Stronger (11 page)

And then there was my mandolin. My dad had mentioned my love of music in a newspaper article, so Guitar Center offered me a free guitar. But I was having trouble playing the two—one from a friend, one from home—that I already had. My damaged eardrums distorted the sound, and the echoes gave me a headache. I played at the hospital mostly to keep people from worrying. I didn’t want them to know how difficult it was to do something I used to love.

So Guitar Center gave me a mandolin instead. I loved that mandolin; it sat beside my bed for weeks, in a place of honor. I couldn’t imagine giving away any of my instruments, even to another bombing victim.

Besides, I didn’t know if Sydney liked music.

Then I saw the tablet computer. Someone in senior management at Costco had sent it to me a few days after the bombing. It was the first computer I had ever owned. On Monday, I had used it to FaceTime with my department manager, Maya, who was visiting family in Holland the week of the bombing.

It went so well that Kevin set up a FaceTime call with our Costco store. The regional vice president flew in to spend the morning with me, and they put us on the big-screen television in the break room.

Everyone came, even people who had the day off. Some even brought their children.

“We love you, Jeff!” a little boy said.

I was laughing. There was a big banner that looked like kindergarteners had made it (by the way, kindergarteners make awesome banners) and a cake with a guitar and the famous Boston “B” on it.

“We’re doing this for you,” they said as they stuffed their faces.

“Sure, Jeff, we get the cake. But you get the vacation.”

“Vacation forever!” I said. I looked at Kevin, who was laughing. “I’m just kidding, guys. I’m coming back. Just not today.”

I actually didn’t know if I was going back. My old job involved a lot of walking and standing. There was no way I could do it anymore. But that wasn’t my concern right then. I was just happy to see the old crew.

The tablet was the nicest thing I’d been given, so I wanted Sydney to have it. She deserved it more than me. But I changed my mind at the last second. The tablet had personal value, since it had been given by friends.

I chose some portable speakers instead. I stuck them in a gift bag, along with Erin’s card, and rolled across the hall to Sydney’s room. She was sitting up in a chair, with her heavily bandaged leg propped in front of her. There were two birthday balloons and a few relatives, but otherwise it was just a normal day at BMC. Sydney had already received the best birthday gift possible: the doctors had saved her leg.

I gave her my package. It was a bit of a stretch, because I couldn’t get my wheelchair past her leg. Right as we both had our hands on it, someone snapped a picture. I hear you can see it on the Internet now. Of course you can. You can see everything on the Internet. But it was originally posted to the Celeste and Sydney Recovery Fund website, so I don’t mind. If the photo helps with the Corcorans’ medical bills, then it’s more than I ever hoped to give.

That night, I received my own gift, when a Hispanic man with long, curly hair walked into my room. I would have known him immediately, even without his famous cowboy hat, because I could never forget his face. It was Carlos Arredondo, the man who saved my life.

Carlos was famous; he had been all over the news. There was another picture of him, holding a torn and bloody American flag in the moments after he rescued me, that was almost as famous in Boston as the iconic shot of us together.

“Carlos!” I yelled when I saw him in the doorway.

He smiled and came toward me, and I couldn’t help myself, I reached out and hugged him. Carlos is a hugger. He’s always smiling, always wanting to step close and talk. It hurt, but I didn’t want to let him go. What can you say to the man who gave you everything? I said, “Thank you,” but that wasn’t enough.

He gave me a hat and a handwritten sign: Together Strong. He asked how I was doing. I showed him the scars and burns on my back. We discussed my goals and chatted about my recovery. I asked him about his life. At first he didn’t want to talk about himself, but eventually, he told me his story.

Carlos was born in Costa Rica. He had come to this country illegally, but his two sons, Alex and Brian, were born in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston and were American citizens. His oldest son, Alex, entered the Marines at age seventeen, straight out of high school. He loved the Marines. He loved the idea of serving his country. The Marines were going to pay for him to go to college.

Three years later, a van pulled up to Carlos’s house in Florida, where he had moved after a divorce. It was August 24, 2004, his forty-fourth birthday. He was expecting a birthday call from Alex. Instead, three Marines told him his son was dead. He had been killed by a sniper in Iraq.

Carlos told me he wasn’t sure what happened next. He just went crazy with grief. He wanted to be alone, but the Marines wouldn’t leave his front yard until his wife—Alex’s stepmom—came home. He became agitated, then angry. He went into the garage, grabbed a gas can and a blowtorch, and locked himself in the front seat of the Marines’ van. He doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. He denied it later, but I think he was trying to kill himself. Instead, the van exploded, hurling him onto his front lawn, on fire. The Marines saved his life. He was severely burned on 26 percent of his body, but he attended his son’s funeral on a stretcher. He asked to be lifted onto the casket. He lay on top of it and apologized to Alex, because he had done nothing, he said, to save him.

He went through months of physical recovery and legal trouble. Some people wanted him prosecuted for destruction of government property. He was in agony from the burns. He didn’t care. He thought only of his son and how he hadn’t helped him.

“I let him die.”

When he was well enough, he put a message on his pickup truck: “Alexander Arredondo. My Son. KIA in Iraq.” He put American flags in the bed, along with his son’s uniform and a photograph from his funeral. He quit his construction job and drove around the country, speaking out against the war.

He was beaten up. He was spit on and called racist names. He was told to go back to wherever he came from. He kept attending rallies, sometimes pulling a coffin draped in an American flag and his son’s uniform, sometimes carrying Alex’s desert boots and dog tags. He stood in front of the White House with a picture of Alex in his coffin, wearing his dress blues. He talked to anyone who would listen.

His younger son, Brian, was struggling with depression. The boys had been joined at the hip, Carlos told me. Brian idolized Alex. He took his death hard. Carlos moved back to the Boston area to be near Brian, who lived with his mother, and Alex’s grave. In 2006, Carlos became a United States citizen. He legally changed his name to Alexander Brian Arredondo, in honor of his sons.

But the war dragged on, and Brian’s depression grew worse. He fell into drugs and struggled with addiction. “He was tortured by his brother’s death. That’s what his mother always said. Brian was tortured.”

On December 19, 2011, Brian Arredondo committed suicide. It was seven years since his brother died in Najaf, and only a few days before the last troops came home from Iraq.

By that time, I was crying. Carlos gave me a tissue, then reached into his pocket. “I live for them,” he said.

He handed me his card. It read in part:

Carlos Arredondo

Dad on Fire

He had been at the finish line of the Boston Marathon handing out American flags. He was there to support the “Tough Ruck” team, twenty National Guardsmen who had started marching the marathon route with rucksacks at 5:30 a.m. They were raising money for the families of soldiers killed in action, or those who had committed suicide or died in PTSD-related accidents. One of the guardsmen was marching in honor of Alex.

The soldiers had just crossed the finish line, after nine hours of marching, when the first bomb went off. Carlos saw the ball of fire. He saw a man fall over the barricade into the marathon course. And then everything disappeared into smoke. He jumped the barricade on his side and was halfway across the road when the second bomb exploded.

He crossed himself,
God protect me
, and kept running. He was lifting the barricade off Michele when he saw me, without my legs, lying in a pool of blood. He knew I didn’t have much time. He lifted me into the wheelchair. He ran beside me, unwilling to leave my side. He stayed with me as long as he could, staring after the ambulance as it pulled away and headed down the street. I was the one person he focused on that day.

By then, we were both crying. I hugged him again, and he hugged me back. There was a long silence, the only time I’ve been around Carlos when he wasn’t talking.

“Don’t cry,” he said, wiping away his tears. “Something good happened.”

English is Carlos’s second language, so it’s sometimes hard for him to express the nuances. What he said probably sounds strange to you. But in context, I knew exactly what he meant. He meant that something good had happened
because he was alive
. I suspect it had been hard for him since Alex’s death. He believed he was doing the right thing, but it was probably hard to know if it was making a difference. The war never ended. He lost his other son.

But he saved my life. I mean that: I would be dead today without Carlos Arredondo. And now he can say to himself, if he ever struggled with it before: Something good happened because of me. It’s a good thing I survived.

14.

I
transferred from Boston Medical to the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center the day after I met Carlos. Erin had pulled strings to get me transferred quickly, because she thought it would lift my spirits. And she was right. It felt like a big deal to leave the hospital, even if I was still, technically, in a hospital. It was a vote of confidence from my doctors. My treatment wouldn’t be about my immediate health anymore; it would be about learning how to live without legs.

I was all in on that, because I was already sick of the wheelchair. I wanted to walk.

At first, they transferred me to the old Spaulding Rehab Center, a plain redbrick building squeezed between the TD North office tower and the Zakim Bridge on the northwest edge of downtown. It was cramped and worn down and felt like an old mental hospital, complete with metal gates that could be pulled down at the ends of the hall. I felt like I’d been rolled into
The Shining
.

Even the television sucked. It was an old tube TV, not a flat-screen, and the picture was so bad the Red Sox looked green.

Three days later, they strapped me and a few other patients into a special van and drove us a mile or two north, through an old neighborhood, then through an industrial area, then finally onto a long block of new buildings. The new Spaulding Rehabilitation Center was on the site of the old navy yard, on the point of land where the Mystic River met the bay. It was a world-class facility, in planning and construction for ten years, and it happened to open twelve days after the bombing.

They took us through the front door, where backhoes were leveling the land for a park next door. The floors gleamed, and the hallways were extrawide, so two wheelchairs could pass with ease. My room on the fifth floor had a view across the river to the old docks and warehouses on the north side, and the windows were low enough that I could look out of them from my wheelchair. This was progress. I couldn’t see well out of the medical center windows, and at the old Spaulding… forget it. I heard they’d originally designed the windows at “standing person” height at the new Spaulding, too, meaning you couldn’t look directly out the window if you were sitting down. Your line of sight was too low. A guy in a wheelchair pointed out the problem. It cost $300,000 to lower the windowsills.

Best of all, each patient room had a bathroom, and I could roll to the sink and into the shower with ease. The bathrooms at Boston Medical were supposedly wheelchair friendly, but they were small. It was like being in an airplane bathroom. I was always banging into things, feeling trapped, and forgetting which little compartment served what purpose. New Spaulding was like going from a Boeing 747 to the USS
Enterprise
.

The building was better for my family, too. Much better. There was a nice visitors’ lounge at the end of my hall, with views of the river. There was a decent cafeteria on the first floor, and space in my room for five or six guests. That night, Erin slept on the sofa at the foot of my bed, the first time in two weeks she was able to stretch out. Not that she got a good night’s sleep. I was still in pain whenever I rolled over, and more than once Erin climbed into bed and comforted me, talking and rubbing my singed afro hair.

The next day, Erin’s roommate, Michele, moved into the room next to mine. As I was being evacuated from the bombing site, Michele had been rushed to the marathon medical tent. Shrapnel had shredded the lower part of her right leg. The EMT didn’t think they could save it. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, they planned to amputate her foot. Two emergency surgeries saved her leg and foot, but her Achilles tendon was so damaged she couldn’t walk. The first time she tried, on Thursday, she managed only two steps. Erin had been back and forth all week to see her at Beth Israel Deaconess, including for her skin-graft surgery on Friday.