Stronger

by Jeff Bauman

  I know it was a burden, but knowing Erin, she shouldered it without complaint. At least my family hadn’t rejected or blamed her, like she had feared. She stayed with me for several hours that day, although it couldn’t have been easy, either in her condition or mine. Erin was exhausted and overwhelmed. I was so bruised and burned I didn’t look like myself, and my body was… short. Everyone was worried about my mental state.

  “If Jeff can do this with me,” Erin had told her sister Jill the previous night, when they were down in the hospital lobby taking a break, “then I can handle anything. But he has to want it. I can’t do it for him.”

  How would I react when I woke up and discovered what had happened? Would I fall into despair? Would I be angry? Would I even be myself anymore?

  Around five that evening, Erin decided to leave. Michele was awake and recovering from another surgery, so Erin and Gail drove across town to spend a few hours with her.

  And of course, that was exactly when I decided to wake up.

  5.

  The first thing I remember is my best friend Sully’s face. He was standing beside the bed, looking down at me. I turned and saw his ex-girlfriend Jill standing on the other side. Honestly, they didn’t look so good.

  It was late afternoon on Tuesday, almost thirty hours after the bombing. According to the doctors, I wasn’t expected to be awake until Wednesday. So of course Sully takes credit.

  “I shouted, ‘BAU-MAN, wake up,’ ” he tells people proudly, especially after he’s had a few. “I barked it, just like that: ‘BO-MAN! BO-MAN! Wake up!’ And he woke up.”

  What actually woke me up was Jill stroking my hair. I was lying somewhere, and I felt something lightly touching my head, and I opened my eyes.

  My whole body hurt. They had me on morphine for the worst of the pain, but it still felt like I’d taken one of those movie beatings, where the bad guys kick you a few extra times in the stomach for good measure, even after you’re down. When I turned my head, it hurt. I couldn’t even gather my thoughts, I was in so much pain.

  I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t. My throat was dry, but I couldn’t move my tongue. I panicked. I thought I was choking. Then I noticed the tube jammed down my throat.

  I stared at Sully and Jill. They were staring at me. Waiting. What could I say? Nothing, not with that tube in my mouth. I lifted my arm and made a motion like writing. I think it was Jill who gave me the pencil and pad of paper.

  I wrote: Lt. Dan.

  Sully laughed out loud. “Only Bauman,” he said. Lt. Dan was Forrest Gump’s commanding officer. He lost his legs in Vietnam.

  I motioned toward the lower part of my body.

  “Yeah,” Sully said sadly. “You lost your legs.”

  I motioned for the paper again. I had one more thing to say. I wrote…

  Oh man, I wish I knew what I had written, because everybody remembers something different. It’s been reported many times, first by Bloomberg News, then by the Boston Globe and others, that I wrote Bag. Saw the guy. Looked right at me. That’s what Chris—my half brother on Dad’s side—remembers, and he’s the one who talked to the press. The family members on Mom’s side disagree. They say I drew pictures, although they can’t agree on what I drew.

  Sully remembers me pointing to my eyes. Then drawing a backpack. A bomb. Then a face. I gave the saw it sign again with my fingers.

  And he understood.

  He walked out into the hallway with my note, his hands shaking. That’s the one detail everyone agrees on: that when Sully came out of my room, he was white and shaking. He didn’t say a word. He just handed my note to Uncle Bob (or, in some versions, to my dad). My family had just come out of a meeting with the FBI liaison for victim relations, an ass-kicking older woman named Renee Morell, who had been explaining how the FBI would help relatives with hotel rooms and meal credits.

  Uncle Bob (or maybe my dad) passed the note to Ms. Morell, who called the local FBI office. Or maybe Uncle Bob called the FBI, whose number was posted in the hallway.

  Until recently, I had assumed the agents were simply waiting for me. I told the EMT in the ambulance that I had seen the bomber, and for me, that seemed like only seconds ago. Surely, I thought, someone would be waiting to take my testimony. That was why it took them only a minute to arrive.

  I found out later it took almost an hour, I just don’t remember it. In fact, I don’t even remember writing the note. I remember writing “Lt. Dan,” and watching Sully’s face turn from fear to laughter, and feeling… good. Like myself. Then my breathing tube was out, and two FBI agents and the commissioner of the Massachusetts State Police were standing beside my bed. They pulled the curtain behind them, Law & Order style, pulled up some chairs, and started asking questions.

  They asked me what I had seen.

  “I saw the guy.”

  They asked me for a description.

  Dark baseball cap. Dark jacket, maybe leather. Dark sunglasses.

  “What kind?”

  Um… aviators.

  His jacket was open. He was wearing a gray shirt. And a backpack. It was a JanSport.

  “A JanSport? You remember that?”

  Clearly.

  They asked me for a physical description.

  Taller than me. Stubble. Light skin.

  “He was white?”

  Yes, white.

  Why did you notice him?

  “He was all business.”

  That was the first time I said that, but it sticks with me now. It’s the phrase that jumps into my mind whenever I picture Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He was a bad dude. Not bad like cool, but bad like angry. Troubled. One look, and you knew he was not someone to mess with. He’d punch your teeth out just for bumping him. He was all business.

  “He wasn’t there to enjoy himself,” I told the FBI. “He was there for a reason.”

  I told them how we eyeballed each other, and then how he was gone, but his backpack was still there, on the ground. The JanSport.

  “Just look for me,” I said. “If you have video, look for me. He was beside me. Right beside me.”

  At the end, I wrote down a description. That’s all I know for sure. I think the conversation happened the way I described it. I remember all those things. I can picture them right now. But is that exactly what I told the FBI? How can I know for sure? I don’t think they recorded the conversation, and I don’t know what happened to my written description or my original note. I assume it’s all in their case files somewhere.

  “Thank you,” one of the agents said at the end. “Do you mind if we come back later?”

  I nodded, and they left. At that point, I was wiped out. But I was happy. I’d done as much as I could do, and it felt good, like I was part of the team. I turned to my dad, who had been sitting quietly in the corner. “Do you think I helped?”

  “You helped,” he said. “Before they talked to you, I don’t think they had any idea who they were looking for.”

  That didn’t make any sense to me. This guy had been standing in a crowd. There were cameras everywhere. How could they not know who he was? How could I have been the only one to notice him?

  My brother Tim said later that he overheard the FBI agents talking by the elevator on their way out.

  “What do you think?” one of them said. “The kid’s on a lot of painkillers.”

  “It’s the best information we’ve got,” the other replied.

  The agents came back a few hours later. This time, they brought a stack of photographs. It was late at night, and the hospital was quiet. I sat in bed with a flashlight for twenty minutes, studying each face. I handed them back. None of them were the guy I had seen. If the agents were disappointed, they didn’t show it.

  “I want to see Erin,” I said after they left.

  Erin had just arrived at Michele’s room when she got the call that I was alert. By the time she’d made it back, the FBI was interviewing me. Then my family had wanted to see me. Then the FBI had come back again.

&
nbsp; It was around midnight before we finally got time to ourselves. Erin’s sister Gail remembers looking in the doorway window and seeing us sitting on the bed, whispering, our heads close together. There were two security guards stationed outside my door, but otherwise the hospital was still, until a nurse came by to check on me.

  “Can you give them a minute?” Gail asked.

  She did. The nurse left us sitting together, under a single small light, with my cords and tubes dangling around us. I don’t know what I said. I had been blown up; Erin had been without basic comforts for two days. I hope that I said, “I love you.”

  I probably said, “Thank you for being here.”

  There was no place I’d rather have been. That was what Erin told me later. She said that when she saw me smile, she knew I was still her person. And she knew this was where she wanted to be. With me.

  I didn’t sleep that night, so I was awake when the FBI agents arrived early on Wednesday morning. Again, they gave me a stack of photographs without explanation. Again, I studied every face. None looked like the guy I had seen, and only a few fit my general description. I think they were looking for accomplices. They wanted to know if I had noticed any of these people in the crowd. I told them I hadn’t. The guy had been alone.

  “We’d like to bring in a sketch artist,” they said.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “But only after his surgery,” a nurse added.

  The original amputation of my legs had been an emergency procedure. They chopped through my knees and sealed the wounds to save my life. Now I needed a formal amputation to even my legs and shape my stumps for prosthetics. Legs the same length would mean the same amount of work on both sides. Over time, this would help prevent back and hip pain, common problems for people with artificial legs. The better this surgery went, explained my surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey Kalish, the easier it would be for me to walk again.

  And that was all I wanted. I wanted to walk.

  The surgery took several hours, as Dr. Kalish separated each layer of skin, tissue, and muscle in my legs. He cut each layer a little shorter than the one beside it, angling inward with the outer layers longest. Lastly, he sawed off the ends of my femurs and tucked the muscles, then the arteries, then my fatty tissues and nerves, around them. My skin came last, pulled together at the ends to encase everything inside. Like a sausage. When I woke up that afternoon, I was four inches shorter, and my legs were on fire. Bloody bandages were wrapped around the ends, but there were no stitches. The wounds would be left open for a few days, so that blood and fluid could drain.

  When the FBI sketch artist arrived soon after, the nurses weren’t happy.

  “It’s up to Jeff,” they told the FBI while glancing at me, clearly trying to convince me to send them away. They wanted to catch the bombers as much as anyone, but I was in a delicate condition. I had just woken up from major surgery. I had bleeding wounds. I was susceptible to infections, infarctions, and a hundred other types of medical-sounding stuff.

  I hate medical-sounding stuff.

  But I wanted to work with the sketch artist. I wanted to do my part. We went over it again and again: talking, erasing, drawing. Stopping while I tried to picture the face of the killer, the guy who stared at me, all business, secretly excited by the fact that he was taking my life. It took two hours, but in the end, I was amazed. The drawing looked exactly like the guy who had stood beside me.

  That evening, the press later reported, the police found a suspect in store surveillance video taken near the scene, along with a possible accomplice. My description was essential, they said, because FBI experts had been sifting through hundreds of hours of footage, featuring thousands of faces. It was vital to narrow the focus.

  I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know how much I really helped, because the FBI agents never came back. I meet with the FBI every month, just like many other victims, so they can fill me in on the case, and ask me a few questions if needed, but they don’t tell me much.

  I talk with state and local cops all the time, though. I meet them at charity events, or they come over and shake my hand when I’m out.

  “We heard about what you did,” they tell me. “Identifying those guys.”

  “It was nothing,” I say. “Just trying to do my part.”

  “No, Jeff,” they tell me. “It wasn’t nothing.” Sometimes I feel like they want to tell me more, but they can’t. I understand. It’s an ongoing investigation. It’s strictly need-to-know, and I’m a civilian. I don’t have a need. “You should be proud,” they tell me. “You’re a big part of this. You got the ball rolling.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, laughing. “But you guys are the heroes. You nailed them.”

  “No,” they always say. “We’re not heroes. We were just doing our jobs.”

  6.

  People always want to know how I felt in those first few days. Was I guilty that I hadn’t done more to stop the bombing? Was I angry? Was I afraid? Was I Boston Strong?

  No, I was happy to be alive.

  Besides that, I was in pain. It was intense physical pain, the kind that doesn’t leave you much energy for anything else. It was kind of like when you really have to go to the bathroom, I mean, like a real emergency, when you think you might not make it. You can’t focus on anything else, right?

  My pain was like that. The hospital had me on a four-hour cycle of pain medication, but even when the pills were at their strongest, I hurt. Everywhere. My arm where shrapnel had punctured it, my stomach where they had sliced me open for surgery. With both my eardrums ruptured, my head was always ringing. The burns on my back were so raw, it was uncomfortable to lie on them, but even more uncomfortable to move. I couldn’t yet roll onto my side, but every time I moved even a few inches, it felt like my skin was sliding off.

  And every time my legs touched anything—the sheets, my IV tubes, each other—pain shot through my body. The nerves in my legs were lit up by the blast, and they were ready to fire. Mostly the pain was sharp, like needles, but sometimes it would increase without warning, until it felt like someone was pounding the ends of my legs with a baseball bat. Coffee would cramp my legs, so I only drank it once in the hospital. Certain sounds and smells would set off convulsions in my thighs, sending pain cascading through my torso and down into my phantom limbs.

  I tried to ignore it. I had a morphine button I could push, but I tried not to use it. I talked with my family. I tried to watch the news, but all they talked about was the bombing. And every time they talked about the bombing, sooner or later, they’d show pictures of explosions and blood, and they’d show that photograph of me in the wheelchair.

  So I watched a lot of ESPN, drowning the hours in scores and highlights. It was late in the hockey season, but early for baseball. The Red Sox were in Cleveland. I watched as Victorino slapped in a few runs, and Aceves melted down in the sixth, but I was watching from a different planet. I was on a lot of medication; I felt best when the world just floated past.

  I knew I needed to stay positive, especially around Mom. That was my priority. Mom had always struggled. She had worried about me all my life, even when I was a little kid. I didn’t have to see her red eyes and drawn face to know this was killing her. So I never told her about my pain. I called her in right after taking my medicine, so I was less likely to wince or have a panic attack. I tried not to complain.

  “I knew there were two ways you could go,” Mom tells me now, her hands still shaking. “You could be…” She stops. Mom doesn’t say depressed, because she doesn’t like that word, but that’s what she means. “You could have taken it hard, Jeff. Or you could be Bauman.”

  That’s her nickname for me. Mom calls me Bauman or Bo. Jeff is my dad’s name.

  “I don’t know if you remember…”

  “I don’t, Mom,” I tell her, knowing what’s coming.

  “… we were all standing over you.”

  “I know. It’s creepy.”

  “And you opened your eyes
. This was early, maybe Tuesday, so we weren’t expecting it. We didn’t know what to say. Your eyes went from one person to the next, and nobody was sure whether you recognized them or not. Finally, you tried to speak. But you couldn’t. So it must have been Tuesday, right? Anyway, I bent down so you could whisper in my ear.

  “ ‘What is this,’ you whispered, ‘a funeral viewing? Everybody sit down.’ ”

  Mom usually cries when she tells that story. I’ve heard it five times, and maybe four of those times she’s ended in tears. That’s how important it is to her.

  “That’s when I knew,” she says. “You were still my Jeffrey. You weren’t going to be… sad. You were Bauman strong.”

  I’m not sure about Mom’s story. There are certain parts of it that don’t quite work. I was in the emergency intensive care unit, for one thing, so only two people were allowed in my room at a time. I know my family constantly broke that rule (we aren’t the best at following rules), but how could the whole family have been there?

  And when I woke up, I was on a breathing tube. How could I have whispered even those two sentences to her?

  But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe her. In fact, I know it’s true, that the moment must have happened, because it means so much to her. I know Mom. I know how her worry would have crushed her. She cries now, listing the things I can’t do: play hockey (I quit playing when I was thirteen), ride a bicycle (I don’t even own one), run a marathon (that was never gonna happen). I can imagine how she felt, worrying that I would never smile and be happy again.

  And besides, my brother Tim tells a similar story. In his version, everyone was there, and he was squeezing my hand, asking if I knew who he was, when I made the joke.

  So maybe it happened on Wednesday, after my third surgery. Or maybe it happened on Monday night, before my second surgery. Maybe they had me off the breathing tube for a while, before slicing open my stomach and poking around inside me.

  It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter if it never quite happened like that. Everybody has a story about those days, which they swear is true, even though none of the stories are the same. They say it happened on Tuesday, while someone else swears it was the next week.