Left Neglected (20 page)

It’s Thursday, and everyone’s been having a great vacation week. I did spend the first couple of days granny caning on eggshells after realizing that we forgot to bring the Wii up with us from Welmont, assuming this oversight was going to precipitate a monumental disaster involving tears and tantrums and a possible overnight FedEx shipment from Bob, but the kids haven’t even asked for it. Charlie and Lucy have either been outside or content to play “olden day” games inside with my mother and me, games that don’t require a left side, like I’m-Going-on-a-Picnic, I’m-Thinking-of-an-Animal, and Rock-Paper-Scissors (even the kids always beat me). My mother also bought a twelve-pack of Play-Doh, and we’ve all enjoyed hours of rolling, sculpting, and pretending (and Linus has enjoyed some unauthorized tasting).

I did remember to bring the mug of marbles, but we haven’t needed that either. With all the time they’re spending outdoors, the kids are exhausted at the end of the day, and I’ve been happy to give them an hour of Nick Jr. before bed, free of charge. And Charlie’s attention has seemed normal all week. This could be attributed to his Concerta, but my mother and I think he noticeably benefits from so much unstructured time outside, from not being confined by walls or fences or a seat in a classroom, from so much physical activity, and from days that aren’t spent rushing from one thing to the next.

And to be honest, I think I’ve been benefiting from being unplugged and unscheduled as well. The only TV I’ve seen all week is
Ellen.
I haven’t checked the CNN crawl or watched any news, and I don’t miss it. Of course, I miss work, but I don’t miss that jumpy feeling that comes with having to react all day at any given second to the next urgent phone call, to the thirty unexpected emails that come in while I’m in a meeting, or to whatever unforeseen crisis is undoubtedly heading my way before 6:00. Sure, it’s exciting, but so is watching the family of deer who stop to notice us while they’re crossing the field in the backyard.

My mother took Charlie and Lucy to the mountain this morning for their lessons and brought Linus along for the ride. After a lot of sincere begging, I granted Charlie his wish to switch from skis to a snowboard. He had his first lesson yesterday and absolutely loved it. Snowboarding is the coolest, and I was pronounced the coolest mom ever for letting him become a wicked cool snowboarder.

This morning over breakfast, he argued, quite skillfully, for permission to skip the lesson today and go off on his own, but I told him no. Bob and I don’t know how to snowboard, so we won’t be able to offer him any help on the slopes (assuming I get back on the slopes). He needs to learn the basic skills properly, and I have to believe that takes more than a day. He claims he’s got it down, and that today’s lesson will be
BORING,
but Charlie always possesses more confidence than skill, and even more impatience, and I don’t want him breaking his neck. He then tried sulking, but I didn’t budge. Then he tried roping Lucy into his cause, hoping to gang up on me and wear me down, but Lucy likes her lessons. She’s cautious and social and prefers to be under the watchful eyes and enthusiastic encouragement of the instructors. When he finally realized it was the lesson or nothing, he gave up, but he took away my “coolest mom ever” status. At least I had it for a day.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table painting a picture of the backyard, using the oils from the beautiful artist’s kit that my mother gave to me for Christmas. The kit is a smooth, plain wooden briefcase on the outside, but inside it contains rows of oil paints, pastels, acrylics, charcoal pencils, and brushes— a feast of color and creative possibility. I’ve squeezed gooey puddles of lamp black, titanium white, cadmium yellow, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, raw umber, alizarin crimson, and phthalo green onto my glass palette, and I’ve mixed as many combinations together with my stainless steel palette knife. Some of my mixtures turned to mud, but some swirled as if by divine magic into new colors that sing and pop and live.

Our backyard landscape already looks like an oil painting, so it’s easy inspiration—the snow-covered field guarded in the distance by maple and pine trees, the rolling hills behind them, the cloudy blue sky above, our shed painted bright barn red, the aged copper green rooster weathervane nested on its roof. It’s been years since I’ve held a paintbrush, but it comes effortlessly back to me, like riding a bike (although I’m sure riding a bike probably isn’t the best example of this for me now). Painting is all about seeing. It’s about focusing past the quick and dirty assumptions normally made by the eyes and mind and seeing what is actually there. It’s about spending leisure time in every detail. I see the sky, which isn’t simply blue but many blues and whites and grays, whitest where it touches the hills and bluest where it kisses the heavens. I see the three different tones of red on the shed produced by sunlight and shade, and the shadows of clouds dancing like sooty black ghosts along the hills.

I study my canvas and smile, satisfied with what I’ve created. I drop my brush into the glass pickle jar holding the other brushes I’ve already used and push the canvas to the side to let it dry. I sip my coffee, which is now stone cold, and rest my eyes on the view. After a few minutes, I grow tired of the yard and want something else to do. My mother should be home soon. She told me not to go wandering around the house while she’s out, and even though I’d really like to go lie down on the couch, I’ve learned my lesson from the time I “wandered” over to the refrigerator. I decide to limit my next activity to something that can be done from where I’m sitting.

My Sunday
New York Times
is on the table and within easy reach. I drag it over to me and begin removing sections, looking for the Week in Review. Mixed in with the folded pages, I find my mother’s
People
magazine. I pick it up and study the cover. Pre-accident me can’t even believe that I’m considering this. Oh what the heck. Let’s see what Angelina Jolie is up to.

I push the newspaper aside and flip open the magazine, casually taking in photographs of stars and the small snippets describing who’s seen with whom. I’m a few pages in when my mother bursts into the living room, huffing and puffing, toting Linus on her hip.

“You okay?” I ask.

“He’s getting so heavy,” says my mother.

He is heavy, similar in size and shape to a Thanksgiving turkey, but he’s actually slimmed down some since learning to walk. My mother places Linus on the floor, pulls off his boots, and unzips his coat. She then lets out a loud, cleansing exhale and looks over at me. Her face lights up.

“Aha!” she says, catching me red-handed.

“I know, I know.”

“Isn’t it great?”

“Great is a little much.”

“Oh come on, it’s fun. Call it a guilty pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with a little reading for pleasure.”

“The Sunday
Times
gives me pleasure.”

“Oh please! The look on your face while you’re reading that thing is more pained than Charlie’s on his worst homework day.”

“Really?”

“Yes, you look like you’re getting dental work done.”

Huh.

“But I can’t replace the
New York Times
with
People.
I still need to get the news.”

“That’s fine, but this can be good practice for you, too. Like, okay, name all the people on this page,” she says, standing over my shoulder.

“Renée Zellweger, Ben Affleck, I don’t know who that woman is, and Brad Pitt.”

“Katie Holmes, married to Tom Cruise. Anyone else?”

I look the page over again.

“No.”

“Anyone next to Brad Pitt?” she asks in a flirty voice, so I know it’s not a yes or a no, but a who answer.

Without trying to find out who is there, I go with the odds and take a guess.

“Angelina.”

“Nope,” she says, urging me in her tone to try again.

Huh. I don’t see anyone. Okay. Look left, scan left, go left. I imagine searching for my red bookmark even though I don’t have it here. Oh my God. Look at that. There he is.

“George Clooney.”

I wouldn’t think that even a traumatic brain injury could keep me from noticing him.

“Yeah, this will be good practice for me,” I say, enjoying George’s mischievous, smiling eyes.

“Good, I’m proud of you,” says my mother.

She’s never said that she was proud of me before. Not for graduating from college, not for going to Harvard Business School, not for my impressive job or my not-nearly-as-impressive-but-still-adequate parenting skills. The first time she ever tells me that she’s proud of me, it’s for reading
People
magazine. That might be the strangest thing a parent has ever been proud of.

“Sarah, this is beautiful,” says my mother, her attention shifting to my painting.

“Thanks.”

“Truly, you’re talented. Where did you learn to do this?”

“I took a couple of classes in college.”

“You’re really good.”

“Thanks,” I say again, watching her face enjoy what I’ve painted.

“I even like how the left sides of things are missing or fade off.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

Look left, scan left, go left. I find the left edge of the canvas with my right hand and then move my attention across the picture from left to right. The first thing I notice is the sky—completely untouched white canvas at the left border, gradually turning a cloudy gray, becoming almost clear day blue by the time I hit the right edge. It looks almost as if a foggy morning were burning off from right to left across the horizon. The maple trees have no branches on the left, the pine trees only half their green needles. And although the conservation land extends many acres beyond what the eye can see in either direction, the forest in my painting grows only on the right. The left side of each rolling hill rolls flat, and the left side of the shed sort of dissolves into nothingness. I forgot to paint the entire rooster weathervane. It stands on the left half of the shed’s roof.

I sigh and pluck a soaking brush from my glass pickle jar.

“Well, this will be good practice, too,” I say, wondering where to begin filling in the blanks.

“No, don’t. You should leave it. It’s good the way it is.”

“It is?” “It’s interesting to look at, sort of haunting or mysterious, but not creepy mysterious. It’s good. You should leave it the way it is.”

I look at my painting again and try to see it as my mother does. I try, but now instead of noticing only the right side of everything, I notice everything that is missing. Everything that is wrong.

Omissions. Flaws. Neglect. Brain damage.

“You want to watch the end of the kids’ lessons later and have lunch at the lodge?” asks my mother.

“Sure,” I say.

I continue to stare at my painting, at the brushstrokes, the shading, the composition, trying to see what my mother sees.

Trying to see what is good.

I’m sitting at a booth inside the base lodge at Mount Cortland, my right shoulder pressed up against the window overlooking the south side of the mountain. My mother is sitting across from me knitting an impractical but adorable ivory wool sweater for Linus, who is asleep in his umbrella stroller. I’m amazed that he can sleep through all the activity and noise in here. It’s nearing lunchtime, and the room is starting to become crowded with chatty, hungry skiers, all stomping in their heavy boots on the hardwood floor. There are no rugs or curtains or decorative fabric of any kind in the lodge, nothing to absorb sound, and so every boot step and every voice bounces all over the room, creating an unmusical reverberation that will eventually give me a headache.

My mother noticed a workbook of word search puzzles in the checkout line at the supermarket yesterday, and remembering that Heidi used to give word searches to me at Baldwin, she bought it. She loves any chance she gets to be my therapist. I’m working on one of the pages now, and I’ve found eleven of the twenty words. I assume the remaining nine are hidden somewhere on the left side, but I don’t feel like hunting them down. I decide to daydream out the window instead.

It’s turned into a bright and sunny day made even brighter by the reflection of the sun off so much white, and it takes a minute for my squinting eyes to adjust. I look around for the kids at their lessons on Rabbit Lane over by the Magic Carpet lift and spot Charlie in the middle of the hill on his snow-board. He falls backward onto his bottom or forward onto his knees every few seconds, but for the few seconds in between while he’s actually up, he appears to be moving really well, and it does look fun. Good thing he has young bones and is only about four feet tall, not very far from the ground he keeps crashing down onto. I can’t imagine how sore and bruised and worn out I’d be if I were to fall that many times. I think about these last couple of months. Well, maybe I can imagine it.

Then I find Lucy waiting at the top of the lift, probably for instruction. Unlike her fearless brother, she won’t move one ski on her own without express permission. She’s still doing nothing, and I’ve lost sight of Charlie, so my attention drifts to the right, as it’s prone to do, to the bottom of Fox Run and Wild Goose Chase, my two favorite trails. I watch the skiers, indistinct blobs of red, blue, and black, sailing on a sea of white to the bottom, then snaking into the line for the quad lift in front of me.

I wish I were out there. I watch one couple, I assume a husband and wife, come to a stop side by side just outside my window. Their cheeks and noses are pink, and they’re smiling and talking. I can’t make out what they’re saying. For some reason, I want them to look up and notice me, but they don’t. They turn back toward the mountain and get into the lift line, sliding forward a few feet at a time, getting ready to go again. They remind me of Bob and me. Everything around me is bombarding my senses, triggering an almost overwhelming urge to get my shiny, new skis and get on that mountain— the sounds of the lodge, the smell of French fries, the intense brilliance of the outdoor light, imagining the feel of the cold mountain air inside my lungs and pressed against my cheeks and nose, watching the young couple’s shared exhilaration after finishing a great run. I want to be out there.

You will be
. But I’m not so sure of myself. I’m having a hard enough time walking on flat, nonskid floors with the assistance of my granny cane.
You WILL be,
insists pre-accident me, her tone leaving zero room for any other acceptable possibility. Pre-accident me is so black-and-white, and it occurs to me that, like Charlie, she has more confidence than the goods to back it up.
You will be.
This time it’s Bob’s voice in my head, assured and encouraging. Reluctantly, I believe him.

“What’s that?” asks my mother.

“What?” I ask, wondering if I said any of what I was just thinking about aloud.

“Out there. That person coming down the mountain sitting down.”

I scan the blobs on the hill and don’t see what she’s talking about.

“Where?”

“There.” She points. “And there’s a skier standing behind it.”

I finally locate what she’s looking at. Closer now, it looks like the front person is sitting on a sled attached to a ski, and the person behind is skiing and holding on to some kind of handle attached to the sled, most likely steering it.

“Probably someone who’s handicapped,” I say.

“Maybe you could do that,” she says, her excited voice bouncing across the table at me like a ping-pong ball.

“I don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to ski sitting down.”

“Well, maybe there’s a way for you to do it standing up.”

“Yeah, it’s called skiing.”

“No, I mean a special way.”

“You mean a handicapped way.”

“I mean, maybe there’s a way for you to ski now.”

“I don’t want to ski now unless I can do it the normal way, and I’m not ready. I don’t want to be a handicapped skier.”

“You’re the only one using that word, Sarah.”

“It doesn’t matter. We don’t own any ‘special’ equipment, and I’m not investing thousands of dollars in some kind of ski sled that I don’t want to use in the first place.”

“Maybe they have them here. Excuse me, miss?”

My mother flags the attention of a young woman walking by our table. She’s wearing the signature red and black Mount Cortland staff ski jacket.

“See that person out there skiing sitting down? did that person rent that equipment here?”

“Yes, it’s from NEHSA, New England Handicapped Sports,” she says. She glances over at my granny cane. “It’s in the building next door. I can take you over if you want.”

“No thanks,” I say before my mother has a chance to start packing up our things. “Just curious, thanks.”

“Can I bring you some information about it?”

“No, we’re good, thanks,” I say.

“Okay, well, NEHSA’s right next door if you change your mind,” she says and walks away.

“I think we should check it out,” says my mother.

“I don’t want to.”

“But you’ve been dying to ski.”

“That’s not skiing, it’s sitting.”

“It’s more like skiing than sitting in this booth. It’s outside. It’s a way down the mountain.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not just give it a try?”

“I don’t want to.”

I wish Bob were here. He’d have choked the life out of this conversation in its first couple of breaths. The “skier” and the dogsled musher behind him come to a stop in front of our window. The musher is wearing the same red and black jacket worn by the woman we just spoke with. An instructor. The “skier’s” legs are strapped together and onto the sled. The “skier” is probably paralyzed from the waist down. I’m not paralyzed. Or maybe the “skier” is an amputee, and one or both of his legs are prosthetics. I have both of my legs. The “skier” and the instructor talk for a minute. The “skier” has a huge smile on his face. The instructor then guides the “skier” directly to the front of the line, where they both board the quad lift with far more ease than I expected.

I watch them ride up the mountain and follow their ascent until their chair gets too small to distinguish. I spend the next half hour before lunch watching skiers and snowboarders zigzagging down Fox Run and Wild Goose Chase. But if I have to be honest, I’m not simply watching the activity on the mountain with passive eyes. I’m searching for the sitting “skier” and his musher. But I don’t see them again.

I continue to steal glances out the window all through lunch but still catch no sight of them. They must’ve moved over to a different set of trails. I check one more time as we’re packing up our things to leave for home. I still don’t see them.

But if I close my eyes, I can see the “skier’s” smiling face.