Will & I

by Clay Byars

  My father shook his head and tried not to smile. “Damn,” he said under his breath.

  Once inside, the smell of home came over me. I felt nauseated. Howard, our bird dog, walked into the kitchen and immediately turned around upon seeing me and my chair. I doubt he knew who I was. If he did, he must have been even more confused.

  My mother came in and said, “Hey, theya, baby? Your room’s all made up for you.”

  When I tried to go through the doorway to the hall, my wheelchair didn’t seem to fit. I got angry. I stopped banging into the frame after a minute. Then I burst into tears. I hadn’t expected this at all. Having this place I’d known so intimately suddenly turn on me made everything I’d been through and was going through an undeniable continuation of my past. My mother started crying, too. She pleadingly looked at my father, who I could tell was about to cry, as well.

  “C’mon, now,” he said. “Stop that. See, it’ll fit.” He wheeled me through with less than a centimeter to spare on the sides.

  My room was perfectly clean and cold when I drove in. The sheets and pillows were immaculate. I felt like a prospective house buyer taking a tour. I got Candy to help me out of my chair and onto the bed. I asked her to leave me alone and to take my wheelchair with her. After she’d gone, I let my body fall back on the mattress and closed my eyes. I opened them after a minute and, before I moved or made a sound, I tried to imagine I was fine.

  I started going home every weekend. The staff at the treatment center encouraged it. They said it would make my transition easier. My mother and father were coached on how to adjust to living with a special-needs person. I’m not sure if they tried to relay any of this instruction to Will, but if they did, he wouldn’t have listened to a word of it. There was no way he was ever going to see me that way.

  Weeks later, when I got out of the hospital permanently, I refused to let my father bring a rented wheelchair home with us. I knew I could get used to doing without one. I was already accustomed to everything about home except spending the night there. Candy would still come every day, and she drove me to therapy.

  Still, my mother got together with my by this point numerous doctors and therapists and planned a little “suh-praz pah-tie” for me there at the hospital. My sister, who was a paralegal at the time and lived in a starter neighborhood near my parents, also attended. There were a lot of forced smiles and pictures taken, but there were also ice cream and cake—both of which I could and did eat. One of my therapists made a picture book for me, complete with a rhyming story that charted my progress from the beginning. It was very emotional for my mother.

  Afterward, back in the kitchen at our house, she set her car keys on the counter and sighed with finality. “That’s that.”

  I asked Candy to follow me back to my room and turn on my computer for me. She did and said good night. I sat down, resting both of my hands on the keyboard. Slowly I began to type, using only the index finger of my right hand. I remember being impressed with myself, that I could do this, dragging my one hand around like a Ouija-board pointer.

  I didn’t think of myself as a writer yet. I’d never kept a journal, before the wreck. I’d always had a slight literary bent—a thing that set me apart from Will, that I liked English in high school—but writing came to me more than I to it, at a time when it was all but impossible for me to communicate verbally. In those moments of laborious typing, I experienced a sense of freedom that would have amazed anyone watching. I don’t know what I wrote that night, but I know that it was the beginning of a new life, one in which I would no longer try to talk myself out of reality.

  17

  Shortly after I moved home, a friend from high school, a girl named Serena, asked me to escort her to a debutante ball, where she would be ceremonially “introduced” to polite society. Since I knew or was acquainted with many of the people we’d be seeing there—a lot of them had come to the hospital after I was first admitted (as had Serena)—I couldn’t help feeling the night would be my debut, as well. I went to the barber beforehand and had the beard I’d been growing since the day of my stroke shaved off.

  On that Friday morning my father called me back to his bedroom for a chat. “Have a seat, son,” he said, as he picked a tie off the door to his closet. He was getting dressed for work. He’d had polio as a child, and it left him with a hunched body and uneven legs. He was short with long arms, such that his wingspan exceeded his height. But he was also a good athlete before he started putting on weight. Without his shirt on, the curvature of his spine was more noticeable. It made me remember sleeping with my head against his back when Will and I were little.

  As I lowered myself down onto the rolling blue ottoman, the serious, painful look that preceded what my father took to be a meaningful dissertation came over his face.

  “I don’t know if you’ve thought about how it’s going to be from now on,” he said. “I hope so. But you do realize things are going to be different … There’s just no way around that.”

  He paused and put his hand on my shoulder, but I began to smirk. I knew he’d rehearsed this. He started to smile with me, but instead he continued. “Some people are threatened by what they’re not used to. They don’t mean to be, they just are.” He now looked like he might cry. “But you’ve got to realize that most people are basically good people.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but why are you telling me this? Why now?”

  He became defensive. “Well, with tonight being your first real time out, I thought I’d better warn you.”

  “You don’t think I’m always gonna be like this, do you?”

  He hesitated and lowered his eyebrows like he was confused. “Nobody knows how far you’ll go,” he said. “Look at how far you’ve come, and you weren’t supposed to progress at all. It’s open-ended, how much further you’ll go.”

  “But you don’t think I’ll ever get back to where I was?” I said. I had the breathlessness of peeling off a scab as I said this.

  “Honestly,” he said, “probably not.” Then he quickly added, “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a full life. Look at me.”

  Although this was to be my first time out in public for an extended period of time, it wasn’t my first time out at all. Candy and I had stopped by the bank on the way to therapy one morning a few days after I moved home, and I decided to go inside with her. It took a while, or until I was no longer outside, to realize that everyone was staring at me, and what was even more disturbing was that those who weren’t staring were obviously trying not to. Still, the most surreal part of it all was that no one would make eye contact with me. Of course, I had been looked at before, but this was different. I started to make a joke to Candy about hooking me up to a leash to walk around, but she was already in front of a teller doing whatever business we had come for. When I told her later about the staring, she surprised me by saying that she’d noticed it, too, but she didn’t say she thought it was strange. Instead she advised me, “Tell ’em to take a damn picture, it’ll last longer.” I tried to discount the stares as the reactions of people who didn’t know my story yet, but the experience apparently made an impact—I didn’t go out in public again before I went to the barber. Nevertheless, I genuinely looked forward to being around people I was familiar with at the ball.

  The Birmingham Country Club, where the ball was held, had spared no expense. The valet drivers had on tails and white gloves. As they opened the car doors, they seemed oblivious to the fact that they were playing a very small part in a much larger production. Bronze urns with gigantic rose, gardenia, and Elaeagnus arrangements lined the entryway next to the porte cochere where you dropped off your car. Rose petals had been scattered up and down the long oriental carpet that led to the guest book.

  We were among the last to arrive, and both dining rooms were full. Serena’s father appeared from somewhere to take us to our seats. The noise level was high—I knew right away I wouldn’t be having many conversations. No one could hear me. I wasn’t too fazed b
y the stares we got as we wove in between the tables to our own.

  During the meal, however, I grew frazzled. Apart from being able to have only the crudest yes-or-no conversations (along with the occasional question requiring a brief response, which Serena would then have to repeat for everyone else), I found myself disturbingly outside the general discussion. A sense of frustration overtook me, then threatened to become one of hopelessness. From the moment of our arrival, the continued avoidance of eye contact had been disturbing. Even some of the people who’d come to see me in the hospital looked away when I looked at them. What was different? There I was a patient. Here I was … what? A victim?

  As if I didn’t have enough differences telling people to stay away—I’d stopped wearing my sling for this very reason—when the few people who did come up to speak reached out to shake my hand, it was either a straight-arm handshake or I had to pick up my right hand with my left so my elbow would bend. Either way, that usually ended the meeting right then. That was also the first time that someone shook my fingertips.

  After dinner, I saw one of my father’s friends, a man I’d known my whole life and who had visited me at the rehab facility downtown. I felt at first a sense of relief as he made his way over to me, but before I could say anything, he introduced himself. I started to smile before I realized he wasn’t kidding. When I asked if he was serious, he appeared not to understand and told me to keep up the good work. (Repeated introductions no longer make me think twice. I learned to expect them. This was in part a bad thing, because as a result, I came to depend on them. Now that I’m improved and no longer read as brain-damaged, people don’t do it as often as they used to, but I have lost the habit of remembering names, certain that if whoever and I meet again, they will reintroduce themselves. I remember almost everything else about conversations, but not names.)

  The debutantes and their dates lined up on opposite wings of a makeshift runway for the presentation. The announcer called out each girl’s name, followed by that of her escort. The pair then joined in the center, turned, and walked toward the chairs that had been set up for club members and their wives. At the end of the runway they met the club president and his wife. After the girl curtsied to the couple, the president’s wife would tie an amethyst bracelet around her wrist.

  Upon our announcement, the crowd, including the other debutantes and their dates, burst into applause. I hurried to meet up with Serena. I wasn’t thinking about my walking at all, just getting there. Athletic, lanky Serena was beautiful in a white dress. We’d been on the same soccer team in the second grade. When we joined, the applause became more forceful. Some of the people stood and continued their ovation. This quickly became contagious and included everyone. As I hurriedly hobbled down the runway, dragging my left leg like it was dead weight and holding tight to Serena for balance, I looked out and spotted my mother and father. They were beaming with proud smiles and watering eyes.

  I felt hollow.

  18

  My therapy quit showing immediate results the way it had done up to then. Since coming home I’d shown hardly any improvement. The thought of stagnating terrified me. I’d start to get scared and anxious, wanting to grab on to something, to keep my progress from receding, but nothing was there.

  The smothering began almost immediately as well. My mother would have breathed for me, if she could. Both she and my father were skittish around me, not trusting me to do even the smallest things for myself. Not just them—everybody was like that. It was as if overnight I’d become a not-exactly-human reminder of others’ mortality. But I couldn’t take out my anger on everyone, so I took it out on my parents. At one point, in a fit of frustration, I told my mother, “Thanks for life and money.” She started crying. But Candy, whenever I flew into a rage, would just smile and make me repeat myself as I grew more and more furious.

  When I’d been home for about a month, I received a letter from Eleanor. I still hadn’t totally recovered from the trauma of her visit to my hospital room, but she had called me a few times at the treatment center, and that had gone a little better. All I could say intelligibly on the phone was yes and no, but hearing her voice had been a shot of adrenaline. She’d talked mostly to Candy, to find out how I was doing, though one time she had asked for me. Whatever else she’d said then, she mentioned that she and her most recent boyfriend had broken up, which blotted out the rest.

  Her letter was in reply to one I’d written her. She began by saying that it had been a very long, very strange time. There was so much she wanted to ask me. What did I think about another visit? She had her spring break coming up in April, maybe she could come over my birthday. Then she wrote about UVM. She didn’t like Vermont—she thought it was too claustrophobic—and her parents were getting a divorce. She wanted to be closer to home, so she was going to transfer after that semester. In addition to the letter, she sent along a copy of a book she had recently read.

  I set the letter down. I was filled with lighthearted ecstasy and reality-crushing dread at the same time. Eleanor had made herself vulnerable to me once. It felt like maybe she was doing that again. Another person’s trust—as opposed to just concern and pity—felt within my reach.

  And the dread? I was scared of how she would react to me, that she might expect to find me more or less as I’d been before, which is not what I was. Also I was scared of having more of my memories destroyed. What would we do? Where would we go? Maybe she could be my keeper for a few days.

  I wrote back telling her of my apprehension. I needed to be stronger before I could see her again. She responded immediately. She said she understood if I didn’t want to see her, she just wanted to see me. She didn’t want me to feel pressured. She didn’t want to lose touch again, though, and she thought that might be happening. But she agreed—letters could work.

  Around the same time, I got a letter from Will, who’d gone to Spain on a study-abroad program—which I found out later was our parents’ idea. He and a friend from Sewanee were living in San Sebastian with a guy from Boston and a Swedish girl. His Spanish wasn’t that great, but his new roommates were fluent, so he was able to draft. It was a miracle that he’d been allowed to go at all. Months earlier, he’d been busted while driving some people home after a concert in Athens, Georgia. He passed a Wendy’s on the way to the apartment where he was staying, and screeched into the exit side of the drive-through. A cop on patrol nearby witnessed this and pulled him over once he got back in traffic. He gave Will a DUI test, which Will passed, but then he found half an ounce of weed one of the guys tried to hide in the back of the car. He arrested Will after no one claimed it. In a fit of frustration, when Will refused to divulge where the marijuana had come from, my father punched him, and later scared the shit out of him by convincing him he’d been given six months in jail. But in the end, Will’s lawyer was good enough to keep the judge from making an example of him, and my mother resumed referring to him as “my little jailbird.” His letter made me laugh and filled me with envy. He was having adventures. He’d been thrown off a train one night somewhere in rural France—Dax, he thinks—because they didn’t have the right tickets, then almost got arrested by the border guards at the desolate station for having improper documentation. He sounded happy. But all I could think about was how permanently far away all of it seemed.

  * * *

  My twenty-first birthday arrived. I was in my bathroom trying to shave with my spastic left arm when I heard Candy calling my name from down the hall. She knew from experience not to surprise me and my jumpy reflexes. There were usually ten or fifteen minutes between my parents’ leaving for work and Candy’s pulling up. I suspected they sat in their car at the bottom of the driveway until she got there, but I couldn’t bring myself to check. It was the only time I had completely to myself. In that quarter hour or less I found a stillness that wasn’t possible otherwise, and somehow felt less alone.

  “The big two-one,” Candy said, and collapsed back into the leather chair in my room.
“You already had a beer this morning?”

  “Right.”

  “C’mon,” she said, “now you’re legal. How’s it feel?”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. “Sometimes like I’m the oldest person alive, and sometimes like I’m three.”

  She smiled. “Aw, man, it’s not that bad.” But then she nodded.

  I went and put on my bathing suit. She and I had discussed that today would be my first time back in the pool. I’d been looking forward to it. The therapy exercises I could do in the water were limitless. I knew the water would still be cold—it was only April—but the occasion was momentous. I would be able to look back and see my twenty-first birthday as the day I began my real recovery.

  We walked out back and down the steps to the pool. My weak toes made it harder to walk barefoot than with shoes, especially on that pebbled cement. Without the platform of a shoe under them, they were liable to fold up under my feet. I held on to the rail at the steps and stuck one of my toes in the water. It was even colder than I’d expected. I looked at Candy and winced.

  “Nobody’s making you do this,” she said. “You’ll still be a hero as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  She laughed.

  I walked around to the ladder by the deep end. I began to get goose bumps just thinking about the cold. I held on to the ladder and began to rock back and forth. With a final thought of to hell with it, I tried to leap out. My foot might as well have slipped, as I didn’t leap at all, but instantly became horizontal and hit the water with a loud smack. Before the frigid shock could register, I knew something was wrong. The stroke had taken away my ability to hold my breath underwater. My soft palate, in the back of my throat, was so weak (it’s still quite weak), it couldn’t keep water from flooding in through my nose. My body turned rigid and started to sink. The water stung as it came flooding into my throat, while I floundered at the surface gasping for air and swallowing what seemed to be half of the pool. I never got scared, though. I never had time. Before fear could come into play, Candy had jumped into the water with her jeans and tennis shoes on, grabbed my shirt, and was paddling us both to the shallow end.