So he climbed upward, taking care to dust off his tracks behind him with a sheared-off pine bough as he made his way topside. With a long stretch, he was able to circle an arm around a guardrail post and pull himself up and out of the ravine the rest of the way, as it was quite steep and slippery there. He climbed back inside his car and sped away, my purse on the seat beside him.
Meanwhile, caught up in my harness, I gasped and my eyes opened. Nothing worked. Arms wouldn't move; legs wouldn't move. Mouth full of blood; eyes filmy as if oiled. I tried speaking. "Uh-uh-uh," said something deep in my throat. Was it my own voice? I wouldn't claim it, not just then.
Then it was all black again and the sounds and movements ceased.
22
Danny
The nurses had a pool on houseplants like me. Everybody would kick in twenty dollars and bet on the date we would wake up. Trauma had $400 in my sweepstakes; Med-Surg had $600; Psychiatry refused to play; Neurology had $120 and non-medical staff had $80. They never told you who won, but you could guess who didn't, because they were uncivil, some of them. Especially the nurses from Med-Surg, who had cared for me over six surgeries. They felt like they had a right to win and I didn't blame them. When Trang explained all this, I began to understand how nurses take care of themselves while taking care of Neuro's houseplants.
Right shoulder, left leg, maxillofacial, plastic surgery so a crushed nose can transmit air, reconstruction to eye sockets so light can find optic nerves, left-hand reconstruction. There were fractured bones, grafts, compromised blood supply, nerve damage, and, worst of all, the closed head injury. Nothing could be done for that one except wait and let the brain heal itself. Time would tell.
"Anything yet, 235?" asks nurse Trang. I look at her with a dumb look on my face. The hospital has registered me as Jane Doe 235 because all ID is missing. The police and deputies and authorities have come here again and again trying to identify me. The trouble with it all is that my face has been rebuilt after it was shattered and cut in the accident. No one knows the face I have now and so, of course, no one out there recognizes me. Even my pictures in the paper don’t bring responses.
Trang has asked if I'm seeing any clues in any of the day's readings material. I shake my head. I am sitting up in bed, People magazines and local newspapers strewn about me, searching for a clue. A clue about my identity. Which is what Rehab has suggested. That I look over news stories and see if anything resonates.
"Don't worry, 235," nurse Trang says in her chirpy voice. "It will happen. I've seen it a dozen times, I'll bet. At least a dozen times."
"What happens?" I ask.
"What happens? Well, a whole new world opens up. Families get reunited, tears get shed, memories trickle in—at least at first. Then it's like someone opened the floodgates and the memories come pouring in."
"And they get to go home?"
"Sure enough. Just like you will at some point. You were wearing a wedding ring, so there's a husband out there somewhere. He just doesn't know where to look for you. But he'll find you. They always seem to."
A chill travels up my back and I shiver violently. A husband? What can that be like? What if I don't even like him anymore, much less love him? Will I be allowed to leave and go someplace else to start over? These questions really trouble me, so I turn my attention back to the newest People magazine. It isn't that I expect to find myself in People; it's more about some article or picture or story or even advertisement jiggling my mind and returning a memory.
Returning a memory. That's what the doctors call it. "Something will return a memory, often at the most unexpected time," Dr. Thomas has told me. "It will be an image or a few words, or maybe the sound of the voice. Who knows? But your job is to keep looking for that clue that brings it back for you."
"Will I ever leave here?" I ask Dr. Thomas.
"Of course you will," he says in his sweet fashion. "Even without restoration of memory you will reach a point where you will be able to start your life all over."
A space opens between us. We both know he is lying. He has no idea whether I'll leave here. At this stage of things, I can still lapse back into a comatose vegetative state. Unlikely, but it's happened before.
"How will I support myself?"
He stops rotating the shoulder that was shattered and looks down into my eyes. "Becoming self-supporting is the job of vocational rehab. I'm sorry I don't have that answer for you. But they will, so not to worry."
Vocational rehab, physical therapy, group—the efforts to heal me continue without letup between the hours of nine and four every day, seven days a week. I am learning how to write again. I am learning how to recognize faces by the use of visual cues about people that I commit to memory. I do this by attaching a name to the clue. Dr. Thomas: tall with sparkling teeth and blue eyes. Nurse Trang: short and heavy with gold rimmed glasses and ink pen hanging from her wrist loop. And on and on.
Studying my own face in a mirror: I don't recognize the person I see but I know the clues: thin face; dark complexion; green eyes; scar across forehead; scars on either side of nose; new refrigerator-white teeth; rebuilt left jaw not yet recovered, forever swollen to golf ball size—the result they tell me, of my head hitting the driver's window as I rolled down the ravine where the hunters found me. So there it is, my collection of faces by clues. I never look familiar to myself. I look desperate, like all meds have stopped working.
They call it face blindness. Dr. Thomas says it's called prosopagnosia. He tells me it's a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. "It's very rare," he says, "occurring in less than one percent of the population"
"Why do I have it?"
"Same answer as always: you hit your head so hard that you injured the part of your brain that can recognize faces. But don't worry, in trauma cases the ability to recognize faces is one of the first things that comes back. Frankly I've only ever seen one other case of face blindness."
"What happened?"
"She learned to recognize her family."
"Wow."
The next time I look, the desperation has deepened.
23
Danny
Then there is the physical therapy on my body.
Knees on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Right shoulder Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Fine motor function is every day.
I am being taught how to write and how to read. It is all very slow. But by now I am accustomed to the routine. I am a snail on a pane of glass. They tell me I have been in the hospital for nearly three months. They tell me that I will soon be moved to a rehab home. I don't want to go to a rehab home; I want to go to my own home.
The psych team says my affect is flat. They say I am all but emotionless because of the head injury. That part of my brain was damaged which experiences and expresses emotions. So they are training me to experience and remember typical responses that I might one day feel in the life of a woman 43 years of age (a date established by the oral surgeon from clues given up by my teeth). Red light at the crosswalk: feel fear. See a baby: feel love, feel happiness, feel joy. Some events were multifaceted in this manner. A baby could mean several feelings all mixed together. So could assault and battery.
The psych team reports to Judi Gorski, the psychiatrist who has diagnosed my condition. The team includes psychologists, social workers, neuropsychologists, neurologists, counselors, and a priest. "A priest is what?" I ask.
"A priest is a spiritual leader."
"I need his services for what?"
"Just meet with him. Maybe it will click and maybe it won't."
So I do and it doesn't click. I can't imagine faces, can't imagine personalities, can't imagine a spirit without a body. So I humor the man in the black dress with the cross that dangles from his belt. I am courteous but maybe distant.
The speech therapist is covered up with my deficits. Words come and go. What I learn today I will forget tomorrow. What I will know tomorrow hasn't been covered yet; much of it
comes in and out of my mind and there is no way to predict any of it. Words are random events, nebulae that hang in the void as I go sweeping past, straining to grasp them.
Speech therapy starts with simple sounds and words and graduates into more difficult expressions and abstractions. Months into it, my reading skills have improved to a fourth grade level. Then junior high. Then senior high. It is coming back but everyone involved is definitely earning their salary in working with me.
"Jane Doe,” my therapist says, "when we say a man is a kind man, what are we saying?"
"A kind man listens to me."
"Is that all?"
"A kind man doesn't hurt me?"
"Okay. What else?"
"A kind man doesn't hit me?"
"Good, good."
"A kind man doesn't sex me?"
"Well, yes and no. Some kind men do sex a woman. Especially when they're married."
"Am I married?"
The therapist, a middle-aged woman named Dr. June, sits back, a perplexed look on her face. "We don't know if you're married or unmarried."
"Where's my husband?"
"We don't know if there is a husband."
"Has he been to see me?"
"No. No husband has come to see you."
"Will he come?"
"We hope so. If there is a husband at all. But so far we don't know."
"When will we know?"
Dr. June decides it won't hurt to tell the truth.
"The police and the hospital are putting your picture in the papers. We're asking for anyone who recognizes you to contact us."
"Who will it be?"
"That, we don't know. We'll just have to see."
"How should I feel about it?"
"Well, I would imagine you might feel hopeful. Excited. Maybe a little frightened."
"Three things. I feel excitement in my stomach and the hairs on the back of my neck. I feel hopeful in my chest. Hope feels like a bubble. Frightened feels like weak in my legs. I can feel all three at the same time?"
"Yes, you can. Humans can feel a mix of feelings."
"So I'm going to try to feel hopeful, excited, and a little frightened. It is a challenge."
"Excellent, Jane! Good work!"
On another occasion, I ask Dr. Thomas what happened to me.
He says, "You were in a coma for a month, and the accident basically knocked you back to infancy. You're having to relearn everything—eating, walking. However, the things that you were good at in the past have been easy to relearn. You figured out computers in a couple weeks, for example. You're having to re-learn how to write. But it might take years to regain certain social skills. You have completely lost all memories of the year before the accident. They may never come back. Other memories appear to you like old snapshots. They exist, but they just seem like unrelated pictures. However, in the beginning you didn't have them at all. You're definitely a very different person than you were, but we didn't know you before so we cannot say how different or in what ways. Before the accident, maybe you were witty, charming, and urbane. After the accident, you are blunt and esoteric. Of course much of this will change over time and you will become more and more who you once were. At least that's our hope for you. We've seen it happen many times before."
"Will I ever know anyone from before? I mean, will I ever recognize them?"
"Maybe you will if you see them. Maybe you won't. We'll have to wait and see when that happens. Or doesn't."
"So what we know is we don't know much."
"I couldn't have said it better," Dr. Thomas says with a smile. "I'm sorry I can't be more helpful. But head injuries like yours aren't localized, so it's really difficult to predict what will happen. Whereas a tumor in the area of a temporal lobe might be predictable, yours is more like someone who has many tumors located at different points. Many areas of damage are at play here. So it's not an easy case."
"Well, when can I get out of the hospital and go home?"
They must be sick of this refrain here on Neuro.
He stares at me. He is studying me as one would a song that plays only so much and then loops back to the beginning. It is endless, this going home riff.
"Well, we need to figure out where home is first. Don't you agree?"
"I agree. We don't know where I belong."
"Exactly."
"Or who I belong to."
"That's right; we don't know."
"I hope someone comes for me. That would help."
"We'll just have to see. We've put your picture in the newspaper. We'll see if anyone knows anything about you."
"There's someone coming for me, Dr. Thomas. I need to be ready."
"You will be who you are when it happens."
I smile. "That works."
He almost says something else. But then thinks better of it and just smiles at me.
“What?” I ask. “What?”
24
Danny and Tingo
The cops figured if they could trace the car I was driving they might find a connection to my identity. At least this is what they told me.
Here's what they did, my detectives Tingo and Carr.
They had located the owner of the VW by use of the vehicle's VIN number. His name was Elroy Hussell and he lived in Mount Vernon out past East Alton. The two detectives drove out of Alton and headed east to Mount Vernon, a small town with three traffic lights, an Elks Club, a VFW, a Walmart Express, Walgreen's, and a courthouse in the center of a town square. They drove around when their GPS got lost, finally located Hussell's road, and headed west. Two miles outside of town they came to a mailbox on the side of the road that said, HUSSELL E.
Tingo pulled the Ford Interceptor into Hussell's driveway and waited for Detective Carr to stub out his cigarette before opening the driver's door and stepping out. It was early March in southern Illinois. Tingo says the sky was slate and low with snowflakes blowing across the cracked concrete of Mr. Hussell's driveway and out across the brown grass of his small front yard. The house was wood frame, white, with a glassed-in porch across the front. A large green ball on a pedestal stood in the near corner of the front yard, reflecting in a hallucinogenic arc the front of the house, as Detective Tingo eyeballed its surface while walking up to the front door. He wondered why people allowed such contrivances on their property; he also wondered why Jane Doe 235 was driving Elroy Hussell's VW at the time of her accident.
They knocked. An ancient white-haired man wearing a white undershirt with brown stains down the front, answered the door and peered at them over reading glasses halfway down his nose.
"Who are you?" he said by way of greeting.
"Detectives Tingo and Carr," said the two cops, badging the man.
"Okay."
"Can we come in? We need about five minutes of your time."
"I don't think so. Let's talk right here."
Tingo and Carr were cold in the frigid March air, but they didn't argue. Tingo plunged ahead.
"All right. Well, we've located motor vehicle records on a 2001 VW that lists you as the owner. Do you remember that vehicle?"
"So what if I do?"
"Well, we'd like to know if you had such a vehicle registered to you."
"Yup. Then some sumbitch stole it. Made off with it last Thanksgiving."
Carr spoke up. "You live in the country. What do you have here, eighty acres?"
"Can't say. Neighbors encroach and claim my fence is on their land. It's all tied up in court."
"All right. Well, it just seems odd to me that a man such as yourself, living in the country, would own a VW. Was that your main vehicle for getting around?"
"See that pickup back there? That's my main vehicle. No, the VW was what I bought for my granddaughter, Lacey June. But she never got the title because she never made the Dean's List up there at Normal."
"So your granddaughter drove the VW?"
"Yup. Right up to where she left the keys in and someone stole it."
"Which would ha
ve been Thanksgiving night?"
"Yup."
"Did you ever seen the car again?" Tingo asked. He was staring back along the driveway, now empty except for a well-used red F-150.
"Nope. Know nothing about who took it, where it went, who did what. The cops already been here and asked all that. Don't they let you fellers see their reports?"
"Yes, sir," said Tingo. "But we're just following up on their preliminary work."
"Are we finished? I want to close this goddam pneumonia hole."
He meant the doorway he was leaning out of. The detectives didn't blame him. It was below zero that morning.
"We might have some follow-up," said Carr. "But we'll let you go back inside for now."
"Thank you, Mr. Hussell. Appreciate the time."
"I hope we're done with all this. I don't know nothin' else, fellers."
"Goodbye, Mr. Hussell."
The door swung shut and the two detectives watched as the glass shutters on the porch windows turned black as the shades inside were drawn.
"He really is done," Tingo said whimsically. "Strange old bird."
"Asshole," said Carr. "Miserable old grunt living off farm subsidies and Social Security. I hate these people."
"I know. It does get old."
"So are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"I'm thinking we run the title on the VW and update what the county mounties said in their report."
"Exactly my call."
The detectives returned to their Ford Interceptor and typed the VW's VIN into the dash-mounted computer terminal. Then they waited. Carr lit a cigarette and Tingo rolled down his window and complained for the umpteenth time about second-hand smoke. Carr ignored him, enjoying his cigarette almost down to the filter. By the time he flipped the butt onto Hussell's driveway, the computer terminal returned with more title information from the Secretary of State.
"Don't that beat all," said Tingo.
Voices In The Walls: A Psychological Thriller (Michael Gresham Series) Page 10