Kathy Little Bird (32 page)

I knew he was right. Probably it was a migraine.

John and Lucinda found us.

Abram quickly explained the situation and John went to find a wheelchair.

I protested only feebly. I was wheeled to a parking lot and gotten into their car. It was not easy to miss. Polished and buffed, it was the most ancient vehicle in evidence, and John Wertheimer’s pride and joy.

Lucinda insisted on sitting beside me in the backseat. She loosened my belt, chafed my hands, and repeatedly told me that I was going to be fine, which made think I was probably quite ill. A strange sensation came over me. Suddenly Lucinda seemed far away, as though I were looking at her through
the wrong end of a telescope. Everything seemed to be receding, until it wasn’t there at all.

A
LONG
time.

I don’t know how I knew it was a long time, but I did.

A long time.

Out of total blackness, streaks of gray differentiated into gradated shades. Sounds came back. They conveyed no meaning, but were made by a human voice.

Time. Empty, passing, slow, painful. No thoughts, but feeling, an elongated, formless feeling…

Shapes.

What were they? I almost knew…Almost. Not quite. Drifting. Time passing. Time passing. Was I here before? Then I realized, I’m lost. Lost inside my head.

There were partial thoughts, fissures in the blankness, lesions through which time passed. Time passed. I could not find even the illusion of self. I was lost.

Who was this
I
that was used as a reference point? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember my name and yet I couldn’t force my mind away from the problem of who I was. The effort made me tremble.

Shooting pains in my head. Agony, agony in the back of my neck.

A shape beside my bed.

Shapes shifting, moving…

People! Oh my God, shapes and people were the same
thing. That is, the moving shapes were. The rest was furniture. But not always.

To keep from slipping into the void, I let sound into my mind, listening to connected phrases. Over and over, a womb song, soft, protective.

I had no speech and no language and could barely comprehend my own thinking, yet strangely my capacity for feeling was unimpaired, even heightened. Strongest of all was the yearning that overcame me associated with a word.
Abram.
I didn’t know what that word meant. I didn’t know it
was
a word. I didn’t know what words were. But the sound “Abram” brought peace.

T
ALKING
was far beyond my powers. I was better at shapes. Some time later I was moved. I didn’t move, I was moved. I grew conscious of myself as inhabiting a large, inert mass. People came and went about it.

Certain things became familiar. What had been rasping, unmusical noises became words. They began to convey meaning, and from that moment I made an effort to extract their sense.

With terrible swiftness the bit of world I occupied was sucked into a black hole, the earth standing on end, like a sinking ship being pulled under.

I started to shriek.

“It’s all right, Kathy. It’s all right.”

The shriek was smashing my eardrums, streaking vapor trails across my brain. I was pushed, shoved, crushed against
the floor, stepped on, bones and sinews torn out of place, organs struggling for air that wasn’t there, breaking apart, dying.

Abram, where are you? Abram!

I’m here, Kathy, I’m here.

Abram came back to me. First as a feeling, a good, warm feeling, a feeling that made me feel safe. The rest began filtering in as I tried to get in touch with myself.

I made an effort and moved my right hand. I couldn’t work the fingers. I was better with my left hand; I always had been. I crawled it over to touch my right. When it made contact, I could move that one too.

From then on I concentrated my energy on becoming reacquainted with my body. I blinked my eyes to shut out and readmit light. I gulped air, exhaled it. With tremendous effort I raised my elbows, then let them drop, up, down, up, down, up, down—flapping like a bird.

I was a bird! I was Kathy Little Bird.

My face was wet, I felt tears on my face. That was odd; I was trying to laugh.

Daily I added to the list of those parts of me I recognized. I turned my head, opened and closed my eyes. I coughed.

I learned to swallow and they took the suction tube out of my mouth. I grew dextrous with my fingers, thumb to thumb, index finger to index finger, middle finger to middle finger, fourth and pinky joined in to the tune of “Frere Jacques.” With no past and no future, I was fighting for the present.
Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques. Dormez vous? Dormez vous?
The song helped me hold to a sense of myself.

Words were still beyond me. People said them over and over, repeating certain ones. I couldn’t hook them up to the pictures of what they were, but I knew I was supposed to make the connection. I knew I had to. I knew the way to survival was remaking connections.

“Kathy” was me. “Abram” was Abram. “Frere Jacques” was song. I started with that. Slowly the things around me found their place in the scheme of things. The chair in the corner had its own name, the bed did, the covers, the window.

I wasn’t prepared for someone kneeling on the floor beside my bed. I wasn’t prepared for a head on the covers near my arm. I wasn’t prepared for sobbing that wasn’t my own.

I listened to strangled sounds. There were words in them. My name—“Kathy, Kathy.” More words…“Love.” That was a word I’d known at one time. Now, it floated away.

More words spilled against the covers.

More tears. This time they were mine.

I
T
must be another day. Abram was with me. He had shaved off his beard. I knew this was significant, but when I tried to think why he had done it my head began to hurt. He was talking to me. He was talking as though I could understand what he was saying.

It was about the bookstore where we lived. “It has an old-fashioned English look to it. Substantial, built of Queenston and Montreal limestone,” he told me. “The roof slopes at a
forty-five-degree angle,” he told me. “The dormer windows fit just under them. That’s where we display the books. Do you remember?”

Static danced in my head as I listened. I recognized most of the words, but had trouble hooking them up.

His voice continued. “Montreal itself is founded on the site of an old Huron village, Hochelaga. It’s an enormous flat plain from which Mount Royal humps up like a dinosaur caught in volcanic ash. The amazing thing, although it’s a thousand miles from the Atlantic Ocean, it is one of the great seaports. During the war German subs came right up the St. Lawrence. Your father could tell you about that.”

I was beginning to take it in, some of it at any rate. Then in one of those startling flashes it occurred to me that you take in information with your whole body, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, all the different parts of you. And I knew Abram would keep telling me about myself and about the world, and that one of those times I would understand.

He was talking about me now, telling me what had happened. I understood that much, but couldn’t remember how he got from the island of Montreal and the St. Lawrence to me.

The problem was, he wanted me to say something back. He wanted a word to match his words. Abram wouldn’t let me alone. He kept pitching words at me, slowly, articulating exaggeratedly. I turned away and closed my eyes. But I knew he wouldn’t give me any peace until I imitated him and managed the same sound.

My mouth had no idea how to form words. It was exasperatingly
difficult, especially as I now had lots of things to say. I could make sounds, but I couldn’t shape them into words.

I knew I should work at it. But how do you start when you don’t know how to begin? I was ready to give up. I did give up. I had sunk to the bottom of that dead water, the Sargasso Sea. What a waste, feeding me, changing my bedding, dumping bedpans, and for what? So I could breathe in and out, match my fingers to their opposite.

Sheaves of thought bumped against each other. An implosion. Like the Big Bang, it all came together. I was born. Like any newborn I let out a cry. Not of pain—pure joy! I was finishing breakfast, chewing on some tasteless, gelatinous muck simply to stay alive, when bang, like a whack on a bass drum, or a baby’s bottom, it came together. Everything. I could taste the food. It was scrambled eggs with strawberry jam. Someone was feeding me with a spoon.

That someone was the girl. I saw she was a pretty girl of about eighteen. This must be Pam.

Oh yes, I remember now. Abram told me about Pam. She was the Wertheimers’ niece, and she was sweet, and helpful, did such a good job cataloguing books, and, I’m sure, was quite marvelous at looking after me.

This caring, proper Pam leaned toward me to wipe my face. I shook my head and removed the spot of egg myself.

I’d done it! Planned it, executed it, by myself.

“Kathy!” Pam exclaimed, and her eyes filled. She ran out and returned with Abram, chattering to him all the while about what I had done.

But my triumph brought things back to me—boots with laces, descending. Sound splitting me into pieces. Hurtling face down, sticky with blood, the floor against my forehead—can’t breathe, patent leather shoes…

Abram took me in his arms and held me.

I began to remember. I remembered fainting in the airport. And coming here to my home—I remembered that. Then what had happened to me? What had become of me?…They called what I had been a vegetative state. What if I didn’t improve?

You should have let me die. Why didn’t you let me die, Abram? I wanted to say this, but what came out of my mouth was a jumble.

“You’re better, Kathy. Much better. From now on you’ll make rapid-fire progress. You’ll see.”

Then I did get a word out. My first real word.

“No,” I said.

Abram hugged me. “That’s good. That’s terrific.”

S
EVERAL
enigmas were solved.

The shapes I had been conscious of almost from the beginning were now sorted into people, things and sounds. On my vanity a music box held the little French tune that had
played in my head. Another problem solved; I could put a check after “Frere Jacques.”