Stronger (12 page)

Having both of us at Spaulding made things easier for Erin. Her life, or at least this part of it, was finally manageable. She could be there for both her best friend and her boyfriend without driving across town.

It made it easier on Michele and me, too. We hadn’t seen each other since locking eyes after the bombing; I was so happy she was alive. She felt the same about me, considering she’d seen me lying in a pool of blood. Early in the morning, when neither of us could sleep, we’d sit together and talk about what had happened. I told her about seeing bone through the hole in her leg. She told me about realizing my legs were gone.

“I had a bad feeling about the guy,” I told her. “I was about to say we should move.” She hadn’t known that. It made me feel guilty again.

“I still smell it,” I told her one morning. “People were on fire.”

“I know,” she said. And she did. Only someone who was there could understand the horror of the smell. That was what was great about having Michele next door.

In the afternoon, we’d usually hang out with Erin. Sometimes we’d watch television. Sometimes I’d play my mandolin. Or I’d do wheelies, which always impress girls. We talked more than we ever had before. Michele is a talker, and I am quiet by nature. I don’t think she really knew me until we sat with Erin in her room.

Late in the week, Remy came for a visit. She had an ugly shrapnel wound in her thigh, and the doctors had surgically implanted a valve in her leg to drain the pus. She had spent time at Spaulding, but was now home with her parents in Amesbury.

Remy had deeply conflicted feelings. Because of her wound, she was often in pain. Like the rest of us, she had trouble sleeping. And she felt guilty about leaving Michele and me behind when she went toward the finish line. She felt she should have been there with us, although if she had been, nothing would have been better. It would have just been three of us severely injured, instead of two.

Her father had been quoted in the newspaper a few days after the bombing saying she was “angry and depressed.” It was no doubt true. We all felt angry and depressed. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. But now Remy was conflicted about that, too.

“I’m embarrassed,” she confided to Erin. “Why should I be struggling when other people have it so much worse?”

Knowing Remy, she’s probably embarrassed that I’m writing about this. But she shouldn’t be, because her feelings are normal. That’s what I’ve come to realize. Feeling guilty—whether about being lucky or about not stopping the bomber—is normal. So is embarrassment. I still feel embarrassed every day because I don’t have legs. So is feeling traumatized. Being twenty feet from a bomb instead of two doesn’t make it easy.

We didn’t talk about that, though. There was no need. We talked about our lives. Our recoveries. Our families.

“Are you part of the family?” a nurse had asked Michele’s boyfriend when she found them together in her room on the second day.

“No,” he said. “This is our fifth date.”

“It wasn’t easy having my boyfriend put me on the bedside commode for our fifth date,” Michele told us with a laugh.

Before the bombing, she hadn’t been using the word
boyfriend
. Now, she relied on him. Like Erin and me, they were closer because of what they’d been through. I don’t know if that’s a natural reaction to tragedy: to move toward someone, if they don’t pull away.

I tend to think tragedy gives you perspective. When I was lying in my emergency room bed with no legs, staring at the ceiling, I had to ask myself: What do I want now? What do I care about?

When I am in pain, who makes me feel better? Who can I be honest with, without being afraid of their reaction? The answer always came up Erin.

I felt better when she was there, so much so that the only photograph in my hospital room was of her. It was a cell phone shot I’d taken in Washington, D.C., a close-up of the two of us pressed together and smiling. I taped it to my IV stand so I would see it every time I opened my eyes.

That day with Michele and Remy was important, especially for Erin. With the four of us together, I think she felt her own wound healing. Damage had been done, but the essential parts of her life had not been lost. She still had her family and friends. She still had her handsome man. The world she had made for herself had been blown off center, sure, but she was stronger because of what we’d been through.

Someone snapped a picture of the four of us that day. There are at least a dozen pictures of the four of us together, spread out over the last year and a half, but that picture is my favorite. Michele’s in bed with her leg in a walking boot. Remy is standing to one side of her, and Erin is sitting on the bed on her other side. I’m beside Erin, in my wheelchair, with my mandolin, ready to play.

And we’re smiling. Not photograph smiles, but genuine smiles, like we’re about to start laughing. It looks like we’re having a good time.

Unbreakable
. That was the word Michele’s father used. He told her, “I feel like, because of what we’ve been through, our family is unbreakable.”

I think it was the same for the four of us. I hope we always stay that way.

15.

S
paulding was… I want to say it was a community, because that was where the bombing victims came together. We had been spread out at the five hospitals near downtown Boston, but most of us eventually ended up at Spaulding. Not all of us, of course. I only saw the daughter from the Richard family once, for instance, even though she lost a leg. That family had suffered like nobody else: the mother had eye damage, the little girl lost her leg, and poor Martin Richard, who was eight years old, was killed. I saw his older brother once, and it broke my heart. He was the saddest kid I have ever met.

Mom cries every time she thinks of them. “They watched their son die,” she says.

“Martin was Boston Strong,” the family said in their lone statement to the press. That’s the only time those words choked me up. And they’ve never made me more proud.

But Spaulding wasn’t a community. It was the Island of Misfit Toys. Nobody wanted to be there, but we were broken, so we had nowhere else to go. Spaulding was not a jolly place, even though they tried to make it as jolly as they could.

And just like the toys on the island, we all had one goal: to get out.

I started working on that the first day. I had been practicing my transfers at Boston Medical, so by the time I reached Spaulding I no longer needed my board. I could easily slide from my bed to my wheelchair, then onto my mat in the gym, which was more like a single bed covered in a sheet than those mats you nap on in kindergarten.

I still couldn’t lie on my stomach because of my surgical wound, so my therapist, Carlyn Wells, told me to lie on my side. She grabbed my leg and pulled it backward as far as she could. At first I almost screamed. It hurt for her to touch my leg, much less pull on it, but once I got over the shock it felt so good. My muscles had tightened up from two weeks of lying in bed, but also from the shock of the blast. It was like my body had clenched, then never let go. It felt so good for Carlyn to pull me apart.

After the stretch, while I was still lying on my side, she asked me to lift my right leg. Higher, she said. Higher. I could lift it only a few times.

I rolled over on my other side and lifted my left leg. It was even weaker than the right.

I sat up and I worked on leg lifts from a seated position. I hated looking at my legs. They were like dancing sausages, with bandages over the ends. Ten lifts, and I was sweating.

“It’s not weakness, it’s muscle trauma,” Carlyn told me. “Although you do need to get stronger.”

I lifted free weights with my arms: curls, shoulder shrugs, extensions.

“Everything is connected,” Carlyn told me.

I hadn’t just lost my legs; I’d changed the role of each muscle in my body. Sitting up was harder without legs, because I had to rely on my core. Balance meant squaring and lifting my shoulders, not just setting my thighs. When you walk, you can slump your upper body, because your leg muscles can compensate. It’s not a good way to walk, but most people do it that way, at least some of the time. I wasn’t going to be able to “take steps off” anymore. I had to be upright and strong, because my new legs would be more like stilts than the bionics I had promised my nephew Cole. They would support me, but only my upper body would keep them beneath me.

Since I couldn’t sleep, I chose the first training session of the morning. It was about two hours long, so I was usually done by 10:30. Soon after, when I was most tired, a speech therapist would come to my room. Mostly, we talked. At the end, she gave me five words, then came back an hour later and asked me what they were. When that wasn’t a problem, she gave me ten more, then came back the next day and asked me to repeat them. She gave me math homework.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. “Your job is stupid.” I was joking with her, but only partially. I knew she was testing for brain damage, and I hated it.

“You’re fine,” she told me after a week of torture.

Then there was psychological counseling, both individual and group. And occupational therapy designed to help me find solutions for practical chores.

Mom and Aunt Jenn always arrived in the late morning. (My dad had the evening shift, and it was better if they never saw each other.) Mom had taken time off from work to be with me, but there wasn’t much she could do. She fidgeted around the room, asking me questions, but I was often frustrated, and I didn’t feel like talking.

Fortunately, there was the mail. Aunt Jenn had put her address on the Facebook page, and cards and gifts had come flooding in. She packed them up every morning, then picked up Mom and drove her to Spaulding. Mom didn’t like driving in the city.

I couldn’t believe the nice things people wrote. Or how much they cared. Most of them weren’t even from Boston, but they had been following my story, and they wanted to help. Businesses were donating a portion of their sales; small towns were holding fund-raisers; families were pooling resources. Letters would include checks for hundreds of dollars.

A hundred dollars, for a stranger? That’s a big deal.

“How can that be, Mom?” I asked.

“Jeffrey,” Mom said, holding my hand as if she was delivering bad news, “people have given you more than $100,000.”

A hundred thousand dollars?! I had dropped out of college over a $900 debt. I had been making less than $16,000 a year. Now people had donated $100,000 to help me, just because my legs had been pulverized?

It’s stupid to say I would have traded the money for my legs. Of course I would have. But I wasn’t even thinking like that. I was too overwhelmed.

And it’s stupid to focus just on the money.

A woman living in Japan sent me a tiny replica of samurai armor. How cool is that?

A man from Bend, Oregon, sent me a custom Epiphone Les Paul Gibson guitar. It was olive colored and stripped down, the most beautiful guitar I had ever seen, but the note made it one of a kind:

I read about what happened to you and what you are going through, and although you don’t know me, I wanted you to know I’m thinking about you and sending prayers your way.… I read that you like to play guitar, so I’m sending you one that has been special to me. It’s nothing fancy, but it has a great tone and a good action on it. After a while, I have found that guitars become like old friends—consider this a gift from a new one.…

It wasn’t just adults who gave from the heart. A ten-year-old boy broke open his piggy bank and sent me all his money. It was almost $20 in small bills and change.

“Send him a PlayStation,” I said.

“You can’t do that, Jeff,” Mom said.

“Why not?”

“You can’t buy something for everyone that gives to you.”

“Why not?”

Mom picked up another letter and read it: “ ‘I’m sure you’ve heard this over and over again by now, but you are truly a hero. I just want to thank you for being an inspiration to this entire nation. I’ve never seen a stronger, more resilient person in my life.’ ”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why do people say that about me?”

Mom looked at me. I hated being looked at. Did all those people writing letters know that? If they did, what would they have thought?

“They admire your bravery,” Mom said.

I wanted to say,
But I’m not brave. I just lost my legs.

I mean, some kid, in some other state, saved his money for years, probably taking the dishes off the table and putting his clean clothes away, doing chores for his mom. He saved up, probably to buy one of those
Despicable Me
minions or something—kids love the minions, right? I have a minion sticker on my wheelchair. Cole gave it to me.

But does the kid buy the minion? No.

He gives his money to a stranger.

And it wasn’t only that kid. There were dozens of kids who sent me their allowance money. Kindergarten classes drew me pictures. Kids sold their toys to raise funds for bombing victims. “This is so you can feel better,” they wrote.

Maybe someday I’ll start a charity. I’ll find kids who have done something kind, and I’ll give them a gift in return, because that’s real bravery, caring so much about someone else.