The doctors and therapists have nothing more to offer me. I am a boring case, a complete injury, right out of a textbook. A curiosity, a nightmare, maybe even a freak show, but not a challenge.
I’m leaving exactly as I arrived.
Some people report that when they are close to death, they see a light beckoning to them. A bright, warm glow urges them to follow, come, seek out your ultimate destination. They also feel the pull of loved ones telling them to live, fight, come back. Your time has not yet come.
I didn’t see a light. Loved ones did not urge me back. No voices, no music.
I felt nothing. I floated in the most peaceful place in the universe.
I felt nothing. I was alone.
I felt nothing, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I felt the absence of everything.
* * *
I know the car skidded twenty-five feet before we hit the old man and the tree, before Meredith and I went flying into the window, but that’s because the Mooretown Valley News covered my story for two weeks running. It was the biggest tragedy in our town’s history. In Boston, we would not have caused a ripple. But this was Mooretown. The famed George Washington High. I was the local boy done wrong. Sidebars on national statistics. Testimonies by friends and relatives. They covered it all.
Harry saved every article in a big white envelope.
For the record, it took three paramedics to get me out of the car and get me here in two pieces—ha-ha—although one report said that four people worked for two hours to get me out. “He was conscious the whole time,” the EMT driver said. “He told us some jokes. How many people with ADD does it take to change a lightbulb?”
The doctor said, “Everybody laughed. (The answer, Who wants to go ride bikes? is on his Web site.) We thought it was a good sign.”
The nurse added, “When Frank made that joke, we were sure we were going to save his life. We were confident that we were going to see some magic.”
Magic, my ass.
Check out www.Quadkingonthenet.com. Post your favorite Meredith story, or read Betsy Sinclair’s essay, “My Narrow Escape: I Was Frank Marder’s Girlfriend.” Read a diary of my medical status or the Union Leader’s editorial about “the epidemic of drunk drivers.” You can ask questions about spinal cord injury and drunk driving, but nobody does. Or double click on the most popular link: Vote Now! Do you think Frank Marder’s punishment was adequate?
So far: forty people think I should be in jail. Four think the judge could have been more creative with my sentence. Only two think I’ve been punished adequately, and one of them is Harry. The other is probably my mother, so that doesn’t count either.
My father thinks the Steins paid for the site. They’re out for blood. For weeks, they were on the radio, TV, and Internet, memorializing Meredith, begging first the town, then the judge, then the state to do something substantive. “Indecent,” my mother said. “Media hogs. Taking advantage of their tragedy that way.”
I disagreed.
When my parents were hearing the good news, the Steins were burying Meredith. When my parents were learning about wheelchairs, Meredith’s parents were comforting the wife of the old man who never saw me coming. Eenie, meanie, miney, mo—none of us were winners.
Our pictures have been in many papers. Every time, they use our yearbook pictures, the ones we had taken last summer. Hers was black and white, a profile. She’s almost smiling. Her hair falls loosely around her face. Mine was more casual. I wore my Sox shirt.
My parents have even been in The Globe, toward the back of the first section.
My dad looks solemn in his paisley tie; my mother’s eyes and nose are shielded by a low-brimmed hat. Harry, of course, showed me the clipping. “They interviewed me, but they didn’t use my name.” He points to a paragraph deep in the article. Marder’s friends insist that he was not a chronic drinker. “If anyone was a risk taker, it was Meredith Stein,” a source close to both families said.
“A source close to both families?”
“It’s just newspeak.”
“Well, don’t do it again. Don’t badmouth Meredith.”
Harry looked confused. “I was just—”
“Do you understand?”
Harry looked away. “The Steins have been on the radio every day this week. They are demanding that the state change the legislation,” but he never said how. “They’re making you sound like you were a disaster waiting to happen.” He left the picture on my bedside table.
The day that picture was taken, the doctors screwed a halo into my skull to hold my neck in place for the surgery. They ordered test after test after test. But they never got past the same tired questions: “Do you feel this? Frank, do you feel this? Can you move your toe? Your leg? Your hand?”
“How about now?” I wasn’t prepared.
“Now?” I just needed time.
“Frank. How about now?”
The answer was no. No. I don’t feel anything.
The looks were all the same. You know what I mean, the double takes that say loud and clear, I feel sorry for you, or I’m so happy I’m not you. My favorite is the quick hand to the crotch—one, two, three, all there, and a smile. Thank God, mine still works.
Still, I couldn’t help hoping. “Frank, you have some work to do.” The doctors descended upon me in groups of four and five. They had me laid out on this big rolling bed, rolling, rolling, rolling, tilting to the left then right, left then right, over and over again. Machines, light, people, light. They had to strap me in so I wouldn’t fall off the ride. “Okay, Frank? How does that sound?”
I said, “Great. Let’s do some work.”
Thumbs up. I knew how to answer the questions.
Then nothing. The docs made a huddle just out of sight. They talked in low voices. “Frank this. Frank that.” I couldn’t hear them. The younger ones talked in spurts. High voices. Questions. They looked sad and scared and embarrassed.
I thought they didn’t hear me. “Great,” I said. “I’m ready to work.”
Thumbs up.
When I smiled, they all burst into laughter too quickly. I said, “I thought we were working. Didn’t you tell me you wanted me to work?”
All they did was talk.
“You okay, Frank? How do you feel?”
“You feel this, Frank? How about this?”
“Frank, concentrate. I am moving your foot. Can you tell?”
They had to be joking. They weren’t touching me. How about that work, doctor?
“Frank, tell me where I’m touching you.”
“Frank, I’m going to prick you with a pin. Can you feel it?”
“Frank, can you move your arm? Your fingers? Your toes? Anything?”
I said, “You’re starting to freak me out. What did you give me? I don’t feel anything at all.”
Hour after hour, or minute after minute, doctors kept bugging me. Same questions. Same answers. I silently made bargains with myself. I will study harder. I will be nicer to my parents. I will count to ten and my legs will wake up, and my hands will work. I will be able to reach up and hug my mother. I will be honest with Meredith. I didn’t know she was dead.
Day after day, they rolled me, poked me, lifted me, and tested me. They asked me a million questions, all the same. Frank, can you feel this? Their voices grew louder, desperate. FRANK, CAN YOU FEEL THIS? All the time, I waited for an assignment, something I could do, a shred of hope, some good news. Some work to do.
I waited. One week. Two weeks. Still, no work. They moved me from the ICU to rehab. Did I miss something?
Hello. If anyone is listening, I’m still waiting.
A light is always on. A machine is always beeping. They can hear us through the intercom.
Even today, moving day, a constant stream of visitors flows in and out of the room. After Cecilia leaves, the black guy who takes your vitals comes. Then it’s the urine girl. She has a big, round butt, and she’s not afraid to shake it in Freeberg’s face. After that, the
chaplain shows up to pray with me. That gets Freeberg moving. He rustles around, bed to chair, chair to bed.
“Push through your wrists and lift your ass off the bed,” I remind him. Heads can hear every move they can’t make.
The chaplain, Father Joe, sits in the chair next to my bed. He reads a passage I don’t understand. It doesn’t matter—it’s always the same refrain. Find God. Love God. Believe in God.
He crosses my dead body. “You have to believe. You have to trust that He has a plan.”
He can’t possibly expect me to buy that line.
Still, I never balk over a blessing. If there was a rabbi in the house, I’d let him in, too.
“Is the Padre history?” Freeberg asks from the door, even though he can see I’m alone. He rolls around the room, popping wheelies, flexing his biceps, using all and every one of his neurologically intact muscles. “I can’t wait to blow this taco stand.” He’s leaving tomorrow, and already, he’s got big plans. “It’s going to be fucking awesome. Badass Jack’s bringing the pickup truck and we’re going straight to the city. You gotta come meet the guys. Hang out. Two dollar drafts,” he says. “Hookers.”
Richard Freeberg is a high school dropout, a dreg, a punk. He has a prison record that cannot be expunged. The only thing he’s really good at is “fuck speak.” He can use the word fuck in multiple grammatical derivatives.
My first day in rehab, he rolled up to me and asked, “What the fuck is your problem? You never seen a fuckin para-pa-legi-ac before?” He jabbed me in my dead shoulder. “You a head injury, too? Don’t tell me they put me with a fuckin zombie.”
“I am not a zombie,” I said. “I just don’t feel like talking.” At least, not to someone like him. My parents came in with a box of cards to hang on the wall.
“Hey, there,” he said. My father nodded.
My mother sensed no danger and cornered him for a little game of twenty questions.
“What’s your name? How were you injured? How long have you been in treatment? Did you know that most spinal cord injuries happen to males between the age of eighteen and twenty-two?”
“You don’t say.” Freeberg balanced and spun on his back wheels until my mother clapped.
When she turned her back, he wagged his tongue.
“You know,” she said, “three years ago, Channel Thirty-nine did a weeklong series on traumatic injuries. I taped it. If you like, I’ll bring it in.”
“Three years ago?”
“Yes. It was very interesting.”
“Rosemary, give me a hand,” my father said, pulling her to my side of the room, as if her virtue were at stake. “I’m sure Frank’s roommate—”
“Freeberg. Richard. But you can call me—”
My father turned his back. “I’m sure Richard has plenty of things to do.”
When they left, Freeberg called me a fuckin snob. “Your mom’s nice. How come she stays with that asshole?”
I wanted to punch him.
If I had arms.
But by my third day, the sex talk was better than my mother’s audiobooks, Harry’s score sheets, or my father’s cold shoulder. By the end of the week, I almost admired the three tattoos, especially the one “down there,” right above his pubes. “See here?” he said. “These are Rosey’s lips. Rosey Johansen.” He grabbed his crotch. “Oh baby, she was hot! She was thirty-two when I was sixteen, and she taught me everything I know.”
Today he won’t stop talking about the potential sex he can get from looking pathetic. “Seriously, you should come out with us. One look at that chair, and we’ll all get lucky.”
“I thought you made plans with that hottie nurse, Zoe.” Freeberg looks like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He talks a good game, but sometimes he lies.
Zoe used to be our night nurse until she got caught doing Freeberg in the patient lounge after hours. At least, that’s what he says.
But maybe she just got transferred to another floor. Or she turned him down. I can’t imagine choosing beer over a girl with double-D breasts that you can see through a bra, a T-shirt, and a hospital-issue top, but then again, I’m not Freeberg. He has the rest of his life to have sex.
Freeberg reconsiders. “Hell, maybe I should call old Zoe. You know, I bet she could find someone to fuckin sit on your face. What do you say, Frank? You know, like, it’s better than nothing.”
She walks into my room, completely naked. She climbs onto my bed, wrapping her legs around my dead body so she can kiss me. Her long brown hair tickles my face. Her hair is so soft, and I open my mouth, alive and intact, hard as a rock. The fantasy is perfect until she looks at me. Meredith. She covers herself and vanishes. Poof! No hookers, no friends, no parties in the back of the truck.
I don’t deserve another chance.
I should tell Freeberg, no, no thanks, sorry, buddy. I’m going to go home to my room and never open the door. Die.
But instead, I play along. “Sure, man, that would be fucking awesome,” the way he would, but instead of laughing, he says, “Uh-oh.” It must be Harry, still sulking, back for his apology.
I wait for the shuffle steps, the Yankees score sheet, some new joke about dumb blondes. A Coke. Gossip from school. Took him long enough.
My mother’s cheeks are flushed, but her face is dead and expressionless. She gathers the family pictures off my bulletin board and the stack of cards out of the drawer. “It’s cold and gray. We’re expecting a drizzle,” she says. Right after the accident, I caught her checking me out below the waist. She stared at my legs and began to pray, but the power of her faith couldn’t do anything more than modern medicine could.
She wraps the photos in bubble wrap and takes out a rubber band to keep the cards organized.
“We don’t have to save them,” I say.
She finishes the job, her shoulders slumped. Freeberg shoots an extra rubber band across the room. “Last night, we thought we might get snow,” she says, “but we didn’t. Not even a frost. The grass looks dead.” Like me, like us. Looks dead, but is alive. How appropriate.
Freeberg scribbles his name and phone number on a hospital brochure. “Call me,” he says, stuffing it into my bag. He pops a wheelie and spins around. Show off. “If I don’t hear from you, I’m coming to get you.”
“Great. I’ll give you a call ASAP.” My mother doesn’t smile. She thinks we’re sincere, but she’s wrong. Freeberg won’t come anywhere near our neighborhood. We will never see this guy again.
She sidesteps around him, grabs my bags, and nearly runs smack into the woman who picks up the trays. “I’ll be back soon,” she says, squeezing past the tall stack of empty plates and cups. Freeberg rolls after the cart, panting like a dog, but stops at the door and settles back on his tires. He blows her a loud and piercing kiss, then cracks up. “She just flipped me the bird.”
People call Freeberg “the Cat.” As in lucky. Nine lives.
When Freeberg was three, he crossed a highway in his diaper. When he was eleven, he stole a motorcycle and drove it five miles. At thirteen, he got so drunk his stomach had to be pumped. And two years ago, he broke both his legs when he fell off a ladder, trying to visit his girlfriend at three a.m.
Freeberg broke his back when, drunk as a skunk, he jumped into a swimming pool—a perfect cannonball. The only problem was that the owners of the pool had recently drained it. Ouch.
And even then, he didn’t break it all the way. He has enough control of his quads to walk to the bathroom with crutches and braces.
My parents can’t even look at him.
When I broke my neck, I snapped the cord all the way through.
Cecilia comes back in with one hand behind her back and a big foil balloon floating above and behind her. She must not realize we can see it. “Surprise.” She extends her arms to my face. After a momentary lag, the balloon follows. She ties it to my chair. “It was the only one they had,” she says. She wiggles past Freeberg, who pinches her ass.
The balloon says, G
et Well Soon.
Freeberg bats the balloon. “You want to suck it?” he asks.
When I was a kid, I loved sucking helium. The summer between seventh and eighth grade, Harry and I mowed four lawns in one day just so we could buy the deluxe bouquet. Sixteen balloons. We couldn’t wait.
In my room, sweaty and tired, we took turns, sucking in the helium and laughing like crazy, until my dad walked in. “What are you two doing?” he yelled. “Don’t you have any respect for your bodies?”
Ironic. But those were the years of “treat your body like a temple”—my father worked out every morning, didn’t eat eggs or red meat or bacon. That day, he yanked the balloon carcasses out of our hands, dumped them in the garbage, and grounded me for a week. I didn’t care. Sucking gas is one of those rights of passage, like your first bike, your first home run, your first kiss, your first time.
Meredith was my first.
When she was happy, her smile made me feel strong. Physical. Before her, the biggest risk I took was swinging at a three-and-two pitch with two outs in the inning. Before her, I’d only kissed girls. Twice.
Cecilia’s pink-and-green balloon bobs up and down, like it’s laughing at a good joke. Freeberg bats it one last time.
“No.” I am not going to suck the helium. I am not going to meet the guys. My life is over.
I stare at my wheelchair at the side of my bed. The doctor says that the wheelchair is the key to independence, but my mother has to put me in it first. What if she can’t? What if they decide it is not worth the trouble to take care of me?
What happens then, Doctor? What happens then?
Freeberg is leaving for therapy as my mother walks into the room. “It was nice meeting you, Richard.” She holds out her hand, and they shake. “Take care.”
She is wearing clothes she hasn’t put on in years, clothes she hasn’t worn since my parents worked in an office together, when I am sure they still loved each other. “Where’s Harry?” she asks. “He said he’d meet us here.”
Freeberg feigns dismay. “You mean your friend? The one with the pockmarks all over his face? The baggy jeans? That friend? Shit, I had no idea…”
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