“When you can squeeze that closed, you’ll have most of the use of that hand again,” Shannon told Maureen.
Dr. Park began to hold out the hope of home to her like a scoop of ice cream just out of her reach. When she could walk three steps without holding on to anything…even the walker…When she could read three sentences aloud with no mistakes…When she remembered past tenses…
Maureen stayed up late, unlocking, unwrapping, peeling away the plastic around the items in her brain…. I go to the store. I am going to the store. I went to the store. She squeezed the ball and the slingshot. Without telling anyone, and knowing it was dangerous, she walked to the bathroom alone. Once the nurse, Ben, caught her; but instead of grabbing her arm, he nodded and simply watched her carefully, closing the door so Maureen had her privacy.
The last week in April she began to have anxiety attacks: Rag Mop was dead; that was why they wouldn’t let her go home. Tommy’s baby had died. They didn’t want her to know. That’s why they wouldn’t let her go home. Mary brought baby Maura to see her and asked her to stand godmother.
“Sit godmother,” Maureen said. “Is Rag Mop okay?
“He’s fine. He sleeps on the foot of your bed every night,” her sister-in-law said.
“Is Tommy fine?”
“He’s fine.”
“Where is Danny?”
“At school, I think.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“She should be here any minute.”
“Is Rag Mop dead?”
Mary stopped for a moment before she said, “No, Maury. Rag Mop is fine. He’s at home, waiting for you.”
Finally, Jeannie brought the little dog to the hospital again, though, strictly speaking, there were no animals allowed on the ward except the fish in the giant aquarium and the zoo animals that educators from the Minneapolis Zoo brought to the auditorium.
Two days after Jeannie brought in the dog, Maureen asked again if Rag Mop was dead.
But Dr. Park told Jeannie not to worry. “Most kids with brain injury ask the same question every couple of minutes. You could walk out of the room and come back after getting a soda out of the machine and she’d greet you as if she hadn’t seen you in weeks,” Dr. Park told her. “That’s how short we thought her memory would be, but instead she is on the high end of the memory curve. She’s just stressed out. Her mind is whirling.”
In the last week, as her ticket out, Maureen had to do the equivalent of a marathon.
She had to get up, get to a chair, pull on a sports bra and panties, get into pajama pants and a T-shirt, put on her own socks, pour her own cereal out of a box, remember to ring for the nurse and tell her that she had to go to school at exactly nine in the morning, write a full sentence, read aloud, take a vision test, sing one verse of a folk song from memory after hearing it only two times, then walk to the front door of the ward and back to her room without any help in locating it.
And Maureen did it all.
As she left the schoolroom for the last time, Maureen sang to Shannon, “If I had a hammer, I’d hit you in the knee.”
Shannon laughed uproariously.
After it was all over, Maureen slept for fourteen hours.
Finally, with fistfuls of prescriptions—antibiotics for her bladder infection, pills to help her establish a regular sleep schedule, anxiety medication to use as needed—and a binder of instructions and the gear for exercise, Maureen was released. As they did each time a kid went home, the nurses lined the hall and clapped. But Maureen felt something other than the pride and sense of celebration.
In the big, echoing lobby, she was seized by a crippling fear. So many people, so many open spaces and strange faces. It was as though she’d just hatched out of an egg. She thought of the blue-and-yellow striped halls of the unit with longing. She was safe there. Everything she thought she wanted so passionately to see and be in—the smells and sounds of spring, the sights and privacy of home—now seemed huge and threatening.
“I’m not really. I’m not real. I’m…I’m not ready,” she told Jeannie. She could see white vans with loops of wire on top and big letters on the sides. “Real. Feel. Ward. Safe. Have rehab. Have rehab.”
“We can wait for a moment,” Jeannie said. “Daddy is going to go around back where the ambulance is so that we can avoid those TV people out there. Here’s Molly, Maury.”
Molly had just run between rows of reporters and gave Maureen a hug.
Maureen was stunned to see that Molly was dressed in a couple of T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops.
“Where is your coat?” she asked. “Cold. Coat. Cold.”
Because she knew what the repetition meant now, although it still gave her the creeps, Molly said, “Maureen, it’s spring! It’s sixty-eight degrees outside!” She could see the reporters with their microphones gazing in at them and knew it would terrify Maureen if they began to shout questions at her. Even now a nurse was trying to see what legal issues they could use to get the trucks to move. Careful planning went into choosing Sunday afternoon for the time to release Maureen. But the reporters had their sources, and were vigilant. Finally, the reporters were told by a hospital spokesperson that they were blocking access for patients. Reluctantly, they moved to the outer parking lot, where at least they would see the O’Malley family car and be able to follow.
That was Molly’s cue.
“See you at home, Maury,” she said, darting back toward the emergency bay.
The news vans did follow Bill as he headed for home. But it was Molly Schottmann who had volunteered to sit in the backseat, a cap with a fake blond ponytail attached to it on her head.
Jeannie and Maureen came later in the ambulance.
So, just as he had headed the crew that drove Maureen to the ED that night four months before, Carl was at the helm when the ambulance brought her home.
Jeannie was on top of the world. Her tulips had never looked so regal. Pat and Jack had come home, although it was finals week, and Henry had cleaned the house from the top down. Mary and Tom had steaks on the grill. Although Maureen would have to return two days a week to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, there was talk of a physical therapist in Bigelow who might do some of the work on a private basis. Bill had found a music teacher who would come to give Maury private lessons and bought an old upright piano from the parents of a student.
A return to some kind of ordinary life seemed possible, and ordinary had never seemed so precious.
Across the street, the Flannery house was silent, the blinds drawn.
Bill saw Sarah peek out of her bedroom window, then slip back inside as he walked down the drive to meet the ambulance.
The medics set up her wheelchair and slid Maureen into it. Bill unloaded her walker. Maureen waved shyly at her brothers, who gradually realized she wouldn’t break and rushed to kiss her and hug her. Bill began to push her up the front path.
But Maureen stopped him.
“Walk,” she said. Bill pressed his lips together and helped his frail daughter stand up.
She took her last few steps down her front walk as she had taken them four months ago—on her feet, without the use of her walker, while news photographers perched in trees and lay on the sidewalk to capture the moment. Her right foot dragged like a reluctant puppy, and she had to stop twice to get her balance. But she made it.
When she got to the steps, Bill scooped her up and carried her in. While the boys unloaded Maureen’s bags and bags of equipment, which filled every available inch of floor space in the laundry room, Bill settled Maureen for the moment in his own big blue leather recliner.
He watched as she ran her hands over the arms of the chair. She glanced quizzically around the room, examining the fireplace, grinning at Rag Mop’s excited dance on the carpet in front of her. For a moment, Bill nearly rushed forward, thinking that Maureen was about to fall, but she was only bending down to smell the leather. She stroked it again and gazed up at him, a puzzled frown on her face.
“Daddy?” she a
sked, as though he had just returned from a long trip.
“Yes!” Bill said, and dropped to his knees.
“Okay, Daddy. I am now,” said Maureen.
prom night
After the nationwide splash of photographs for the “Risen-from-Dead Girl Comes Home,” Henry wrote the final blog entry.
May 4
Luke 15: 4–6 What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.
One day before my birthday, my sister came home from Anne Morrow Lindbergh Children’s Hospital and Clinics. What a mouthful! No wonder they call it “Anne’s House”!
She was on her way home on December 23 last year, but it turned out to be a trip that took four months and involved some of the most heartbreaking and heartwarming events of any of our lives.
Although we would never have asked to have something like this happen, we have learned so much from it.
We have a new respect for the dedication and training and care that doctors give every day. We have, maybe even more, a greater understanding of how much devotion and compassion nurses and therapists have—every hour of every day.
It has been nearly five months since Maureen was injured and believed dead. But not one day of that time has she complained. She has grown angry and frustrated. She has had to do things over and over. She gets tired and discouraged. But she keeps us all going; and she comes roaring back, more determined than ever, after every setback.
And you—all of you, here in our hometown, and in Minneapolis and in Turin and Barcelona and El Paso and Miami and Juneau—have helped us to keep going, too.
Yeats wrote,
Out of sight is out of mind:
Long have man and woman-kind
Heavy of will and light of mood,
Taken away our wheaten food,
Taken away our Altar stone;
Hail and rain and thunder alone,
And red hearts we turn to grey,
Are true till Time gutter away.
But our hearts never turned to grey, though they stayed true, because we were inspired by you and by our sister’s courage. Someday, I hope I will be able to tease her again and trip her again (yes, brothers look forward to these things!) and jump out from behind her door and make her scream.
For now, just seeing her sitting at the table trying to copy every letter of the alphabet is like watching an artist carve a statue out of a block of marble. We just don’t know how she does it. But every day, Maureen does it because she has to.
It was the longest winter of our lives.
Now it is spring. Maureen is alive and getting better.
Next year, she will go back to Bigelow High as a junior with a special tutor provided by the state’s coordinator for disabilities services.
We will never forget the grief of this winter. As
Shakespeare wrote,
For being both to me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
We will never forget Bridget Flannery, who was like another little sister to us.
But we hope we have all learned to treasure life more fully and be better human beings.
With friendship,
William Henry O’Malley
Henry was going to petition his college that his blog be counted as a literature course. There were more than a hundred entries. He realized that petitioning for credit was fairly slimy but figured that sympathy was on his side. He also had searched Shakespeare and Yeats for appropriate quotations for each entry, so, in a sense, it was a literary endeavor. And his mom was always good for a quote from Grandma’s old Bible.
Though Maureen had only been home for a week, Molly and Danny planned a “quiet” surprise birthday party for her the following Saturday.
Inevitably, word got out. All of the cheerleaders, along with about sixty other class friends—everyone but the weirdest Goths and even some of them—came to welcome Maureen home. They brought her music boxes and earrings and bracelets and sweaters, gift certificates for books and movies, stuffed animals, and a big straw hat for reading in the sun—all tributes for the miracle of her being restored to them. Brandon Hillier gave her a lawn chair that popped open on its own. Danny planted a rose tree where Maury could see it from her hospital bed in what used to be Coach’s office (she couldn’t manage stairs yet). The girls on the squad and Eddy chipped in and bought her a DishDelish jogging suit and a new letter jacket with her senior letter on it—despite the fact that she would never be a cheerleader again.
The cake that Jeannie baked read DARLING MAUREEN, WELCOME BACK HOME AND BACK TO YOUR LIFE.
Everybody clapped as she cut the first slice, and Bill videotaped her taking her first delighted bite.
But Maureen started to cry after the cake was cut and couldn’t seem to stop, so finally Coach carried her inside. The kids drifted away in small groups.
“Do you think she’s thinking about Bridget?” Britney asked Molly.
“Maybe,” Molly answered. She had her own ideas but wasn’t about to toss them into the gossip hole. She believed Maureen was overcome knowing that she was so much less than what she had been before—a tiny, pale thing, like a baby bird fallen from its nest. She wore new jeans, but a size 4 hung limp on her. Her arms were as thin as chopsticks, her wrists bigger than her biceps. “I think she’s just emotional.” And then there was the future. Sure, she was way past other brain-injured kids, but what did that mean in the real world? Would she ever be able to live on her own? Danny had said she was still confused sometimes, that she didn’t recognize ordinary things, like stop signs. It would be more than a year, he’d told Molly, before Maury could even try to drive.
But Danny had his own notions, too, about Maureen’s sudden tears.
Seeing everyone—over half the class—must have reminded Maureen how much she had missed and would miss. They would be juniors next fall, thinking about college. She would spend the summer swimming in a therapy pool to build up her muscles and coordination, making tapes of herself speaking and playing them back, keeping a notebook of questions she asked over and over so she didn’t drive people nuts. She didn’t have a child’s mind in a woman’s body. She had a young woman’s mind in a young woman’s body. But all of it was barricaded.
He went back to the O’Malleys’ alone on Sunday morning with a plan.
Maureen was sitting up in bed goofing around with the new laptop that someone from somewhere had sent to her. Danny sat down beside her and helped her program a Face Place page, picking out a pink-rose background, helping her tap out a profile that told people she was Maureen O’Malley, age sixteen if you counted from birth or three months if you counted from her coming out of the coma. He took pictures of her posing in the big leather chair and uploaded them to the site.
When Maury typed, he saw for the first time how clumsy her fingers really were, how she had to stare at a letter before making the decision to use it.
Mrs. O. had been planning to go to Mass; but Mary, who was going to stay with Maureen, called to say the baby was sick.
Danny offered to stay with Maureen. What he wanted to say was private anyhow.
Once Mrs. O. was on her way, Danny put the laptop to sleep and took Maureen’s hand.
“I don’t want you to take this wrong,” he said. “But I don’t think you should miss the prom. I know we’re sophomores, but everybody goes. Do you want to go with me?”
Maureen threw her arms around his neck like a child at Christmas.
“I would love this!” she said.
“I don’t mean a date. I don’t want to upset you,” he said.
“Of course. We’re friends,” Maureen said. “But a dress and everything!”
“It’s p
rom,” he said. “I don’t want you to think that I’m doing this because I feel sorry for you, though, Maury. I don’t feel sorry for you. I like you.”
“We’re friends,” she repeated. Her hand had dropped to his chest. He was uncomfortably aware of her body under the light pair of shorts and strappy top she had on. She was so tiny, but her weight was coming back up. She looked almost like a normal girl. But one of her eyes was tearing and red.
“What happened to you?” he asked, pointing to her eye.
“I tried to put on lashes….” she said, and stopped. “Mascara. I almost poked out my eye.” They both began to laugh, and then they were kissing. He didn’t know which one of them started it. He was longing for Bridget so much, or else Maureen; he lay down beside her on the bed and pulled her on top of him. His mouth trembled when he gently touched her small breasts.
“We need to stop,” he said. But Maureen took his hand and began moving it in small circles, lower and lower on her belly.
“No,” she said. “I’m not…a baby. I’m not retarded.”
“We’re friends.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Danny answered, remembering that whatever she thought would drop from her brain to her mouth like a gum ball down the slot.
“You can love me,” she said. “I mean, this way.”
“I can’t, Maury.”
“Why, am I ugly?”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Because I walk in that? Stupid? Crash? Stupid head? I’m not stupid, Danny. I’m not the same, but not stupid.”
“Don’t be nuts,” Danny said. “It’s not that! I just don’t think it’s right for us!”
“Because of Bridge?”
“Because of everything!”
“You almost thought before!”
“That was a long time ago, Maureen, and we both agreed it wasn’t right.”
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