“Frank? What happened?” Mom keeps her nose above and beyond Freeberg. “Where’s Harry? You didn’t have an argument, did you?”
“See you in the fast lane,” Freeberg says, rolling out the door.
I wait for the latest installment of “Richard’s crude ways,” but Mom is distracted. For my last day in the hospital, she bites her tongue and stares at the chair. Or maybe, she’s worried about Harry.
“I should check at the desk or the cafeteria.”
Nobody moves. Certainly not me.
“We could call him. He can come back. It’s not too late. Plenty of time.” She clutches her notebook, the one Dad bought her for their anniversary, the one she had never used until she had to organize her questions.
What if his skin looks red? What if he has a coughing fit? What if I can’t get him out of bed?
Not all her questions. Not What if I can’t do it? The nurses and doctors never answer that one. Never the big ones, like What if I don’t like taking care of my son? Is there a place he can go? And, of course, never How did I end up with a paralyzed son and a cheating husband?
She sits on the side of my bed. “I’ll call Harry.” She dials, hangs up, dials, hangs up. The line is busy. “I’ll try one more time.”
“Maybe he took the phone off the hook.”
She tries three more times.
“Busy?”
She tries not to cry. Digs through her purse for the travel-size Bible. We have bigger problems.
“Help us, O Heavenly Father. My son needs your help. He needs your strength and wisdom.” She prays over me, like it will make a difference. “Help him on this very important day in his life. Give him the strength he needs.”
If I had died, my family could grieve. They could rejoice and remember the person I was. Move on.
“Amen.” She closes her Bible and rests her head on my chest. Her face is so close to mine, I can see her pores and her smeared makeup, the places where she wiped away old tears.
It’s hard to breathe against the weight of her head. She could kill me this way. If she pressed a little harder …
“Mom, sit up.” I cough. “Mom. I can’t breathe.” She bolts upright, and my breath returns.
“I couldn’t sleep a wink last night,” she says, attempting to smooth out my hair. My mother’s not a hugger, not like Harry’s mom. She needs her space.
My parents sleep in two beds pushed together. They keep a little space, a crack of air between them, so that they don’t have to touch. The crack grows maybe twice a year, when he’s cheating. She stopped touching me when I grew taller than my father, when she knew that I looked at girls and women.
Now she will have to touch me all the time. She’ll have to wash me and stretch me and get me up. She’ll have to look at me naked. She’ll have to shave and powder me.
Her breath is hot and sweet on my face. She dials Harry’s number one more time. She opens the book and squeezes it shut. Open and shut. Open and shut. “Doctor Rockingham should be here any minute. One more conference and we’re free and clear.” She pats my head. “How do you feel?”
Asking a head how he feels is about as stupid as telling a blind man to look. But able-bodied people—bodies—they can’t seem to remember that. They make the same mistake every day: Hi, Frank. How does that feel—oops. Even in the hospital, they say it: feel—oops. They put on these big clown-face smiles, like I am not just paralyzed, I am deaf or stupid. Sometimes they catch themselves. Hey, Frank, how do you—yeah. Sorry.
My mother says it again. “How do you feel?” She does not seem to understand that this idiom, this truly meaningless question, is now a bitter slap in the face. But, actually, I should give her some slack. At least she is trying to make some conversation with me.
Someone knocks on the door and my mother stands up, like we were just caught making out. “Hello, Doctor Rockingham, sir,” she says, straightening her skirt, trying to smile through tears. My mother is very impressed with Dr. Rockingham, aka Drock.
“Hello, Rosemary. Hello, Frank.” For my last day, our final meeting, he is alone. No gaggle of overworked, sleep-deprived residents to listen to his wisdom today.
I’ll almost miss his routine. “This, students, is Frank Marder, a complete C4-5. Can anyone tell me what that means?” They stutter and whisper, like I don’t know the truth. “And here’s Mr. Freeberg, an incomplete L4, the virtual lottery winner of spinal-cord injuries. Check out the difference between these two young men. Hey, Frank, how do you—”
Just because we can’t walk, doesn’t mean we are morons. When he comes back after rounds to flirt with sexy Stacey, my physical therapist, he slips the gold wedding band into the lab coat pocket. Freeberg cuts him slack. He forgives anybody anything if they’re trying to get a piece of ass. Just don’t ask him how he’s feeling.
Drock’s pathetic. He gives my mother a short, sterile embrace. I get a quick flick of the wrist. “Frank, you must be feeling great today.”
Drock is a little doctor, a short, thin man with small hands. He never sits down. Yesterday, Cecilia told me that he has a bald spot in the center of his skull. In the middle of the shiny circle, he sports a large mole, the shape of Oklahoma.
At the head of my bed, he and my mom look down at me. I am still, a breathing corpse.
“Going home. Now that’s great news.” His voice cracks; he coughs to cover it up, but we both know he sounds nervous.
“Sorry I’m late,” my father says, rushing in the door. He towers over Drock. “I had—”
“A meeting?” my mother asks.
Dad straightens his tie.
Drock directs the attention back to me. “You must be thrilled to be going home. We’re so happy for you, Frank, so very happy. You’ve made such progress.”
“Progress?” I ask. “Really?”
My father starts rubbing his hands, like he’s trying to set them on fire.
“Oh, yes, your skin looks great and you’re tolerating … let me see”—he checks the chart, but clearly can’t find what he’s looking for—“hours of time in the chair.” He wipes his forehead and shoots Mom a knowing glance. Uh-oh. When there’s good news, there’s the other kind, too.
“Sadly, though, the van, the new van”—the van they have been talking to my parents about, the van with all the fancy adaptations—“is not quite ready.” Drock looks at the wall above my head. There is a nick on the cleft of his chin. “It’s just a matter of days, maybe a week or two. The van,” he tells the lovely picture of flowers and daisies. “But for now … for now, Frank, my man, I feel that it’s best that you go home. If you need to get out of the house, there are a number of taxi services you can call.” He gives my mother a yellow card. “But the important thing is to start your life today.”
The doctor flinches when my father’s cell phone rings. “The office,” he says, heading for the door.
“Why can’t I stay until the van is ready?” Bad question. Drock looks away. Hey Drock, have you heard the one about the quad and the lying doctor?
He is ultimately saved by the bell—Stacey appears from outside my visual range to stand next to her man and my mom, a virtual trifecta of smiles. “Hi, Frank.” She turns to my mom. “Sorry I’m late.” She smiles at me. “Are you psyched to go home?” Her hair is pulled back in a big red headband, a little like Minnie Mouse’s. I try to imagine what her words would sound like in a higher octave. “I am so optimistic for you, Frank! Going home will be a total morale booster.”
Do they think I’m an idiot? What would be good for my morale is to get up off this fucking slab and walk out of here, not ride, dependent, no feeling, no nothing, no nothing ever again.
Freeberg sails by in his high-tech Quickie. Red. Fast. Built for the basketball court. He pops a wheelie and rests on his back tires, while he scrambles through his bedside table, looking for something. My mother is visibly uncomfortable in the presence of such an independent crip. “Is my car ready?” he asks. Freeberg thinks he’s gett
ing a special car with hand controls.
Drock shakes his head. “These things take time, Richard.”
Freeberg peels out, and my father reappears, hands now deep in pockets. Drock pulls my parents aside and hands them a packet of papers. They go over schedules and visits to the hospital. They take a few steps away. I hear: school, class, health, and friends. Adjustment, routine.
Health class, tenth grade. Ms. Markham, the new, young teacher, spoke to us with careful diction and a Southern twang. “What disability scares you most?” We sat there, hands folded. We hated when teachers played with our heads.
But we liked Ms. Markham. She was wearing her perky red-and-white checked dress with the low neck, too low for high school boys to care about the words she was saying.
“Duh … retardation,” someone said, and everyone laughed, haw, haw, haw, like we were the very retards he was referring to. None of us had to worry about disability. We were students. We lived in a suburb with clean streets and pine trees. Our parents had college educations.
Ms. Markham frowned, and raised her hand to regain some control, but all that did was shift her dress slightly to the right, giving me and Harry a nice shot of pink lace and curve.
Harry showed his appreciation by giving her the kind of answer she was looking for. “Paralysis,” he said over the remaining spatter of chuckles. “I would rather be dead than paralyzed.” The guy in front of me flinched; Harry shook out his legs. Someone else burped.
Hindsight is a head’s biggest tease.
My father hands Drock a business card. “If you ever want to double your pension…”
“I’ll let you know.” Drock shakes their hands. For me, he makes his token gesture—not the finger, but not a full wave, before heading for the door. “You’ve done a great job, Frank.”
Mom sits on the edge of my wheelchair and picks the remains of her nail polish.
Dad calls the office. “Yep, we’re taking him home today. Thanks, Clarissa. Yes. Yes. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Clarissa?”
“The new secretary.”
The transport team interrupts the possibility of public accusation. Two scrawny guys—neither of them look strong enough to transfer me. “Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Marder. How’s our guy, Frank, doing today?” The shorter one needs a shower.
“Nice balloon.” The clean one punches the smiley face, while the smelly one checks the brake. “You psyched to get out of here?”
Yes. Frank is very excited to leave the hospital. So please do not ruin this perfectly lovely day by doing anything rash or premature. Do not bend him too far; shift him, but do not drag him. Hold the sheets, not him.
“This will only take a minute, Frank. You know the drill.” They grab fistfuls of my sheets.
“Frank, we’re going to transfer you to the gurney. On three. Okay, Frank?”
What if I say no?
“Are you ready? One. Two.”
No. No. You can’t. I do not give you permission yet. You have to wait for me.
“Three…”
This is my body. My life.
“Lift.”
I hear the weight of my body, see the strain on their faces. The smile of success. They tuck in the sheet and strap me down. They talk like I’m not here.
“Man, did you see that new admit?”
“Yeah! Holy shit, the guy must weigh three hundred pounds. I can’t believe he’s on my service.”
They roll me out the door into an elevator, down halls with long fluorescent lights, until we are at the front door.
“Here you are!”
“Here we are,” my mother murmurs.
The doors open automatically. The transport guys shoot the shit with the security guard. The light hits my face for the first time in weeks.
The sky is not gray; it is almost white, filled with clouds. I squint to look up. Dad meets us at the door. I try to suck a whole mouthful of fresh air into my lungs. It is one of the few willful acts I can perform.
My mother takes my father’s elbow. She is holding Cecilia’s balloon.
“Let it go,” I say.
My mother begins to protest. “It’s a gift. From Cecilia. You don’t want to…” Her voice trails off.
“Let it go,” I repeat. She does. I don’t watch it fly away, but I know it does.
For Christmas, my father likes to give me tools. When I was eleven, it was a screwdriver. Then a wrench. At thirteen, a hammer. We made things: birdfeeders, bookshelves, and once, a small table. He said, “This is what men are supposed to do together. We make things with our hands.” We cleaned the tools and stored them in a red box in the garage. We’d go back to the house, our manly hands scraped and sore.
When I was fifteen, he gave me the prize I had been hoping for: an axe. We raced to the shed and sharpened the blade. “I bought us some wood,” he said. “Your mother loves sitting by the fire.” I threw off my coat.
In silence, we worked. Chopping and stacking until we had made two large piles of split logs, enough for a month’s worth of New England’s dankest nights. My chest ached. He draped his arm on my shoulder. “We men have to depend on one another.”
We men.
The transport team talks trash. My parents flank the gurney. Dad stands still, looking at the circle drive, waiting for the ambulance. He has been talking into his cell phone since we left Drock. “Trust me,” he says. “This is money in the bank.” He waves his hands in the air, talking into the headset, comparing money markets, stocks and bonds. “Depend on me,” he says.
This is what men are supposed to do.
My mother touches my head, as if to say yes, this is hard, standing here, waiting. Her nails have lost their color, so she pills the fringe of her scarf.
When the ambulance pulls up to the curb, my father says good-bye, and my mother walks in front of me to take her place at his side. “Here we go,” he says. He stands straight, like a soldier. She leans on him. Today, she can.
My mother won’t stop talking, talking, talking, talking in that singsong hey how ya doing, Frank, I love you, Frankie voice, like I am a baby and nothing is wrong. First they load me, then the chair, then my parents. “Don’t worry, Frankie, you’re going to be just fine.” My mother uses her public voice. She is trying to hold it together in front of the young men.
My ears hurt.
She takes a tissue from her purse, brings it to her nose, and blows. Such a simple action; she does it with such ease. Tissue, nose, blow, tissue, nose blow—she does it over and over again. Tissue, nose, blow. She is going to use the whole packet of tissues.
She’s scared. I’m scared. We’re all scared. We are all one big conjugation of scared. We haven’t even pulled out of the hospital parking lot.
She blows her nose again. Torture.
In the back of the ambulance, the light is bright. The life-saving equipment is marked and labeled, ready for action. My mother slumps in her seat, until her face is close to mine. Her long hair lingers on my face and tickles my nose. It smells like roses—fake roses. It makes me want to sneeze, but I’ll never turn down human-to-human contact. She sighs very quietly.
“For God’s sake, Rosemary, don’t cry,” my father says. He reaches over me and takes her hand. He holds her hand, like it is precious, squeezing it over and over again above me.
She holds back the tears but pushes away his hand. “I never realized how much equipment there is in an ambulance.”
He says nothing more. Nothing to her, nothing to me, nothing to the boys who drive this bus. We never talk. Maybe we have an understanding, but I don’t know what that understanding means now. I want to yell. My father is not a perfect man. But he is my father, and he needs to help my mother now.
They shift out of my frame of reference. Snap. The buff technician steps up and pulls some straps over my body. Maybe too tight, maybe just right. I don’t know. I am cargo, not a man.
Click.
I bet that’s just what a jail cell sounds like. Snap, click
. Click, snap. Good-bye. Go to jail.
Snap.
Click.
“Here we go, buddy,” the driver says, revving up the engine. “Next stop, home.” Hospital workers love calling crips like me “buddy.” They must get told during orientation that this makes us feel comfortable, or maybe it is so they don’t have to remember our names. Since I got hurt, I’ve been “buddy,” “pal,” “guy,” and “big man.” The list goes on. Cecilia always called me Frank. Zoe called me Frog. My mom liked her. So did my Dad. Zoe has a great body; I saw him look twice.
We pull out of the driveway and roll over the speed bump. The ambulance rattles, and my mother makes a little shrieking noise. “Could you drive a little slower?”
“Don’t worry,” the driver says, “we won’t break any laws today.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” my father says. He’s joking.
My mother never jokes. “Yesterday, on the six o’clock news, Dana Renaldi reported that there were more accidents in the past three months than there had been in the last year.”
“Is that so?” one of the guys asks.
“It is. And more fatalities than any three-month period in the last four.”
“Okay there, buddy?” my father asks. Yeah, he doesn’t use my name, either.
“Yeah,” I say, as loud as my supine lungs will let me. I’m sick of being on my back. I hope that one of them will get me into the chair ASAP. We make our way over a second speed bump, and this time, my head jiggles, like the oxygen tank and the first aid kit that are bolted to the wall. They don’t roll off and neither do I. We are heavy, inanimate objects. My head is, in many ways, a lot like an oxygen tank.
For some reason, that is reassuring.
home: day one
The house is the same, but different. The green leather couch and the brown recliner are back against the wall, and the coffee table is stuffed in a corner. The chairs do not bring people together. My mother’s triple-pile carpet is gone. In its place is space—smooth floor without friction. I sit in my chair in the middle of the room where the EMTs left me. Like a centerpiece.
Head Case Page 3