Stronger

by Jeff Bauman

  I could see it then: two personalities. Two guys trying to be there for me, each in his own way. They were just different. James Taylor… he was like having a dad. One who comes home after work, takes an interest, asks how you’ve been.

  Jimmy Buffett was like my uncle Bob.

  I don’t remember much about the concert. They gave about a hundred bombing victims chairs in front of the barriers, so we had in-front-of-the-front-row seats. Erin and both of our moms sat with me. We were too close to the speakers for my ears, so I spent much of the show watching musicians blast away into a sonic fog. After the concert, we went backstage. We met some of the performers, who were generous with their time. We laughed and chatted, and then James Taylor invited my family back to his dressing room, where we hung out for another half hour or so.

  By the time I left, the arena was empty, and even Erin and Mom had gone back to the hotel. The Colonnade Hotel, one of the nicest in Boston, had given us free rooms for the night so we wouldn’t have to travel back to Chelmsford. Kevin offered to drive me over, so we ended up down in the bowels of the arena with the roadies and Teamsters, winding through passageways, trying to figure out how to get to his car.

  Eventually, we passed this heavy dude hanging out by the loading dock. He looked like Silent Bob from the Kevin Smith movies: black clothes, long hair, hat turned backward. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man?”

  “Good,” I said, stopping to shake his hand. I tried to shake everyone’s hand I could.

  “Did you really see the bomber?” he said.

  “I did.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I looked right at him.”

  “Well, I was reading on the Internet, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in the story. There are a lot of things that just don’t make sense…”

  “We’re out of here,” Kevin said. He grabbed my wheelchair and started wheeling me quickly through the tunnels.

  The guy ran after us, talking about how the bombing was fake, how it was all a government plot.

  Kevin was pissed. He’s a nice guy; this was the first time I’d seen him ready to punch somebody in the face. Eventually, the guy stopped following us, and we made it to the car. But Kevin couldn’t stop thinking about it. I don’t think he said two words on the drive.

  Kevin was protective of me. Maybe too protective. He was unhappy with the AP photo of me in the wheelchair. He thought it was an invasion of my privacy, although he later admitted, “It turned out to be a good thing. It gave you the opportunity to prove that wasn’t the end of your story.”

  He thought the conspiracy theories were insulting. That they diminished me and my suffering. I can see that. I got blown up. I lost my legs. I’ve gone through hell, and so has my family. When people say it’s fake, they dismiss our pain. They dump on everything we’ve done to stick together and find joy in life.

  It doesn’t bother me, though. Why should it? I understand there is a group of people who think I am an actor, born without legs. That I’m a fake victim of a fake bombing. Why would I do that? I’m not sure. I don’t know if they think every victim is a fake, or if all the spectators on that block were fake, or if they think the marathon itself was fake.

  I don’t want to know. Worrying about conspiracy theories would be like hating the bombers, or obsessively thinking about how things could have gone differently. I don’t have time for it. I need my strength. I need to look forward. I can’t waste my energy on losers.

  As James Taylor sang at the concert, and he pointed right at me when he sang it: “They’ll take your soul if you let them, ah, but don’t you let them.”

  The funny thing is, I’m sympathetic to their thinking, at least a bit. The government can’t be trusted. They lied about nuclear weapons in Iraq. They kidnap people. They eavesdrop on our conversations. We know these for facts. They even lied about the eavesdropping, on national television, at the exact moment they were doing it to millions of people. They are too big to be punished, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  But fake a bombing? At a famous, crowded public event? In a major city in the middle of the day, with thousands of cameras around?

  That’s stupid.

  And it hurts people. It really does. I’m not on the Internet, so I’m not too affected by it, but the reason I’m not on the Internet is because of the conspiracies. (If you Google my name, the first choice is “Jeff Bauman fake.”) I don’t answer my phone for numbers I don’t know, and I keep my voice mail full so strangers can’t leave messages. Erin shut down her Facebook page because she didn’t want to read the messages. She has said, at least twice, that she hates the conspiracy theorists more than the bombers.

  “The bombers didn’t target us,” Erin says. “You just happened to be there. But the conspiracy people are trying to ruin our lives. They are terrorizing us, for no purpose, for some stupid hobby.”

  She doesn’t mean it—at least not the part about the “truthers” being worse than the bombers. There’s so much anger and frustration, no matter how much we try to stay positive. It comes out in unexpected ways.

  It’s hardest, I think, for Aunt Jenn. She runs my Facebook page, along with several volunteers, all strangers. She also moderates it, so she hears from the conspiracy nuts. People say terrible things about her and about me. They aren’t just dismissing our pain and suffering; they hate us because they think we’re government operatives. I tell her to ignore the accusations and threats, but she gets emotional. For a while, she had to stop updating the page, because one person was aggressively attacking her, insisting she talk with him. She couldn’t sleep, and she felt unsafe.

  “Our family has suffered so much,” she said. “Why are they doing this?”

  I laughed. “Saying that is just going to make them hate you more, Aunt Jenn.”

  I have no doubt writing this book will feed the conspiracy. There are all kinds of hidden messages in here, right? Of course! Once someone believes something like that, there’s no convincing them otherwise.

  It’s almost funny.

  Except for one thing: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was inspired by conspiracy theories. He believed that 9/11 was an American government plot to frame Muslims, and that lie was so central to his life that he reportedly convinced his own mother it was true. I don’t know if the conspiracy started him down the path to murderous hate, or if it was simply a key step in his decline. I think he was a sociopath looking for a reason. But even if 9/11 “truthing” was just an excuse, it wasn’t harmless. It was poison.

  The day after the concert, Aunt Jenn threw her annual summer party in her big backyard. She lives along a major road in an older house that her husband, Uncle Dale, had owned for decades. A new suburban neighborhood had been built behind it, but their property was grandfathered, so Dale can still park his dump trucks in the back. The yard is so big, you can barely see the trucks behind the pool.

  Aunt Jenn usually invited about eighty people to her party, but this year more than 150 came. Instead of the traditional barbecue, she had it professionally catered, and there was a raffle and silent auction. A dozen of my coworkers at Costco came and drank most of the beer. Carlos and Mel were there, along with Kevin. They were all part of our family now.

  Two men were jogging from Washington, D.C., to raise money for Martin’s family and me. They started at the Pentagon, stopped at Ground Zero, and planned to finish by running the course of the Boston Marathon. I’m not sure where the money came from—I imagine them running along pulling dollars out of bushes, although that’s probably not how it worked—but it was an impressive feat. They were scheduled to finish that morning, so Erin ran with them the last ten miles, sprinting down Boylston Street and across the marathon finish line for the first time.

  Afterward, the men came to Aunt Jenn’s party and gave me a check. Erin gave them her medal for finishing the Boston Marathon. The organizers had given everyone a medal, even those who couldn’t finish because of the bombing.

  “Don’t worry,�
� Erin told the men when they protested. “I’ll get a real one next year.”

  The men left soon after, either because they were tired from their run or because of my shirtless shenanigans, I’m not sure. I was feeling good, riding around in my wheelchair bare-chested, laughing and joking with everyone.

  Aunt Jenn kept trying to get me to put my shirt on. She said the sun would turn the burn scars on my torso red. But guess what? Aunt Jenn isn’t a doctor. I’m pretty sure she had no idea what she was talking about.

  By the time the beer started to run low, though, I was tired. It had been a busy week. But I was happy to be home, and happy to be with my family.

  I got out of my wheelchair, sat on the bottom step to Aunt Jenn’s aboveground pool, and hauled myself up with my arms. I sat on the edge for a while, enjoying the sunshine and laughing with Erin. Then I flipped myself over into the water.

  Aunt Jenn had bought Styrofoam noodles, in case I had trouble staying afloat. I didn’t need them. I just spread my arms and floated, weightless and happy, staring at the sky.

  27.

  On Tuesday, it was back to the grind at Spaulding. Now that I had my prosthetic legs, my workouts changed. I still did the crunches and stretches without my legs, and whatever those exercises are called where you lift your knee (or in my case, thigh) across your body toward the opposite shoulder.

  Then I would strap on my Geniums and try the same exercises. Suddenly, what had become natural turned into some real Navy SEAL–type shit. I thought the workouts were hard before, but they were nothing compared to working out with my artificial legs. I lay down on my back and tried to hold my legs off the floor. I lay on my stomach and tried the Superman, lifting my arms and legs straight out at the same time. The first time I did leg presses, it felt like the sockets were going to rip right off my thighs.

  Then we’d work on the practical stuff, like standing up from and sitting down in my wheelchair. Michelle put a harness under my crotch with a cord that attached to the ceiling and made me walk between two parallel bars. I hated that; I don’t feel comfortable with anything in the undercarriage region. So she switched to a belt, and held on to me from behind while I walked.

  The rest of the exercises hurt, but walking was the hardest. Walking involved mental work. I had to concentrate on shifting my weight so I could lift a leg. Then push it forward. Then put it down a few inches in front. I’d stop, focus, then lift the other leg. Nothing was easy. Every step took mental and physical effort. Every shift in my weight took trust that the leg would hold. I’d be huffing after two steps. By the end my shoulders and arms would be sore, because I’d been straining to hold myself up without even knowing it. It took me a full minute to walk ten feet.

  Part of it was the Genium legs. They were built with so many fail-safes to stop you from falling that any unorthodox motion locked them out. In the past, you’d see people with artificial legs jutting their hips, then swinging their legs in a half circle, producing a side-to-side swaying walk. This technique took less effort with each step, but cumulatively wore the body down. With the Genium, I had to step correctly each time. The leg wouldn’t allow anything else. There were no half measures. No shortcuts. The legs forced me to swap today’s pain for tomorrow’s gain, and all the other cliches of self-improvement culture. Walking was the most tiring part of my day.

  After walking practice, I’d lie on my back for my bridge. In a bridge you lift your torso, hips, and thighs so only your shoulders and feet are touching the ground. Most of the upward force comes from the legs, but it’s the thighs and core that hold the position. My legs, though, couldn’t produce upward force, because they were inanimate metal rods. And I struggled to keep my feet from slipping. Bridging meant controlling my weight while exerting maximum force and stretching my torso in a backward arch. It combined balance, strength, and flexibility.

  “The bridge is the key,” Michelle told me every session. “Once you can do a one-legged bridge on each side, you’ll have all the strength and coordination you need.”

  It was so important, she wouldn’t consider moving on to more complicated processes, like walking on slanted surfaces or stairs, until I mastered it. Until I could hold my two-legged bridge for thirty seconds, I was stuck with small steps on the parallel bars.

  I could handle the physical exertion. I was used to it by then, and I’d seen progress. I was obviously stronger, if not necessarily confident. It was the rest of my life that was becoming a struggle. Erin was working five days a week, and the effort was wearing her down. Her boss was understanding, letting her take an occasional morning off to spend with me at Spaulding, or an extralong lunch so we could relax in Boston after my workout. They let her switch her schedule so that she could leave at three to beat the traffic back to Chelmsford.

  It didn’t work. Even leaving at three, it took her two hours to get to Mom’s apartment. By then, she was worn out and cranky, and I was anxious. The joy of being alone in my room had turned into loneliness. My body needed rest, but I couldn’t sleep, so the days crept by. Mom was trying; she was working hard to give me what I needed, but I didn’t want to… hang out with her. And since I couldn’t drive, I was trapped in the apartment. It was a mile to any business besides a bank, with no sidewalk.

  I had visitors, but I was beginning to lose patience with some of the people who came by. Aunt Jenn, for instance, was always trying to get me to open up about my feelings. Several articles had quoted me as saying that after the explosion, I thought I was going to die, and that I was okay with that.

  “I want to talk about it,” Aunt Jenn told me. “I’m not comfortable with that feeling.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it. Unless you’ve been there, how can you understand? I looked down that day, and my legs were applesauce.

  I saw my feet, and they weren’t attached to my body.

  Maybe it would be better if I didn’t remember that so clearly, because once you’ve seen something like that, you don’t sleep. I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep well again.

  I didn’t want to die. No way. I wanted to live. But my body had been ripped apart; I was lying in a pool of my own blood, and when that happens, you die. There was nothing I could do about it. I was going to die. So I accepted it. I saw the good in my life. I was happy for the time I had.

  Maybe that doesn’t make me a fighter. Maybe even though acceptance lasted only a second, until Carlos Arredondo lifted me up, that doesn’t gibe with the “no pain, no gain, work hard, play hard, never give up” style of looking at the world. Maybe a true hero would have screamed, Hell no.

  But I’m not that guy.

  “Okay, I understand,” Aunt Jenn said when I didn’t respond. “You’re not ready. I understand. But one day, Jeff, we’re going to talk about everything.”

  No we’re not, Aunt Jenn. I’m not that guy, either.

  I preferred Derek and Sully, who never asked me anything. I bought a flat-screen television, put it in my room, and we’d play PlayStation. EA Sports. MLB: The Show.

  I preferred the Red Sox, who were slowly pulling away from the rest of their division, despite their lack of stars.

  But Derek and Sully both worked: Derek for Uncle Bob, and Sully for his stepfather (who was divorced from his mother, but broken family is still family). Derek often came by in the afternoon, when Uncle Bob gave him time off to hang with me. Sully would disappear for days.

  So I spent most of the afternoon alone. Playing video games. Fiddling with my guitar. I’d break out my orange amps (another gift) and play my olive-colored Epiphone, the one the guy in Oregon had given me, until my damaged ears were ringing. It helped me forget what the days were really like. How my life was going to be. I’d learn to drive one day. I’d learn to walk. But I’d always be limited in what I could do.

  I could never play pickup basketball. Never join a coed softball team. Never run. Never fly a plane.

  I couldn’t go back to my old job at Costco, carrying heavy loads of food to the displays, turning
rotisserie chickens, standing at a counter chopping vegetables. And the last thing I wanted was to be given a handicapped job. I didn’t want to be some sort of greeter, like a store mascot. If I was at the front of the store, with my artificial legs, it would be a circus.

  I wanted Erin. She didn’t have to ask what I needed, because she knew what I was going through. She would tell me to lie down when she knew my legs were hurting. She would give me a hug when I woke up in the morning and tried to get out of bed. I had terrible nightmares. I don’t remember what they were about, but I’d wake up sweating and feverish. Erin would rub my back, sometimes for an hour, until I calmed down enough to lie still.

  “Move in with me,” I’d tell her.

  She’d sigh. “I can’t do that.”

  She was practically living out of her car. She was staying with me at Mom’s four or five nights a week, but there wasn’t room for her stuff. She had her clothes in the backseat, hauling them back and forth between Boston and Chelmsford. When she wasn’t with me, she’d stay at her apartment in Brighton, or she’d drive to her parents’ house and stay the night with them. Remy and Michele had gone home for the summer to recover from their wounds, so I think her parents’ house was the only place she felt comfortable.

  “Move in with me,” I’d tell her.

  And she’d say, “Not here, Jeff. I can’t move in here.”

  I needed her. Without Erin, my life was hell. I was lonely. I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie awake thinking about the bombing, feeling depressed and tense for hours. It wasn’t sights or sounds, or even smells, that troubled me. It was the feeling of helplessness. Of lying in the street with no legs and no way to get up. There were nights on end when I never slept at all, not for a second.

  Most days, I’d start texting Erin after lunch.

  What time u comin?