Will & I

by Clay Byars

  Still, I would also burst into tears for no apparent reason. Whenever this happened while I was in therapy with another patient, one of the therapists would quickly wheel me off to be by myself until I was done. I didn’t know why I was crying. It was like an ungrounded storm passing over.

  I would also erupt into strange-sounding laughter at anything, regardless of consequences—assorted memories, easily flustered therapists, the dumpy white nurse who Candy said wanted to be from the hood, calling her “girlfriend” and snapping as she spoke ghetto slang. I would laugh at things that weren’t even funny. The therapists would reprimand me like I was a little kid, shaking a finger in my face while telling me, “You just don’t do that.” But I did. I couldn’t help it. I still have a hard time telling a story I think is the least bit funny without cracking up.

  And humor has always been the means by which Will and I communicate, otherwise our closeness would be too intense to allow expression. I think lots of identical twins feel that. Some achieve the same ends by becoming silent, which Will did whenever I wanted him to talk about what was going on.

  Still, he rarely lets an opportunity to fuck with me pass. After I’d been in the facility a week or so, my computer had arrived, and Candy entered the presets into it, phrases I was using over and over and didn’t want to have to spell out every time, things like “I’m thirsty.” Because my tracheotomy tube repeatedly got clogged with mucus, making it hard to get the little air I received, one of the automatic phrases she’d entered was “My tube needs cleaning.” One morning I was trying to tell this to the doctor making his rounds, when my computer in a robotic voice announced instead, “What are you looking at, dickhead?” My face got hot, but the doctor started laughing even before Candy did.

  12

  My mother walked into my room one early morning holding a cup of coffee with lipstick smudges around the rim and a croissant wrapped in parchment paper, as if this were merely another day to be gotten through. Something about her determined obliviousness instantly put me on guard. The night sitter was leaning back in the recliner my father had bought for Candy. She sat up and started putting away her knitting. My mother stopped at the foot of the bed and tried to contain her proud smile.

  “Guess who I talked to last night?” She looked at the night sitter and winked. “She wants to come see you this Friday, too. I said I knew you couldn’t wait.”

  My heart sank. How could she have done this?

  “It’s Elin-ah,” she said, and looked at me with a now uncertain smile. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I have to get the house cleaned before they get here. It’s literally a pigsty right now.”

  I was too distraught at the time to wonder who “they” were, so I didn’t spell out the question. It quickly became the only thing I could think about, however. Was it Eleanor and her boyfriend? And if so, was it the same boyfriend she’d had before, the one we’d cheated on? I assumed so. That had been only a few months ago.

  When later that day I found out my intuition was right, a queasiness set in that rolled around in my gut, gathering intensity as the weekend approached. Eleanor’s boyfriend had a relative that was getting married in Atlanta, and “they” had decided to come to Birmingham first. I knew she hadn’t told him about us, about our having messed around. Was bringing him here some weird attempt to expunge her guilt? She’d forgotten about him then, so she would put him in my face now, and show him in the process that she and I were just friends. I was thinking all these thoughts and at the same time yearning to see her. Still, he wasn’t actually going to come down to the hospital with her, was he?

  When Friday arrived, I couldn’t concentrate on my therapy all that morning. Since hearing about her visit, the same hopelessness that had accompanied my ambulance ride had edged all my activity. The fairly funny physical therapist who always wore a lab coat even said something after a while. He asked if I had to be somewhere else. Because, he said, he could hurry it up if I did. When I didn’t squint in laughter along with him, he became serious and asked if I felt okay. I typed out the gist of the situation. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Let me see you raise your hip twenty more times and we’ll call it a day.”

  By the time I saw Eleanor’s head peek out from behind the door, I was nauseatedly numb. Will had gone to pick her up at the motel where she was staying. He waited out in the hall with Candy. Eleanor’s boyfriend had stayed back.

  “Hey, there,” she whispered. In my head, I automatically returned the greeting. But I didn’t even have the clicker yet—I was still on the letterboard—and couldn’t communicate with her. I suppose I could have, if she’d offered to use the letterboard, but did I really want that? It would only make things seem that much more different than before. She eased around the door, leaving it cracked, and said softly, “It’s good to see you again.”

  I lowered my eyes in response. The constant suck-tick of the machine pumping oxygen into my neck was the only reason she couldn’t hear my heart beating.

  “This isn’t quite like we planned, is it?” She now spoke in her normal voice and smiled to ease the air. I tried to return the mood. I could see it dawn on her that she was going to be doing all the talking, and I could see her getting uncomfortable because of this.

  “I finally heard back from UVM,” she quickly said, her words almost shaking. “I got in. Yay!” She playfully pumped her fist. “And my brother got engaged. My dog Samantha—you remember, the pug—had this growth on her neck that we thought was cancer, but it turned out to be benign. She’s eventually going to have to have it drained.” She had begun to walk around and inspect the equipment in the room as she was talking. All I could think about was her boyfriend at the motel waiting for her to get back.

  I felt trapped like never before. I don’t remember ever being as mad at my mother. The thing that made me mad was terrible. It was watching Eleanor see me like that, and seeing that I had transformed into someone on the outside of her life. Now I would question my entire history with her. I released the emotion the only way I could: I burst into tears.

  Her back was momentarily to me, and since there wasn’t any accompanying sound, it was a few seconds before she noticed. To her, it must have looked as if someone had pressed a mute button. She glanced at the door. “Wait,” she quickly said. “I’m sorry. Don’t do that.” But I couldn’t quit. Then she began to cry as well.

  She sat down on the side of my bed and picked up my cold, improperly circulated hand with both of her warm ones and held it in her lap. A few minutes later, we both stopped crying. When she stood up, I knew she was about to leave. I was exhausted and relieved, feeling as if I’d run a marathon in the ten minutes she’d spent in the room. She didn’t say anything. She came up beside my head and kissed me on my lifeless lips and walked out.

  I knew Will would be surprised at seeing her again so soon, but that he also wouldn’t say anything. I could hear her crying again as soon as she was outside the door. I tried to blink my eyes dry before anyone else could see me. Will came in and said that he would see me the next weekend. He was heading back to school. He saw my face and looked away.

  13

  A day came when they said it was time to remove my tracheotomy tube. This would allow me to transfer to another unit, the main campus, which was self-contained like a college campus. It was also closer to home, in both senses. I’d have a bigger room there and my own bathroom. I no longer needed a doctor’s constant supervision.

  I was used to them taking the tube out, to clean off the mucus. This time, though, they didn’t put it back in or hook me up immediately to oxygen. They put a bandage over the hole in my throat, the stoma. They didn’t even have to stitch it up. It formed a scab and closed itself. They’d been gradually weaning me off anyway, so this wasn’t a shock. Breathing through your neck isn’t as strange as you may think, either. A stoma is just another way to get air into your lungs.

  Now that I could feasibly talk, w
hich a stoma hooked up to an oxygen tank doesn’t allow, I couldn’t. I was able to let out only a monotonous, inarticulate whisper. But it wasn’t a regular whisper, a familiar whisper. It was different. It was mushy, like trying to walk in deep snow. I couldn’t make sounds with it like I used to, and I couldn’t swallow without some food going into my lungs. I don’t know if I allowed myself the fully formed thought My voice will never sound the same again, but I must have known it, or feared it, which was just as bad. I was devastated. Partly I was pouring other frustrations into it, but partly this—hearing those first nonwords come out—was the real reality check on the narrative of unimpeded progress we’d subscribed to since the stroke, that it would be “only a matter of time” before I’d be “completely back to normal.” This wasn’t normal, this sound coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t coming from someone with a direct line to a normal past. I’d been telling myself it would eventually be okay, but this … I couldn’t see around this.

  I made the ambulance trip again, but in a wheelchair this time. They secured the chair in the back, with me facing out the rear window. The main campus was about five miles away from both where I’d been and my house. Candy rode with me. It was one of the few times she stayed the night as well.

  That first morning, I had to go down the hall for the morning meeting and roll call. Candy would wheel me. Some of the other patients walked, wearing robes and slippers. They apparently all knew one another. The meeting room reminded me of a waiting room at a pediatrician’s office. Assorted goofy animal pictures hung on the walls. There were also ones that said things like, “Do not let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do.”

  Candy and I met the head therapist in the hallway. She was a twentysomething athletic woman, who from a distance seemed to be involved in a routine that had existed for years in its monotony. She seemed to be sleepwalking. On seeing me, she brightened up. She leaned down to my wheelchair with her hands on her knees and said in a tough-guy sarcastic voice, “So you’re the new guy.” She chuckled like this was somehow amusing and looked at Candy. “Has anyone shown him around? This really is a super facility.” If my neck muscles had been stronger, I would have turned around to look at Candy myself.

  “It can get kinda kooky in here”—she gestured with her thumb—“but don’t you worry, we have a whole lotta fun.”

  The therapist got behind my wheelchair and pushed me into the suddenly hushed room. A large circular table and some chairs were in the middle. After I’d been wheeled up and stopped in front of everyone else, a girl about my age broke the silence. She wore a hockey-style helmet with a chinstrap. She giggled and said an embarrassed-sounding “Good morning.”

  The meeting began with the therapist asking us what day of the week it was.

  My initial thought was, Ho-ly shit! I have entered the Twilight Zone. What day of the week was it? Obviously someone had made a mistake. I flashed on the day before, when I’d first arrived at the hospital. For about an hour an attendant had wheeled me around the old stone building, a former TB sanitarium, while they decided where to put me. I didn’t fit neatly into any of the designated categories. Spinal cord injuries and assorted elderly illnesses were the two most popular wings. They ended up deciding I belonged on the TBI (traumatic brain injury) ward. An accurate diagnosis, in its way. But for most of the people there, the words meant brain-damaged. My brain felt like the least damaged part of my body. It was painfully undamaged.

  When Candy stopped laughing and told them they’d made a mistake, I was moved into one of the two rooms reserved for juvenile offenders who need rehab. It was a double room they’d converted into a single, meaning it had plenty of room to exercise. The kids who usually stayed in these rooms were serving relatively minor sentences. They weren’t dangerous or a flight risk. I don’t even know if they had to go somewhere else afterward and serve time. No armed guard monitored the door, though there was a nurses’ station right across the hall. I briefly shared my bathroom with a young black guy with cornrows, who showed up with two policemen. I never found out what he was in for, neither in custody nor in the hospital. He didn’t exactly look like he needed to be there. I think maybe his arm was messed up. Candy talked to him some but didn’t tell me what they’d spoken about.

  The physical therapy sessions were like an old-timey high school dance. Patients waited against the walls for our therapists to summon us onto the floor. Two-foot-high blue padded worktables stood around the room, and most were already in use.

  The first person I saw was an obese woman gliding around with a surprising effortlessness, inspecting the other therapists. Her movements were graceful and fluid, almost as if she were ice-skating. She seemed to be in charge—the top therapist—and given that I had the most to work on of anyone there, she was mine, too.

  I made her pause for a minute, before deciding what to do with me, which pleased me for some reason. She was friendly but guarded. Shy, even—I wondered if it was her weight. But once she set to work, she exuded competence. By the end of that first day, I was standing with her help.

  Almost right away it had become clear that the left side of my body was the one most severely affected by the stroke. My left foot and leg and arm, the left side of my face—that whole side didn’t work like it used to, or like I tried to command. The little movement I’d regained was spastic. My body seemed no longer to possess any natural tension, either. When I stood it felt as if I were wearing lead weights. I remembered what my former, normal balance felt like, but it no longer existed. I thought I’d get used to it, though. Mainly I was excited to be standing.

  My visitors by then had dwindled down to a couple of regulars and the occasional friend of my parents. I preferred at least two acquaintances coming together, because although the conversations they carried on with each other over me often didn’t include me, there wasn’t the stress that came with the yes/no questions of a single visitor.

  One day a man I vaguely recognized showed up by himself and apologized for not coming sooner. He’d just heard I was there. He was younger than my parents but older than me, so maybe he was the older son of one of their friends. When he told me his name, Russell Levenson, and said he was the assistant rector for one of the local Episcopal churches, I thought, Here we go. And I now knew where I recognized him from. When Will and I had played church-league basketball in junior high, he’d been the coach of the St. Luke’s team.

  I stayed silent. I had progressed to single-sentence utterances by then—breathing between each syllable—but I didn’t let on. He acted like he was happy to do all the talking.

  “We’ve had bad weather for so long and it’s such a nice day,” he said, “I thought maybe you’d want to go outside.”

  I looked at Candy.

  “Is that all right?” he said. I’d been outside only once, a few days after arriving.

  Candy helped me get dressed and into my wheelchair. As she started to put her jacket on, Russell said, “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I mean, you’re welcome to, but I can push him.”

  Candy looked at me and reversed the process before grabbing her purse. “Then I’m going to run downstairs for a minute. I should be back before y’all, but if not, he’ll be fine until I get here.”

  Outside in the afternoon sun and noticeably drier air, Russell rolled me down the sidewalk around the main building to a black wrought-iron table and chairs, across from the tennis courts, and he sat in one of the chairs across from me. After a minute he said, “So, how do you like it here?”

  I nodded and shrugged my shoulders at the same time.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I guess a hospital is a hospital as far as you’re concerned. But you don’t have this”—he held out his arms—“downtown.”

  Almost before he’d finished I pushed out some approximation of “I’m just waiting to go home.” This sounded coherent enough in my head, but I knew by his split-second pause that it hadn’t come out that way.

  He sighed and no
dded to himself. “I know, or I can imagine, but at least now you’re one step closer.”

  He made eye contact. “How are you coping with all this? You’ve been dealt a pretty tough hand.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Really? I don’t think I’d be.”

  “I don’t like being here, but…” Ever since my arrival I’d had the uneasy feeling of being absent from school with a stomachache, but I wouldn’t have told him that. Still, I got the impression he was genuinely concerned and not just doing his duty.

  He considered me for a second, then smiled. “That’s good,” he said. He looked around. “What would you think about going over to the tennis courts? I saw some guys playing when I drove in.”

  I nodded and smiled, too, as if we’d decided something.

  Thus began Russell’s weekly visits, which lasted throughout all the rest of the months I spent at the facility. He didn’t seem to mind the time, and I didn’t dread it. I could easily imagine drinking a beer with him. When in one of his later visits he mentioned that he’d gone to Sewanee for divinity school, I didn’t feel tricked, as if his visits had concealed a hidden obligation. There was nothing conspiratorial about Russell. He was confident enough in his faith—as opposed to religious belief—to be a compassionate human first. Even when he quoted scripture, in speech or in the letters we later exchanged, it wasn’t threatening or oppressive. If I didn’t see those verses in the same spirit he did, it was simply my loss.

  When we got back to my room Candy wasn’t there.

  Russell said, “Do you want to sit up for a while? Or I can help you get back in your bed, if you’ll tell me what to do.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Ten minutes later Candy still hadn’t come back, and I could see that Russell wasn’t leaving until she did. I was getting impatient, even if he wasn’t. I thought maybe if I got back into bed, he would feel comfortable enough to leave. He lifted me and helped me get situated without any problems. He told me I was heavier than I looked, which at first made me wonder if I was getting fat. But it turned out the lack of natural tension made picking me up like picking up a 150-pound stone. I couldn’t help at all. He then went to the door and looked out. He must have seen Candy coming down the hall, because he pulled his head back inside and finally said he’d see me later.