The Burn Zone

by Renee Linnell

  “Mom,” I said.

  She couldn’t raise her head. I kneeled next to her wheelchair and started to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Honey,” she managed to slur. “I will be home tomorrow. Bill is coming to visit.”

  I called for a doctor. A woman in a white coat approached.

  “Please tell me what is going on with my mother,” I said.

  “She had a massive stroke. She will never walk or talk again. She will need to live in a nursing home.” She checked her clipboard and walked away.

  A nurse appeared. “I’m going to bathe your mother. Do you want to come?”

  I followed, too stunned to speak. She wheeled my mother into a shower stall, removed the gown, and then turned the show-erhead on full force while aiming it at my mother’s slumped-over head. I felt my mother grimace as the cold water hit her.

  I grabbed the showerhead from the nurse and said, “May I please do this.” It was not a question.

  I turned the water to warm. I made sure the temperature was right and then gently placed it over the top of her shoulders and covered her body with the warm water, the way I would start my own shower, the way I would shower a child. Then I moved it to the top of my mother’s head while tilting her head back; I held her head and was careful not to get the water on her face.

  My mother looked at me with so much love in her eyes. I gently washed and conditioned her hair and did the best I could with the rest of her. Then I softly toweled her dry. I got her dressed in a new hospital gown and back to her bed, where she fell asleep instantly. I called my brother, who was in Florida, and broke down. I was sobbing so much that at first he couldn’t understand me. He said he’d be on the first flight out in the morning. I drove back to my mother’s condo but couldn’t sleep. I was panicked. My mother would be incapacitated from now on. Life as I knew it was over. I spent the night staring at the ceiling and weeping.

  Gary met me at the hospital the next day. I happened to be outside just as he walked up, and I collapsed into his arms, sobbing. I couldn’t pull myself together. I had never been happier to see him in my life; I had never needed to see him more.

  We went inside to see a different doctor. He was kind and lovely and answered all of our questions. He showed us the images of our mother’s brain and explained everything that happened. He told us that no one can ever say for sure what will happen after a brain injury, because a proper diagnosis can’t be made until the swelling goes down. Then he said that getting my mother to a great stroke rehabilitation facility would radically improve her chances of recovery.

  Gary immediately started making phone calls. He found a rehab facility in South Florida, near her home in Boca Raton, and made plans to leave the hospital as soon as we were allowed. We were told she was too disabled to leave unless she was in a medical jet, accompanied by a nurse. The kind doctor helped us secure one and told us we could possibly leave the following day.

  The next afternoon, we left on the jet, with my mom on a stretcher and a nurse by her side. We arrived to the rehab facility after dark. It was a terrible place, a giant hospital filled with the dying and nearly dead. The nurses seemed more interested in what they were going to eat for dinner than in our crazy-looking mother. We knew we had made a mistake as soon as we arrived, but we had to leave her there overnight. They put her in a room with another patient, who looked like a snoring corpse. It broke my heart to leave her there. I had never seen my mother so weak, so incapacitated, so vulnerable.

  “We’ll be back first thing tomorrow,” we told her.

  I had flown from California to Colorado two days before, had not slept for three nights, and was now in Florida. I was exhausted. Gary and I took a taxi to our mother’s house and tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. I spent another night staring at the ceiling and weeping.

  When we arrived at the rehab facility early the next morning, we found our mother lying in bed, with her breakfast on her chest and her head sticking up at a ninety-degree angle. Someone had raised the head of the bed so it resembled a lounge chair, but my mother had slid so far down that her body was flat, with only her head propped up.

  I ran to her, surprised she could breathe in that position.

  “I have to pee,” was the first thing she slurred. “No one will take me to pee.”

  Gary and I hoisted her out of bed and into a wheelchair. I wheeled her to the bathroom and managed, with her help, to lift her onto the toilet.

  “We’re getting you out of here today,” I said.

  Gary made some calls. He had a friend who had access to the best private stroke rehab facility in South Florida. It would cost us a fortune, but we didn’t care. The nurses told us we couldn’t leave, that we couldn’t take her, that she would have to wait to be seen by a doctor and properly discharged. Gary wheeled her past the nurses and out the front door, saying, “Try to stop us.”

  The new place was amazing. She got a private room with a huge window. She got a private nurse. I could tell immediately that she would be taken care of. Her therapy started that day. All I could do was wait and hope that it worked. I spent a week in Florida, most of the time in my mother’s room, washing her and moisturizing her and stretching her limbs, combing her hair, feeding her, watching TV with her. I flew back and forth between California and Florida each month, praying that what the first doctor said was not true.

  My mother’s progress was slow at first but rapidly improved. By December, she moved back into her home, attended by visiting nurses and daily trips to therapy. My brother moved in with her.

  After close to a year of great therapy and incredible will power, she recovered enough to talk, walk, drive, live on her own, and even ski again. The woman was incredibly strong. Her brain was altered but in amazing ways: Her façades were gone. When she hugged me, instead of keeping her body stiff and hard like she used to do, she melted into my arms and allowed me to hold her. She lost her desire to go to church twice a week; instead, she turned to introspection. She was kinder. She was happier. She was frustrated with her new limitations, yes, but her spirit seemed lighter, like a child’s. She left the house dressed however she pleased, no longer concerned with looking “perfect.” She told me she loved me all the time. And she laughed a lot—full-throated, hearty belly laughs. It was adorable to watch. It was as if the stroke had stripped her down to her true essence, her magnificent, original, lovable Self.

  Even though she healed so well, she still had trouble with daily tasks. One day, I noticed she was making beef stew and had put the package of meat, still wrapped in plastic, in the slow cooker. The plastic was melting and slowly poisoning the food. Another day, she was leaving the house and my brother noticed large lumps on her back. He got closer and realized she had put her bra on backward, the padded cups protruding through the back of her shirt. She would run a bath and forget, allowing the bathtub to overflow and flood the bathroom. A few times, she ate old expired food and ended up so sick she had to dial 911. My brother was exhausted from living with her and dealing with all of it on his own.

  I decided to move to Florida to be with her so he could move out. As life would have it, I woke up one day and my hip no longer worked. The joint felt like a sliding glass door that was off its hinges. I could barely walk. I saw doctor after doctor, and they all said the same thing: “No more dancing.” As if my mother having a stroke wasn’t bad enough, suddenly my dance career was over. The next step was obvious: My mother needed me. I moved out of my apartment in California, packed up my car, and drove to Florida.

  Two weeks after I arrived, she told me she was moving to Colorado. I wanted to kill her. It was so like her to do this.

  She moved to Colorado the following week—jumped on a plane with her cat and left. I was beyond pissed off, but I was also relieved. Clearly she was willing and able to live on her own. I called a few more doctors. Maybe I could get my hip working and dance again. I drove to Miami to see the joint specialist for the Miami Dolphins. He put me in an MRI machine and d
ecided to inject the sheath of my iliopsoas with cortisone. It hurt like hell, but it worked. I could walk again, and surf.

  I went to Panama for two weeks to surf and clear my mind. My hip responded well to the ocean. When I returned to Florida, I had forgiven my mother and talked my brother into flying to Colorado to visit her with me. We spent a week together. She was a little slow, a little off, but she could live on her own, and she was happy, so I flew back to Florida to figure out the next step in my life.

  Two weeks later, as I was having lunch with my brother and some friends, my cell phone rang; it was a Colorado number—Audrey, one of my mother’s closest friends. I picked up.

  “When was the last time you spoke to your mother?” she asked.

  “Three days ago,” I responded. “Why?”

  “She drove to Denver for a doctor’s appointment and was supposed to return yesterday. We were going to meet for dinner. I haven’t heard from her, and I’m a bit worried. She asked me to watch her cat. It doesn’t seem like her to not call me if she planned on staying longer in Denver. She would be too concerned about the cat.”

  Where the hell was my mother?

  I called my father’s personal assistant, Sally, who still worked for my mother two days a week out of our home in Boca; she happened to be in her office at our house.

  “When was the last time you talked to my mom?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure . . .” she responded. “A few days ago. Why?”

  I told her about my call with Audrey.

  “Gary and I are on our way to the house right now,” I finished and disconnected the call. On the drive home, my mind went into overdrive. Where the hell was my mother? Dead in a ditch on the side of the road? No, traffic patrol would have called us. Still in Denver at a hotel? No, she would have called Audrey. Drunk in a bar? Possibly, but she’d be too concerned about her cat to not go home. She had to be okay. She had to be okay. She had to be okay, right? She simply had to.

  Sally opened the front door just as I was reaching for the door handle. She had the same look on her face as she had fifteen years earlier. “Your mother is dead,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  After calling multiple police stations in Colorado, Sally found my mother’s body in a morgue. She had been discovered dead in the bathtub in her hotel room in Denver, drowned. I crumpled to the floor. She was only sixty-eight years old. She had healed from her stroke. She was happy and living on her own. How did this happen?

  I had an autopsy done. I had to know. Was it suicide? I got the results a few days later: Apparently, it wasn’t. There was no “foul play,” and the toxicology report showed therapeutic levels of her usual medications (blood thinners, Ambien, Zoloft) and one glass of wine. There was no contusion; there was nothing abnormal. The report deemed her death an accident. How does a grown woman drown in a hotel bathtub? It made no sense.

  That night, I cried my guts out. It could have been suicide or just a lethal combo of drugs and alcohol; I wasn’t sure. I felt so sad for her. She had called me just a week before to tell me she felt lonely and was thinking of returning to Florida. I was still pissed about her move to Colorado right after I arrived to help her, and I reacted poorly.

  “Well, I won’t be here,” I said. “I’ll be in Australia. Gary is never around; he just bought a new house with his girlfriend. You’ll be alone here, too.”

  She said, “Well, at least Sally is there a few days a week. I think I’m going to come home.”

  It was the last conversation I had with her.

  I continued to sob. I was a horrible daughter. I felt like a horrible daughter. I cried and cried . . . and then I tried to talk to her. I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs in her house, in the house I had grown up in; I sat on the floral sofa, and I spoke to her, out loud, alone at midnight.

  “Mom, what happened? I miss you. I’m so sad.”

  I got an instant response; it appeared as her voice in my mind.

  “Honey, please don’t be sad. I was done. I didn’t want to be here anymore. You know that. I got into a warm bath and simply left my body. I’m Home. It’s where I want to be—here, with your father; here, with God.”

  I sniffed. I wiped the tears from my eyes, the running snot from my nose. And then the most surprising words came out of my mouth in the stillness of the night.

  “It’s not that I loved Gary more than you; it’s simply that you needed me less.”

  Oh my God. It was true. I didn’t need her the way my brother had. Gary had always been so clingy, so needy, so adoring of her and her love. I had always been independent, always wanting to be off on my own, too sensitive to be around other people for extended periods of time. She hadn’t been neglecting me. She just needed to be needed. She yearned for it. She could hardly live without it. Suddenly, I understood. So, right then, in that moment, I let her go. I forgave her. And I loved her for being the best mother she could have possibly been.

  With my brother’s girlfriend, I flew out to Colorado and took a taxi to the morgue. We collected my mother’s personal effects, but I refused to identify the body. Some things you just can never unsee. Then we took a cab to her hotel, where her car was still in the parking lot. We drove it back to her condo, packed up all of her belongings, donated them to a women’s shelter, collected her cat, and flew back to Florida.

  Having no idea what to do next, I flew to Argentina. I figured I’d start my dance career again. But when I got there, all I did was sleep and cry. I could barely leave the apartment. I was an orphan. My parents were gone. I felt so alone.

  Eventually, I realized I had to get myself back to the United States and get on with my life. My brother and I sold the family home; I used my half of the money to buy and remodel a little house in Cardiff. I started teaching dance again, built a new life for myself. I returned to Argentina, and, because the peso had been devalued 400 percent when the economy crashed, I was able to buy a brand-new apartment that I rented out to traveling tango dancers when I wasn’t there. I also began importing tango shoes to the United States.

  I got invited to join a burlesque dance company, owned and run by two of the top ranking Latin-ballroom dance champions in California. My part in the company was small: I danced a ménage-a-trois tango with the two owners of the company, and my dress came off at the very end, as the lights dimmed, to reveal my nearly naked body clothed in only a jeweled G-string, flesh-colored fishnet stockings, rhinestone-covered nipples, and flesh-colored high heels.

  Slowly, I began recovering from my mother’s death. I loved my life as a dancer and I loved living in Cardiff. I was traveling back and forth to Argentina. I had great friends. I was surfing a lot. I was being coached by, and dancing with, some of the best tango and Latin-ballroom dancers in the world. But I was still soul-sick. I had a void inside of me that simply could not be filled by anything in this world. I felt like an alien living in a human body, pretending I fit in, but all the while knowing I did not. I could find no one else like me, no one else who saw the world the way I did. I missed my mother terribly. Even though our relationship had been tumultuous, I missed having her to talk to. There had been times, especially after her stroke, when she had given me great advice. I missed knowing that if my life exploded, I had her as a safety net. My brother had gotten married, and we hardly ever spoke to or saw each other. He was on his way to building his own family. I felt very alone.

  And then my godmother got diagnosed with a brain tumor—incurable. She tried radiation and chemotherapy to prolong her life, but neither worked. I flew to Boston every other week to be with her. She died slowly and in agony in August of 2006.

  Her death was another loss that cut me deeply, another loss that left me undone, another deep wound in my psyche. And a month later, when Lakshmi handed out applications to be her student, I grabbed the opportunity like a drowning person grabbing a life ring.

  Part 2 Tantra

  “Love nothing but that which comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny.
For what could more aptly fit your needs?”

  —Marcus Aurelius

  Chapter 13 Australia

  Shortly after Valentine’s Day, Vishnu returned to Arizona, as he did every month, to be with Lakshmi. Usually, when he was there, he became cold and distant with me. When he called or e-mailed, it was strictly business. He seemed to have no time to talk to me about anything else. He never mentioned Lakshmi or what she was doing, he was always very secretive about that. At the end of a phone call, he abruptly told me I needed to get blood work done.

  “I want you to get a full CBC, and I want you to get a gynecological exam. Get tested for every STD, as well. When you have the results, please fax them to me. I want to see them.”

  He then asked, “Are you on birth control pills?”

  “No,” I responded.

  “Ask your doctor to write you a prescription for birth control pills.” He hung up. I guessed Vishnu and I were finally going to have sex.

  I had the blood work done, got the exams, and started taking The Pill. I faxed him my results: I was healthy—nothing to report. He told me he would be back in town the following week and wanted to take me out to dinner. He suggested I walk around a sacred site three times. “It will purify your energy field,” he said. Apparently, this man needed me clean in every way possible if he was going to screw me.

  When he landed, he called to tell me when he’d pick me up and suggested I pack a sleepover bag. I couldn’t bear to; it just seemed too premeditated and unromantic. Again, my emotions were mixed. I wasn’t ready for this step, and yet I knew I was going to take it . . . even if I didn’t really want to. I had turned the volume down so low on my true feelings, my true emotional guidance system, that I wasn’t sure what I actually felt.