How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  Instead, I asked the only question I could come up with. “Could somebody please find my mother?”

  * * *

  NORMALLY, MEMORIES HAVE a chronology to them. Even if you’ve lost pieces of the story, you usually have a sense of order, at least—this led to this. What I recall from the ICU is just a pile of images, sounds, and feelings so jumbled, it’s like a game of pick-up sticks.

  They say everybody loses time in the ICU. It’s basically Vegas in there, minus the showgirls and slot machines. No windows, for one. Bright fluorescents humming at all hours of the day and night—dimmed, sometimes, but not much. Doctors, nurses, techs, residents, physical therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, case managers, administrators, family members, and just about anyone else who feels like it walking through at all hours. Machines beeping and hissing. Rolling carts with computers. Shoes squeaking the floor. Phones ringing.

  It annihilates your circadian rhythms, to say the least.

  Plus, you. You’re asleep, then you’re awake. The world is blurred with drugs and pain. You’re woken at all hours—to take medicines, to be turned to avoid bedsores, or even just because someone, anyone, has a question for you. You’re a passive, drugged-out element of an unearthly ecosystem that churns day and night to keep you alive—but you’re about as far from alive as it’s possible to be.

  Short of being dead.

  I know from my mother, who arrived with my dad just after they wheeled me off to surgery (and found Chip in the waiting room looking “devastated—absolutely devastated”) that the surgery took about two hours and they screwed rods to either side of my lumbar vertebrae to stabilize my spine.

  I was stable enough the next day to go back in for a second surgery to skin-graft the burns. I heard all about this later from my mom as well. Ever the overachieving student, she took copious notes in her tidy cursive, and used them not only to tell me the story of my life but to teach me many new vocabulary words, as well.

  She explained that I was lucky, in a way, that the burns were so bad. Third-degree burns don’t hurt because all the nerves have burned away. She explained that the spinal surgeon met the plastic surgeon in the OR to arrange me on the table so they could get at the burns on my neck without more damage to my spine. She explained, too, how he shaved off the black, crispy, burned skin with a “weck blade” (I imagined it like a carrot peeler), and then harvested skin from two donor sites just under my collarbones (the “superclavicular” area) for “full-thickness skin grafts” on my neck. They sewed the new skin down with “Prolene sutures” in crisscrosses, like quilting.

  I was in recovery for both surgeries in the ICU for seven days, and the entire time, I had a dressing over my neck attached to a suction tube sucking the moisture from the skin grafts as they waited to see if they would take. My mom took a picture with her iPhone before deciding it was in bad taste. She let me see it many weeks later before erasing it entirely. I looked like I was being attacked by a giant albino lamprey.

  Apparently, the first person I asked for after both surgeries was Chip. He came in after the first (though I have no memory of it), but after the second, he’d gone home to sleep, and they sent my mom in instead.

  Other things I know but don’t remember: I had an “indwelling Foley catheter” draining into a bag, and my bowels apparently had to be “manually evacuated” by some hospital tech with a very unfortunate job. What was left of my hair kept getting caught in my dressing, and so someone had trimmed it, unceremoniously and without asking—possibly while I was asleep. I took more drugs in one week than I’d taken in my whole life put together—massive doses of acetaminophen, Valium, Cipro, nizatidine, OxyContin, Clonis, Maalox, and a blissful little substance that makes you forget everything called Versed. Visitors were only allowed in for ten minutes at a time. Mostly, I was alone, surrounded by machines—and herds of strangers.

  One of the painkillers made me throw up a lot. That I do remember.

  I also remember flashes of faces. My mother, leaning down, her face puffy from crying. My father, pursing his lips to be tough and holding out a little thumbs-up gesture at me over and over, like he was giving a toast. Chip, still as a statue, right by the bed but seeming miles away. The weirdest memory I have is of various physical therapists in navy-blue scrubs coming by at all hours to move my legs and feet around for me—bending them, stretching them, turning them. I could see what they were doing, but I couldn’t feel it.

  It was just like a long, strange dream. With vomiting.

  Four

  IT WASN’T UNTIL I moved out of the ICU that I started to wake up. And it wasn’t until I started waking up that I began to realize how bad things really were.

  On the day they moved me out of the ICU, it took all morning to get me into the wheelchair, for example. A nurse called Nina arrived to crank the bed up in slow increments to get me sitting. I’d been lying down for so long, my blood pressure was at risk for crashing, which could cause me to faint or even have a heart attack. You lose muscle mass amazingly fast when you are immobilized and unconscious, and I had lost twenty pounds in one week. I was like a tiny, frail old lady.

  I remember worrying about how shocked Chip would be to see me—and feeling kind of glad he wasn’t there. Like if I had a few days, that might be enough time to pull myself together.

  But that didn’t stop me from asking where he was. “Where’s Chip?” I asked my mother at least three times before she answered.

  “He’s not feeling well today, honey,” she said.

  “Not feeling well?” I asked.

  “A touch of the Irish flu,” my dad said.

  “Cliff!” My mother slapped him on the shoulder.

  Nina could easily have lifted me and placed me in the chair, but that’s not how they roll at inpatient rehab. It’s all about getting you to do things—impossible things—by yourself and before you’re ready. So there I was, not even out of the ICU, enduring a three-hour teachable moment, one slow inch at a time.

  “Can’t you just lift me?” I asked.

  “I can help you lift yourself,” she said, making her “no” sound a little bit like a “yes.”

  My parents were nearby, standing shoulder to shoulder, tilting in toward me in sympathy. Cliff and Linda. I’d seen them shoulder to shoulder many times, but never perched so anxiously. They were itching to step in and give me a hand, but Nina body-blocked them. She had a board, and I had to edge my way onto it in my gown—still catheterized, by the way. With all the tubes and bandages and light-headedness, it was a miracle I even sat up at all.

  And my legs? I still couldn’t feel them—or move them. They were like mutant Japanese udon noodles hanging dead from my knees. Nina edged them over the side of the bed. I watched them dangle.

  “How long till the feeling in my legs comes back?” I asked.

  “That’s a question for the doctor,” Nina said.

  By the time I was in the chair, and Nina had pulled the little foot flaps down and propped my feet up on them, I was as out of breath as if I’d sprinted a mile.

  “Attagirl!” my dad shouted, when I made it—the same shout he’d always used when I crossed the line first at track meets.

  I didn’t look over.

  Nina took my chair handles and wheeled me out, trailing after. We traveled miles through the labyrinth of hallways of the building to find my new room two wings over. It was a double room, but both beds were empty, which meant I got to pick—except my mother really wound up picking, which is kind of her signature move. She asks you what you want to do, waits for your answer, tells you why that won’t work, and then makes you do what she wanted all along.

  I picked the bed nearest the bathroom, but then my mother said she’d read an article in Reader’s Digest that looking at nature was “very healing” and didn’t I think it might be good to stay near the window?

  As usual: I chose one and wound up in the other.

  At my new bed, we did the whole wheelchair rigmarole in
reverse to get me in. It took an hour, and I was panting and nauseated by the end. My parents stood at the foot of the bed the whole time like statues, watching.

  “Where’s Chip, again?” I asked.

  “Sleeping off his hangover,” my father said. This time, my mother let it be.

  I turned to Nina. “How long until I get this catheter out?” I asked, as she pulled up the sheets at last, and I leaned back against the crackly hospital pillow.

  “That’s another question for the doctor.”

  I got the feeling she said that a lot.

  As soon as Nina was gone, my father went for coffee downstairs, and my mother started decorating the room. This was part of her job. She and my dad ran a contracting business together, and he generally handled the construction end of things, and she did the design. So it was both her professional and personal responsibility in almost any situation to make things look better.

  She’d brought a blue-and-white-checked quilt from home and a fuzzy throw blanket. She’d been collecting get-well cards all week from friends and relatives, and she’d brought some Scotch tape to affix them to the walls. She’d bought magazines, which she arranged in a fan shape on the side table, and she’d found my favorite stuffed animal from childhood in the attic (a fuzzy bunny named Fuzzy Bunny) and brought it with her. When she ran out of things to do, she took a seat on the reclining side chair and criticized the décor.

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking with this God-awful mauve on the walls. It’s like the 1980s threw up in here.”

  I’d just survived a plane crash, so of course this was what we talked about. Nothing pissed Linda Jacobsen off like bad décor.

  “Mauve and gray,” she went on. “It’s toxic. They’re poisoning you visually.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, like, Come on. “It’s a hospital room.”

  But she lifted her chin. “The person who decorated this hospital,” she announced, like a woman claiming her dignity in the face of unspeakable horror, “should be in jail.”

  I took a slow breath.

  “You could open the curtains,” I suggested at last.

  She turned toward the window, as if she’d forgotten it. “Of course. Yes.” She clicked right over, her heels making the same noise they’d made my entire life, and yanked the curtain back.

  I don’t know what either of us had expected to see, but the window overlooked the airshaft of the parking garage.

  My mother turned to me. “It’s worse open.”

  Indeed it was.

  Just then, the heavy door to the room swung in, and a doctor I’d never seen before walked in, straight toward my bed, grabbing the computer cart on the way and pulling it behind him. He said, “How’s everything feeling?” as he leaned in to check the dressings over my neck.

  I didn’t know how to answer. “Weird. Surreal. Bleak.”

  “Pain?” he specified.

  Oh. “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s the drugs. They’re disorienting. But we’re weaning you off them, so you should get a better read on the pain tomorrow.”

  “I’m not sure I want a better read on the pain.”

  It was a weak, embryonic joke. But he gave me a shrug. “Point taken.”

  He stepped back to the computer, swiped his ID badge, and started checking my charts. “The good news is,” he said, “everything we grafted is working. No rejection of tissue.”

  Oh! He had operated on me. I guess we had met before.

  “We took two full skin grafts from just under your collarbones,” he pointed at the large dressing that was taped there, and I noticed it, really, for the first time. “You’ll keep that dressing on about five more days, and then we’ll just let it air dry. It’ll scab up and heal. It’ll leave a scar, of course, but once the skin has grown back, there are ointments to help it fade. In ten years, you won’t even see it.”

  Ten years! If I’d been drinking a beverage, I would have spit it right out.

  He went on, unperturbed. “We used full skin on the front of the neck, and partial over the back trapezius area, so there will be more scarring there. Partial leaves a more mottled appearance. But you can cover some of that with hair.” He smiled. “No more ponytails.”

  “Why is there no bandage on the graft?” I asked.

  “Once it ‘takes’ we like to let it air, and just keep Silvadene ointment on it. It doesn’t need to be covered. But you will have to go sleeveless on that side for a good while. Just buy some cheap T-shirts and cut the neck and left sleeve off.” He chuckled. “Kind of Tarzan and Jane.”

  My mother was not amused. “What about the face?”

  My eyes widened. The face? I didn’t remember anything about ‘the face.’

  The doctor looked over at my mom like he hadn’t noticed she was there. Then, to me: “Bet it’s nice to have your mom here.”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  She went on, in a stage whisper, “I can’t even look at her,” and now that she mentioned it, I noticed that was true.

  “The face is all second-degree,” the doc said. “It’s going to blister and scab and itch like hell—but if she doesn’t scratch, there should be minimal scarring. Should heal up in about three weeks.”

  My mom was a stickler for details. “Does ‘minimal scarring’ mean no scarring?”

  But she was being too greedy. “I never make promises,” the doctor said, finishing up on the computer and rolling the cart away. “We’ll do our best, and we’ll hope that’s enough.”

  After he left, it was dead quiet. This room had nothing of the mind-vibrating cacophony of the ICU. Just the white noise of the A/C vent, and the uncomfortable echoes of everything my mom had just said. Then, suddenly, the shuddery breaths of her crying.

  I looked over. She had turned toward the window, arms clutched tight at her waist.

  “Mom, stop it,” I said.

  “You’re going to be just fine,” she told me, like the opposite.

  “Pull it together, please, Mom.” I closed my eyes again. So tired.

  “You were perfect,” she said then. “No wonder Chip is too sick to come.”

  My mom had a remarkable talent for making things worse. She could always find the downside. And she had no filter, so once she found it, everybody else had to find it, too.

  “You know what?” I said then. “I’m pretty exhausted.”

  But she wasn’t done. “You had your whole life ahead of you.”

  So. The opposite of comforting, really.

  “I’ve read the statistics,” she went on, “about what something like this does to a relationship.”

  “Mom—”

  “Guess what? Women don’t leave men, but men do leave women.”

  “Chip is not going to leave me, Mom.” Ridiculous wasn’t even a big enough word for how ridiculous that was.

  “No,” she said, turning to face me. “No, he’s not. Because we are going to fix you.”

  I knew that look on her face far too well.

  “God did not give me all this strength for nothing,” she went on. “You’ll recover, darling girl. We will put you back as good as new. I’ve already got a file folder as fat as a brick with articles on miraculous recoveries and people who’ve defied all their grim diagnoses.”

  Was my diagnosis “grim”? Something told me not to ask.

  My mom turned around and fixed her gaze on the blanket at my feet. “You’re going to bounce back from this and show them all,” she said, going just the tiniest bit Scarlett O’Hara. “We’ll find the best cosmetic surgeons in the world. We’ll scour the earth. We will not rest. If Daddy and I have to spend every cent we’ve ever saved—Cash in our life insurance! Sell the house!—we’ll do it.”

  I should have just let it go. I should have let us lapse back into silence. But something in me needed to convince her. “Chip is not going anywhere,” I tried again. “He loves me.”

  “The old you, maybe,” she said. “But now?” She frowned. “But we�
��re not going to let that happen. I’ve been online every night, researching people who’ve faced this type of thing and overcome it, and I know that more than anything, it takes determination. One girl I read about dove into a too-shallow swimming pool at her bachelorette party and broke her neck. She should have died—but she fought her way back and now she teaches water ballet. Another woman? Crushed by a truck! Broke every bone in her body and then some. Now she’s an aerobics instructor in San Bernardino. Another girl was just crossing the street when a drunk driver mowed her down. Now she’s an underwear model.”

  “I get it, Mom.”

  But there was no stopping her. “What do all these people have in common? Gumption. Grit. Strength. And you’ve got all that in spades—you always have. And you’ve literally got extra, too, because you’ve got me.”

  It wasn’t uninspiring. It was good to know she had my back. Plus, she wasn’t wrong—the woman was strong as an ox. But somehow the sensations it was leaving in me—hazy as they were to identify—seemed equal parts worry, inspiration, and panic. As was always true with my mother, you never could get exactly what you wanted. I wanted the strength without the fear-mongering. I wanted the determination without the control. I wanted the pep talk without the underwear model.

  Mostly, right now, I just wanted to close my eyes.

  Lucky for me, my dad walked in next with a tray of coffees. He knew in an instant just from the vibe what kind of conversation we were having. “Look at this room,” he said, attempting to redirect. “Linda, you’ve worked your magic.”

  But Linda wasn’t having it. “The doctor came in. He says there’s no guarantee that her face will recover.”

  “I believe he said there should be minimal scarring,” I volunteered.

  “You know what?” my dad said, reading us perfectly, “I think our girl needs some rest.” He’d been with my mom for thirty years. He was an expert on damage control.

  “What about the coffee?” she protested.

  “We’ll take it in the car.”

  He came to me, looked me right in my burned face, and crinkled his eyes into a smile while he squeezed my hand. “Get some rest, sweetheart.”