Me Again (5 page)

Teddy switched his smile back on. “Well, thank God for miracles,” he said. “It’s really a... a
blessing
, the way you came back. And after we’d almost given up on you.”

Almost?

“Anyhoo...” Teddy said, looking at his watch. “Jesus, look at the time. I need to get over to Mom and Dad’s.” He stood and pushed the chair back.

“You know how Mom is when she cooks – she’ll give me hell if I show up late for dinner.”

I smiled, having no idea how Mom was when she cooked.

“Listen, I promise the next time I come down we’ll have lots more time together. It’ll be great – just like old times.”

He leaned towards me – for a moment I thought he was going to try to hug me. Instead, he clapped a hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll catch you later, bro,” he said, slipping the massive ring back on its original finger. “It’s been
so
good to see you.”

“You too,” I managed to say.

He walked towards the door, then stopped and turned to face me. “Oh, and don’t worry. I mean, I won’t tell anybody at the firm about your little problem with numbers. Mum’s the word on that.”

“Mum?” I repeated. Figures of speech that didn’t make literal sense were still hard for me. That was one of those closed doors, but I was working on it, and could feel the lock jiggle when I worked the key.

Teddy said, “Totally mum, trust me.”

He made a zipping-his-lips gesture, then turned and walked away, still smiling.

I drifted off to sleep with a lot on my mind. Although today’s visitors had provided some clues, I was really starting to wonder what kind of person I used to be.

Chapter 6

I
FIRST SAW REBECCA IN PHYSICAL THERAPY. She was holding herself upright, making her way slowly through that device that looks like the parallel bars they show in Olympic gymnastic competitions. Set about waist-high, the bars allowed her to support herself with her arms while she worked on putting one foot in front of the other.

I watched her, trying to pick up any pointers. I hadn’t yet worked my way up to standing or walking; we were still rebuilding my strength and range of motion, a process that usually required me to sit in some elaborate exercise machine that focused on a specific muscle group. At the moment, I was doing something my trainer called preacher curls on a machine devised to develop the biceps, using a pathetically low weight that made me glad I couldn’t understand numbers.

The woman’s triceps flexed as she held herself up. It was clear she was in the early stages of learning how to walk – she was supporting most of her weight with her arms, awkwardly throwing one leg forward, letting the foot fall where it may, then shifting her weight and repeating the routine with the other leg. The process looked exhausting. Her face glistened with sweat, as did her arms, which were exposed by the tank top she wore. She was in good shape – she certainly wasn’t a withered coma victim like me. I wondered if perhaps her legs had been injured in an auto accident.

Her physical therapist stood in front of her, a beefy middle-aged man with a buzz cut whose eyes kept drifting to a television mounted high on one wall, where a football team in red and white uniforms battled a team dressed in dark blue. The volume was muted, but every now and then I’d hear the man swear under his breath, or emit a hissing “Yesssss!”

The woman – I didn’t know her name yet – ignored her trainer, and focused on walking. When she reached one end of the bars, she performed a tricky looking maneuver, placing both hands on one bar, then letting go with one hand and swinging around in an awkward pivot that culminated in her catching the other bar with her free hand, now facing the opposite direction. She pulled it off, but just barely, making me dread the day when I would be expected to execute that move. I hoped my therapist would be paying more attention to me than her guy was.

My physical therapist, a young, cheerful guy named Leon, noticed me watching her.

“That’s a fine looking woman, no doubt,” he said. “Shame about what happened to her.”

“What happened?” I asked. Yes, I had graduated to sentences that contained more than a single syllable.

“Stroke, same as you. Shit, she can’t even be thirty years old yet, and she’s havin’ a stroke, a fine looking woman like that? That’s fucked up, man. You know what I’m talkin’ about?”

I nodded, acknowledging one of the rare instances where I did know what somebody was talking about.

“Shit,” said Leon. “Now I went and lost track of how many reps you’ve done. And I know
you
sure as hell weren’t keeping track.”

As Leon had gotten to know me, he often made jokes about the problems I had, and liked to tease me about what he called my “math issues,” a topic that arose frequently, given the amount of counting associated with repetitive physical exercise. But it didn’t bother me – he was one of the only people I’d encountered who would talk to me directly about my problems, instead of trying to sugar-coat or ignore them. I sensed no mean-spiritedness in Leon’s teasing; if anything, he was trying to get me to “lighten up, motherfucker” (another Leonism) in the face of some pretty oppressive circumstances. I liked Leon, and was thankful he’d been assigned to me.

“Aw, hell,” Leon said. “Go ahead and switch to your left arm. Just don’t make me lose count. You’ll end up with one arm looking like Popeye or somethin’.”

Then he shot me a look. “Tell me you do remember who Popeye is.”

Slowly, deliberately, I said, “I yam what I yam.”

It was possibly my longest sentence to date, and it elicited a howl of laughter from Leon that made me smile.

Leon’s outburst made the woman’s trainer look away from the TV for a moment, curious as to the cause of the commotion. The woman remained focused on her walking. Her hair was a light brown that faded into blonde, pulled back in a loose ponytail that was now matted with sweat. Her face registered pure determination, with no self-consciousness about her bedraggled appearance. It made her look... wonderful.

Her therapist looked at his watch. “Okay, hon,” he said, “let’s wrap this up. I’ll get the chair ready.”

The man had to walk past us to get to where he’d stowed her wheelchair. As he did, he held out a fist in front of Leon. I watched as Leon made a fist and gently swung it down on top of the other man’s fist.

“Leon,” the man said.

“My man Bruce,” Leon replied.

The woman’s trainer – Bruce – laid his clipboard down on a bench next to me and knelt down to adjust the wheelchair. I craned my neck and managed to make out a name written on the clipboard:
Rebecca Chase
.

Bruce maneuvered the wheelchair past us and wheeled it into position behind the woman. On cue, she slumped into the chair, and Bruce handed her a towel. Then he turned her wheelchair to face the door, and she looked directly at me for the first time. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and seemed to shine more than most people’s eyes. But I might have been losing some objectivity.

As Bruce wheeled her past us, the woman spoke to me.

“You’re really skinny,” she said.

With that, they were gone, leaving me to listen to Leon trying to choke back his laughter.

I worked to form a word. “Rebecca?”

“Yeah,” said Leon, regaining his composure. “That’s Rebecca. She’s a fine looking woman, but that stroke left her kind of...
funny
. Talks kinda like a zombie or somethin’.”

Leon put a hand on the machine, stopping my arm’s motion. “That’s enough, Popeye. Let’s move on to the leg machines. Here, let me help you.”

As Leon lifted me up, an indignity I’d had to get used to in order to get from one machine to the next, he said, “She’s right about that, though. You are one skinny motherfucker.”

* * * * *

At first my parents visited me every day. They’d often come together, although there were days that I don’t think my father said anything more than hello or goodbye to me. But my mother easily carried the conversational load, acting as a sort of oral historian for me, trying to fill in the many blanks in my memory. She brought photo albums, newspaper clippings, anything she could think of to try to get me reacquainted with the world I’d lost.

Mom – it felt odd, calling a stranger
Mom
, but it made her so happy – really made an effort. A thin woman whose brown hair was giving in to grey, her default expression was a kindly, sincere smile, and her mood seemed perpetually cheery without veering into that annoyingly forced enthusiasm affected by some of the hospital staff. No, everything about my mom seemed to radiate genuine benevolence, making my inability to remember her all the more frustrating.

Some days she came to see me by herself, offering some excuse why Dad (she insisted I call him that) hadn’t been able to accompany her. He and I had so little to say to each other that I didn’t mind his absence. But it got to the point where Mom and I were running out of things to talk about, too. Nothing she showed me or said to me had done anything to rekindle any memories, so essentially we were strangers, struggling to get to know each other. No, that’s not quite right, because it implies that she had something to learn about me. She already knew me. But I didn’t know either of us.

When Mom finally cut her visitation back to every other day or so, I’ll admit I was relieved. Plus, it gave me more free time, and I had plenty to work on. My speech was getting better, although talking was still hard work for me, and I often found it easier simply to write. But what I was really forced to focus on was my physical therapy.

It occurs to me that if my story were being presented as a TV Movie of the Week, at some point we’d cut to a brief montage of me going through the grueling process of months of physical rehabilitation. You know, lots of heart-tugging shots of me enduring repeated pain and failure, peppered with a few small victories, and spliced with close-ups of my sweat-beaded face grimacing in pain (shot from the non-smirking side, of course). And all this would naturally be accompanied by a suitably dramatic and/or triumphant soundtrack, perhaps a song that didn’t quite make it into one of the
Rocky
movies.

But I’ll spare you. The process was lengthy, grueling, and extremely unglamorous. While a great fuss was made when I was finally able to take my first tentative steps, I have to say that the first time I wiped my own ass was a triumph every bit as momentous. I hated being helpless.

And I hated physical therapy. Well, except for Rebecca. She was usually there during my sessions with Leon, and when I was strong enough to go to the PT room on my own to practice, I’d often run into her there. She was way ahead of me – she got around the hospital using a walker, while I was still wheelchair-bound. But it was in those practice sessions that I finally had a chance to meet her, something I had been wanting very much to do.

As often seems to be the case for me, the reality didn’t live up to the anticipation.

One evening I wheeled into the PT room to find it unoccupied except for Rebecca, who was pumping away on a machine that exercised her legs. I hated that machine – even on its lowest setting I found it excruciating, but she was powering on through, her skin glazed with sweat.

While I didn’t want to interrupt her, I felt it would be rude to ignore her, since we were the only two people in the room. So I tentatively rolled over to the leg-press machine and said, “Hi.”

I know, I know. I really needed to up my syllable usage.

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Did you want to use this machine?” She spoke softly, her voice low in pitch and slightly scratchy.

“No,” I said. “Well, yes. But not now.”

“Okay,” she said, and continued pumping away.

I was about to turn my wheelchair and roll away, but I decided to take one last shot. I said the line I’d been practicing. I had it down to where I didn’t slur the words at all, if I really concentrated.

“My name is Jonathan. I just wanted to say hi.”

She stopped pumping and looked at me again. “You already said hi.”

“I know, but—" Shit. This didn’t fit with the second line I’d rehearsed.

“I... I just wanted... to meet you.”

“Oh,” she said. “Why?”

Christ, were all women this hard to talk to?

“I just... you seemed... we’re both...”

Shit. Shit shit shit. I gave up. Between her less-than-warm reception, the weird defensive questions she surprised me with, and the difficulty I had in getting a message from my brain to my mouth in a timely manner, I felt helpless and stupid.

Turning my wheelchair to go, I managed to say, “Sorry, Rebecca.”

At this she surprised me further. She smiled. Not a big smile – just a small upturning at the corners of her mouth, accompanied by her eyes becoming somehow brighter. It was a good little smile, simple and real. But it quickly dissolved into a scowl.

“How do you know my name?” she demanded.

Shit.

“Saw it,” I said, “on Bruce’s clipboard.”

Then, for reasons I cannot explain, I announced, “I can read.”

Immediately I felt like an idiot.

“I can read, too,” Rebecca said. “Can you write?”

“Yes,” I said, puzzled by the question.

“I’m having trouble with that. It takes me longer than it should.”

“That’s how... talking is for me,” I stammered. “Easier for me to write.”

“That’s weird,” she said.

“Weird,” I agreed, back to my monosyllabic self.

Rebecca sat up in the machine, leaning closer to me.

“I like how my name sounds when you say it.”

She spoke in a near monotone, I was noticing, making it hard to read any emotions that might be behind the words. Not sure how to respond, I said, “Rebecca?”

“Rebecca,” she said. “Everybody calls me Becky, and I don’t think I like it. But I like it when you say Rebecca.”

“Rebecca,” I said quickly, eager to please. Again I promptly felt like an idiot, but it was a feeling I was getting used to.

“I wish my husband would call me Rebecca.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. Sorry for the language – just recalling my thoughts at the time.

“He calls me Becky, too. Sometimes just Beck. I don’t like that.”

I didn’t like it either.

Rebecca stood up, toweling herself off with one hand while she gripped her walker with the other.

“You can use this now. I need to work on my arms. So my left arm doesn’t get... what’s that thing where one side of your body doesn’t get as strong as the other?”

“Neglect,” I said, having become quite the expert on stroke terminology. I was facing this problem with my right arm, which wasn’t being nearly as cooperative as the left.

“Neglect,” she repeated, nodding. She began to push her walker away, then turned to face me.