by Cathy Lamb
At least I was in normal clothes. Zack had brought me clothes. I was in my favorite jeans, a loose white shirt with blue embroidery around the V neckline, and two necklaces I’d made myself—one made with five crystals, and another with red beads and a peace sign. Plus he brought me a handful of my gold bangle bracelets. Definite improvement over my hospital gown.
Zack hugged and kissed me. I tried not to cling pathetically to him before he left.
“I’m going to miss you.” My speech was still muffled, my mouth and brain not coordinating well with each other, but he knew what I was saying.
“I’m going to miss you, too.” Those green eyes filled. Zack and I, before my accident, we were not big criers. Now we cry all the time. “Don’t be a baby,” I said to him, and he laughed. It was hard to see him go.
* * *
A friendly doctor came in and chatted with me for a few minutes after Zack left, then another doctor, and a nurse. The nurse later led me to the activities room and showed me around. When she left I sat down on a sofa. I tried to be invisible while I figured things out.
A soldier came up to chat with me. I knew he was a soldier because he was wearing army pants and a green ARMY T-shirt and his dog tags. He was also walking ramrod straight. I would have thought he would be at the VA, but he was here.
The soldier had a head injury from a grenade in Afghanistan, he told me. “Boom! Blew me off my feet. Boom!” He was wearing a helmet, like several other people here. “You can call me Soldier.” I wobbled as I stood up to shake his hand. He politely helped me stand, then he saluted. He spoke slowly. “We’re a broken bunch of sons of cats and knitters.”
I laughed. That was probably inappropriate, but sometimes, lately, I seem to display the wrong emotions. “Broken but fighting. I need a cat.”
He fist-bumped me, the scar on his forehead about four inches long, disappearing into the helmet. “I have not yet begun to fight. Have you seen any purple yarn? I’m learning to knit. The therapists say it will help me hold on to my memories.”
“I haven’t seen it. But if I do, I’ll give it to you. I’m hoping to get my brain back together.” I could hear my words. Still slurry, slow. Like Soldier’s.
We sat down on the couch because, he said, “You can’t stand straight. You’re like a Gumby doll. All rubbery and twisty.”
We both leaned back.
“I’m fighting for my buddies who did not come home.”
“I’m sorry, Soldier.” We sat in that deep grief for a while and then I started sobbing for all of his buddies who did not come home. My emotions are unhinged, uncontrollable. What I feel, I show. “That’s so sad,” I wailed. “That’s so sad.”
Soldier put an arm around me and said, “It’s okay. They’re up in heaven now with the angels. They’re hangin’. Maybe they’re learning to knit, like me.”
A woman walked over, about forty-five, thick reddish hair, chocolate brown eyes, carrying something made from clay. She said, “Is this crying session?” She sat on the couch with us and burst into a round of tears. The clay project was a pink frog, and she stroked it. I put my arm around her.
“I like crying session,” she said when she stopped. She smiled. “I need to cry or everything that happened to me gets stuck in my heart like the Amazon rain forest and I can’t breathe through the rain.”
“Have you seen my purple yarn, Frog Lady?”
“Yes, Soldier. I did. It’s under the chair in the lounge, by the window.”
“Thanks.”
“What are you knitting?” I asked.
“Purple socks for my grandma.”
“I want my grandma!” Frog Lady said, and then she suddenly picked up a book and threw it across the room. It hit a bookcase. Books fell out of the bookcase. “Dang it! I am so mad in here today. So mad!”
“Nice arm,” I said.
Her face crumpled when she heard the bang, then she perked up. “Thanks! I use it to catch frogs.” Then she said, “Are you two brother and sister?”
We said no.
“Huh.” She stared at us suspiciously as if we might be lying. “You don’t look alike because one is white and one is brown, but you both talk the same. Slow. Like a slow jumping frog.”
* * *
I’m a wreck, my emotions whacked out.
My anger flares out of control, and all of a sudden I’m in a rage. It can happen when I can’t put a puzzle together or answer memory questions my therapists ask me or line cards up or work with flash cards or calculate easy arithmetic.
Numbers, my old friends, keep flipping and flopping in my head. I can’t read, the letters jump around. I can’t write, same thing. A couple days ago a therapist gave me a pen, and it was as if he’d handed me a wet poodle. Or a river. Or thunder. I could hardly hold the pen. I could hardly write; the words were a mish and a mash, some letters flipped, others missing. For some reason, every time I wrote the letter “m” I wrote it three times. Same with the letter “k.”
I was asked to draw a clock with the numbers on it, and I could only do half.
Ten cards were placed upside down in front of me. I picked up one and was supposed to try to remember where it was when I found its pair. I couldn’t do it. I tried for almost an hour.
A therapist gave me a list of five items to remember, then we talked about something else and I was supposed to recite the five items about ten minutes later. I could remember only one.
My anger comes in waves, as does a searing frustration and acute anxiety.
My walk is off, and I keep swaying to the left. I keep crashing into walls and tables.
The other day I ran into a little table in the activities room and ended up throwing it. I was in the activities room because there were beads for making necklaces and I wanted to make a necklace. The smashed table made a lot of noise.
Two people’s heads whipped up, and both started crying. One man jumped up and yelled, “Where the hell is he, I’ll kill him!” and an older woman called out, a worried note in her voice, “Is my husband here again? The police are supposed to be called if he comes.”
I was so ashamed. I picked up the table then told everyone, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did that. I won’t throw tables again.”
Soldier said, “I threw that table before, too. It may be the table.”
“It probably is a bad table,” Frog Lady said to me, nodding. “They have those here. I saw your pink yarn, Soldier. It’s in the pantry in the kitchen.”
I think much better than I speak, and I think much better than what my actions show. It’s like a whole bunch of fuses have blown between thinking and doing. I am one person in my head and a whole different, confused, damaged, emotional person on the outside.
I used to be someone who could get things done, and now I have to use handle bars to sit on a toilet. I can’t follow simple recipes in the practice kitchen.
My vision blurs sometimes. I still have headaches, although they are way better.
I am not who I was. Everything is hard. Sometimes I feel as if I’m not getting any better, that I will never be the same, never be me again, and that is so frustrating and depressing. Who am I if I am not me?
On the other hand, I laugh in here, too. Soldier made a funny pink hat out of paper flowers and wore it all day on top of his helmet to make everyone happy.
Other times I laugh, but the humor is unintentional. We’re not really laughing at the person, more at the situation that we are all in. One patient, a fifty-year-old woman named Ebony, forgets to get dressed and comes out of her room in only her bra and underwear sometimes. Yesterday she peered down at herself and said, “What the hell? Where are my boobs?”
Another patient, a sixty-year-old college professor named Eddie who was in a rickshaw accident when he was exploring India, gets stuck on the same two sentences sometimes. They are, “I was hit by a rickshaw in India. Do you like saffron?” One time he kept saying them again and again, and Soldier put his arm around him and said, “We got it,
man.”
And Eddie said, “Thank you, Soldier.” And he stopped saying the sentences for about twenty-four hours.
We Brain Bang Unit people have activities together, but when you have a bunch of people with head injuries in one room, who knows how it’s going to go. We had to quit playing pool one day because two people had a serious duel with the pool sticks. One had been an Olympic fencer, so it didn’t go well for the other guy.
Many people wear helmets because their heads cannot take another hit. One helmeted man told me, “They cut my head out with a saw and now they have it in a toolbox in a freezer. When do you think I’m going to get my head back?”
On the flip side, I tell myself that I’ll get better and I need to put aside my type A freakoid personality, born from odd neuroses and old hurts, and be patient.
Every day, though, I am grateful to be alive. To be walking, even though I sway; to be talking, even though it sounds like I’m talking slowly through sludge; to be using a toilet and not a catheter.
Yes, I am grateful.
* * *
I kept having the same bone-tingling nightmare. The bald man with the black pig eyes, laughing and leering at me, kept creeping through my sleep. I ran from him when I saw him. I ran as fast as I could, but often my body would freeze or he would simply catch up to me. Last night he bit me then wrapped a rope around my neck and hung me from the ceiling. He pushed me back and forth, and I swayed like a pendulum while he ate a Barbie with his fang teeth and spat out her head.
Who is he? Why do I keep seeing him?
Was he the driver of the van that hit me?
* * *
I told Zack about my nightmares. “I don’t have them every night, but enough. This man is coming after me. He’s bald. Heavy. Small eyes. He’s smiling, but the smile is sick.”
His face had gone entirely still. “What does he do in your nightmares?”
“He chases me down and kills me. Every time.” I swear his face lost color. “Are you okay? Are you sick, Zack?”
He didn’t speak for long seconds.
“Zack?”
“I’m sorry you’re having nightmares, honey.”
“It’s okay. When I get to shack up with you again, I’m sure they’ll go away.”
“I’m sure they will, too.”
I smiled; he did not smile back. He looked away, his mind somewhere else entirely.
* * *
In the activities room there are art supplies, books, games, cards, and jewelry-making supplies: chains, charms, beads, wires for wrapping rocks and faux stones, and even pliers. Nothing fancy, but there’s a lot of it. Apparently one of the people on the board makes jewelry and donates what she doesn’t want to this unit because her nephew used to be here.
I started making necklaces. I would give them to Zack, my dad, and Justine and Chick and their families.
I continued working on the necklaces even when I heard a patient tell one of the nurses that she was going out to garden and was going to “break a rake in half over my own bad damn head.”
Another patient, who hardly ever spoke, his head lolling about, announced, “I have not had sex in ten years.” A third patient hobbled by with a walker. He stopped for a second and said to me, “Tennessee.” I said hello.
I first started making necklaces with Chick and Justine when we were fourteen.
The three of us often felt poor. Chick’s mother was a single mother with two kids and a nail salon. Justine’s father was the police chief, but there were eight kids and there was no way their mother could work an outside job.
My dad was a roofer. He did well, and he worked from March, as soon as the sun was out, through October, even November if the weather held. He traveled to different towns to construct roofs, on homes and businesses, as our small town couldn’t support all the work he needed. He was also a metalsmith. He liked making birdbaths and fountains, which he sold at a local nursery, and he liked making wind chimes. Everything he made was exquisite, so well done, and it flew off the shelves, but he fit in that work around his roofing business.
But my dad had expenses. My mother paid no child support at all. I asked him later why he didn’t take my mother to court, and he said it was because he thought she might take him to court to get full custody of me. The chance was small, as I rarely saw her, but my mother was beautiful and she knew how to cry on command. A sappy judge might believe her sob story and give her custody. My dad did not trust the judicial system enough to risk it.
So he was supporting me, with no help, and trying to save for my college education, but he was also supporting my beloved grandma Dixie who had been diagnosed with emphysema. Her smoking a pack and a half a day had caught up to her, and he had had to move her into a medical care home. It was a top-of-the-line care home. She was willing to go; she knew with her labored breathing she needed help. We moved her in and brought all of her precious antique perfume bottles.
I later learned that she paid for the care at first, but when she ran out of money after selling her auto shop, my dad paid for it. She had handed over her finances to my dad because she was so sick, so she never knew what the care home cost or what my dad did for her. “It would kill her pride,” my dad told me. “She was an independent woman. If she knew I was paying for her, she would have driven her truck off a cliff to save me the money.”
Chick, Justine, and I were in that stage where we wanted money for clothes, ice cream, and music. Even then I was into a hippie/bohemian/country girl chic style. I was pairing cowgirl boots and embroidered shirts, skirts and brightly colored tights, silver studded belts and vintage coats and dresses. And I started making myself simple necklaces out of beads to go with my outfits.
We started making necklaces out of pretty rocks we found near the lake. We polished them up with a solution that Chick’s mother found for us and wrapped them in wire using pliers. We sometimes added beads—bought at Goodwill, garage sales, and at a big-box store that my dad took us to.
My dad bought us, in bulk, leather string we could use instead of chains, and we were in business. We sold our Rockin’ It Necklaces, as we’d dubbed them, at a farmers’ market each Saturday in town. The rock necklaces sold surprisingly well, especially during summer and fall when tourists came in for camping and hiking and playing on the lake.
My dad made us a booth out of plywood for the farmers’ market. With wood from our property he made us stands to display the jewelry. We had wooden tables, and over them we threw white, lacy antique tablecloths that Chick found in the attic of her home. The cloths were stained here and there, but we covered the stains with our displays. My dad made us a sign with the name of our company: ROCK JEWELRY.
My dad said I could keep half the money for fun, 10 percent I had to give away to help others, and the rest went into my college account.
With some of that 50 percent, I bought clothes at Goodwill with Chick and Justine in another town. We didn’t want to buy clothes our friends had previously owned. It was our secret, buying used clothes, and we giggled over the prices. I bought some music and a weekly ice-cream cone, and I bought my grandma gifts. A china teacup. A crystal perfume bottle I found at an antique store. A fluffy blanket.
She wheezed out her thanks, attached to her oxygen tank, and I hugged her. “Never spend any money on cigarettes,” she admonished me.
I saved the rest of the money. My dad had always told me, “It’s not if you’ll be hit with bad times financially, it’s when. Always be ready for it, Natalie. Always have savings.”
Most families cannot save enough for a true tragedy. It’s impossible.
Who knew, though, that the necklaces I made would help us to save our home when a true tragedy struck us.
* * *
Soldier came and sat down by me in the activities room as I threaded some white and silver beads onto a chain, my fingers working slowly as they remembered how to make a necklace. “Want to sign my helmet? I can’t remember your name.”
That made me a
little upset, and I put my necklace down as my chin trembled. He couldn’t remember my name! Am I invisible? Am I nothing? Then I remembered that this head injury makes me get upset way too quick about ridiculous stuff, and I breathed. “My name is Natalie Deschutes Fox Shelton. I’ll sign my name on your helmet and then you’ll remember.” I wrote Natliae. There was something wrong with it but I couldn’t figure out what. “There. Now when you need to know my name you can take off your helmet and look at it.”
His helmet was still on his head. “That’ll work. But I think I’m going to call you Jewelry Maker.” He grabbed some pencils and paper. “I’m going to sit here and draw a picture of the three bears and Goldilocks for my grandma. She likes my pictures, says I should draw whatever I want.”
The red-haired woman sat down with me and Soldier at the table. She had another ceramic frog with her.
“Hi, Frog Lady,” Soldier said.
“Hello, Soldier.”
“That’s your second frog, right?” I asked. I was pleased I could remember.
“No. This is my twentieth frog. I make one every day. They’re for my family and my friends. Everybody in the Amazon likes frogs. Monkeys. Lizards. Species. Subspecies. Genus. Endangered. Field research.”
She gave me the frog to hold.
“Be careful! He’s sleeping. The nice nurse, Roberto, you know him? He takes all my clay frogs home with him with a hop and puts them in an oven and cooks them for me so they come out all painted and shiny like this. The cooking doesn’t kill the frogs. He makes art, too. Not frog art.”
I knew the nice nurse, Roberto. He sang me a song in Spanish yesterday when I was having a bad day. It was about music and dancing.
“I like your Mexican shirt,” she said to me. “Adios! Hola!”
A man hobbled over using a cane. He had black hair under his helmet and dark eyes, like brown ink. “Hi,” he said to me. “Everybody calls me Architect. That’s not my real name. There were shelves high in the sky, and I fell off and knocked my knocker.” He tapped the side of his helmet.
“Hi. I’m Natalie Deschutes Fox Shelton. I’m making a necklace.”