Left Neglected (27 page)

My mother and I are killing time with Linus in Welmont Toy Shop While Lucy is at her dance class down the street and Charlie is at basketball practice at the community center across town. Freed from his umbrella stroller, Linus is in heaven playing at the Thomas train table, linking and unlinking trains, pushing them along the tracks, through tunnels, and over bridges. He could do this all day, but we have only about twenty more minutes before the end of Lucy’s class, and my mother and I are already resigned to how Leaving the Toy Store is going to play out.

I’ll tell him in a happy, this-will-be-buckets-of-fun voice that it’s time for us to go. Not fooled for a second, he’ll instantly lose his mind and try to shoplift as many trains as his pudgy little hands can cling to. My mother and I will then dumbly explain to a completely distraught one-year-old who lacks the capacity for rational thought that the trains belong to the store and have to stay here. He’ll then throw himself onto the floor, trying to resist our plan to leave through civil disobedience, and we’ll have to pry the trains loose and carry him, utterly uncooperative, stiff as a board, and screaming, out the door. It’ll be ugly. But for now, he’s a delightful toddler in a state of pure bliss.

“Look at this,” says my mother, holding up an elaborately gemmed and frilly princess gown.

“She’d love it, but she doesn’t need it.”

Lucy has an entire steamer trunk stuffed with dress-up costumes.

“I know, but she’d look so cute in it.”

I’m standing in front of the display of Wii games, looking for We Ski & Snowboard, but I don’t see it anywhere. I could order it online, but I actually want this game for myself and was hoping to play it with the kids today.

“Mom, can you help me look for the snowboarding video game?”

Before I give up, I want to make sure it isn’t hiding somewhere on the left. She walks over and stands next to me, places her hands on her hips, squints, and looks up and down the display.

“What am I looking for?” she asks.

“We Ski and Snowboard.”

“I don’t see it,” she says. “We should get going. I need to pick up my prescription at CVS.”

CVS is three blocks down the street.

“You go, we’ll wait for you here,” I say, both wanting to give Linus more time with the trains he loves and to save myself the walk.

“You sure?” she asks.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back.”

Not seeing any video games that the kids want or that we don’t already have and acknowledging that we certainly don’t
need
any of them, I continue browsing near the train table. They have every classic board game I remember from my childhood— Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Yahtzee, clue, sorry—plus many shelves more that I haven’t heard of. I roam past the games and stop to admire the Alex display—paints, modeling clay, glues, yarns, puppets, beads, origami—I would’ve gone crazy for all of this stuff when I was a kid. Lucy likes anything crafty, but if she were here, she’d be exactly where my mother was shopping, probably coveting the very dress my mother showed me.

I look back over at the train table. Linus isn’t there. He’s probably standing somewhere to my left. Look left, scan left, go left. No Linus.

“Linus?”

I do a full lap around the table. He’s not there.

“Linus, where are you? Linus?”

I hear my own voice sounding scared, and that scares me further. I cane, step, and drag myself within sight of the teenage girl behind the register.

“Have you seen a one-year-old little boy?” I ask.

“Yeah, he’s at the train table.”

“He’s not there now. I can’t find him. Can you help me?”

I don’t wait for her to answer. I turn around and start walking through the store.

“Linus!”

Where could he be? The shop is modest, quaint, and open, with most of the toys displayed on shelves against the walls. There aren’t any long aisles with toys stacked to the ceiling. It’s not Toys R Us. Even if he’s hiding, I should be able to see him. I search under the dress-up costumes, behind the puppets, over by the cars and trucks, his second favorite area of the store. Look left, scan left, go left. He’s not anywhere.

“Ma’am, he’s not in the store,” says the teenager.

Oh my God.

I head for the door as fast as I can. As I push it open, a bicycle bell dings. The door is heavy, too heavy for Linus to open on his own. There were some teenagers in the store earlier. he must’ve wandered out with them. I remember hearing the bell ding. A while ago. Oh my God.

I look down the length of the sidewalk. There are clumps of pedestrians scattered all over it. I look through all the legs. I don’t see him.

“Linus!”

I turn my body around and look the other way. I don’t see him. Oh my God. I start walking down the sidewalk, praying that I’ve chosen the right direction, hating myself for not being able to run.

“Linus!”

Assuming he wasn’t kidnapped (please God), where would he go? His favorite things in the world are trains, cars, and trucks, especially loud ones. Ones that are moving. Time and sound and life itself seems to blur and warp around me as I stop and look out into the street. Main Street. Busy in late afternoon with tired drivers, drivers on their cell phones, drivers not expecting to see a jaywalking toddler. I stand on the edge of the sidewalk, scanning the road for the horror my mind is imagining, my legs frozen in place. In fact, every inch of me feels frozen in place— my left side, my right side, my heart, my lungs, even my blood— like every moving, living part of me has paused to witness what is about to unfold, as if their very existence hangs in the balance. I don’t see him anywhere. He’s gone. I can’t breathe.

“Sarah!”

I look and look. I don’t see him. My vision narrows. Details and color dissolve. My lungs turn to stone. I’m suffocating.

“Sarah!”

My mind registers my mother’s voice. I look across the fading street and down the sidewalk, but I don’t see her.

“Sarah!”

Her voice is louder now and coming from my left. I turn and see her running down the sidewalk toward me, holding Linus on her hip. Air and life rush back into my body.

“Linus!”

She reaches me before I can move.

“I came out of CVS and just happened to look the other way. He was about to wander into the road,” she says, her voice short of breath and shaking.

“Oh my God.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. One minute he was at the trains, and the next …”

My throat goes dry. I can’t say it. I can’t relive it, even if it’s only what could’ve happened and fortunately didn’t. I burst into tears.

“Come here, sit down,” she says, leading me to the bench outside The Cheese Shop.

We sit, and my mother passes Linus to me. I hold him tight in my lap and kiss his face over and over while I cry. My mother is panting, her eyes wide and facing the street, but they don’t look like they’re actually seeing anything except for whatever scene is playing out in her mind. A landscaping truck rumbles by us.

“Truck! Truck!” says Linus, delighted.

I hold him tighter. My mother snaps out of her trance and checks her watch.

“We have to go get Lucy,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, wiping my eyes. “His stroller is still at the toy store.”

I look over my beautiful baby boy before I pass him back to my mother to be carried. He’s completely unharmed and oblivious to what could’ve happened. I kiss his neck and squeeze him one more time. Then I notice his hands.

“And we have to return these trains.”

L
ATER THAT NIGHT, FEELING RESTLESS,
I get out of bed, creep into Linus’s room, and watch him sleeping in his crib. He’s lying on his back, wearing blue feety pajamas, one arm up over his head. I listen to his deep-sleep exhales. Even years past those fragile newborn months, it still gives my maternal ears relief and peace to hear the sounds of my children breathing when they’re asleep. His orange nukie is in his mouth, the silky edge of his favorite blanket is touching his cheek, and Bunny is lying limp across his chest. He’s surrounded by every kind of baby security paraphernalia imaginable, and yet none of it protected him from what could have happened today.

Thank you, God, for keeping him safe.
I imagine what could’ve happened today, and then I imagine standing here now, but instead looking into an empty crib. The image knocks the wind out of me, and I can barely stand here and think it.
Thank you, God, for keeping him safe.
And while I believe it’s always proper manners and good policy to thank God for life’s blessings and miracles, I know this time I should also be thanking someone else.

I leave Linus’s room as quietly as possible and make my way downstairs, through the living room, to the sunroom. I’m about to knock when I think I hear one of the kids. Oh no, I probably woke up Linus. But after a second listen, I realize the sound is coming from behind the French doors.

“Mom?” I ask and enter without permission.

She’s lying on her bed, curled up under her quilt, surrounded by a pile of crumpled white tissues. She’s crying.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

She rolls over to face me, pulls a clean tissue from the box, and presses it against her eyes.

“Oh, I’m feeling emotional about today.”

“Me, too,” I say.

I walk over to her and sit on the edge of her bed.

“I don’t think my heart could’ve taken it if anything happened to him,” she says.

“Me either.”

“You don’t know, Sarah. I hope you never know what it’s like.”

I realize now that today wasn’t just about Linus for my mother.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone in the toy store,” she says.

“No, I should’ve been watching him.”

“I should’ve been there.”

“You were there when it counted. You found him. He’s okay.”

“What if I hadn’t seen him? I keep thinking about what could’ve happened.”

“Me, too.”

“I should’ve stayed with you.”

She starts sobbing.

“It’s okay, Mom. He’s okay. I just checked on him. He’s asleep and dreaming about trains. We’re all okay.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

“You were.”

“No, for you. All those years. I’m so sorry.”

She pulls the last tissue out of the box and blows her nose while she cries. There aren’t enough tissues for the sorrow she’s been living with. I reach around her neck with my right hand and hug her into me.

“It’s okay, Mom. I forgive you. You’re here now. Thank you for being here now.”

Her crying body softens while I hold her in my hug. When she’s finally quiet, I lie down next to her and fall asleep.

Heidi opens the bottle of wine she gave to me on my last day at Baldwin and pours us each a glass. She then carries both glasses while I “carry” my granny cane. I can feel her watching me as we move from the kitchen to the living room.

“Your walk is much better,” she says. “Much smoother and a lot less drag.”

“Thanks,” I say, surprised by the compliment.

A lot of things are a lot smoother and less of a drag now than they were four and a half months ago—finding the food on the left side of my plate, threading my left arm into my left shirtsleeve, typing, reading. But the improvements don’t happen overnight. They’re slow, small, sneaky, and shy, and only accumulate into something remarkable after weeks and months, not days. So I hadn’t noticed that my walk has improved since Baldwin. It’s nice to hear.

We sit down on the couch, and Heidi passes me my wine.

“To your continued recovery,” she says, raising her glass.

“I’ll definitely drink to that,” I say, holding my glass out in front of me but waiting for Heidi to do the clinking (I’d probably miss and spill my wine all over her).

She taps my glass with hers, and we drink to my continued recovery. She’s probably the only health care professional at this point who openly believes that this is possible. Everyone else either says nothing, avoids giving any kind of concrete prediction, or they say
maybe,
but then they drown the
maybe
in a list of
but
s, caveats, and
I don’t want to give you any false hope
speeches. And denial is a big problem. No one wants me to live in denial, to go on believing that I might get better if the odds are overwhelmingly against it. God forbid. But then, maybe Heidi doesn’t hold out hope for my full recovery as an occupational therapist. Maybe she believes in the possibility because she’s my friend. When it comes to Neglect, I’ll take the hope of a friend over the cautious prognosis of a physiatrist any day.

“How are things at Baldwin?” I ask.

“Pretty much the same. We have a new woman with Neglect. She’s sixty-two, had a stroke. Hers is a lot worse than yours, and she has some other deficits. She’s been with us three weeks and is still completely unaware that she has it, thinks she’s perfectly healthy. She’s going to be a real challenge to rehabilitate.”

I think back to those early days at Baldwin, when I was the new woman with Neglect. It feels like a million years ago and just yesterday. Without knowing anything else about this new woman with Neglect, I feel a connection to her, like when I hear of someone who went to Middlebury or HBS or when I meet someone from Welmont. However different we are, we share a similar life experience.

There are times now when I forget that I have Left Neglect, but it’s not because of an unconscious unawareness like it was in the beginning. I know I have this. So I don’t try to walk without my cane, thinking that my left leg works. I know I need help getting dressed, so I don’t do it by myself and then leave the house with my shirt half on and my left pant leg dragging behind me. And I don’t use the stove because I know it’s dangerous (not that I used it much before). I know that I need to constantly remind myself that there is a left side, that I have a left side, to look left, scan left, and go left, and even if I do, there’s a good chance that I’m still registering only what’s on the right.

But when I’m not walking or reading or searching for the carrots on my dinner plate, when I’m relaxing in the sunroom or talking with the kids or having a glass of wine on the couch with a friend, I feel perfectly healthy. I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with me. I’m not a woman with Neglect. I’m Sarah Nickerson.

“How’s Martha?” I ask.

“Oh, she misses you terribly,” she says, smiling.

“I’m sure.”

“I’m glad we finally found the time to do this,” she says.

“Me, too.”

Heidi has called to check on me at least once a week since I came home from Baldwin. She’s also stopped by many times, usually when dropping off Charlie after basketball. But between her work schedule and me being in Vermont every weekend and school vacation days, we hadn’t found time to get together for our wine date until now, almost the end of March.

“I love your house,” she says, having a look around the living room.

“Thank you.”

“I can’t believe you might move from here.”

“I know. It’ll be a big change if it happens.”

“Tell me about the job.”

“It’s the director of development for NEHSA. I’d be responsible for developing and growing their strategies for raising funds. So finding corporate sponsors, donors, leveraging relationships to help market the program, writing grants. It’s twenty hours a week, and I could work at least half of those hours from home.”

“It sounds like the perfect job for you.”

“It really does. All the business skills I’ve accumulated at HBS and Berkley give me the ability to do the job well. And my disability gives me the empathy and experience as someone who has benefited from NEHSA to do the job with passion. I’d be contributing in a necessary way to an important organization that I believe in. And the hours are perfect.”

“What about Bob? Would he be able to work at NEHSA, too?” she asks.

“No, no. The organization is mostly volunteer. And he’d want something else anyway.”

Heidi checks her watch. My old watch. It looks good on her.

“Where is Bob?” she asks, realizing the late time.

The kids and my mother are already in bed.

“Still at work.”

“Wow, late night.”

“Yeah.”

I don’t elaborate. While it’s not atypical for Bob to have stretches where he needs to work late every night for a month, this particular stretch began right about when I turned down the job at Berkley, and the timing feels too exact to be coincidental. He could be working extra hours to ensure that he, as our sole breadwinner, doesn’t get laid off, or he could be under even more extreme pressure to help his weak company survive to fight another day, but I think he’s simply avoiding me and my job offer in Vermont.

“When would you go?”

“Well, NEHSA needs an answer from me ASAP, but I wouldn’t need to start until the fall. So we have some time.”

“So, what are you going to tell them?”

“I want to tell them yes, but I can’t unless Bob feels confident that he can find something up there, too. We’ll see. If it doesn’t work out, I’m sure I can find something around here,” I say, not sure of this at all.

“What about your mom? Would she go with you?”

“She’s going back to the Cape for the summer, but she’s coming back to live with us after Labor Day.”

“And what does she think about living in Vermont?”

“Oh, she loves it up there. Better than here.”

“And what will you do for help in the summer?”

“If we’re in Vermont, Mike Green’s niece is home from college for the summer and needs a part-time job. She’s nannied for years, she’s in school for nursing, and Mike thinks she’d be great with me and the kids. And if we’re here, Abby will be back from New York in May and said she could nanny for the summer.”

“Sounds like you’ve got everything lined up but Bob.”

“Yup.”

Everything but Bob.