Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (32 page)

Joey said nothing. Angie would have to make that choice.

“No, no. I’ll be there. The don’ll understand. He…he’ll understand.”

~oOo~

The first year after the death of a loved one was a journey from one painful milestone to the next. Each holiday, birthday, and anniversary was the first without that person, and each event pricked the wound and made it bleed again. It had been true after the death of their mother. Theo had written about it in his book after the death of his first wife. Now they were all living through it again without Pop.

Pop had loved this season. He’d celebrated from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. The Pagano tradition was to decorate the house, in full, after Thanksgiving dinner. He’d put a Christmas album—Perry Como or Johnny Mathis or Bing Crosby—on the turntable, crank up the volume, and his army of children and grandchildren would help him get lights up and wreaths hung. Even his last Christmas season, when he’d been ill and weak, he’d been excited for the holidays.

He’d passed all that joy onto his children. They’d planned to follow tradition in honor of Pop this year, but it hurt to think that he wouldn’t be with them to enjoy it. The day, full of family chaos, and including Tina, Matt, and both of their parents in the mix, was loud and boisterous and yet subdued at its edges.

Knowing better than to let a surprise like that just happen during a Thanksgiving dinner that was already fraught with churning, conflicting emotions, Joey had told Tina and her father about his meeting with Angie. Angelo had been angry about his meddling, until Tina had managed to convey that if he was family, then he wasn’t meddling.

Later, Angelo had pulled him aside and demanded an explanation. Joey had texted it to him so that he would be sure to be clear.
Tina needs her family to heal.

That had been all he’d needed to say.

Tina didn’t have many words yet to express her feelings, but Joey had seen everything in her eyes. She was, above all, apprehensive. She didn’t know how she felt about her brother. And that, Joey, thought, was a wound in itself.

Angie showed up ten minutes early, before anyone had started serving dinner. Wanting to stay near the front door around two o’clock, Joey was in the living room with Ben, Carlo’s youngest, sorting through the stack of Christmas albums. Ben, almost nine years old, was still fascinated by the very idea of albums and spent more time reading them and studying their art than he did choosing.

When the doorbell rang, Joey left Ben where he was and got up to answer. Tina came from the kitchen and ended up in the main hall at nearly the same time. He held out his hand to her, and she came to him and took it. Then Joey answered the door.

Angie stood there with an extravagant bundle of orange and yellow flowers, a bottle of wine, and a boxed bottle of 12-year-old Chivas. In his nervous shock at seeing his sister right there at the door, he paled and took a step back, then recovered.

“Hi, Teenie.”

Tina stood there, squeezing Joey’s fingers. Her hand was shaking, and he reached his other arm over and held her hand with both of his own.

They were going to have to usher him in or send him away. With Tina seeming to be stuck, Joey nodded at her brother and stepped out of the way so he could come in.

Sabina came up the hall. “Angie, welcome.”

“Thank you, Sabina.” He kissed her cheek and held out his gifts, like a schoolboy trying to remember all of his manners.

“Oh, lovely. Thank you.” She took the flowers and the wine. When also taking the Chivas proved awkward for her, Joey let go of Tina and took it himself.

He turned to set it on the hall table, and he saw Angelo standing at the far end of the hallway. Just standing there, in shadow, a waiting beast.

Sabina had slipped away to the kitchen, and it was only Joey, Tina, Angie, and Angelo in the hall.

Joey cleared his throat and tried to find words to say.

But Angie beat him to it. He reached out and brushed a finger over Tina’s temple, near her scarred eye. “I never wanted you hurt, shrimp. I know I don’t show it, but I love you.”

She sighed heavily. Expressively. In it, Joey heard that she’d decided what she wanted to do about her brother.

“I know.”

Angie hadn’t heard her speak again yet. He tilted his head and smiled. “You sound good.”

She shrugged. “W-w-wwworking…on it.”

“I’m so sorry, shrimp.”

With a nod, Tina lifted her arms, and when Angie came to her and closed her in an embrace, she hugged him back.

And that was all that needed to be said.

~oOo~

That night, after dinner was over and the decorations were up inside and out, while the kids watched Christmas movies in the cellar, the women talked in the kitchen, and the men drank in the living room, Joey needed some time to himself. He put his parka back on and went to sit on the patio.

He was better than he’d been the year before, especially in spirit, but he wasn’t normal. His family chaos was hard to keep up with, and it wore him out.

Tina had gone with her parents and Matt back to their house right after pie; Genie had had a much bigger day than she was used to. Angie had left then, too, to put in some face time at Nick and Bev’s. The Cortis were reunited. It had been a bit awkward, but Genie was happy. And so was Tina.

Joey never spent a night without Tina anymore, but they weren’t quite living together. She had obligations to her family, and he had obligations to his. Adele still panicked at the thought of being alone in the house, even right next door. And Tina needed to help take care of her mother. It helped her to help Genie.

So they took turns, sleeping here or there. It was an inelegant situation that needed a better solution, but they hadn’t figured one out yet. He was working on it, because he had some big plans coming up.

On this night, he was happy to be going to the Cortis for the night, even though Angelo always gave him a look that said he was none too pleased to know so much about his only daughter’s, his baby’s, late night habits.

But Tina had told him, back when she had all the words at her disposal, that her parents had been loud, and he knew she considered it payback now.

“Here you are. You good?” John leaned out the back door.

Joey cleared his throat and lined up an answer. “Yeah.”

“It’s cold. You need your tank? I saw it in the front hall.”

Often, the cold impaired his breathing even more than usual. He took a breath; it was deep and smooth. “No…M’all set.”

In nothing heavier than his pullover sweater, John stepped out onto the patio. “You don’t use it much anymore, huh?”

Joey lifted his shoulder. He slept with the cannula every night, but otherwise, he didn’t think about it much. Actually, that he didn’t think about it much was pretty fucking miraculous, considering where he’d been last year at this time. He kept the tank with him, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d needed a hit off of it. Weeks, maybe.

Since Tina had been hurt, his own problems hadn’t really featured among his thoughts.

“Sleep with it,” he said in answer to his brother.

“Yeah, but”—John sat on one of the chairs nearby—“Joey, shit. You’ve made huge progress this year. You’re talking better, you’re breathing better, and hell, you’re kinda ripped. You’re in a relationship with a good woman, and you’re standing up with her through her trouble.”

Not knowing what to say in response, Joey said nothing. Talking better wasn’t talking well.

John chuckled and leaned forward. “This might piss you off, but I want to tell you something. On my wedding day, before you flaked and left me standing high and dry, Pop talked to me. He told me that he wanted me to watch out for you and make sure you didn’t fall any farther than you already had. He thought Adele would let you turn into a blob, and he said he was fighting too much with you, as usual, to get you to see what you needed. So he put it on me. And then you flaked and bailed while Katrynn was halfway down the aisle and left me with no best man, and I had a whole lot of trouble caring what you did with your life.”

Well, he was right that it would piss Joey off.

Joey stood up, ready to walk away, back into the house, get his keys and get out, but John stood, too, and blocked him.

“Hold on. I wasn’t done. What I was getting at is you didn’t need me. Or Pop. Or Adele. You needed you. You did good, JoJo. Pop was proud.”

Nobody called him that anymore, and he was glad they’d stopped. But John grinned and gave him an affectionate slap on the shoulder, and Joey gave up being mad.

Pop had never told him he was proud of him, not once in thirty-six years. But Carmen and John had now both said that he had been, because they’d seen his pride. Had Pop ever said those words to any of them? He didn’t know.

Maybe he should have been paying closer attention and not waiting for words his father hadn’t known how to say.

~ 22 ~

“Oh, it’s so good to see you.” Dr. Esther Rosen came around her desk and gave Tina a hug. The gesture was stiff and awkward; as far as Tina could recall, they’d never touched each other before. But she hugged the professor back.

“Sit, sit. How are you? Forgive me. Are you able to tell me?”

Tina heard herself make the same kind of throat-clearing noise that Joey often made. “I talk. Little.” She concentrated on the next sounds. Each sound was a conscious choice. “Buh-better. Ev-ery day.” Okay, that was all she could manage right then.

“Excellent. I can see you thinking about your formations. What therapy model are you working with? CIT?”

Constraint-induced Therapy. A fucking misery. Tina nodded. “Hard.”

Esther laughed. “Yes. That’s the consensus. It seems to be working. I’d heard you had complete expression loss.”

Another nod. “Still…no…wr-wr-writing.”

“That will take longer, which of course you know. The processes are more complex, which is why we see so many orthography and chirography issues in patients with expressive disorders, even those with near-fluent speech.”

Orthography and chirography. Scientist-speak for spelling and handwriting. Tina longed for the days when words like that might be part of her life again—the words and the things that they meant.

Tina was grateful that Esther was treating her like the same student she’d been working with for years and not like a patient—or worse, a child. But she wasn’t here on a social call. She had a difficult topic to raise and no good way to do it except to muddle through.

And after this awful meeting, she was going to the RTC to collect her things. This day was going to suck from stem to stern, except that Joey would be there with her.

She picked up her feather pendant and held it between her fingers. “Need…to…tah-alk.”

Esther nodded, and waited, seeming interested.

“C-c-cahn’t…” Shit. A ‘d.’ Her mouth refused to make that sound. She gave up and repeated a word she’d just said. “Talk…paper. Can’t. F-f-ffff-finish.” Breathless and developing a headache, Tina sat back in frustration. She couldn’t do this. She should have let Joey come and speak for her, or write it out for her, but it pierced her very soul to have lost this part of her life, and the least her fucking head could do was let her bow out herself.

After a pause, Esther said, “May I check to see if I understand you?”

Tina’s nod was vigorous with relief.

“Are you saying you’re unable to defend your dissertation because of your expression impairment?”

Again, Tina nodded, but the relief was gone. Now tears loomed. That was the reason she’d come to campus, to Esther. To tell her that she couldn’t finish her degree. Years of work, and years of future work, lost. A
life
lost.

“Tina! Of
course
you don’t have to defend. We’d decided that already, and there was no debate about it. Your dissertation is complete. We’ve all signed off on it. The defense is…well, it’s a celebration of the work. But it is not the important part of the work. Your degree is complete. You have earned—with distinction, I might add—your Ph.D. I thought you knew. I thought you were here for information about the hooding.”

The hooding, a commencement ritual where Esther, her dissertation director, would drape her doctoral hood over her shoulders. “Wh—wh—” ‘W’ was an insanely difficult sound for her to make. And there were a few sounds that were still utterly beyond her.

She stopped and thought of something else. “Not…ppp-pity.”

Esther frowned, offended. “We’re not in the habit of conferring terminal degrees on people because we feel sorry for them, no. You earned the degree.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Absolutely. So, will I have the honor of hooding you in two weeks?”

Tina was suddenly crying so hard she almost forgot to nod.

~oOo~

The due date to submit graduation paperwork had passed weeks ago, but they were making a special clearance for her. In the department office after her meeting with Esther, Tina stood at the reception desk while the secretary forged her name to the forms, since she wasn’t able to do it herself. Then they improvised a fingerprint stamp to make it supposedly legit. Whatever. She was going to walk and get hooded. She was Dr. Valentina Corti.

Holy shit!

She didn’t know what she’d be able to do with it, since she spoke like a two-year-old and couldn’t even write her own name, but that was a trouble for later. Right now, a meeting that she’d thought meant the ruination of her dream had instead revived it.

Her friend Grace came to the desk. “Hi, Linda. Is Dr. Korgen in?”

The secretary shook her head as she stapled Tina’s forms together. Tina thought she saw her roll her eyes a little. “He’s in a meeting with the Provost. I’m not sure he’ll be back today.”

“Oh. Really? Okay. Thanks.” She stood undecided, then turned and headed back out without noticing—or at least without acknowledging—Tina.

Grace had sent flowers to the hospital but had never asked to visit. Tina didn’t hold it against her; she hadn’t wanted visitors except her family. But she was hurt that Grace hadn’t known she was standing right there. They’d been friends for years—campus friends, not best friends, but still.

“Ggggg.” The sound coming out of her mouth was like a dying animal. She hated that so very much.

Linda helped. “Grace?”

Grace turned, waiting to know why she’d been hailed. She looked right at Tina without recognition, and Tina tried not to die a little inside. She knew she looked different. And sounded different. And was different.

Then Grace’s eyes went wide. “Tina?”

Unbearably self-conscious, Tina smiled and fussed with a lock of the wig Joey hated. “Hi.”

“Oh, my God. I didn’t recog—I—how are you?”

“Buh-b-better. Healing.”

Manifestly trying to prevail over her feelings of shock and pity, Grace’s eyes scanned again and again over Tina’s scarred face. Everywhere but her eyes. “That’s good. That’s so good. I was so sorry to hear that you’d been hurt.”

Tina wanted this encounter over. It was obvious that Grace couldn’t be her friend while she was like this. For someone studying to be a therapist, she clearly didn’t know how to deal with disability in her personal life. Tina hoped she never had to deal with it in her personal brain.

She didn’t exert the effort to respond to Grace.

“So…are you signing up for writing hours for next semester?”

“No. W-w-walking. F-finished.”

“What? Really? That’s…” Her friend’s shock seemed less benign this time. “Um, that’s great. Congratulations.”

Tina was exhausted from the effort of talking with Esther, and from the emotional tilt-a-whirl that meeting had sent her on, and uncomfortable in this stilted conversation with a ‘friend’ who had no idea what to do with her. She decided that she was finished with more than just her degree.

She offered Grace a last smile and a nod, and then she left the office.

One more hard thing was left before she could get through this day.

~oOo~

As she arrived at the RTC, she passed two of her colleagues carrying boxes out, and when she went into her office it was nearly entirely devoid of her presence. Joey had dropped her off on campus so she could talk to Esther and had come her to help her pack her things, and he’d done an extremely efficient job of it, apparently enlisting the help of everyone there.

She stood in the barren space that had been her work home for years and tried to comprehend the seismic changes that her life, her future, had undergone over the course of a single semester. In late August, she’d been hurt. Now it was early December, and nothing about her life was the same.

Not even her and Joey. There had been a shift between them, too. Not a bad shift—in fact, it seemed like a growth of their relationship—but a shift. Things were different.

Because she was different.

And so was he, in a way she couldn’t pinpoint. It was more than just his improved health. His
presence
seemed changed.

He closed a box and came to her, folding her up in his arms. “Okay?”

Yes. And no. She sighed and snuggled into his embrace. “Hurts.” She loved this job. She’d been making a difference in people’s lives, helping them make their lives better. But she couldn’t do it without fluent expression, and there was no telling when, or if, she’d have that again.

“Yeah. Love you.”

“Love you.” There was good news—her degree—but she didn’t know if she could say all the words she’d need in order to share it with him. Standing in her office, now so empty it echoed, what she’d lost was more powerful than what she’d kept, and instead of sharing her good news, she held onto him and cried.

~oOo~

Before she and Joey left for her last time—though not for his; he still had therapy sessions with Gayle—Tina went to Oliver Gold’s office. She and Oliver had worked closely, especially early on, sharing research on animal-assisted therapy as they developed their individual projects. He curated the therapy animals at the RTC.

Oliver wasn’t in his office; he was off-site with the dogs, Moses, Betsy, and Gogo. They’d already had their goodbyes. Tina wanted to see the other animals, those that lived in enclosures—the lizards and the fish, the hamsters and the rabbits, and PorkPie, the parrot. She just wanted to stand there among them and linger over the last traces of the career she’d worked so hard to have.

By now, she’d stopped trying to hold back her tears, and a constant river of them dripped from her chin.

Sunny the bunny’s house was empty, and the door was open. She went to the observation glass to see if he was with a patient.

He was—with little Ava. Kirsten, a physical therapist, sat on the floor with them. Tina flipped on the speaker.

Kirsten was working to get Ava, who didn’t walk, to use her legs. She had Ava seated with her skinny little legs stretched before her as much as possible. A portable backrest held her in place.

The therapist held the rabbit on her lap, and when Ava lifted one leg and then the other as asked, Kirsten handed Sunny to her for some snuggle time.

Sunny was an important motivator for Ava and had been for years now. Her parents had given her her own bunny at home, but Ava trusted Sunny above every living being on the planet. Their connection gave her strength to try new things. Yet she’d never fussed about saying goodbye. She understood that Sunny wasn’t hers, and being able to visit the rabbit made her much more receptive and responsive to all of her therapies.

That was an important conclusion that Tina had drawn: while pairing a patient with an animal for a singular bond had myriad benefits,
not
making a support animal directly attached to one patient had equally important benefits for socialization and receptivity.

At least she’d managed to write all that down before she’d lost the ability to make words. At least she’d finished her dissertation, and all her work wouldn’t be trapped inside her broken head with her.

She wiped her cheeks and knocked on the door.

“Come in!”

At Kirsten’s invitation, she went in and waved.

Seeing her, Ava smiled her wide, open-mouthed grin. “TAAAAAH!” she yelled. “TAAAAAH!” That was how she said Tina’s name. It had been months since they’d been able to work together, but Ava remembered her, despite the changes to her appearance, and was thrilled to see her.