She went out again in Newport with her friends, but it wasn’t the same. She was still taking painkillers—the pain and throbbing in her leg still woke her up at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. on many nights—and she didn’t want to drink when she was medicated. The places she loved, where she had felt at home, had turned into obstacle courses. One night at SpeakEasy, one of their regular haunts, she tried to get upstairs to the bathroom and couldn’t. Her friend Jason offered to carry her. “Just leave me alone,” she told him, the darkness in her voice surprising everyone. The well-intentioned offer had touched a nerve. Heather’s independence was her most prized possession. She remembered how she used to walk home alone from bars in the wee hours, never worrying that anyone would try to hurt her. Now she couldn’t run away if someone did. When a noise awakened her in the middle of the night, she was struck again by her own helplessness. If someone broke into her apartment, there would be no time for her to put on her other leg and get away. Such thoughts had not come to her in the hospital, when she had been surrounded by people. It was only now, on her own with time to think, that the stark reality of her limitations started to sink in.
And she was truly on her own now: The ex-boyfriend who had come back to her after the bombing, pledging to be there for her—he was gone again. It had been a gamble from the start, Heather had known that. Their history had left her with no illusions, but still, she had wanted to—maybe she had needed to—believe him when he asked her in the hospital for another chance. For a while, it seemed like he had meant it. He drove her home from the hospital; he helped her parents and pitched in at her fund-raisers. By late July, though, she could see he had not changed. He had let her down—again. It was over, and this time, there would be no second chances. Heather was hurt and angry, but grateful at least for the clarity, if not the timing. She had never needed someone more. Of the bombing victims Heather had gotten to know, she was now the only one completely on her own. Soon enough she would drive herself, carry her own bags, change her own lightbulbs. Months later she would wonder if her self-reliance had sped up her progress.
Even with all this pressing down on her, though, it was possible, for a few seconds, to forget about her leg. It happened at home one day when the doorbell rang. She was sitting on her bed, not wearing her prosthetic, and she leapt toward the door at the familiar sound. Her movement was an act of memory and instinct, but it was an outdated memory. She had only one leg now to land on, and she landed badly, falling on the floor. It hurt, and it was humiliating. It was like she was being punished for forgetting. Such rebukes came without warning. At the end of May, three weeks after going home from the hospital, Heather went to Boston for a One Fund concert. The five-hour benefit show brought together a dozen well-known bands and musicians, some with Boston ties, to raise money for the victims. Many of the marathon amputees were there in front-row seats. Jeff Bauman attended, and Carlos Arredondo, the bystander who had helped him. Heather sat next to Mery Daniel, another woman who had lost a leg. Her friend Roseann came, too. It was the first time all of them had had a chance to talk.
For weeks, Heather had been focused on her own ordeal. She had not watched the news; her knowledge of the other victims had been limited. Sitting now with others who had gone through the same thing, she felt herself part of a new community. Together, they welcomed hugs from members of New Kids on the Block and reveled in their proximity to Aerosmith. James Taylor and Carole King serenaded them with “You’ve Got a Friend.” Heather was surprised to find herself crying, for the first time, in public. It felt okay. The other victims were mostly strangers, but in one important way, she knew them better than anyone. When the show was over, Heather and one of her friends stopped in a restroom before leaving the TD Garden. The floor was wet, and her crutch slipped out from under her. She fell hard onto the concrete. Pain ricocheted through her leg; all the joy of the night drained instantly away. Don’t forget, the pain seemed to say. Nothing will be easy for you now.
She had been with Mery earlier that day, at a photo shoot for People magazine. Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a dancer who had suffered an amputation, was there, too. The shoot, at Spaulding, made them laugh. The magazine stylists had dressed them in “Boston Strong”–themed T-shirts; Heather couldn’t believe she was going to be in People wearing a T-shirt. The photographer had called for “wind” to blow their hair, so an assistant stood in front them waving a piece of cardboard. The three women, each one missing a leg, stood on a platform with a slightly tilted surface. Adrianne wore her brand-new prosthesis; she had just gotten it that day. Frightened of falling, trying not to lose their balance, they held on to one another as the camera clicked and clicked. It was nerve-racking and ridiculous; how could it possibly produce a decent picture? They could not believe it when the photo landed on the cover, their smiling faces radiating confidence. The contradiction cut through her new life—the public snapshots, with their airbrushed theme of triumph, and the complex private realm where fear and strength and pain were all tangled up together.
• • •
On a Tuesday morning in mid-August, Heather stood in her bathroom blow-drying her hair. She spritzed herself lightly with perfume, finished a container of yogurt, and turned off the TV, where a weatherman was forecasting fog. She wore small hoop earrings, a mint-green and lemon-yellow sweater, and white Top-Sider loafers with navy trim. She also wore her prosthetic leg. It was her second day back on the job at Raytheon, the defense contractor where she worked in human resources. After the bombing, Heather had known the time wasn’t right for a new job in Boston, or anywhere else. She needed her friends and family nearby—for now—so she had made her peace with staying where she was. There were moments, though, when it was hard. Back in June, a call had come from a company down south, asking her if she was interested in a job. No, she had told them, feeling a pang of loss. Instead, she would immerse herself in what she knew. She had started slowly the previous day, working for only five hours, sorting through the six hundred e-mails in her inbox. There had been a small party, with a cake, to welcome her back. Today would be more like a regular day: seven hours, with conference calls and stacks of files awaiting her review. She needed to be there at 9:00, but she would squeeze in an hour of physical therapy first.
She drove across Newport, past the long gray sweep of Easton’s Beach, to the office building where she did her therapy. The large, open room was already humming with people stretching, exercising, lifting weights, trying to bounce back from all kinds of injuries. Heather stood on a spot where strips of tape made a star pattern on the carpet, and practiced tapping the heel of her prosthetic foot on each point of the star. It was dull, repetitive work, and surprisingly hard. She switched legs, trying it with her good foot. “It’s the calf muscles,” she said, quickly figuring out what was missing. “I don’t have the calf.” She moved through a series of deep knee bends; they seemed to be getting easier. Her therapist placed a block on the floor in front of her, and Heather stepped forward, bending low to pick it up. “We want to give her back her gliding, graceful motion,” said Bert Reid, an owner of Olympic Physical Therapy, who had come over to greet her. “She’s come a million miles, and she’s got a million more to go.” Heather made a face: a million more? The previous week at PT, she had loped down the back hallway in a half run. It had been slow and halting and extremely painful, but it had given her a flash of breathless belief: She would run for real again someday. Now she returned to the hallway. Facing the buttermilk-colored wall, she sashayed down one side, taking small, quick sideways steps, then reversed direction and came swiftly back, past exam room doors and a row of framed Little League photos. Her leg was starting to ache.
“From the pounding? That’s okay,” the therapist said. “We have to train it to absorb the pounding.”
In the past, Heather had ended her sessions by icing her leg. But it was 8:45, almost time for work. “I don’t think I have time to ice it,” she said. Back in the car, she brushed out her hair
and reapplied her lipstick. She headed for the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through, waiting to order a medium hot with skim milk and Splenda. The line was long and slow. It felt, at last, like a typical Tuesday morning. She was finally getting back to her old routine—exactly what she had wanted—but it felt less satisfying than she had expected. There was no way around it: She was different—her perspective on the world, not just her leg—and she wasn’t sure she wanted the same things as before. The vividness and intensity of those days after the bombing had been like nothing she had ever known. Painful, yes, but also urgent and meaningful. It was almost inevitable that her old life would seem less gripping by comparison. Heather was deeply grateful to her employer; she knew she was lucky to have a job to come back to, good health insurance, and the flexibility to work part-time for now. She just didn’t know if she still aspired to be a human resources VP. Even with all she had lost, she felt an expanded sense of possibility. Before the bombing, she had been ready for a change. The change that had come, violent and unexpected, had transformed her in more ways than one. Maybe it had prepared her, too, for some purpose she could not yet see.
Turning into the driveway to the plant, she pulled out her employee ID card and hung it up on her rearview mirror. A blinking red sign beside the security checkpoint proudly announced the number of days without workplace injuries. Heather drove slowly through the gate. It was 9:00 A.M. Time to get to work.
• • •
Another day, another stretch of open hallway. Another group of medical professionals watching her walk. It had been four months since Heather’s leg had been amputated. She was back at Spaulding to see her doctor. As always, she had lots of questions: Would she ever stop shifting weight onto her good leg? Would her good ankle ever stop getting so swollen? What about the pain—would it ever go away? Her doctor, David Crandell, knelt in front of her as she removed her prosthetic leg and rolled off the soft protective sleeve she wore underneath. He held the stump of her leg in his hand, palpating it gently. Heather squirmed. It was still tender.
“So I’ll always have some pain?” she asked.
“Well, no,” the doctor said. “Not if you get to a certain level of activity. The tissue is getting used to bearing weight where it hasn’t had to. . . . It’s still only been a short period of time.”
She was almost afraid to ask her next question: “Will the limp go away?”
“Yes. Yes,” the doctor said without hesitation. “In several months, people will not know.”
Heather longed to believe it. Most of what she still endured, no one else could see. But the limp announced to the world that she was different. That type of red flag, marking her as a victim, was what she had been trying to avoid when she had decided not to keep her foot.
Now the doctor had a question: What were her goals going forward?
“To get rid of this limp,” Heather said firmly. “To get running like I used to run.”
• • •
The morning felt like fall, damp and cold and gray, as Heather drove north from Rhode Island to New Hampshire. She was going to see the people who had made her prosthetic leg, to check on another one they were making now. Waiting for her there, with the new prosthetic, was a pair of four-inch high heels, platform pumps in a pale beige. They were the shoes Heather had ordered online before the bombing, the ones that had made her cry the day she came home from the hospital. Now she was getting ready to wear them for the first time. It had not taken Heather long to decide that she would wear heels again. She was known for her love of beautiful shoes; dressing up was part of who she was. To give that up would be a kind of surrender, and she refused. Plenty of things worried Heather about her situation, but walking on a prosthetic leg in four-inch heels—that didn’t scare her a bit.
A few days before, near her home in Newport, she had stood up on a paddleboard in the ocean. It was the first time she had tried it since before the bombing, and she had been nervous. She had asked her friends to take her to a secluded spot where there would be fewer watching eyes, but somehow they ended up smack in the middle of a busy beach. She was self-conscious about her water leg—a waterproof prosthetic—but with an ACE bandage wrapped around the top, it was a convincing substitute. “Wow, that’s risky!” a stranger had remarked at the beach. Heather had assumed he meant her paddleboarding. Then she realized he was talking about her friend, who had carried an expensive camera into the water. The outing felt like keeping a promise to herself—she had vowed to make it onto the board by summer’s end, but she hadn’t quite believed that it was possible.
In the old brick mill that housed the headquarters of Next Step Bionics & Prosthetics, she rolled her jeans above her knee, removed her everyday prosthetic, and pressed her weight into the high-heel leg, waiting for the click of the pin that would hold it in place. The quick switch was becoming familiar routine. Like other twenty-first-century amputees—at least those blessed with generous insurance coverage—Heather had, in place of her human leg, a tool kit of specialized synthetic options. She had her regular leg and her water leg for showering and swimming, and she hoped to get another high-tech leg designed for running. She had bought a big bag to tote her growing collection of prosthetics, a quilted duffel in a pink-and-green paisley print. She would not be taking home the new high-heel leg today. It had to be sent to England for a final step: the manufacture of a custom-designed cover that would resemble her real leg as closely as possible, right down to the color of her skin and the shape of her toes. First, though, she needed to make sure the shape of it was perfect. She stood before a mirror in her four-inch pumps, her gaze shifting from one leg to the other. The calf, she observed, looked kind of flat. “Let me give you a little more muscle,” offered Dave Newman, a Next Step technician. He would add a little more ankle bone, too, while he was at it. It was easy to do, by heating up strips of lightweight foam and layering them on the prosthetic calf and ankle. Then he would sand it down again, sculpting and smoothing out the surface.
Down the hall in another room, a knot of reporters and six TV cameras were waiting. The company had invited the media to come see the work it was doing; the crews showed up, of course, because of Heather. It was time for her to make a brief appearance. She headed down the hall in her high heels, with the company president, Matt Albuquerque, holding her hand to steady her. Camera flashes lit up her face as she stepped through the door. Emerging from the room a few minutes later after answering every question, Heather turned to walk back down the hall. This time when Albuquerque reached for her hand, she pulled it away. “I can probably do it,” she said. Her eyes were bright and she was grinning.
CHAPTER 20
WINS AND LOSSES
Living with the memory of April
The woman, a stranger, walked in and handed him a Starbucks gift card. “You might need this,” she said. It was a small act of generosity, but it helped. The gift of hand-knit blankets helped, too, and the letters from schoolchildren in Kentucky and West Virginia. So did the wind chimes and painted ceramic hearts from the people of Newtown, Connecticut, still badly bruised from their own tragedy just months earlier. For Shane O’Hara and his staff at Marathon Sports, these and other gestures of kindness had helped them recover in the weeks after the first bomb exploded outside the front door. Their progress had been halting, but it had come. Focusing on the positive things seemed to hasten the pace.
There had been setbacks, too, including some insensitive comments from less conscientious visitors to the store. One of the first weekends after they reopened, a kid asked if the bombing had left limbs inside. O’Hara found the crassness shocking. At the end of June, he took a much-needed vacation with his family to their friends’ place on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. When he returned to work, he felt recharged and ready to go. Then, his first day back, someone came in and asked: “So, where did the bomb go off?” Just like that, his sense of peace and distance evaporated. It wasn’t that O’Hara a
nd his colleagues refused to talk about what they had gone through that April afternoon. They just wanted people to show the tact and respect the subject deserved.
Every day, the Marathon Sports staff came to work on Boylston Street knowing the memories could be stirred up at any time. If it wasn’t a customer’s remark, it was the TV trucks that gathered outside when the attack was back in the news. It was the curious tourists, visible through the store window, pausing at the site of the blast. O’Hara knew the bombing had changed him. He had become quieter, his appetite for jokes and pranks not what it used to be. Maybe all that would come back, but a few months after one of the hardest days of his life, he couldn’t be sure. “I just want it to be over,” he said. “And it never is going to be over.”
Boston, six months out from the bombing, had begun to move on, too. The passage, though, would be long. The marathon attack of 2013 would not fade easily, promising to linger indefinitely in the city’s consciousness. Later, it would surely take its rightful place in history, on the timeline of local events that had shaped the world beyond: the launching of the 9/11 terror attacks from Logan Airport; the red state–blue state convention speech by Barack Obama in 2004; the racial tensions and school desegregation battles of the 1970s; the gangland killings under the reign of James “Whitey” Bulger; the ascension of the Kennedys to near royalty; the agitation of local abolitionists and revolutionaries; the midnight ride of Paul Revere; and the shot heard around the world that heralded American independence.
Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice Page 28