Take Me Back

by Sally Mandel

  Take Me Back

  Sally Mandel

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Sally Mandel

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.

  First Diversion Books edition September 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-626810-58-7

  Also by Sally Mandel

  Change of Heart

  Quinn

  Heart and Soul

  Out of the Blue

  Portrait of a Married Woman

  A Time to Sing

  For Barry, now more than ever.

  Introduction

  Letter From A Broken Brain

  In the months following my brain injury in February 2005, it became clear that I would never write another book again. I had been a novelist for almost thirty years, during which time six of my books had been published. If I was not in the process of actually typing out the story, I was living with my characters, getting to know the details of their lives, what they wore, how they spoke to one another, what their most private secrets were. Sometimes I wondered whether my imagined world were not more “real” than reality. With a headful of characters I inevitably grew attached to, my life was always rich and colorful.

  On that fateful winter day in Manhattan, I checked into the hospital for surgery on my hand. In many facilities, the operation is considered ambulatory, but my surgeon felt that I should remain overnight for pain control. My husband suggested that we hire a nurse to stay with me, but I told him that since I would not be undergoing general anesthesia, there was no need.

  In the course of the night, a nurse checked my respiration rate, which was dangerously low. But rather than call immediately for help, he simply made the entry into my records and disappeared. By the time anyone saw me an hour or so later, I was unconscious—“coded blue”. When I woke up in the ICU the next morning, a parade of medical personnel came by to express amazement that I was alive. No one knows exactly how I received the morphine overdose, but what was clear was that I had nearly died and that my brain, which had been deprived of oxygen for some period of time, would never entirely recover.

  People who have undergone a traumatic event talk about the “before” and “after” in their lives. Often, it takes only a splinter of time to hurl you from one into the other. Yet when I became conscious, I had no idea that I had just entered the “after” part of my life, no idea that I would never be the same.

  What I remember most about those early days is the profound confusion. I had begun to perceive that things were “different,” but could not figure out quite how. The rooms in my apartment seemed changed, the view out the window peculiar. I could stare ahead for long periods of time with no thoughts, just a vague sense that there was nothing but a hollow space between my ears where echoes of thoughts and memories made an incoherent murmur. I had a CT scan, a PET scan, an MRI. I underwent hours of neurological testing. Finally, the diagnosis confirmed irreparable damage to my left frontal lobe. In my mind, I pictured a dent there, like the evidence left behind after an automobile collision.

  At each of the many doctor visits thereafter I was required to fill out a form. Always, there was the blank line for “Profession.” It had been a long road to achieving the right to call myself a writer, and it had always given me a little throb of pleasure to scribble it down in the blank space. “What am I now,” I thought, “an ex-writer”?

  Then I would be called in to see that day’s doctor and he would tell me that after six months, or nine months, or a year, I would reach the apex of my recovery and that I should expect no more improvement thereafter. The stranger who had moved into my familiar skin would never disappear.

  There was guilt. I would look at pictures in the newspaper of soldiers who had suffered brain damage in Iraq. Some were paralyzed, or had lost their ability to speak. I told myself that I was lucky. I could so easily have died. The conviction that I might be over-reacting, however, only served to send me deeper into despair and so, like many people who suffer brain injury, I plummeted into a profound depression. I thought about suicide every day. Sometimes, killing myself was the only image I could focus on. I imagined with longing the nothingness of oblivion.

  My psychopharmacologist worked with me for more than a year to find the effective combination of drugs that would, without turning me into a total zombie, diminish the constant yearning for self-destruction. I could tell from the way my family and friends looked at me that I was certainly a partial zombie. They addressed me as they would a baffled child, which is pretty much what I was.

  After I got the cast off my hand, my daughter and I went to an eco-lodge in Belize. She was in her early twenties at the time, and I suppose I was thinking that I was “taking her” on vacation as I had so many times before. In fact, she took charge of me, from the moment I got lost in the airport to her returning me to my room. We had adjoining cabins, but I simply could not keep track of where I was supposed to be or when. I showed up at mealtimes too early or too late. I wandered aimlessly around the hotel grounds. At night, before my daughter went to bed, she stuck post-its on my bedside table telling me at what time I was supposed to meet her for breakfast and listing our activities for the morning—separately, so that there was not too much information on any one scrap. It soon became clear that I needed reminders for everything: set alarm, file nails, wash out socks, show up for an activity, and so on.

  What I remember most, though, about that trip is sitting in a garden seat beside my gentle warden, swinging idly back and forth, just talking quietly. It was peaceful there, with one person I loved and trusted, a person I could relate to. I clung to that healing memory, and still do.

  Back in Manhattan, I found that I could not understand the implications of red light/green light at street corners and trained myself to follow the crowd at intersections. I got lost in my neighborhood because I could not “see” familiar landmarks. The tailor, whom I had visited countless times in over thirty years, had simply disappeared. I walked back and forth, back and forth, before the shop inexplicably reappeared. This inability to “see” applied to items around the house as well. I could not find my glasses even when I was staring directly at them. It was always so startling when they would materialize hours later in the exact spot that I had searched before. I came to realize that what I saw—or didn’t see—could not be trusted.

  I could not tolerate bright light or noise. I had to leave restaurants and sit on the curb outside, hoping that an ambulance or fire truck with their excruciating sirens would not pass by. I wore sunglasses indoors against the ever present glare. Even now, years later, how I love a rainy day!

  Although some of my symptoms have eased, many remain problematic. My short-term memory, for example, is shot. My husband recounts places we recently visited, social occasions we attended, people we spent an evening with. It’s all news to me. We call the place in my head where all this stuff must surely be stored the “Black Hole.”

  My vocabulary continues to be eccentric and elusive. I have trouble grasping the right word and I say things like, “Have you ever been to Niagara Farms?” Then I’ll try to correct myself: “No, that’s not it. Have you ever been to Niagara Farms?” It may come out right after a few more tries or it may not. Or I’ll ask, “Can you pick up a bottle of wrinkle?” If I cannot retrieve the word, “water,” I’ll talk around it: “You know, it’s in a lake, you drink it, it’s what rain is…” Even when
the answer is given, I often still cannot say it aloud.

  Numbers continue to mystify me. The first time I tried to play bridge, I tossed a card out of my hand to make a trick with the three others on the table. I stared at them in bewilderment. I tried to make my brain “move” but it was simply stuck in neutral. “I don’t know what they mean,” I told my husband. His eyes filled with tears.

  After countless hours of daily rehab, I have improved in understanding things numerical, especially if I can see them. Listening to a chain of numbers being read to me over the phone makes my head hurt. I may have to ask for a confirmation number three times, and “slowly, please,” before I can manage to write it down. “9” still reads as the letter “n”, and “7” as “s”.

  Reading presents a challenge. During rehab, I began with articles in the New York Times. My rehab specialist would select one and ask me to read the first paragraph to myself. She would then inquire what it meant. I would inevitably answer, “I have no idea.” She would explain how to take the first sentence apart, a few words at a time. When I understood those, I could move on to the next phrase. Using this system, I would usually be able to absorb the meaning, but one small article could take half an hour of analysis. It was agonizing how quickly I could lose all memory of a sentence when I had struggled over it just minutes before.

  When I was a child, bedtime meant hiding under the covers with my book and a flashlight. Ever since, I have always read before falling asleep. It was a delicious transporting time before drifting off. After The Event, however, it became an ordeal. I would read a paragraph several times through, using my new technique. That worked all right—eventually, I could put away two or three pages. But the next night, I would open to the following page and could remember nothing of what I had read before. And so… back to the beginning. It was a painstaking, frustrating process. But it was the only way to learn, once again, how to read.

  All of this is a partial explanation of why I knew, without question or doubt, that I would never write a novel again. If I could not even read a book, how could I possibly expect myself to write one?

  And yet…

  You may be wondering what the attached pile of pages following this letter represents. I can tell you: years of hard work every day, going through childish exercises with my rehab specialist, and finally graduating to doing many of them on my own. Reading and more reading, and never letting up. Because it is all too easy to slip back. Fighting discouragement and depression with medication and positive reinforcement from my always optimistic psychopharmacologist, my patient and loving family, my loyal friends. Closing my ears to certain physicians I consulted who kept telling me I’d already achieved what I could reasonably expect. Trying to finish the New York Times crossword every day, watching Jeopardy. Daring to make my first solo drive at the wheel of our car. Summoning the courage to take a trip by myself, getting lost in the airport but controlling my panic. Learning to make lists for everything and trying to remember to take those lists with me. And to read them. Accepting that I would become exhausted every day simply from trying to make sense out of the words assaulting me via telephone, television, people behind the grocery counter, ordinary conversations. Respecting the need to shut myself off from the world in a dark room for an hour every afternoon so that I might be ready for the battle that is the rest of the day. That I am first to leave a celebratory event, as at my own daughter’s wedding, when I become overwhelmed by my own emotions and by the crowd. Accepting that I will lose friends who cannot understand that while I may appear normal, I am, in fact, forever changed. That I will forget promises and lose track of commitments.

  And so I confronted, as best I could, the challenges necessary to lead a semblance of a normal life, which, for me, includes the act of writing. It was a leap of faith. For a long time, the concept was unimaginable. But one evening over dinner, my husband asked, “How about trying to write again?”

  I have learned to pay attention to this man I’ve spent nearly the whole of my life with when he looks at me in a particularly penetrating way. His life has changed along with mine, of course. He has become expert at reading my face for signs of confusion or distress. Not only does he know my weaknesses, he usually figures out before I do when I need to adjust my medication or take a nap. Talk about love. I can’t begin to tell you—he has kept me afloat through it all. But write?

  I stared at him as if his hair had caught on fire and explained that in order to write each sentence of a novel, you must recall everything you’ve written before. I couldn’t remember what I had for breakfast. It wasn’t going to happen.

  “What about a short story?” he asked.

  “I’ve never written a short story in my life,” I said.

  “So?” he said.

  “Hm,” I thought.

  And then, after many months, the first chapter of TAKE ME BACK was born, the one introducing Lily Adams. It is a hard-won twenty-six pages long, with at least a hundred pages of notes to support its creation. After Lily’s debut, I was surprised that I could not stop thinking about another character in the story, her granddaughter, Amy. Maybe I ought to try experimenting with her, I thought. I liked the result. After that there were Lily’s daughter, Stella, and William, and Simon. Lo and behold, one day after years of trial and error, it turned out that I had written… a novel.

  The morning I wrote the final word, I burst into tears, I must report, and fell down on my knees. I’m not a religious person, understand; this was totally a reflexive thing. I simply had to express my gratitude somehow.

  So that’s my story. That’s why this book is so different from my others, born as it was from a profoundly grueling and intimate experience. It was immensely satisfying.

  It was my beloved son, a surgeon, who first pored through the hundred pages of documentation of my hospital stay in order to determine exactly what had happened to me, and to bring to light the negligence that had left me permanently damaged. Along with being the kind of doctor who would never allow such a thing to occur on his watch, he is protective of his Mom. The guy still holds my hand when we walk down the street together.

  Anyway, he phoned me a while ago and asked, “So, Mom, are you going to write another one?”

  “I don’t have a single idea,” I replied. “Nope, not a one.”

  And, as it happened, the very next day, Ellie Taft walked into my head. She’s been there ever since. In some ways, I feel that I already know her better than I do myself. But maybe, as I write her story, she will help me understand and accept the unfamiliar person that I have now become.

  Mrs. Adams

  Lily: 1992

  The first time Mrs. Adams heard the voices she turned up her hearing aid. But no, there was no one in the room, no one outside the door. She dismissed the sounds as some dysfunction of the apparatus; sometimes things penetrated loud and clear, other times everything seemed filtered through flannel. Often when the voices spoke, she was not wearing it at all. At first there had been only fragments, like unrelated syllables, but these days a low murmur might last as much as a minute, with certain words that she could make out quite clearly: new dress; Sundays; philosophy. She was certain that she’d heard the word Studebaker, for instance, and once even the phrase such a good soul. It seemed that the low babble came from somewhere over her right shoulder. There was a sliver of light there, too, as if a door were ajar. If she blinked, it disappeared. She never mentioned this to anyone, not even Alice. It didn’t frighten her; she just found it distracting, puzzling and even intriguing.

  The day that she had her spell, she was sitting as usual in her favorite chair by the window, working the Times crossword puzzle. There were some fine antiques in the room—a Colonial bureau, a Persian rug, a few pieces of nineteenth century Chinese porcelain, one of which Mrs. Adams used to hold M&M’s in case her granddaughter turned up unexpectedly. There was a wall hanging of Chinese ancestors over the sofa brought back by her missionary father and a Tif
fany lamp beside her on the table. The room had the pleasant air of beat-up gentility, the early morning sun casting a warm glow onto the newspaper Mrs. Adams held on her lap.

  The tremor in her hand made holding the pencil difficult, but Amy had somewhere unearthed a special kind with a rubber grip that improved things a little. The Parkinson’s had announced itself dramatically by tripping her up on a short flight of stairs and sending her tumbling, thankfully with nothing broken, just a few nasty bruises. Reluctantly, she began to use a cane, which compensated somewhat for her increasingly lurching gait. The disease thereafter had crept up slowly, only gradually impairing her functions over the course of a decade. She measured its impact at least in part by the expression on Amy’s face when she made her sporadic visits.

  “Gran, your hands are shaking a lot more. Isn’t there anything you can take for that?” She still wore her hair tied back in a ponytail, just as she had when she was a little girl.

  Mrs. Adams smiled. “It’s a blessing in disguise, dear. I do believe I’ve written my last birthday card.” The sadness in her granddaughter’s face had thrown such a shadow over the old woman’s heart that she had to clasp her trembling hands together and hide them in her lap.

  Alice showed up at ten o’clock sharp, as always. She hung up her jacket and went to clear Mrs. Adams’ TV tray of dishes. “Morning, Mrs. A,” she said, inspecting the remains of breakfast to assure herself that Mrs. Adams was eating enough. Skin and bones, she was. Alice held the juice glass up to the light and looked quizzically at Mrs. Adams. It was supposed to be coated with a film of a sweet chocolate protein drink to help keep weight on the old woman. “Ensure,” it was called, though Mrs. Adams referred to it as “Endure.” No film this morning.