Gone

by Linda K. Olson

  We gazed at this mesmerizing fairyland every day, letting it transport us to a place where everything was serene and happy. The undefeated citadel on the hill gave us strength.

  Evenings became our special time together. We had no energy to waste on pity, regret, or anger. Exhausted but anxious to create our new normal, we primped, smoothed the bedsheets, and settled in with each other by nine o’clock. Someone had brought us a copy of The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, and its recently published sequel, War and Remembrance. Each had more than a thousand pages of war, romance, and intrigue, with enough historical accuracy to bring it to life for us. The sex scenes made me blush and cast furtive glances at Dave. I wondered if we would ever feel those things again.

  One afternoon, Donna and Adrian sashayed into our room, giggling like schoolgirls. Adrian dangled a pretty wrapped box over my bed.

  “Looky here,” she teased, holding it just barely out of my reach. “Come get it.”

  I scooted toward her an inch at a time, reached out without tipping over, and snatched it away from her. “Ha haaa,” I said. “Guess I showed you!”

  Feeling a little smug, I dropped it on my lap, then realized I’d have to untie the bow, remove the string, undo the tape, and get the lid off. I snuck a look around the room, making sure a commando nurse wasn’t watching, grabbed the ribbon with my teeth, and pulled. Voilà—out spilled a dainty set of white eyelet-lace baby-doll pajamas—the kind that shows lots of bare skin and cleavage.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I held the skimpy top at arm’s length and waved it back and forth. Oh, heck—why not! I jiggled my boobs free of my hospital gown and tried pulling the top over my head. The little straps hung on my ears. I wobbled precariously, trying to jab my left hand into the armhole. Dave was at my side almost instantaneously, gently tugging it down over my shoulders. Before I could stop him, he fondled my boobs and planted a loud smooch on my cheek.

  The elephant in the room couldn’t be avoided. Someone cackled; others averted their eyes. I had no idea how or if that was going to work in the long run, but at least, for the time being, he was acting interested.

  The sexy pj’s became my signature look.

  By the end of the first week, everyone in the hospital knew who we were. The most glaring reason was that we were always speaking English and they were always speaking German. Our families had relatively free rein to come and go as they pleased. Nurses would linger longer than necessary in our room, and I’m quite sure we had more than the usual number of doctor visits during the day. Maybe the “free rein” was because of our language differences and we just didn’t know any better. But maybe it was because our independent, adventurous American spirit made us somewhat of a delightful distraction.

  At the end of every day, our families found their way back to their quarters at military housing in Berchtesgaden, emotionally exhausted. There were usually ten or eleven people: Dave’s family, my family, and Adrian and Johnny. They were the grateful recipients of a steady supply of homemade food that arrived frequently from the military base in Stuttgart. Johnny’s commanding figure opened the bar early every evening, and in his infinite wisdom he titrated the evening’s gin and tonics as he felt necessary.

  I’m told it was my dad who first suggested that they dance. He and my mom had been taking ballroom dancing lessons for the past few years and enjoyed practicing to big-band music on the tile entryway of their home in the evenings before dinner. We had grown up as strict Seventh-day Adventists, a religion that disapproves of dancing. This departure from our upbringing had been rather momentous a few years earlier. I can imagine my father standing up and stepping into the middle of the room, beckoning my mother, who of course would demur at first but finally hold her arms out to him as they came together for a romantic waltz or a fox-trot or maybe even a little cha-cha. I’m sure Dave’s parents and Adrian and Johnny were quick to follow. Anxious faces tentatively smiled, then laughed, and then maybe there was even a chorus or two of Frank Sinatra or Peggy Lee.

  One night, after a few of Johnny’s “stiff ones,” they got down to business and created a society to record and track the progress of my recovery. I’m still amazed at the name they came up with. They must have gone around the circle and asked everyone for a word to incorporate into the title.

  From:

  The Society for the Serendipitous Restoration of Social, Scientific, and Sexual Scintillation Among the Amorous, Erotic, and Occasionally Erratic Emmigrants [sic] to the Bavarian Barracks in Berchtesgaden

  To:

  The Famously Fantastic, Fabulously Realistically, and Resolutely Responsive Regenerates Confined in a Cozy Corner of the Krankenhaus

  Greetings:

  Having duly considered cautiously the characters of the confinees in question with the definite difficulties that developed, undoing (temporarily) the doings of the most durable doers in the domain of diabolical diagnostic designers, the Society awards the meticulous marks in management measures initiated by the ingenious ingenue and her consort in commodiously comfortable Krankenhaus cohabitation.

  Bertchesgaden University for Mature Students

  “BUMS”

  Every afternoon, our families and friends straggled in with time weighing heavily on them. This seemed harder in some ways on them than it was on me. Their helplessness and my need for fresh air gave me a mission.

  “I can’t stand it in here anymore,” I blurted out one afternoon. “I’ve got to get out of here! Let’s find a way to get outdoors before I go stir-crazy.”

  “Great idea, Olsie!” Dave said.

  The next time Nora stepped into the room, we pleaded with her to help us make a plan. “Do you think you could find a wheelchair for Linda so I can take her outside for some fresh air?” Dave asked.

  She swung around and said, “Nein, you can’t push her out there. You need to be in a wheelchair, too!” And with that, she swept out of the room. Five minutes later, she returned with another nurse and two cane-backed wheelchairs.

  “Okay,” she said to the other nurse. “On the count of three, let’s lift Linda and put her in this wheelchair. Eins, zwei, drei.”

  I clenched my fist and squeezed my eyes shut, hoping I wouldn’t scream. They put me down gently and wrapped me in a snowstorm of white sheets and blankets. Dave settled himself into the other chair, a brown hospital robe over his hospital gown. Off we went on our first wheelchair adventure. Hospital fashionistas, we made our way down to the ground-floor lobby.

  “Do you see what I see?” I asked as we neared the lobby gift shop.

  “Uh, yes. Flowers, cards . . .” And then he did a double take. “Beer? Are they selling beer in a hospital lobby?”

  Suddenly, we had a plan.

  When everyone arrived that afternoon, we loaded up books and blankets. Adrian and Dave’s brother and fellow accident survivor, Mark, rolled our wheelchairs down to the lobby where we bought a few bottles of beer and then paraded out to the garden. From then on, we held court outdoors every afternoon in the warm September air smelling of cut grass and happiness. Some days there were up to seven people, all of us taking turns at playing the role of jester. We tried to outdo each other with jokes and funny stories, becoming more ribald as the afternoon shadows grew longer. My goal was to make everyone laugh and see the future as full of possibilities.

  My surgeons, having seen Dave show that he’d had plenty of surgical experience, happily allowed him to be doctor to me when they weren’t around.

  “My, you’re healing up nicely, ma’am. No more catheter, no more IV,” he said with an impish smile one morning after my doctors had made their rounds.

  He went about his work. After a few minutes, he said what had obviously been on his mind the entire time. “And your boobs are perfect. Your bottom’s perfect, too. You’re still a turn-on.”

  “Doctor, I don’t believe your behavior is appropriate. What would the hospital administrator say?” I responded coyly as the back of his arm “accidentally” s
lid over the thin fabric separating my boobs from his body.

  “I’m just being friendly,” he said with an unapologetic grin.

  It sounded good. It felt good. But it was still hard to see myself as sexy Linda. Playing doctor was one thing. But Dave played nurse, too. He attended to my basic bodily needs and administered medication, for the most part, by suppository, the Austrian-German way. Those images were hard to shake and replace with the way things had been.

  But that night, after everyone had gone and all was quiet on the hospital floor, he became husband again.

  I watched from my bed as Dave, still in his cast, hobbled around the room, doing some tidying. He caught my eye and stopped at my bedside, leaned over, and kissed me softly on the lips. It felt good. Really good.

  “Mmm, let me touch you,” he whispered.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you sure you want to? How can I possibly turn you on?”

  “I’ve been dying to for days,” he responded.

  I smiled and let out a giggle before the reality set in. “Well, okay, but I don’t know what will happen,” I said.

  “You’re neurologically intact. Let’s see what’s going on with the supratentorial part, shall we?” he whispered.

  He kissed me gently on the lips, carefully reached his hand under the sheet covering my lower torso, and found the sensitive area. He was soft and gentle and slow and patient and found that the sensitive area was just as sensitive as it had always been. After a few minutes, I moaned softly, and all the tension of the past ten days left my body in one exhale. We were lovers again.

  “Mmm, that felt so good,” I murmured after a few minutes. “But what about you? I can’t do anything.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” he said. It was clear to see that that was a lie! I smiled and winked at him—a small consolation prize, but all I had to offer.

  “And we just proved that you are, too, so I can wait. But I will make you pay me back when you can. You’re going to have a pretty large accounts payable by then!”

  “Ooh, okay,” I said, giggling. “I’ll look forward to that! You better be ready.”

  A little friendliness had crept into the Salzburg trauma hospital. That night in bed, wrapped around each other as much as two people with three good arms and one good leg between them can, we sighed the collective sigh of partners climbing back up the steep cliff from which we’d been so unceremoniously thrown.

  In the second week of our recovery, a petite, young, blond occupational therapist walked in one morning and introduced herself.

  “Ich heisse Sonja. Wie heissen Sie?”

  By that time, I had an automatic response to anyone who came into our room speaking German. I’d flash my big smile and say either “Guten Morgen” or “Hi, how are you?” It didn’t matter which, because as soon as I said it, indecipherable German words flew out of their mouths, and all I could do was up my smile a notch and shrug my shoulders.

  Responding to my Help me! look, Dave jumped in. “Guten Morgen, Sonja. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

  Then he turned to me. “Say, ‘Ich heisse Linda.’”

  She smiled expectantly at me as she placed a pencil and piece of paper on the bedside table. She took out another piece of paper and showed me a list of words. With gestures and pointing, she indicated that she was going to dictate them to me so I could write them down.

  “Der Hase” (the rabbit), she said in a slow, deliberate voice.

  I gave her a confused look.

  We laughed as I tried to pronounce each word on her spelling list. I failed the German vocab test, but I assiduously practiced writing them every day.

  As had become our routine, when the hospital quieted down in the evening, we shifted into work mode to grapple with how to re-create our lives. Dave took charge and made things black and white. We shared our fears and frustration, but he went a step further and made me put pen to paper and write a list of the issues we were facing.

  “Hon,” he said one night, “yesterday I asked Adrian and my mom if they’d bring us a notebook and something to write with.” Reaching into his nightstand, he pulled out a tablet and notebook and limped over to my bed. “Which would be easier for you, a pen or a pencil?”

  Pen or pencil . . . I don’t even know how to hold a stick in my left hand. How can I even make this minor decision? I opted for the pen. Maybe the words I write will be stronger and come to life.

  Where do you start when you have to start all over at age twenty-nine? Can you categorize your life in a list on one page? How many words does it take?

  Looking back at the pages we saved from those nights, I see the answer. The first page has ten categories: Personal, Rehabilitation, Professional, Social, Marital, Family, Psychological Adjustment, Sports Activities, Occupational Adjustments, Desirable Goals. The words tilt up and down on the page in my second grade–looking print. Four more pages provide ideas and details about how we might proceed in moving on with our lives. They are poignant in retrospect, the result of much soul searching at the time.

  “I’d like to send a postcard to the White,” I told Dave one morning.

  The White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles was where I was doing my radiology residency. This was my first attempt to reconnect with my career.

  Like magic, a pen and postcard of the Mozartplatz appeared on my hospital bed stand. Even though I’d been practicing for a couple of days, my left hand fumbled with the pen. Should I hold it with three fingers or four? Where should my thumb be? The edge of my hand covered most of the postcard as I tried touching the pen to it. How am I supposed to write and keep this stupid little card from moving around?

  “Can you bring over that coffee mug and set it on the corner of this card?” This is downright hard, if not impossible, but I can’t imagine someone holding things for me the rest of my life. So come on, Linda—just get over it and figure it out.

  09-02-1979

  Dear Rad Gang,

  I couldnt [sic] have found a prettier town to have been incarcerated in. They have let me look at my X-rays before and after. They’ll make an excellent teaching file. This is one of 6 hospitals in Austria for trauma only. We’ve had exellent [sic] care. You can all do us a big favor by finding the best rehab cent and prosthesis [sic]. Love, Linda

  The first three words run up- and then downhill: “Dear Rad Gang, I couldnt [sic] have found a prettier town to have been incarcerated in.” I choke up a little as I start. I try to make it sound positive (“prettier town”) and make fun of it (“being incarcerated”).

  My childlike handwriting continues: “They have let me look at my X-rays before and after. They’ll make an excellent teaching file.” Every radiologist in the country knows what a teaching file case, or TF, is: radiographic images that show something unique, or classic, or difficult to diagnose. Teaching file cases are fascinating to look at but are almost always bad news for the patient. My X-rays were certainly worth the proverbial thousand words. Then again, you don’t need to see my films. The diagnosis is visible to the naked eye.

  “This is one of 6 hospitals in Austria for trauma only. We’ve had exellent [sic] care.” This is really weird—I can’t spell. It is shocking to write a sentence and discover that several words have letters or whole syllables missing. I forced myself to spell the words out loud and then squeeze in the missing ones haphazardly. I hadn’t given a thought about how to spell these simple words since I was in second grade.

  It’d been many years since I’d given a thought to many things. Suddenly, I was forced to rethink everything.

  “Be careful. Don’t let them psychoanalyze you.”

  Mal Braverman, MD, was a psychiatrist from Beverly Hills who had been doing research on burn victims in the Unfallkrankenhaus. A tall, husky man, he’d introduced himself by saying he’d heard a lot about us. Dave and I liked him immediately. A warm, friendly person, he spoke with us for about an hour. I described the accident, telling him I’d been conscious the whole time. Together
, Dave and I told him our deepest feelings and worries, and shared the plan we’d put together for the future. He questioned both of us. Psychiatrist questions. He watched and observed us.

  “I’d say both of you are handling this problem just fine. No doubt it will be tough. I’m pleased to see how well grounded you are and what you’re doing. When you get back to the States, they will want both of you to undergo counseling and analysis. Don’t let them dig into you, because I know they’ll want to go into deep, Freudian-type psychoanalysis, and neither of you needs that.”

  We were stunned but pleased and promised to take his advice. It had been only two weeks since the accident, and I’d had no nightmares or panic attacks and was not reliving the accident. But, having no experience with the mental consequences of trauma, we were unaware of the potential for long-term sequelae. Unbeknownst to us, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III) was being revised to include the change from “gross stress reaction” to “post-traumatic stress disorder” and was evoking a lot of attention. Dave and I were strong individuals, and deep down we felt that if we combined our strengths, we could work through this as a team.

  “Ahem,” Johnny said. He held himself up straight like the commanding Navy officer he was, demanding the attention of the court.

  The breeze blew through the trees, and had it not been for my disfigurement and bawdy attire, it would have been easy to mistake our party as a group of tourists enjoying a secret garden tucked in a fold of the ancient city. In many ways, we wanted to stay, but it was almost time to go.

  “May I have your attention, please?” Johnny continued, theatrically snapping a sheet of paper in front of him. “The Society of Sexual Serendipity presents to you, Dave and Linda, your Report of Progress!”