Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  “Can’t we do this another day?” she said.

  “We have to do this, El,” Cam told her. He led Eleanor toward the station wagon.

  Jackie Kennedy in Dallas. The pink suit, with the blood.

  Eleanor wanted to get in the ambulance with Toby, but the EMTs needed to be there with him. “You follow behind,” one of them told her. There wasn’t room for more people.

  Cam drove. Nobody said anything. There had been a cassette in the tape player when Cam turned the ignition on. The soundtrack from The Music Man, right at the spot where they’d left off, when she’d last pulled into the driveway, with the three of them all singing “Seventy-Six Trombones” in the back. Toby loudest of all.

  “Turn off the music,” Eleanor said.

  40.

  That Moment Has Passed

  The tests, when they got the results back, left them no room for fantasy. Mild to medium brain damage resulting from oxygen deprivation. The doctor started talking about lobes and hemispheres, but they couldn’t take in the rest.

  “This is just temporary, right?” Eleanor said. “How long before he’s back to normal?”

  The doctor just looked at her for a moment and took a long, slow breath. “There are people who can help your son retrain himself so other hemispheres take over some of the function of the damaged portions of his brain,” he told them. “But injured brain cells do not regenerate.”

  She could see his lips moving, but the words made no sense. She must have heard this wrong.

  “Your son can still live a good life,” the doctor told them. “Different from how he was before. But he can still take pleasure in his family. His motor function will not be greatly compromised. Primarily, his injuries have to do with language and cognition.”

  There was a woman reading a magazine in the waiting room with Tom Cruise on the cover. A baby crying down the hall. At the water fountain, a mother was holding a child up to drink. Another child had spilled a bag of Cheerios on the floor. On the television mounted to the wall, Let’s Make a Deal.

  “The thing we all need to hold on to right now”—this was the doctor, still talking—“is that Toby could have died this afternoon. In certain ways, he did. You were very lucky your husband was able to bring him back with the CPR. Another thirty seconds—maybe less—we’d be looking at a whole different story. But it would be too much to expect a human brain to survive that long without oxygen and emerge unscathed.”

  No. No. No. No. Eleanor was shaking her head. Her whole body was shaking. Cam leaned in to put his arms around her. She pushed him away.

  It had sunk in now. How this happened. The way she looked at him at this moment, she might have been confronting an assassin.

  “You did this to our son,” she said. Her voice a whisper.

  Cam crumpled. Those red curls covering his face.

  “I would give anything . . .” he said. “I would do anything.”

  “But there isn’t anything you can do now, is there?” she said, her voice unrecognizable to her own self. Ice. “That moment has passed.”

  41.

  We Are the Children

  Toby’s hospital room, three days after the accident. Toby on the bed, his arms at his sides. There was a tube going into his arm—glucose, because he couldn’t eat—and a set of wires attached to his head that the doctor explained had been put there to monitor brain activity.

  The four of them—Eleanor, Cam, Ursula, Alison—gathered by the bed.

  “You might try talking to him,” the neurologist who’d been brought in to consult on Toby’s case suggested. “Even when we think nothing’s going on in there, sometimes the sound of a familiar voice, a familiar piece of music, triggers something in the brain cells.”

  “I have an idea, guys,” Ursula said. “Let’s all sing to him.”

  She tried “Thriller” first. When that got no response, she tried another one—her thin, pure soprano just barely audible over the sound of the machines.

  We are the world

  “You remember this one, right, Tobes?” she said to him.

  Eleanor studied the expression on her son’s face as they sang to him. His full, beautiful lips, the constellation of freckles. The halo of red hair arranged on the pillow. Then she regarded her younger daughter. At that moment she understood what it meant to sing one’s heart out.

  “. . . we’ll make a better day, just you and me.”

  Nothing.

  42.

  Ball. Egg. Dinosaur.

  They put the violin away. In those first days after they brought Toby home from the hospital, Ursula had played his record for him, sitting him down next to the turntable and setting the needle on the familiar groove. “It’s your favorite, Tobes. You remember this, right?”

  If the notes reached some place in his damaged brain, nothing in his eyes or his strangely flaccid body gave indication of that. Toby stared blankly at Ursula, who stood next to the record player holding a ruler and waving her arms to the music, pretending to be a conductor.

  “Will you just quit, for once?” Alison snapped at her. It wasn’t like her to speak to her sister in this tone of voice. Ursula set down her ruler.

  He walked, but differently. Toby moved slowly through the rooms of the house now, and in the yard where he used to fly past in a blur of wild energy. In the old days, he was always on the move: to the woodshop, the garden, the woods, always going someplace, always fast. Now he drifted like a piece of milkweed on a still afternoon. Mostly he just sat there, turning the pages of a book, if one was placed in his hands, or staring at the sky. Sometimes he just studied the tip of his shoelace or an ant crawling up his pants leg. The head of a dandelion or a piece of grass was enough to occupy him.

  Eleanor spent hours turning the pages of one of their old baby books with Toby on her lap, pointing out the names of ordinary objects, colors. This is a ball. This is an egg. This is a dinosaur. When she couldn’t take that anymore, she took down Baby’s First Hundred Words—not much more advanced, but a little. This is a farmer. This is a baker. This is a fireman. Toby never objected to sitting there. But he never responded, either.

  Very often, Sally would place herself next to Toby, her tongue on his leg or arm, breathing quietly and snorting when a squirrel or the memory of a good bone entered her dream. He seemed to like this, as much as anyone could tell what Toby liked anymore. His face, once so animated, was drained of expression. His features were as beautiful as ever, but the effect was all different without his jokes, his Michael Jackson dance, that big voice, announcing his arrival in whatever room he burst into. It was unclear to Eleanor whether he said so little because he no longer remembered words, or because he just had nothing to say.

  When he spoke, it was usually about wanting something to eat, his request offered up in a high, soft whisper. Hearing him speak in the strange new voice, Eleanor sometimes had to walk out of the room so the girls wouldn’t see her burying her face in her hands. Now and then, though, Ursula found her mother with her face pressed against the wall, or lying on the bed holding a pillow.

  “Let’s just be happy he didn’t die, okay?” she said, stroking Eleanor’s hair.

  Darla brought lemon bars. Phyllis left a Bible on the table. Walt came by with his checkerboard. “I was thinking I could play this with your boy,” he said.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Alison said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Walt told her. “We’ll have a good time sitting out in the sun, moving the pieces around on the board. It might be nice for him, and a help to your mother.”

  The one who really rose to the occasion, though, was Cam. Cam, who had never even taken one of their children to the dentist before and had a hard time keeping the names of their teachers straight from one year to the next, got on the phone, talking to doctors in places as far away as Denver and Atlanta, where they worked with children with brain injuries. He brought home photocopies of articles about innovations in brain rehabilitation from the state library
and researched facilities where Toby could work on language, rebuild muscle tone. Cam’s parents—never much involved—had offered to pay for treatment, but every place Cam contacted said the same thing after reviewing Toby’s scans. Prospects for rehabilitation, with brain injury of this kind, were minimal. Expectations should be kept low.

  Cam didn’t let this discourage him. “Those doctors don’t know everything,” he said. “They don’t know Toby.” He sent away for a book by a woman who had invented a way to teach her brain-injured daughter to communicate with sign language and another book about foods that stimulated the growth of new brain cells, and then he cooked them. He joined a support group of parents of children who were brain injured—a term Eleanor was unable to utter. Tuesday nights, he made the hour-long drive alone to meetings.

  Cam tried bringing Toby to the playground. He buckled his son into the toddler swing and pushed so gently that the swing barely rose. One, one, Toby has fun.

  “Home now,” Toby said, after Cam climbed with him to the top of the slide, trying to guide his newly limp body down. Toby had always loved the slide, and fought to stay longer on the playground every time they went there.

  “Go home,” Toby repeated. “Home.”

  Back in the kitchen, where they set him in his chair—his frog cup in front of him, and the Beatrix Potter bowl he’d always loved—he stared blankly out over the heads of the other children. Their amazing geologist. The boy destined for Carnegie Hall. The web-footed swimmer who might one day have swum the English Channel. The child who had told them he’d been a buffalo in a former life. The child who spoke to God.

  Now he said nothing. Just reached for a piece of bread and silently chewed it.

  43.

  Bad Things, Good People

  Everything changed.

  For Eleanor, the rooms of their home had become almost unbearable. As much as possible, she retreated to her desk now, staring at the blank page of her drawing pad. It was easier to put in long hours working than to spend her days with her son, confronted with the constant picture of what it meant that the boy she had raised and adored for four and a half years had disappeared, replaced by this odd little red-haired stranger.

  She was angry now, all right. At Cam most of all. But there was a terrible secret she admitted to no one. She was angry at Toby, too.

  There was nothing rational about this, but Eleanor had to work hard not to snap at him when he couldn’t answer some simple question she asked or go up the stairs without getting on all fours, or when—this was the worst—she spoke to him and he looked through her as if he had no idea who she was. To Eleanor, it was as if the person responsible for the disappearance of her beloved son was this strange, silent imposter, cleverly disguised in a similar body—with the same flaming hair, but otherwise unrecognizable. She wanted the old Toby back, and though she told herself it made no sense, she resented the person now occupying his place at the table.

  That fall, she set up a room for herself in the barn—the place Cam had once used for his woodshop. The place became her hideout. She would rather work all day at her drawing table in the barn—all day, and all night—and earn money to pay Phyllis than sit watching the boy flipping listlessly through the pages of a magazine or staring out the window at their empty bird feeder.

  Ursula had always been the most tender one of Eleanor’s children, but now she revealed a kind of compassion that had been largely hidden before, probably because until this awful moment, it hadn’t been needed. Ursula was heroic. She became her brother’s tireless defender and protector, with no consideration of the cost to herself. From the moment Ursula got out of bed everything she did and said seemed driven by two impulses: to help her brother and to make her family happy again.

  She fixed pancakes for Cam and Eleanor—breakfast in bed—also muffins and cookies and bowls of popcorn, like in the old days, when they piled onto the couch to watch movies together. Phyllis did most of the housework now, but Ursula took on special projects—sitting with Toby on the floor for hours, reciting the numbers, pointing out shapes, reminding him of the names for things. She hung up all the clothes that had accumulated on the floor in Alison’s room. She Dustbustered Eleanor’s workspace. She arranged Toby’s Ninja Turtles in interesting places—scenes intended to inspire her brother to play, only he never did anymore.

  One night, Ursula set the table with candles and the plates they only used on Thanksgiving, with an artificial rose that appeared to have been taken from a cemetery in a vase at the center of the table. No special occasion, but there had been a segment on Phil Donahue that week about the importance of keeping the romance alive in marriage.

  “You two need to have a candlelight dinner, like in the movies,” she told Eleanor. She had put on a Dolly Parton tape and made sandwiches for the rest of them to eat upstairs so their parents could have privacy. She had been disappointed by Eleanor’s choice of outfit for the special dinner, but—sensing her mother’s reluctance to change into something fancier—ran upstairs to her room. She came back with a crown from her dress-up box.

  “I guess we’d better act romantic,” Cam said, as Ursula pushed the Play button so “I Will Always Love You” started—maybe their daughter had failed to recognize, this was a sad song—and left them to be alone. “We don’t want to disappoint our daughter, right?”

  After the accident, Cam had stopped showing up for softball games. For a while everyone figured he’d be back. That September—no Labor Day party that year—he told the team they’d better find a new first baseman.

  He needed to spend more time with Toby, he told his teammates. But there was an element of self-punishment, too. What did it matter if a man made a brilliant catch on a long ball to right field and tagged the runner out on first, if he had failed to protect his four-year-old son from drowning?

  Ursula did not announce this to any of them, but she had checked several books out of the library: a joke book, designed to liven up their silent dinnertimes; a book called Love, Medicine & Miracles, by a doctor she’d seen on Phil Donahue (a different episode); and a book from the Personal Growth section, located with the help of Mrs. Jenkins, the librarian.

  The most helpful book, in Ursula’s opinion, was When Bad Things Happen to Good People, written by a rabbi whose son had been born with a terrible disease that made him turn into an old man by the time he was Ursula’s age, seven, which meant that he’d died when he was fourteen years old. This rabbi, a man named Harold Kushner, wrote the book to figure out how to stay happy after something terrible happens, and according to him this was possible.

  As a second grader, Ursula found the book difficult reading, but she stuck with it—sounding out the words, working her way through the chapters late at night in her bed when everyone else in the family was asleep. After she finished it she wrote a letter to the author, Harold Kushner, in which she explained about her brother Toby, and how sad her parents were, and asked his advice—explaining first, regretfully, that they weren’t Jewish, but she had a dreidel.

  Harold Kushner had written back to say that a person didn’t have to be Jewish to have a relationship with God. He suggested some parts of the Bible that she and her parents might find comforting, but when she tried to share these with the two of them, her mother had looked at Ursula as if she, too, were brain damaged.

  “What kind of God would let something like this happen to Toby?” she said. She didn’t yell at Ursula, but she sounded mad. “You’re wasting your time with that book.”

  “Ease up, El,” her father said. “Ursula was just trying to help.”

  Eleanor got up from the table. “Here’s what you need to understand, Ursula,” she said. “Some things that happen don’t have any solution. Some things that get broken aren’t fixable.” She picked up Ursula’s most recent library selection, Love, Medicine & Miracles, opened the door to the woodstove, and threw it in.

  Crazyland alert.

  “That was a library book,” Ursula said quietly. She was a g
irl who prided herself on never once bringing library materials back late.

  “It was a good idea, Ursie,” Cam told her, after Eleanor left the room. “Your mom is just having a hard time right now.”

  After, from where she stood in the kitchen with Phyllis, slicing a roll of Toll House cookies and arranging them on the sheet, she heard her parents talking in the yard. Not really talking. They didn’t do that so much anymore, except for working out things like who drove Toby to physical therapy and who picked him up.

  “I’m just as sad as you are, Eleanor,” her father said. “But we have to find a way to keep going. You can’t go crazy on our children like that. Our daughter’s just trying to help.”

  Ursula looked at the babysitter, who placed a hand on her shoulder. “All parents argue sometimes,” Phyllis told her. “Don’t worry.” But she did.

  At night, in bed, Ursula searched the pages of Harold Kushner’s book for something that might apply: What could a person do to help their father who believed he was responsible for the most terrible thing that ever happened in your family? Worst of all, what if your mother believed this also? How could you make everyone happy again, or just not so miserable?

  All she could think of was praying. She tried that, too.

  By October, when the leaves on their big tree turned red, and after, when they fell, Ursula was still spending hours every day reading to her brother. Sometimes she told him jokes. She applied polish to his fingernails and his toenails and French-braided his hair, that nobody felt like cutting. Ursula held on to the hope that one of these days Toby might emerge, like Scuffy the Tugboat, through the fog, look her in the eye, and speak to her in that strangely husky man’s voice of his—not just the one- or two-word phrases that came out of him now, but sentences and songs, like in the old days. Laughter.

  Did you know I saw Mr. T on the playground?