“I heard what you said. You said what you’d put in an ad.”
“What?”
“What you’d advertise. You were on the phone.”
“I’m not following. So now—what?”
“You said, ‘Slim with big breasts and fat toes.’”
“Oh my God. We were talking about our bodies. Jeez.”
“I heard.”
She put the newspaper over her face. “It was Teresa from school. Saying what she would put in one of those ads in The Stranger.”
“What about you? Did you put an ad in?”
“Yeah, right. I totally did. I’m looking for a guy with a—”
Something happened. When she opened her eyes she was lying on her back with things on her. Papers. She was under a low roof. Half under. Table. Couch. Glass thing dangling. Lamp. She funneled through time, and found her name. She was Mary Ann. Her head hurt. Down the room a blurred man stood with his legs apart.
Earthquake? She lay there in the prickling of details that weren’t really thought. Her mind was joined to her body in a combination of exhaustion and alertness. She couldn’t tell if there was silence or she was deaf. At length she heard her own voice produce the sound, if not the words, of a question. No answer. Her mind tried to sleep, but she kept her eyes open, thinking with a slowness like moving in a bath.
Dennis. She knew him. Dennis.
Her tongue was sore. Seizure. But pain . . . her head . . . huge . . . a word for it . . .
She was in medical school. There.
Dennis. Not helping her. She let her breath out. “You.”
“I what?”
“Hurt,” she said, drawing up her knees. She could move. She could produce words, she was seeing double but she had her speech centers. “You.” She raised a finger off the floorboard. Where was the other hand? On an arm twisted back along her head. “You. Get. Out.”
At that he took one broad step, grabbed the lamp and hurled it. The cord whipped after it and somewhere glass shattered. She rolled her eyes up, seeing the underside of his jaw and thinking—and at the same time noticing that she was thinking—strategically. She had her second realization, and with it a knowledge of what the word realization meant. He was panting. It might not be over.
There on a level with her were his feet. In socks, if he kicked. “Oh God,” she said. Her voice surprised her, a normal groan as if she were telling him how much reading she had to do.
“Oh God,” he responded, but he had backed away, he had sat down. That was good. Not on the couch, on the rocking chair, and he was rocking it, of all things, so hard it ground on the wood. If she shut one eye she could get two flushed, small, handsome faces condensed into one.
How long was she out? She was starting to give a history. She had speech, she was speaking reasonably, and the person listening in the ER would be somebody she knew. A nurse would be best.
The phone rang, with a muted sound. “There’s your call, there’s Mom,” Dennis said in a mincing voice, or was that her imagination? Did she have her imagination?
Her finger kept softly touching the leg of the coffee table. I hit a table. Marble, from Goodwill. Iceberg. We call it the iceberg. So she had her mind. The brain works to repair itself, just like blood, which wants to clot. It doesn’t want out into hair.
“Is there more to this?” the nurse would say, or maybe just, “OK, cut the crap. What happened?”
He did it.
She started over. Maybe he hit me with a lamp. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t remember getting up this morning. What day is it? What time is it?
What a comfort it would be, if a nurse were to say, “Three o’clock.” The day would be half over. They would have figured everything out.
Why was there no question of tears?
She turned her head and vomited, an act requiring no effort on her part. The phone was ringing again. So, Sunday. Her mother called on Sunday.
How was she going to get to the ER?
Now she saw in his face something she had not learned about in her years of learning everything rapidly and well. But she detached herself from the sight and went limp as he shoved the iceberg, toppling her books, and dropped to the floor half beside and half on top of her, tearing newspaper out from between them. I wonder if I’ll beg, she thought. No, this was something else. He had started to cry. He sobbed, banging the floor with his fist. Would someone come? “Don’t you know you can’t talk like that? Big tits and fat toes? Don’t you know that?” She could barely hear him. He weighed her down, her head pounded. I think maybe he killed me, she told the nurse.
AFTER a couple of years she never referred to it. People did not encourage that, as anyone back from an illness or a travel ordeal, her father said, or even from travel without an ordeal, will tell you. He was explaining not to Mary Ann but to her mother, to soothe her mother and give her some rest from talking.
People who had known Mary Ann when she was in medical school knew of the episode; that’s what they called it, as she did herself. What else to call it? She had not been murdered.
WHEN they moved her out of the ICU she had her own window. Across the street stood a big tree where there was a bird the size of a goose or an owl, even bigger, too heavy for the limb it sat on. No, no, not a bird, merely leaves, the giant leaves of the tulip poplar: her mother brought one up to her room to prove it. There was no bird as big as the shape she was seeing. But a bulky green bird with a half-open beak sat there day after day, neck craned to peer into her room. The nurse she liked fixed her pillows and said to her mother, “Must’ve escaped from the zoo.”
“I’m sorry!” her mother said, almost in tears with the leaf in her hand.
“I don’t care,” Mary Ann said. “Let it sit there.”
“Oh, it’s worrying you,” her mother said. “It’s making you uneasy.”
“No.”
HER friends put all his things in two boxes to be picked up. They glanced through a scrapbook Teresa found wrapped in a lab coat at the back of a drawer. Drawings, dozens of clippings about random subjects, photos of Mary Ann cut up and pasted into collages. His name, Dennis Vose, written hundreds of times. Somebody came to collect the boxes. Her parents were in touch with his lawyer—he had a lawyer!—and through the lawyer he had turned over the key to her apartment. He could have given somebody else a copy, her mother said. “One of his henchmen?” her father said from the big hospital chair. They were both professors but her mother had taken an indefinite leave of absence from the English Department. Her pacing, her bringing up things from books, her fury of analysis, always broken at its height by tears, did not bother Mary Ann as much as it bothered her father, who sat with his hand over his eyes beside Mary Ann’s bed with its rails and gears.
FROM the bathroom of the new apartment she could hear Teresa on the kitchen phone. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But . . . Yeah, but how do we convey to her . . .”
Teresa was staying with her until her mother could get there. She had passed her Activities of Daily Living—they wouldn’t discharge you until you had mastered those—but she was going to have to have somebody for a while anyway. That was fine, but she was not going to leave Seattle and go to Portland to be with her parents. Nothing and nobody was going to make her leave her physical therapist, Nolan. On her last day in inpatient rehab, the PTs clapped while she was having the tantrum about Nolan. People with some aphasia, they told her—“some” was what everybody said she had, and it would resolve, most or all of it—would almost always find they could curse.
Nolan had to call her mother to explain that some patients developed a dependency on a particular therapist. He said that as an outpatient Mary Ann would ordinarily have somebody new but he would go on working with her himself as long as she wanted.
“You’re a lucky girl,” the nurses had told her when she was first sitting up and listening to what was said to her. “Medical students get the royal treatment.” “Pretty ones. No kidding, they have a special saw they use
on them.” “Don’t listen to her. Seriously, you should have seen these guys taking care of you.”
Every resident who came in went over the whole thing with her. The nurses’ account was shorter and had blood and mess in it. From when she arrived in the ER still pretty much herself and talking, downhill fast. Intracranial pressure. When that went high enough a team came in and sawed into the skull and lifted a section of it off, to be frozen and put back on later. In a case like hers, where the piece of bone turned out not to be sterile, they used plastic. A piece of plastic, said one resident, as expensive as a car. A used car, Nolan said when she got to him. He made her half dozen procedures sound like a science project she herself had undertaken, well done but not all that complicated.
Bone or plastic, the piece was held in place with snowflakes.
Snowflakes. The snowflake, the surgeons explained in their careful, tiring way, was a little half-inch plate that fixed the piece back into the skull with screws. The plates got their name from the spokes sticking out from them, into which tiny screws were sunk. “Think of a dance floor in your skull,” Nolan said, “outlined with spangles.”
Teresa said Mary Ann would be playing tennis again soon, and they would be running their morning miles, but Nolan made no mention of that. Nolan never spoke of a possible improvement until it got close. Milestone was a not word he used. But Mary Ann was getting around, growing her hair, starting to read. Doorknobs and shoelaces gave her trouble, and forks, and stepping out of reach of the hug Teresa wanted to give her first thing in the morning when she wandered into the kitchen in her bathrobe.
“You know, your sweet little fat guy Nolan says we can go ahead and talk about anything that comes up,” Teresa said, pouring her coffee and Mary Ann’s milk. Mary Ann no longer liked the taste of coffee.
“Why are you looking at me?”
“I’m just looking at you. You’re looking at me too, babe.”
“Am I different?”
“Well, you’ve had a little work done. A little makeover.”
Mary Ann didn’t laugh because a laugh had to be assembled from scratch. Once she had laughed at everything. They all said so. You could tell where Mary Ann was sitting in a lecture hall. “I don’t mean looks,” she said to Teresa.
“Neither do I,” Teresa said.
“MARY ANN, he yanked you by the arm, hard. I saw him. And then the time you were dancing at the sink. He spun you around. You snapped your fingers. You thought he was doing some flamenco thing. You thought he was going to dance with you.”
“I did,” said Mary Ann, not making it a question.
“He pushed you. He was furious. I know this. You told me. He said, ‘People can see in.’”
“They could, too,” Mary Ann said. The big windows of the apartment where she had lived eight months before came back to her clearly, with plants on the sills. Were these plants she had now the same ones?
“You talked about getting a cat.” Teresa seemed to have a drill, a list she worked from, of things that were normal and things that were not normal. Mary Ann saw that the list was scrambled but could not be sure where Teresa came down on some of the items. “He kept going to see his family in Canada. You liked the same music. Music was a big thing to him. You knew him three months. He said he was studying for the GREs. You didn’t say you had lived with guys before. He is, I admit, an incredibly good-looking guy. You told your mom, ‘He’s the best-looking man I ever saw.’ You told your mom everything.”
“I did.”
In his backpack he had kept a pill container, and when she clicked open the compartments for the days, they were all empty. She didn’t know which of Teresa’s lists this would go on. Sometimes a thing that seemed in his favor, such as the fact that he had cried and played “Come As You Are” all day the day they heard Kurt Cobain was dead, was on the wrong list.
Teresa picked her up from PT so often she was getting to know Nolan. “That Nolan,” Teresa said. “He used to be a wild child, know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“He went here as an undergrad and then he trained here. Said he used to live down at the Blue Moon.”
Mary Ann didn’t ask what the Blue Moon was.
“He was a drummer of all things! He drummed with some band.”
How did Teresa know that?
“What a little sweetie,” Teresa said.
SMELLS. Detergent, for instance. That smell contained the time she said, “Jesus you waste a lot of electricity.” Dennis worked out every day in the fitness room in their building, and after he showered he put in a wash. He didn’t mix his laundry with hers but went down to the basement machines by himself and came back with a small, folded pile. When she said that, he stood there with his back to her, holding the laundry against his chest. She put her arms around him from the back and she could feel the heartbeat shaking his body. Gradually it slowed down.
“How come you don’t criticize me? How come you don’t get mad?” she said. “Like when I swear. I know it bothers you.”
“You know it but you do it,” he said without turning around. “Is that the idea?”
AFTER a year her mother was the only one who talked about it. Only her mother craved an exact tally of what had been altered or erased, and searched for it in photograph albums, in Mary Ann’s old transcripts and letters of acceptance.
He had pleaded guilty. Something was wrong with him so he was in a private institution. Where? It didn’t matter where. Wherever it was, he could not get out. Her mother assured her of this until her father said, “Gail, that’s not something Mary’s worried about.”
She didn’t worry. Even later, when her mother was in bed dying, Mary Ann was not worrying. Her worry centers were gone, Nolan said. He wished his were.
“You need snowflakes,” she told him.
FOR a while her friends would remind her of things, explain things, question and prompt her. Reason with her. They liked to tell her stories of herself, how she had drunk beer half the night and aced the anatomy exam, how when they got their grades she had climbed onto the iceberg and danced.
After a while she saw less of them because more than a year had gone by and they were in their clinical rotations. “It breaks my heart,” her mother said. “Where are they? Where’s Teresa?”
“She’s at her apartment,” Mary Ann replied. She was the logical one now.
“The only person you see anything of is Nolan.”
“I see the doctor. The OT. I see those people downstairs. I see you and Dad.”
“I wonder if Nolan knows who you really are,” her mother said in her new voice of thin argument.
Mary Ann didn’t argue any more, with her mother or anyone else, the energy for it having left her. It was to Nolan, now, that she told everything.
“She means who she thinks you are,” Nolan said. “She can’t help it.” Nolan understood everybody. He had to. Once the doctors were finished, he took over. In serious rehab, with the Hoyer lifts and the parallel bars, you saw it all. “We get the guy who makes the winning touchdown at three o’clock, and at six he gets hit by a bus. Whoever thinks they’re somebody, they’re right. Some body.” Nolan didn’t interfere with their pride, but he didn’t throw compliments around either, just eased gradually into his system: moving the limb in question or getting squared away with the non-limb. Not looking back. Not forward either, any distance into what might or might not be achieved. Just right in front of you.
They were not allowed to skip a session but they could feel free to yell at the top of their lungs; they could curse, weep, soil themselves for spite. Nolan said it was a pity the doctors didn’t get to see what some of these patients had in them, the pain they volunteered for, the feats they were capable of.
Mary Ann saw the doctors step inside the gym in their hard shoes to make suggestions. When Nolan was the one who knew. There was mind and there was body, and on the washed-out road between them, he waited for her every day. At their wedding he said, “I know two th
ings: what bad luck is, and what good luck is.”
SHE held her baby, touched his ear. Tory. Sometimes her love for him sent a shudder through her so strong it woke him up if she was holding him. All things fell to one side or the other of a line like a tennis net: safe or unsafe.
“Your mother was just the same, when you were a little one,” her father said. For her mother had died.
Now whenever she read about a man who had run over his girlfriend or gone after his wife and kids with a shotgun, she checked the name, she read to the end, she turned on the news. This was a few years before you could track people down on a computer. It couldn’t be him, though; he was in a hospital, probably in Canada. He was Canadian.
“He put that accent on,” her father said on one of his visits, with a deep sigh. “He wasn’t Canadian.” She saw that her father, and if her father, then others as well, had information she did not have. “Dennis Vose . . .” her father began.
“It’s snowing!” she said from the window.
“It’s not going to stick.” For a minute she was in two lives, so clearly did she hear her mother say that. The wet snow trickled down the pane and she had the unwelcome thought of her mother as she had been long ago, when she was still an English professor and had ideas about everything, including the weather, art, poems, the health of children, what to wear, what made people believe in a God, and how her friends wished they had a child like Mary Ann, whom she had decided on first looking into her eyes, burning with infant wisdom, would be named after George Eliot.
“Not for the looks,” her father would always add.
The baby woke up crying. He gave her a wild look, and when she picked him up he shivered as if she had found him lying out in the snow instead of in his crib. Already, after so few months of life, it seemed a baby could be visited by dreams. “I’ll always, always come,” she told him.
WHEN he was old enough, they told him she had hurt her head and there was a plate in it for protection. With fingers infinitely gentle, he liked to tap and rub her scalp, exploring for the snowflakes. Of course he didn’t know what had happened to require them. She didn’t want her son to think of such a thing, her warmhearted, dreamy little boy with his spontaneous songs. Nothing prepared you for motherhood, for the tide that knocked what was left of any other life right off the shelf, while you waded around it and sloshed it out of your way, with your child held close, held above it, above all things.
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