go out to the car and get my crutches, Mom?” he asked me. I was reluctant, picturing hoards of teenagers jostling into him as the bell rang, even though I had just been assured that Neil would get a ten-minute head start in between classes to avoid just that. But I agreed. I went out to the car, dumped the sack of mail into the front seat, and grabbed his crutches from the back. I went back into the school and handed him the crutches. He pushed the walker toward me. Then he was gone, hobbling down the hall. It felt like it had dropping him off at kindergarten and watching him head off alone for the first time.

Maybe Neil didn’t feel he’d needed a reentry meeting, but I had. I needed something. I didn’t want to go home. After a month of spending every day together from beginning to end, I was not ready to just leave Neil. I wanted to be near my son, or at least just stay in the same building as he was. I stopped into the guidance office and talked with his counselor. I went to the theater and helped Suzanne, the drama teacher, pin stars onto a silk flag for an upcoming student production. I didn’t want to go home to that empty house.

22

The Journal

I’ve journaled all my life. As a little girl I called it a diary. I got one every year for Christmas: soft pink ledgers with tiny locks and thin metal keys. In them I detailed my middle school years: fishnet stockings and Girl Scout meetings. I poured my heart onto their pages in high school: my first kiss with Donny Gagne, tears spilled over Jim Croce’s death.

Later in life I chronicled more salient events: my potluck hippie wedding, the birth of my children, my graduation from medical school. I wrote in spiral-bound notebooks. They sit stacked by the dozens on shelves in my bedroom closet. If my husband and I want to remember the meal we had on our anniversary in 1989, I can simply open the appropriate book and voila! Details!

“I had the grilled halibut with the chimichurri sauce. You had the peppercorn pâté. Remember?”

After the accident, all that changed. The ink dried up. I didn’t write a word. Even the night Neil was admitted to the Brigham, when I gave Saul a list of things we might need in the hospital—a change of clothes, my knitting to pass the time—my journal was not on the list. It’s as if I knew my energy was needed in the here and now, not reflecting, not writing.

Three CAT scans, an operation on his leg, low blood pressure, antiseizure medications. We went through it all. But my pen was silent. In the ICU, on the step-down unit, at home with physical and mental therapy, the page remained blank.

At first it just didn’t occur to me to write. This was life, not art. My boy needed me. I listened to the doctors describe his injuries. I prayed for his recovery. I sat in the waiting room through his leg operation, too worried to pick up a pen. But as the days stretched out through long hours of physical therapy, as we moved from the ICU to the step-down unit, I knew it was more than fear or worry that paralyzed me. More than sheer writer’s block. I knew I would write eventually, maybe even soon. But I needed some distance first. I felt too raw at that moment. Too
in
the moment.

The British novelist Graham Greene once called the necessary distance an author must have from his or her material “a sliver of ice in the heart of the writer.” Right now I did not have that ice. My heart was still warm with worry for my boy.

Notebooks still lay all around my house. There was one for my essays, one for my health column for parents published in the local newspaper. There was one for fiction and one for my novel-in-progress. Then there was the one where I kept track of where each piece was submitted, when they were accepted, and when they would be published. Now all these notebooks seemed to be calling out to me, beckoning me back. I once went so far as to open up my journal to the last thing I wrote before the accident. But it was like watching a train approaching a woman on the tracks and having no way to warn her: blithely breezy words, then nothing.

I slammed it shut.

Partly my inability to write was due to the sheer amount of work it took to care for Neil each day, and a lack of energy to do anything else. Partly I wasn’t yet sure how to write about the ways my son’s life had so drastically changed. So I ignored my notebooks and focused on the tasks at hand: setting up equipment, arranging appointments.

After Neil’s reentry meeting, I eventually went home. I paced. I puttered. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to be alone. I threw in a load of clothes. I ran the dishwasher. I sat at my dining room table looking out the window at the oak trees sloughing their leaves onto my yard. I drank black coffee, which probably didn’t help my profound angst. I knew somehow I needed to gain control of my world again. I grabbed a notebook and pen and began to write.

The words came quickly. The phone call. The crash. The cries of pain. The weeks of hard work. Physical therapy. Antiepileptics. I got it all down. My hand cramped. I soaked the pages with my tears. I lost all track of time. I wrote right up to that very morning. His first day back at school. The meeting. The walker. My fears and anxiety.

At last I was done. I pushed the pen and notebook away in exhaustion. My breath was coming hard. I felt as though I’d run a marathon. I was spent. I looked at the clock, amazed to find that over three hours had gone by. But I was back, doing what I do: capturing my world in words on a page. Trying to make sense of something senseless. Pulling one word after another from some deep space in my heart. Writing was becoming less about documenting and more about understanding.

One day about a month after Neil had started back to school part-time, I came home from running some errand to find him sitting at the dining room table, my journal opened in front of him. My heart skipped a beat. What had I written there? I racked my brain: Neil pulling off his johnny. Neil lashing out at the hospital staff. Neil needing to be restrained.

But before I could decide whether to ask him to stop reading my private entries or let him continue, he looked up at me, his face blank as a plate.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you in the hospital, Mom.”

My heart cracked. He didn’t know he had. He didn’t know anything. He was almost totally amnesic for his entire stay in the ICU, remembering only brief images, a few spoken words. I squeezed his shoulders and pressed my lips to the top of his head.

“It’s okay, Neil. Read what you want. I’ll be here if you have any questions.”

I knew at that moment that he needed to recover information about those lost days. My journal was filling in the memory gaps for him. He was learning things from my writing that I could not bring myself to express out loud: the breadth and depth of my love for him, my deep sorrow at not being able to take away his pain, my guilt for being the mother of the one who survived this terrible accident, my guilt at feeling guilty. I hovered as Neil read: pretending to dust, rearranging piles of books, all the while keeping a wary eye on my son. Finally he closed the back cover of the notebook and looked up at me.

“I just like the song,” he finally said.

Here he was reassuring me that his song choice was just that. No need to read anything into it. Here we were, reassuring each other that it was okay.

23

Vulnerability

Just as I was sending my boy back out into the world, it had suddenly become a very dangerous place. I went from controlling his day, his calorie count, and his medication to watching him hobble down the school hallway with his walker to his refusing all help from me.

The accident happened in January 2003. Terrorists had flown their planes into the World Trade Towers two autumns before, and now the president was beating the drums of war. Our days were branded with a colorful hierarchy of alertness, orange one day, red the next. News reports advised us to cover our windows with plastic and duct tape just in case of an anthrax attack.

To me life now felt fragile and unpredictable in a way it never was before. Not long ago war was far away and terrorists hurt other people and I knew where my children were. Now I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. My son had left home one night and come back a week later a different person. One with blood on his brain and metal in his leg. Minus a girlfriend and with an extra ache in his heart. When my children were little I remember feeling too lucky. I spent a lot of my time counting my blessings and wondering when it was all going to be taken away from me. We all try to protect our children as best we can. We vaccinate them. We watch them sleep. We buy them safe toys and warn them about strangers. But I had failed. I had sent my younger son out of the house and into the path of a killer. I had undone all those years of protection with one sentence.

“Why don’t you walk her home, Neil?”

Almost losing one of my children makes him seem even more susceptible to danger. I worry about Neil in a way I don’t Dan. With Dan I don’t lose sleep over each rejection or disappointment. With Neil I want to smooth his way. I analyze the timber of his voice on the phone, mining the conversation for evidence of depression or angst. I wonder if it will be this way forever. If I will always feel the need to be his spotter. Cushioning each blow, softening the falls. Or if I can someday let go of him. And watch him stand. And walk tall. Maybe even fly.