Stronger (7 page)
“Gail went to run an errand to the drugstore for Mrs. Odom,” Erin told me. “Mr. Odom is on life support. She never expected to be in town this long.”
That information made me uncomfortable, even more than my legs. I didn’t like thinking about the larger situation—all the death and destruction. I didn’t know what to say.
“You’ve got an afro,” Erin said, patting my hair.
“You’re joking,” I said.
“It’s true.”
“Give me a mirror.”
She did. I couldn’t believe how beat up I looked. A Jason Statham–type roundhouse kick to the right eye. Burns on my forehead. The heat of the blast had singed my hair, making it stick out in all directions. “I think it looks good, E,” I said. “I think I should keep this hair. How high do you think it will grow?”
It really did look good, by the way. I think Erin agreed that I was handsome, despite my black eye. “It will be nice when your eyebrows grow back,” she said.
“Afro eyebrows! Do you think it could happen?”
She touched my left arm, the only part of my body that didn’t hurt. She put her head close to mine and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that,” I told her.
She turned off the light and hugged me. “Watch the legs,” I said.
I put my arm around her. She was quiet for a long time. I could feel her breathing so slowly that I thought she might have gone to sleep. Neither of us had taken a shower since the bombing, and I’m not sure either of us had slept.
“You’re famous, you know,” she said finally.
“I don’t want to be famous for this.”
She sighed. “That’s what I thought.” I’ve said before how different Erin and I were, but in the important ways, we were the same.
She kissed me on the forehead. My legs were throbbing. “I just want to be left alone,” I said.
But then I thought: No, not alone. I want to be with you.
T
hursday, April 18, will be remembered in Boston as the day the manhunt began. It might become a new holiday now, part of the legend of Patriot’s Day, along with the marathon and Paul Revere’s ride and the battle at the Old North Bridge. At least for a few years, anyway, until the memory starts to fade.
But Thursday didn’t start that way, at least for me. It started with a homemade Pop-Tart.
While I was in surgery on Wednesday, my store manager at Costco, Kevin “Heavy Kevy” Horst, had arrived at the hospital with a care package and a stack of paperwork. Mom met him in the lobby, flanked by her sisters, Aunt Jenn and Aunt Karen. After the media blitz on Tuesday, the hospital wasn’t letting anyone without a pass through to the ICU.
Kevin sat with them and explained my benefits: disability, the Employee Assistance Program, the “dismemberment” benefit in the insurance package.
I was fortunate. Costco’s health insurance was top-notch. I’m more fortunate than many of my fellow victims, who are struggling not just with bills, but with insurers who don’t want to pay for their long recoveries, or the lifetime of health issues many of us will endure. Someone told me later that investors had been hammering Costco for years over its health insurance policies, insisting they offer a less expensive (and far worse) plan. I guess that was worth a few pennies on the stock price. Costco always said no.
A year ago, I couldn’t have cared less. In fact, a few months before the bombing, I had tried to quit the insurance program. I was young and healthy, and I figured I’d be healthy for years. I never even went to the doctor for checkups. Why did I need to pay out of pocket every week for something I wasn’t even using? A hundred bucks a month could come in very handy.
My department manager, Maya, talked me out of it. “It’s important,” she told me. “You may not understand that now, but someday you will.”
I figured it wasn’t worth arguing about, so I dropped the idea. That turned out to be the greatest decision I never made. Even with good insurance, my medical bills are high. My artificial legs cost $100,000 each, and my insurance paid only half. I was fortunate that several charities, like Wiggle Your Toes, which provides limbs for recent amputees, covered the initial cost. But what about when the legs wear out? Or when they need repairs? Or when I suffer complications next year, or the year after that, from the trauma to my body? If I had to guess, I’d say I have a million dollars in medical bills ahead of me.
That’s one of the reasons I’m so thankful to everyone who has donated to me. I try not to think about the future, but Mom thinks about it all the time. You saved her from a lifetime of worry.
“Thank you,” Mom told Kevin, when Aunt Jenn finally stopped asking him questions. “Thank you. I had no idea he was so well taken care of.”
Kevin then started ticking off other things he had set up for them. The hospital parking deck was expensive, so Kevin had wrangled three free parking spaces for my family less than a block away. His gym had provided free passes so my family could have a place to exercise or relax. He had gone to local restaurants and asked, “If I buy gift cards for Jeff’s family, will you match the amount?”
“No,” the restaurants said, “we’ll give you as many gift cards as you need.”
The FBI was providing hotel rooms for my close relatives, but other friends and relatives had no place in the city to stay. Kevin’s friend offered her apartment for a few weeks, so they wouldn’t have to drive back and forth to Chelmsford. Erin’s family, who lived more than an hour away, stayed there several times.
In the middle of all this, my dad showed up in the lobby, agitated as usual. “This is all nice,” he said, after listening to all Kevin had done. “But I want to know one thing: if Jeff makes it out of this, will you hire him back?”
“We can’t hire him back,” Kevin told him. “He still works for us. We’re not going to let him go.”
Dad shook Kevin’s hand, then started to cry.
The next morning, Kevin showed up in my room with that Pop-Tart–like pastry. It was homemade by a nearby restaurant named Flour, which must have been Kevin’s favorite, because he talked about it all the time.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
“Costco gave me time off to take care of you,” Kevin told me. “It’s the least I can do.”
He handed me a new cell phone. It was much nicer than the old one I had lost in the bombing. The old one had been held together with tape. “From your friends at work,” he said. “We all chipped in to buy it for you.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, addressing him in the respectful way I always had on the job.
“Please, call me Kevin.”
“Yes, sir.”
Of course, that was my Thursday morning. For the rest of Boston, and maybe even the country, Thursday started with an interfaith service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, near the site of the bombing. This was the first official public expression of grief, and Boston turned out. By then, the city had rallied. Boston Strong was everywhere. On clothes. On the destination signs on the buses. On the front of the Museum of Fine Arts. The streets outside the cathedral were mobbed with everyone from dignitaries in formal dress to motorcycle gangs. More than an hour before the service, the line to get in was already more than a block long.
A representative of President Barack Obama’s office came to the hospital to offer a ticket to each victim’s family. Mom wanted Erin to go, but she turned it down.
“Tell President Obama I’m sorry,” Erin said, “but I can’t handle it right now. I’m a mess.”
Other family members wanted to go, but there weren’t enough tickets. They would have to wait in line. Kevin wouldn’t hear of that. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll take care of you.”
He started making calls. Within twenty minutes, he had secured my family ten seats at the front of the church. The governor’s office had authorized it. That was the first time I realized the name Jeff Bauman meant something to people in Boston, and that the city was going to take care of us.
“Thank you, sir,” I told Kevin. It was an instinct. This was my boss’s boss.
“Please, Jeff,” he said, “you don’t need to call me sir.”
I watched some of the ceremony, which was carried live across the country. President Obama spoke of the victims. The city’s religious leaders, of all faiths, urged peace and love to counter anger and hate. Like many others, I thought of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy who died in the blast. There was a famous picture of him, taken the year before, smiling (with one of his front baby teeth missing) and holding a handwritten sign that said: No more hurting people. Peace.
“It was beautiful,” said Uncle Bob, who had walked to the ceremony from the hospital. “A beautiful service.”
“But too soon,” Aunt Cathleen added.
A few hours later, I received my first surprise visitor. Late one night, my dad had been down in the hospital lobby, working through his feelings. By which I mean he was pacing, talking to himself, and crying. By then, Massachusetts had posted state troopers at the hospital door to protect the privacy of victims. This trooper, Carlo Matromate, happened to be chatty.
“Who are you here for?” he asked.
“My son.” My dad told him about me.
“How’s he doing?” Carlo asked.
“He’s down,” my dad said. “He tries not to show it.”
“Tell you what,” the trooper said. “I used to work security, and I know a few Patriots. You think that would cheer him up?”
“I’m sure it would,” my dad said. “Jeff loves the Patriots.”
So Thursday, around noon, in walked a state trooper, escorting Julian Edelman. Now, Julian Edelman is no typical star. He went to a small college. He was a late-round draft pick. He worked his way up from punt returns, where he was the best to ever play the game. Everybody in Boston loved Julian Edelman. He was the little guy who kept fighting. He was tough.
And here he was, in my hospital room, calling me tough. Telling me to keep going, because the whole city was pulling for me.
At first, it was… wow. What do you say? But after a few minutes, it was… well, Julian Edelman was a regular dude. Just a good guy to talk to. He brought me a football, one he’d intercepted and run back for a touchdown when he filled in on defense for half a year. We were throwing it around the room when suddenly, boom, in walked Bradley Cooper.
I’m not a fan of the
Hangover
movies, but I love
Silver Linings Playbook
. My dad is a Philly guy, so I knew those characters. And now Pat Solitano was here, standing in my hospital room with his hand out, saying, “Hi, Jeff. I’m Bradley. It’s an honor to meet you.”
I heard later he was in town filming a movie, and he had been at the interfaith service. Afterward, he walked over to the hospital to see someone he knew, who happened to be on my floor. Somehow, Kevin found out he was there, so he waited by the elevator. For security reasons, only one elevator bank was allowed to stop on the fifth floor.
“Hi, Mr. Cooper. So nice to see you. Wow. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jeff Bauman. He was the man in the wheelchair. He lost both his legs in the bombing.”
“Yeah, I know who he is.”
“He’s a fan, and I know he’d like to meet you.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m, um… I’m his brother. He’s right on this floor.”
“Well, then, let’s go.”
So that’s how I ended up tossing a football, in an intensive care hospital room, with Bradley Cooper and Julian Edelman. Julian had a picture taken with the three of us and Carlo, the state trooper. He posted it online later that day, so now the world has a copy, too.
My favorite detail in the photo is my grandma. She’s in the front corner, looking toward me, like she doesn’t even know a photo is being taken, even though the rest of us are posing. I’m even giving a thumbs-up. I don’t get to see Grandma much, because she’s my dad’s mom and lives near Philly, but I love her. When she found out what had happened, she had to be there for me,
had to
, even though she no longer travels. My aunt had driven her from south Jersey the day before. I’m sure they squabbled the whole ten hours.
“Who was that?” Grandma asked, after everyone had gone.
“That was Julian Edelman and Bradley Cooper, Mom,” my dad said.