Left Neglected (14 page)

“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 assumes 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.

“I’m here now,” she says.

“Well, I don’t want you here now.”

“But Sarah, you—”

“You’re not staying.”

“You need help.”

“Then I’ll get it from someone else, just like I’ve always done. I don’t need you.”

I glare at her, daring her to contradict me, but I’ve already ended it. She’s crying. Martha hands her a box of tissues. My mother blows her nose and dabs her eyes as she continues weeping. I sit and watch her, encouraging her in my unapologetic silence. Good. I’m glad she’s crying. I don’t feel bad for her. I’m not sorry. She should feel like crying. She should feel sorry.

But as much as a part of me wants to see her tarred and feathered in the center of town, I can sustain this tough and heartless stance for only a minute or two, and then I do feel bad for her. She has helped me through the last five weeks. She’s been here every day. She’s helped me to walk and eat, to get showered and dressed, to go to the bathroom. I have needed her. And she is here now.

But I can’t skip over thirty years of abandonment and just pretend that she chose not to be my mother for most of my life. I can’t stand watching her cry anymore, but I’ll be damned if I’m apologizing or acquiescing to her plan to stay. We’re all done here. I’m going home and back to my life, so she’s going back to hers. I grab my granny cane with my right hand, lean on it, and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

“Where are you going?” asks Martha.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I say, planting both feet on the floor.

Martha moves to stand next to me in the spotter’s position.

“Don’t help me. I don’t need anyone’s help.”

She pauses, raises her eyebrows at me again, and then backs off and moves out of my way. I realize Martha must be thinking that I’m a spoiled brat and a horrible daughter, but I’m beyond caring what anyone here thinks of me. Well, I care what Heidi thinks of me, but she’s not here right now. And right now, I’m a spoiled brat horrible daughter who is hell-bent on getting to the bathroom without anyone’s help.

But walking with a left leg that fades in and out of existence is enormously frustrating and complicated. Even stepping forward with my right foot requires a conscious and continued faith in the existence of my left side, because when that right foot is in the space between here and there, I’m standing only on my left leg. My left leg and foot have to be appropriately activated, compromising between flexion and extension, responsible for balancing me and holding all of my weight upright—a tall order for an appendage that feels no loyalty toward me whatsoever.

I sometimes think it would be easiest to hop on my right foot to get from place to place, but I haven’t yet had the courage to try it. Logically, hopping should work, but somehow I just know I’ll end up sprawled out on the floor. Anticipating this outcome really shouldn’t deter me from giving it a shot, as I end up sprawled out on the floor most of the time anyway. I have big, colorful bruises all over me. I can’t believe I haven’t fractured a hip or dislocated my knee. Thank God I have strong bones and loose joints. I guess I realize that hopping isn’t a practical long-term solution for mobility.

This is where the granny cane helps. Before I take a step with either foot, I take a step with my right hand on the cane, gaining some stability and assurance. Then I shift my weight into my right hand as much as possible to lessen the burden on my untrustworthy left leg, and I step my right foot forward to meet the cane.

Now my left leg is somewhere behind me, and the trick is to first remember that I have a left leg and to believe that it is somewhere behind me. Then I have to find it and get it next to me. The natural way to do this, of course, would be to pick it up and take a stride forward. But, much to the dismay of my pride, I don’t do this. I lift my left leg up and try to walk like a normal person (well, a normal person with a granny cane) only if I’m on the mat in the gym and someone’s spotting me. If I lift my left leg up off the ground, I can and do lose track of where it is in the blink of an eye, and then I can’t anticipate when it’s going to make contact with the floor, and I always guess too soon or too late, and I end up doing something weird and painful to myself that concludes with me sprawled out on the floor.

So I drag my left leg. It’s much safer, and my chances of forward progress go up considerably if my left foot never loses connection with the floor. I know this looks pathetic, but I’m wearing black elastic-waist pants just like my mother’s, a hot-pink fleece hat, mismatched socks, and no makeup. I think it’s safe to say that vanity is no longer my biggest concern. Plus now’s not the time to be daring. If I fall, Martha and my mother will scurry over to help me off the floor. And I don’t want anyone’s help.

Cane. Step. Drag. Breathe.

Cane. Step. Drag. Breathe.

I can feel them watching me.
Don’t think about them, Sarah. You can’t afford to get distracted. You are walking to the bathroom. You are walking to the bathroom.

Cane. Step. Drag. Breathe.

My mother blows her nose. She’s not coming home with me. She thinks she can just show up and be my mother. It’s not happening. It’s too little, too late.
Stop it. Don’t think about her. You are walking to the bathroom.

Cane. Step. Drag. Breathe.

I can’t believe Bob talked about this with her without talking to me first. I can’t believe he
decided
this with her instead of deciding the exact opposite thing with me. What was he thinking?
Don’t think about it now. Talk to him later. You are walking to the bathroom.

Cane. Step. Drag. Breathe.

Breathe.

I’ve made it to the toilet, and I want to yell out,
I did it!
and
See, I don’t need either of you!
but it would be premature to celebrate and probably unwise to gloat.

I haven’t done what I came in here to do, and I have miles to go before I pee. I take a deep breath, preparing to let go of the granny cane, aiming to grab the stainless steel safety rail next to the toilet. In the terrifying moment between cane and rail, I feel like a flying trapeze artist swinging from one bar, reaching for the next, high above the ground, showstopping catastrophe only the slightest miscalculation away. But I make it.

Breathe.

Next step.
Dear left hand, I need you to find the waistband of my pants and underwear and pull them down. I know this is a lot to ask, and I hate to bother you with this, but my right hand is busy keeping us off the floor. And I don’t want to ask anyone else for help. So I really need you to do this. Please.

Nothing happens. Where the heck is my left hand? It has to be in here somewhere. I find my diamond ring and then my hand. Oh no. I’m still holding that damn spoon.
Dear left hand, please let go of the spoon. You have to let go of the spoon so you can find the waistband of my pants and underwear and pull them down before I pee. Please let go of the spoon.

Nothing happens.
Let go. Release. Open. Unfold. Relax. Please!

Nothing. I’m about to lose it. I feel like I’m trying to persuade an overtired, disobedient, willful toddler to see reason and cooperate. I want to scream,
Listen to me, hand, do what I say right now or you’re spending the rest of the day in time-out!

I really have to pee, and I’m not at all good at holding it, but I refuse to ask for help. I can do this. I went to Harvard Business School. I know how to problem solve. Solve this problem.

Okay. Keep the spoon. That’s fine. We’ll use it.
Dear left hand, find the waistband of my pants and underwear and spoon them down.

To my amazement, this works. It takes me several tries and calm coaxing, and I’m glad no one is in here to witness this process, but I manage to pry my pants and underwear down to my thighs with a spoon. Almost there. Holding on to the safety rail for dear life with my right hand, I lower myself onto the toilet seat.

Sweet relief.

The rest is relatively easy. I wipe with my right hand, wriggle my underwear and pants back on while seated with my right hand, grab onto the safety rail, hoist myself up, and lurch from the rail to my granny cane. Then I turn and take a few small steps over to the sink. I lean my pelvis against it and let go of the cane.

Like I’ve been working on in therapy every day, I scan left of the spigot to find the hot water handle with my right hand. I turn the hot water on and wash my right hand. I don’t bother trying to wash my left hand. I dry my hand on my pants, get a firm hold of my cane, and walk out of the bathroom.

Cane. Step. Drag. Breathe.

I’m almost there.
See? You don’t need Martha. You don’t need any more rehabilitation at Baldwin. And you definitely don’t need your mother.

I hear Martha laughing. Against my better judgment, I look up from my cane and foot. I look up and see that Martha is laughing at me. And my mother is trying not to.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“You might want to reconsider your mother’s offer to help you,” says Martha.

That tipped the scale for my mother, and now they’re both cracking up.

“What?” I ask.

My mother puts her hand over her mouth like she’s trying to stop herself, but she makes eye contact with Martha and gives in, laughing even harder.

“Where is your left hand?” asks Martha, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.

I don’t know. A tingling prelude to unrecoverable embarrassment rushes through me as I search for my left hand. Where is my left hand? I have no idea. I ignore their laughter and the fact that I’m not concentrating nearly enough on standing upright in the middle of the room and try to find my diamond ring. But I don’t see it anywhere.

Whatever. Ignore them. I’m about to carry on with getting back to my bed when I suddenly notice the feel of smooth metal against my thigh. My bare thigh. The spoon. I look down and scan left.

My left arm is tucked into my pants.

I’m in the gym, sitting at one of the long tables, copying a picture of a cat. I finish and put my pencil down, satisfied. Heidi looks it over.

“You really are good,” she says.

“Did I get the whole cat?”

“No, but what you drew is far better than what I could do.”

“What did I miss?”

“The left ear, the left whiskers, and the left paws.”

I inspect the two sketches, going back and forth between the original cat and my cat. They look exactly the same to me.

“Oh,” I say, my voice dropping.

“But you got both eyes and the left sides of the nose and mouth, and most of the body on the left. This is really good, Sarah. You’re including so much more than you did when you first got here,” she says, shuffling through the pages of drawings I’ve copied so far this morning.

I have improved. But
really good
is a really big stretch. Charlie and Lucy could copy the whole cat. And I still can’t. And today is my last day.

Heidi places the next sheet on the table, an elaborately detailed picture of a city square populated with buildings, cars, people, a fountain, pigeons, far more complex than any picture I’ve been asked to replicate during my stay here. I take my pencil in hand, but I freeze up, unsure of where to place the tip down. I have to find the left side of the entire scene. Then I have to draw everything in that maddeningly impermanent space, including the maddeningly impermanent left side of each thing I find there. Then I also have to find the left side of each thing on the right side of the scene—the left side of each car, each pigeon, every person, the left half of the fountain. I notice a dog walker to the right of the fountain, but then I become hopelessly drawn to a man holding a bouquet of red balloons to the right of him, and the dog walker disappears. How on earth am I supposed to tackle this? This is probably the picture I was supposed to be able to copy on my last day had I fully recovered, taken from the final pages of some rehabilitation textbook, hundreds of pages ahead of the chapter I’ve been hopelessly mired in.

“What’s wrong?” asks Heidi.

“I can’t do this,” I say, panic swelling at the back of my mouth.

“Sure you can. Try starting with the buildings.”

“No. No, I can’t do this. I can’t even copy a cat.”

“You did great with the cat. Take it one thing at a time.”

“I can’t. I can’t go home like this, Heidi. How am I going to do everything I’m supposed to do?”

“Calm down. You’re going to be fine.”

“I’m not fine. I’m not. I can’t even copy a cat.”

“You got most of the cat—”

“I went to Harvard, and now I’m an idiot who can’t copy a cat,” I say, choking back tears.

Before the accident, I could make quick sense of any sheet of paper—complicated cost analyses, org charts, decision trees. Now, a page from Charlie’s
Where’s Waldo?
would probably bring me to my knees. I look back down at the picture, hunting for the guy with the red balloons. Waldo’s gone.

“Hold on a sec,” says Heidi.

She swipes the city square picture off the table, probably to keep me from melting down any further, and runs out of the gym. I try to hold it together until she returns, feeling like my freak-out needs an audience to be most effective. Where did she go? Maybe she’s looking for an easier task, something I can readily master and feel good about, so we can end my last session neat and tidy on a positive note. Or maybe she’s gone running to Dr. Nelson and is pleading with him to reverse the decision to send me home.
She can’t even copy a cat!

“Okay,” she says, carrying a canvas bag and returning to her seat next to me. “Take a look at this picture.”

She centers a white sheet of paper on the table in front of me. I see two simple houses, one on the top half of the paper and the other on the bottom. They each have two windows and a front door. They’re identical in every way.

“Which one would you rather live in?” asks Heidi.

I wouldn’t want to live in either of these dinky little houses.

“They’re the same,” I say.

“Okay, but if you had to pick one, which one would you live in?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then just pick one for me.”

I study the twin houses one last time, searching for something subtle in one of them that I might’ve missed, an extra pane in one of the windows or a missing shingle on one of the roofs. Nope, they’re the same.

“Fine,” I say, pointing to the top one.

Heidi smiles, delighted for some unknown reason by my choice of hypothetical residence. She pulls out my red, L-shaped bookmark and places it on the paper.

“Okay, scan left. Find the red edge.”

My eyes crawl west along the white page until I see red. Then I roll my gaze to the right of the red margin, and I’m stunned by what I find drawn on the page, so unmistakable, so obvious. I see two simple houses, identical in every way, except that the left half of the bottom one is consumed in fire.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“Do you see it?” asks Heidi.

“The bottom one is on fire.”

“Yes! And you chose the top house!”

“So? I had a fifty-fifty chance.”

“It’s not chance. Your brain saw the whole picture. You’re just not always conscious of what it’s seeing on the left. But your intuition told you to pick the top house. You need to listen to that intuition. You’re not an idiot, Sarah. Your intelligence is intact.”

I guess. But so what if my brain sees the whole picture? If it doesn’t share what it knows with me in a way that I can be conscious of, then what good does that do me?

“You’re so lucky. There are so many people here who can’t think anymore or remember anyone or talk or move. Imagine if you couldn’t talk to Bob or your kids or if you couldn’t remember them or hold them.”

Many times over the last month, I glimpsed the unfathomable devastation that the human body and mind can survive. In the cafeteria, in the hallways, in the elevator, in the lobby, I would suddenly bear witness to missing arms and legs, missing pieces of skull, deformed faces, memories erased, language strangled, tubes and machinery supporting nutrition and breath. I always forced myself to look away and told myself I was being polite by not staring. But in truth, I didn’t want to see anyone worse off than me because I didn’t want to explore one inch of the perspective that Heidi just posed—that I was lucky.

“And you could’ve easily died, Sarah. You could’ve died in that accident or in surgery or after surgery. You could’ve crashed into another car and killed someone else. What if your kids had been in the car with you? you’re so lucky.”

I look her in the eye. She’s right. I’ve been so focused on what’s horrible and unfair and terrifying about my condition that I hadn’t acknowledged what is positive about my condition, as if the positive had been sitting quietly by itself on the far edge of the left side of my condition, there but completely ignored. I can’t copy a whole cat. But I can recognize it, name it, know what one sounds and feels like, and I can copy most of it, enough for anyone who looks at it to know what I’ve drawn. I am lucky.

“Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for reminding me.”

“You’re welcome. You’re gonna be fine. I know it. And …”

She leans down, reaches into her canvas bag, and presents me with a bottle of white wine wearing a festive red ribbon around its neck.

“Tada! For the next time I see you, my living room or yours.”

“Thank you,” I say, smiling. “I can’t wait.”

She places the bottle of wine on top of the burning house on the table and hugs me.

“Trust your intuition. It’ll guide you,” she says, holding me in her hug.

“Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for everything,” I say and squeeze her a little harder with my right arm.

Her cell phone vibrates. She lets go of me and reads a text message.

“I have to make a call. I’ll be back in a minute, and we’ll get you ready to go home.”

“Okay.”

Alone in the gym for the last time, I let my gaze wander around the room. Good-bye, parallel bars. Good-bye, mirror. Good-bye, poster. Good-bye, puzzles and games table. Goodbye, bowls and beads. Good-bye—wait.

I go back to the poster. Something’s different. I’m aware only that something about the poster is different without being able to pinpoint precisely what is different for a few seconds, and then I see it, so unmistakable, so obvious, like the burning house.

The picture on the poster is of two hands, not one. And the hands aren’t clenched into individual fists, ready for battle. The hands are clasped together. Holding hands. And the word above the hands in red letters isn’t
Attitude.
The word above the holding hands is
Gratitude.

I start to cry, loving this poster that I’d been looking at all wrong. I think about Heidi and Bob and my kids and even Martha and my mother and all the help and love I’ve been given and all that I have. I think my brain saw this whole poster the whole time and kept drawing my attention to it, trying to show me. A part of me, unspoken and unconscious and intact, always knew what this poster was about.
Thank you for sharing this with me.

I’m going home today, unable to copy a whole cat but able to see this whole poster, filled with gratitude.