Love You Hard

by Abby Maslin

  CHAPTER 19

  March 2013

  I pull my hair back in an elastic rubber band and pull the sleeves of my gray sweatshirt down over my knuckles. Then I roll out my mat.

  I’ve been coming to this Advanced Beginner yoga class every Tuesday morning for the past month, hiding myself in the back of the room, grateful to blend into a roomful of people who don’t know me. Michele, my instructor, stands at the front, a dozen feet away, chatting with other students before the class begins.

  Yoga is not new to me. I used to take classes fairly regularly, but after TC was hospitalized, the motivation disappeared. Yoga was the thing I was supposed to do that morning in August when everything collapsed instead. Afterward, I dreaded the idea of walking back into my familiar gym. The gaze of my former instructors upon me. The possibility that I might lose my shit the moment I stepped onto the mat.

  I tug on the waistband of my tights, fixing each inch of myself before I get started. As Michele begins cueing the class, I bend my head toward the mat in child’s pose, the sound of my breathing audible to my ears. My heart decelerates. My shoulders loosen. I stop thinking about anything outside the cocoon formed by my own body.

  I feel myself surrender. And the healing begins.

  The kindest thing I’ve done for myself in the past six months is drag my body to this bright, sunlit room full of strangers. This rectangular, foam island where there is no future, only the present, is where I am learning to be alone with myself again. It may look as if I am simply downward dogging and warrior posing and savasana napping, but it’s obvious to me what I’m really doing: wrestling out the demons, the trauma, and the fear—all of which gnaw, deep and untapped, inside my limbs. I am lucky to have this time—these ninety minutes of solitude, where I am no one’s anything. Where I can simply be nobody. Just a collection of cells reorganizing themselves in space.

  * * *

  TC’s healing must be just as immersive. I think I know how I can help. A hundred conversations lead us back to the same place. “I want to go back to work,” he contends, again and again.

  But there are so many options now I’d like to make him see. We don’t have to live that life. We don’t have to be confined by two full-time jobs, an expensive apartment, and all the expectations we’ve seen people trying to contort themselves to meet—those people still able to live within the box.

  “We can sell the apartment and get an RV,” I tell TC. “Jack’s still young. We can drive around the country. We can stop and visit and stay as long as we like. We don’t have to go back to our old lives,” I plead with him.

  “Noonie.” He looks at me wounded, using my old nickname, a word, like others, his tongue has recently relearned. “That’s exactly the life I left. I don’t want that life for us. I want our life.”

  I stop to consider his emphatic and surprisingly articulate point, reminded of the period of TC’s childhood in which he’d traveled from place to place, unsettled. Simply finding a job had been his stepfather’s aim during that hard, uncertain time. TC’s family hadn’t traveled cross-country for the fun of it. They’d been trying to make a life.

  “Please,” he says clearly. “Just help me go back to work.”

  This is my mission, the thing I’ve always declared I would do: help him regain his speech. If ever he is to work again, I must help him relearn how to read and write. And not just enough to get by. But enough to get by professionally. This mission is too great for me to tackle alone in the limited capacity of Brain School.

  * * *

  Aphasia, I discovered months ago, is a disorder for which there’s still a limited amount of research and information available. Wide-casting internet searches turned up peanuts at first, especially when I didn’t have the clarity to know what to search for. There were some sites offering general information, and there were also the dense textbooks I’d ordered months ago (unfortunately, those had turned out to be minimally helpful for a layperson like myself). But what I was really seeking were practical tips, treatments, and activities, beyond the ones I’d invented on my own to aid in TC’s recovery.

  After the New Year, I stumbled upon something potentially useful: a five-week intensive speech therapy program at Dalhousie University, all the way in Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s designed around the needs of those recovering from severe strokes and brain injuries, and its premise is based in neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to keep changing and evolving.

  There are only a handful of intensive aphasia programs in North America, and this is one of them. InteRACT, the program is called, stands out among the rest, however. It promises an individualized approach, a small number of participants, and an impressive patient-to-therapist ratio. It also includes an emphasis on TC’s two major goals: learning to read aloud again and helping him to regain functional independence so he can tackle common day-to-day tasks without me.

  Naturally, like other intensive programs, it’s not covered by insurance. The program will cost us what some people pay for a year of college tuition. This, however, feels like exactly the kind of thing our Capitol Hill neighbors would want us to do with the generous pot of money they’ve collected in our name. Unlike other brain-injury survivors, we’re lucky to even have the chance to go.

  Weeks ago, I began the long application process, the pages of questionnaires, and the video interview that will allow therapists to assess TC’s current speech abilities.

  Linda, the director of the program, and I have stayed in close contact as I’ve pestered her with my many, many questions about the program, including whether TC is a good candidate.

  A few weeks after completing the final portion of the application, I get an e-mail.

  Dear Thomas:

  We are happy to inform you that you have been selected as a candidate for the May 2013 InteRACT program. You have been selected to attend based on your initial application information and our belief that you may benefit from this program.

  We look forward to meeting you!

  Ecstatic at the news, I step away from my computer and rush to tell TC. I’m not sure if he recognizes what it is I’ve been doing as I’ve prepared the application. I’ve explained it several times, of course, but that’s no guarantee he understands what’s about to happen. We’re going to Halifax. And if this program is everything I hope it will be, it may just put us on the course we’ve been searching for. The one leading us back to our own lives, and also to each other.

  Part IV

  The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless . . . beyond speech . . . beyond concept.

  —Thomas Merton

  There is a long and painfully colorless stretch of road that cuts through the province of New Brunswick, Canada. It is a broad and vacant highway, five hundred kilometers of blank scenery, interrupted by the rare city or Tim Hortons pit stop.

  As the sole driver on this unusual road trip, I am keeping myself occupied the best I can, passing the time with old Radiolab podcasts and the occasional audiobook. Mainly, I’m trying not to go stir-crazy as the quiet passenger beside me stares out the window.

  It is a three-day trip, Maryland to Halifax. I’ve planned out the route carefully, making a concerted effort to include TC in the decision-making. Turning the trip into an adventure was my way of salvaging the situation. If we’ve gotta travel a thousand miles to get to “Aphasia Camp” (as we’ve named it), we might as well tap into a bit of wanderlust as well.

  Eight hours on the first day put us in Albany, New York, where we visited with my aunt Mary Ellen and my cousin Tara’s family. The next day got us all the way up to Acadia National Park in Southwest Harbor, Maine. I knew nothing about Southwest Harbor before this trip, except that our family friend Pat had traveled there once and raved about some hummus she ate at a local restaurant called Sips. So, yes, I organized a thousand-mile road trip around the chance to try some hummus. As
fate would have it, the restaurant was closed that night.

  Even so, Southwest Harbor had been a majestic sight. The dense forests of emerald pine trees. The effervescent fjard, Somes Sound, which weaves in and out of the landscape like a cobalt thread. It’s a place I’d probably never have thought to visit if this unconventional road trip hadn’t inspired it.

  And today, the last day of our journey, TC and I will arrive in Halifax, where we’ll spend the next five weeks living in a furnished rental apartment down the street from the university where the InteRACT program takes place.

  * * *

  —

  Getting here has been a literal and a metaphorical journey.

  A month of unimaginable things are behind us, most prominently the first of the criminal trials. Last week, I sat nervously with Jennifer, our victim advocate, in the tiny space to the right of the courtroom, waiting for my turn to testify. Detective Saunders popped his head in for a moment, carrying a cardboard box that he set on the chair beside me.

  “These are some of the things they recovered the night TC was assaulted,” he shared. “You probably don’t want any of it, but they’re yours if there’s anything of value.”

  I reached into the box, which was bruised on the bottom and looked anything but official after eight months of sitting in storage. Inside were a pair of deteriorating flip-flops, the very ones I’d described in TC’s missing-person report, the grooves of his footprints now caked with dirt and what looked to be splotches of dried blood. Not wanting the feeling of that night under my clean fingertips, I quickly tossed them back into the box.

  His wallet was in there too, also coated with sticky residue. Inside was his driver’s license: Thomas Maslin, 09/03/82. 5’11”. Brown eyes. Organ donor. As well as a handful of other cards: dental insurance, business cards, a “buy 10 get one free” punch card for our local coffee shop.

  The mundane artifacts of a life that abandoned us without permission.

  That afternoon I walked down the aisle of the courtroom, trying to achieve some delicate balance between heartbroken and composed. As I learned from our lawyer during my witness preparation, there seems to be an unspoken rule to these things. One must not be so devastated that she appears unreliable as a witness. One must not be so well groomed that there’s no reason to believe her life hasn’t been upended.

  TC’s primary attacker sat diagonally to my left, at a table beside his own lawyer. He may have looked at me while I spoke, but our eyes never met.

  Since August, I’ve tortured myself replaying people’s comments in my mind. The Maslins were stupid and naive. This is what happens to White people in a Black city. This is a White problem. This is a Black problem. You have to forgive TC’s assailants. They have to suffer.

  Everyone it didn’t happen to seems to have a bold opinion about what I ought to take away from this terrible event. If I’ve learned anything from this act of violence, however, it’s that we must be brave enough to define forgiveness for ourselves. If I let other people’s biases and opinions shape that concept for me, if I allowed them to take something complicated and nuanced and make it tidy and convenient instead, it couldn’t possibly be true. I’ve always known life is not tidy and convenient.

  Here is what I also know, here is the indisputable fact of life: that terrible, tragic things happen to all people. The ones who can’t accept this are usually the first to point fingers, armed with a thousand explanations for why it can’t happen to them. I heard those words—this can’t be happening—in my own mind on the morning of August 18, and now I understand what I was really saying: that privilege was supposed to keep us safe. That despite the overwhelming evidence of our humanness, TC and I were protected in some way others are not.

  His assault was a grenade to my denial.

  And, indeed, it was also an injustice. An act that cannot be rationalized away, nor excused. All I can do is accept the difficult work of defining my own forgiveness.

  We will move forward, me and TC. We will make a life together. We will reject the belief that our lives are ruined, and we will create something brave and new instead.

  Forgiveness doesn’t have to be about anyone else. It can simply be about choosing to live.

  * * *

  —

  As miles of vacant highway loom in front of me, seated next to a navigator who can’t tell me the words on the map in front of him, I recognize this as the moment in which we are invited to craft that very life I imagine. Nova Scotia waits in the distance. We will find our way forward.

  CHAPTER 20

  May 2013

  The brisk wind intensifies over the harbor, causing my ponytail to slap my face as I slow and ascend the steep hill. My route is the same on every run: down along Lower Water Street, starting at the Farmers’ Market, over to the Maritime Museum, then uphill on Prince Street and a loop around the hilltop Citadel.

  Halifax is a charming city, much cuter than I expected. The scenery reminds me of the year TC and I lived in Boston, the cold, damp breeze from the bay casting a chill over the rooftops of the quaint, old buildings. Like Boston, it’s a city with a lot of history. Settled in the early 1600s, it was the site of the Halifax Explosion during World War I, when two cargo ships accidentally collided, causing three thousand tons of TNT to explode in the harbor. The city’s also famously known as the recovery site of the Titanic disaster, where more than three hundred bodies were pulled from the sea following the sinking of the great ocean liner.

  It seems I’m absorbing as much Canadian history as I am speech therapy since we’ve been here, TC and I being the only Americans in his intensive program and there being many, many moments of downtime in which to chat with his team of therapists and fellow participants.

  Once I’ve reached the top of the hill, I stop to catch my breath. A dozen yards behind me is the imposing Citadel, the city’s historic military fortress, with its ceremonial guards at attention in kilts and cherry-red uniform coats, looking quite like their Buckingham Palace counterparts across the Atlantic.

  I’ve always hated running, but somehow I don’t anymore. Running seems to have a similar effect as yoga these days: the movement of it keeps me nailed to the present. When my muscles are burning, pulsing with effort, I cannot dwell on the past, nor worry about the future.

  I continue running, stopping at last outside the university. I push through the double doors into the warm building, suddenly aware of the heat I’ve been generating inside my Lycra leggings. The temperature here is perfect for running: mid-fifties, never a day above sixty, with a notoriously frequent cloud cover that offers protection from the sun.

  TC is currently in his afternoon group session. He and the other two participants, David and Val, both stroke victims, join him in the conference room, where they alternate between daily sessions of music and art.

  It’s the one session a day I’m not allowed to attend. My presence is required at all of the others, though, which is why, for the next month, Jack will remain in Southern Maryland, alternating between the homes of his two sets of grandparents.

  “Ugh,” I complained to my mom every day in the weeks before we left for Canada. “I hate that we have to do this. The idea of leaving Jack makes me feel like the world’s worst mom.”

  “Think of it this way,” she offered. “If going away for one month helps Jack get his father back for any amount of time, it will have been fully worth it. Don’t think of it as leaving him. Think of it as an investment in his future.”

  Still, the parting was difficult. On the morning we departed, I scooped Jack into my arms and held him there for minutes. “Mommy loves you so much,” I said into his soft hair. “Daddy and I are going to call you every day while we’re gone. And you’re going to have so much fun with Grammy and Pop-Pop, Noni and Granddad, won’t you?”

  There is no denying he’s in the most loving hands possible while we’re away. It doesn
’t diminish his absence, however. TC and I find ourselves describing Jack to every therapist and intern here. I think we’ve established an endearing-enough version of our son that everyone is now equally excited for Jack to visit during the last week of the program.

  Our days begin at 9:00 A.M., when TC steps into his first individual therapy session with Linda. Linda is the architect of the InteRACT program, and unlike other speech therapists, she is an aphasia-specific expert, publishing professional studies on this disorder. There is something about aphasia that has kept Linda fascinated for years. Before InteRACT was a full-fledged intensive program, it was a weekly therapy group she ran on her own. Linda began this work three decades ago, giving her a breadth of experience none of our other therapists have had.

  I sit with my coffee in hand, in a folding chair behind TC, watching as Linda directs him through the repetitive exercise of reading one of Jack’s board books. Beyond returning to work, this is TC’s primary goal in life: to be able to read to Jack.

  The two of them are neck and neck in their communication abilities these days. Jack’s second birthday back in November marked a period of rapid language acquisition. Ever since then, his vocabulary has exploded. From one- and two-word phrases have emerged full sentences and clever commands.

  We’re racing a clock now, and TC knows it. The more rapidly Jack learns, the quicker TC must be to catch up with him. On the table in front of my husband sits his book of choice, Dear Zoo.

  Linda points to the first word on the page, supplying the intonation in her voice that is meant to remind TC’s healing brain of the repeating sentence structure in this book.

  “They sent me an . . .” She pauses, waiting for TC to take over.