by Anne Panning
I held the phone out to her when she came in, twirling a small black moonflower she’d picked from her flower garden. “Finally,” she whispered, handing it to me, “it’s blooming.” Before taking the phone, she took out her earring, an old-fashioned gesture of hers I loved. “Yes?” she said.
As she listened, her whole body went limp but I grabbed onto her and steadied her. Somehow I felt my role as her sole support bear down on me with more peace and calm than dread and apprehension. It was a role I had been preparing for, though I didn’t know it, all my life. I was a good listener, and whether by default or due to birth order or temperament, I had been groomed by my mother to be both sensible and strong, empathetic and unflappable; I was anyone’s best bet for a confidante who would go the extra mile to get you to your destination. My reliability had always been the perfect antidote to Harry’s jittery haplessness.
Later, I remembered the term “life altering” being used over and over again to describe what had happened.
At first our mother wouldn’t let Harry or me come to the hospital to visit our father, although she spent almost every waking—and sleeping—hour there. It was just too awful and his situation so dire that we’d have to “wait and see,” she’d said. In reality, I knew my mother was protecting us from a future of memories, seared forever, of our father: weakened, marred, maimed. It was as if we’d essentially been orphaned, and although it was fun in an illicit way to stay up late, ignore homework, watch music videos whenever we wanted, and eat out of cans and boxes, it quickly wore on me, and I soon felt abandoned by my parents in a way that made me feel six years old again. My sleep was fitful and interrupted; I’d awaken, only to feel exhausted. I had nightmares of horrible car crashes that woke me up in fits of sobbing.
In the mornings, I’d find my mother’s tote bag flung on the dining room table where she’d left it the night before, health bars and insurance forms and Kleenex spilling out as if she’d thrown it there in haste. In reality, she’d make her way upstairs late for a few fitful hours of sleep and stay in bed until after Harry and I had left for school. I knew she was awake because I remembered looking up at her bedroom window as I got in the passenger side of Harry’s Honda. I could see the curtains in her bedroom blowing in the breeze and would sometimes have to look away when I saw her peek out at us as we drove off. Her face was like a ghost’s behind the pale lace curtains, and it nearly ruined me for the entire day to see her haunting us like that.
We knew the basics, certainly: our father had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle on Highway 21, which leads to Lake Ontario (what he was doing so far away from Bellport caused much speculation). Something had happened to both of his legs: they had been somehow broken or damaged in a way that I sensed was far more serious than we’d been told. Although he’d been wearing a helmet, he’d hit his head hard. What we also knew was that he had escaped spinal cord injury, and for that we all felt a tremendous relief. To me, though, it seemed like a false relief borne out of a desire to be happy about something, anything. Ah, I thought, so he won’t be paralyzed! Thank God for good news!
As the days after the accident accumulated and then became a week, I think we all sensed the tragedy was larger than anyone knew, including our mother. When our father had at last stabilized and it seemed he would live and could breathe on his own, our mother capitulated and finally agreed that it was time for Harry and me to see him, for better or worse. We both took the day off from school, even though visiting hours didn’t start until one, and even though our mother decided we should wait until three, which was “a better time for him.” I sensed she was stalling.
The ride to the hospital felt long. Fall was coming on early, and the leaves, though still a hard green, blushed orange at the tips. Our mother, always a nervous driver, kept her hands in the ten-and-two position, her body erect, her face stoic. A light rain fell, more like a mist, and as we turned and followed the Erie Canal, an ominous cloud hung heavily over the water despite the dying sunlight to the west. Harry had wanted to drive, had made a brief nasty scene when my mother refused him, but had thankfully backed off at my urging.
“Boys,” our mother said. I sat in back with my long legs spread out on either side. A compact car, it was barely able to contain the four of us on family outings, which had only rarely occurred anyway. She adjusted the rearview, then quickly placed her right hand back into position on the steering wheel. “There’s something you need to prepare yourselves for.” She eyed me in the mirror, and I nodded obediently, letting her know I was ready. “There’s something you need to know,” she said.
Harry was up front fiddling with the radio stations. I knew exactly which five had been programmed for each button: NPR, jazz, classical AM, 80s rock, and the college’s alternative station. Our father prided himself on keeping up with current music and often went out and bought the newest albums before I’d even heard of them. To my surprise, Harry settled on the jazz station. “Highly overrated,” he used to say, which would elicit a lecture from our father about innovation and experimentation and form and keeping an open mind.
“Now listen,” our mother said. She turned onto the highway, only after craning her neck to look both ways several times. “I should’ve told you this—” she started, then shook her head.
“What?” Harry said, sounding fed up.
“It’s just—it was all so uncertain,” she said. I could hear the catch in her voice; she was scared. In the rearview mirror, I could see her eyebrows knit together. “Don’t be mad,” she said.
“Mad?” I said. “At who?” I was so far beyond anger her comment threw me.
She shrugged her shoulders and continued to drive in silence.
“Your father has lost both of his legs,” she said finally. “They were injured so badly they had to be amputated.”
We sped past little clusters of apple orchards, their spooky gnarled branches reminding me of old, evil witch hands. There didn’t seem to be any appropriate response to her news. I had questions, certainly. Namely, why the hell couldn’t the doctors do something to save his legs? Why hadn’t she told us this before? Had it taken too much time getting him to the hospital? Why the hell had he been on his way up to the lake? Was he with anyone? But I asked nothing. She had scared me into silence.
Harry banged a knuckle back and forth against the window glass to the beat of a low bass drum. I thought he would stop upon hearing the news, but he did not. Thump, thump, thump. “When was this?” he asked.
“I don’t know ... two days ago?” she said. “I can’t keep track anymore.” She was trying to get over into the left-hand lane but kept slowing down and missing her chances.
“Shit,” Harry said. He stopped the knuckle rapping finally as she slid the car over, barely missing a truck. The person laid on the horn and glared at us as he passed. My mother gripped the steering wheel harder. “I wanted to make sure everything turned out all right,” she said. “You know? I didn’t want to be giving any worse news than I had to.” I puzzled over this for a minute, unsure what she meant.
“The thing is,” Harry said, “we’re his family. His kids, you know?” He turned to look at her, but she kept her eyes on the road. “I mean, I think we can take it. As much as you can, anyway.” I didn’t like him challenging her like that, so I changed the topic.
“How’s he doing?” I asked. “Is he all right?” We were just approaching downtown where the highway split off and became freeway. The familiar cluster of buildings—the old Kodak headquarters, the new prison, the Frontier soccer stadium, the Xerox tower with the big red X—used to make me think I had really arrived somewhere, even though I knew we were not L. A. or New York City or even Boston but a third-tier, small-town city. I usually looked with special fondness at the old-fashioned limestone Hoover building that housed my father’s law firm where he had always made enough money to keep us comfortable, to keep me and Harry in the latest jeans and tennis shoes, to keep us traveling to interesting places like the Grand
Canyon and the Florida Keys, to keep two late-model cars in the garage so that anyone could tell at a glance we did not suffer. This afternoon the skyline seemed sooty and sad.
“He’s all right,” my mother said, but I could feel her editing things out again. “But he lost so much blood. You can imagine.” She seemed unsure whether to continue or not. She put a finger to her lips, as if considering. “The couple who found him had given him up for dead. I mean, they had a cell phone and called 911, but they reported later they couldn’t even get a pulse ...” She wiped at her nose. “You don’t know how lucky he is. Really.”
I didn’t. Or perhaps I couldn’t possibly find a way to define what she was describing as luck. By this time we had exited the freeway and my mother was circling the hospital parking garage, looking for an empty space. I sat and tried to sort out the combination of things at work inside of me. After my father had gotten the bicycle, he’d become someone else, and although we all, I sensed, watched his transformation with some fascination, we could also see him leaving us further and further behind as he reached for some exhilarating notion of solitary flight.
The hospital was without details for me, save the elevator. A recorded voice narrated each floor we passed, announcing when the doors would open and close. I discovered, thanks to Harry, this was for the blind, or “the visually impaired,” as our mother corrected. Harry was able to make great fun of this in his customary snide fashion and get away with it. I laughed hard when the Japanese-sounding voice said, “Fifth floor,” but the mood didn’t last. In fact, I felt the urge to vomit as we stood outside my father’s room.
Before going inside, we were given surgical masks to wear because of our father’s high susceptibility to infection, and this gave Harry even more comedic material with which to work, although my mother at last shushed him as if he were a young child instead of an adult towering over her with a wispy goatee and hunched shoulders. I’ll admit it was very hard to keep a level head.
Our father was asleep and for this I was grateful; we were able to take in the basic situation without worrying about his reaction to our reaction. Harry and I both hung back by the window while our mother fussed with his bedding and bandages. She stood back, arms crossed, casting a brave grim smile over him, then nodded for us to come over.
“He’s not in a coma, is he?” Harry asked. “I mean, or whatever.”
“No,” our mother whispered. “He’s heavily sedated, for the pain. But he may be able to hear you.”
The thing that kept running through my head was: Vietnam vet. My history teacher had just done a unit on the Vietnam War, and what stayed with me most clearly were the images of bandaged stumps of amputated limbs. Just like the vets, my father had gauze wound around his upper thighs (what was left of them), which looked oddly claylike where the flesh was visible.
I felt pressured to say something upbeat and hopeful, but Harry and I both stood there, mute. I touched my father’s arm in one of the few places that was not compromised with needles and medical tape and monitors and stroked lightly. He was warm. Harry scratched his head and sighed. I could feel our mother watching us for some gauge as to how our future might play itself out; her stiff breathing told me that she needed us to be strong, capable boys. Just then a little yelp came out of my throat that was somewhere between a cry and a gasp. Harry flinched. My mother stared at the floor. My father’s monitors continued to tick time on the black screen.
My father opened his eyes just a crack and looked reptilian when he did so. “Nick,” he said in a voice that sounded drunk. “Harry. You—came.” I wanted him to know that we’d actually wanted to come much sooner than this, and I gave my mother the eye, silently accusing her of not telling him she was the one who’d kept us away. I could sense a new little war growing between us all, different territory at stake than before. But as all of this raced through my head, my father dropped off to sleep again. Soon a nurse came in to do vitals, in essence, ending the visit. We left, depositing the surgical masks in a large waste can in the lobby. Mine felt warm from all the breathing.
On the ride home, our silence was filled by NPR news and a long in-depth segment on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. We let it drown out our concerns as city gave way to suburbia, and finally the Erie Canal led us home.
It wasn’t until late November that my father was officially allowed to come home. There had been come-and-go infections in varying degrees of severity, and just when they’d thought he was “out of the woods” (according to his fly fisherman doctor, who always wore sand-colored clothing and a crisp blue bow tie), something else would present itself as a danger. Plus, his spirits were so down that the doctor had ordered us to work hard at cheering him up since his emotional health was jeopardizing his physical health. “And we can’t have that, comrades,” he said, I thought, somewhat glibly. But many was the day that Harry and I had sat by his bedside playing a round of hearts or backgammon, and many more were the days that my father sat there, unspeaking, enduring, it seemed, our constant campaign of enacting a “normal” family life.
“Try to focus on the positive,” the doctor said on one of our last hospital visits. “Focus on what he can do instead of what he can’t. You see?” He winked. There was a sparkle in his eyes that suggested he might actually enjoy this—the challenge our family presented to him as a medical and psychological problem.
The day my father returned home it snowed—in classic upstate New York fashion—ten inches. All day big cottony flakes came down and settled themselves along the porch railing where you could see the accumulation, inch by inch. A mobile van service brought him home, and I remembered thinking: my father is now one of the people you see in those vehicles. From my bedroom window, I surreptitiously took a photograph of the van as it pulled up the driveway.
I watched as the aides rolled him up a newly built ramp. My father did not move his head or show any emotion. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, the snow swirling around him in a way that looked, from my perspective, artificial. I continued to peer down from my window like a spy. I knew Harry was in his room doing the same thing while our mother had to be the adult, provide the positive public face as the care workers got him into the house, which was anything but wheelchair accessible at that point. Extended family members had all offered to come and help, to cook us a big Thanksgiving dinner, but my mother had graciously held them off, saying that she thought our father might need some private transition time.
And there he was, sitting in the middle of the living room when I came down. “Dad,” I said. “Happy Thanksgiving.” I touched the back of his wheelchair.
“Yeah,” he said, as if it were a joke and we were the only two people in on it. Whenever he spoke he sounded drunk, even though he had escaped serious head injury. “Thank God.” But he laughed a little, the corners of his mouth twisting up in a familiar way. His green eyes looked huge and haunted, as if they had taken in a magnificent but horrible sight and would never quite be the same. He had the appearance of the religiously converted, minus the beatific glow.
My mother was like a nervous hostess at dinner, self-conscious about each and every dish, apologetic when the mashed potatoes turned cold, overly generous with the portions on my father’s plate. I watched her drain wine glass after wine glass of chardonnay, her old standby; she preferred the tiny crystal glasses that necessitated small servings, even though she ended up drinking more of them than she probably should have. “So,” she said, “just like old times, all of us here.”
Harry kept getting up to check on the football game. My mother kept getting up to get butter, salt and pepper, serving utensils. My father sat holding his napkin, not eating. It seemed like there should have been some speech of sorts, some sage instructions for how to navigate the new terrain in front of us, but no one seemed capable of that, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one. Besides, what did I know? I could barely manage to look at my father as he sat pushed up to the table in his wheelchair. Everything in the house
had been pushed back against the walls to make way for his chair. Luckily, at least one of his arms was still strong and he could push himself around, although he wasn’t very good at it yet. He had told me about his physical therapy sessions, or “PT” as he called it, and how hard they worked him, how pissed off he’d get when he couldn’t navigate the little obstacle course they’d set up as a test. “It’s more complicated than driving a car,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like it would be, but it is.”
Eventually, he excused himself from dinner and wheeled himself (at great effort) into the living room where he parked in front of the television set. I was reminded of a scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where the patients all sat in front of the television, drooling. I knew my father’s mind was still, for the most part, capable, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he would always be viewed as incompetent. It seemed to go along with the chair. That’s what he called it, too—“the chair.”
I heard my mother crying that night for the first time since the accident. It was the middle of the night, and I’d had to get up to go to the bathroom. I stood frozen outside the door and listened. I could imagine her small shoulders shaking silently as she lay in their big king-sized bed all alone while my father slept downstairs in what used to be the family room. What I really wondered beyond the basic, how was my father going to survive this? was how their already rocky marriage would survive it. Later I would come to serve as observer, arbiter, coach, and snare. Harry, not surprisingly, dodged participation on any level.
By Christmas my father was able to maneuver the entire first floor of our house, even though the narrow old Victorian was not exactly easy on him. Ever since he’d come home, various contractors had been coming through the house with tape measures and blueprints for adapting our house to meet ADA requirements. My father, a civil rights lawyer, had had excellent disability insurance, and this offered the one single ray of hope in an otherwise bleak situation. Whereas many people in my father’s situation would have been forced to downgrade and relocate to a more “ability-appropriate” living situation (i.e., one-floor, all-accessible apartment complexes), my father’s insurance paid for almost all the renovations of our home, which thankfully allowed us to stay put.
