Gone

by Linda K. Olson

  CHAPTER 12:

  Save Me!

  A hot Santa Ana wind had been blowing all week, with gusts measuring up to one hundred miles per hour. Wildfire reports blared incessantly on our radio stations. Needing a distraction and thinking about writing a book, I asked Dave if he could look in our storage locker for any boxes that might have stuff from after the accident.

  He returned home with an old Perma Pak storage box and left it in my office. It was late in the evening when I noticed it, faded black capital letters on each side spelling “MEMORABILIA.” Inside was a clutter of tattered envelopes, tabbed manila folders, and a few notebooks that memorialized grade school, college, and beyond.

  At the top of one folder, “Ovens & Stoves” was crossed off and “Salzburg” printed in black ink underneath. This was what I needed. I was on a mission to find things that would jog my memory of the immediate post-accident period. Three other folders looked promising, too: “Accident Documents,” “Military Service Documents,” and “Letters, Etc.”

  I couldn’t recall ever having seen the accident file. As soon as I pulled the front of the “Accident Documents” open, I saw a folded piece of white paper:

  Polizeiinspektion

  8420 Berchtesgaden, 02.04.1980 Berchtesgaden

  B-Tgb.Nr. 505/80

  Frau

  Linda Hodgens

  Two paragraphs followed, all written in German and signed “Ernst, Polizeihauptkommissar.”

  Sixteen black-and-white photos were stacked neatly inside the folded paper, as if waiting to show me something—and waiting to see if I had the courage to look. I refolded the letter and sat motionless, staring at the large, dreamy watercolor of Salzburg that hangs on my office wall. Its lush shades of blue, green, and warm yellows drew my eyes across the Salzach River into the quaint streets of Old Town, with its steepled skyline, and up a steep hill to the ancient, walled Hohensalzburg Fortress. For years, this painting has personified serenity for me.

  I slouched in my wheelchair with what was left of my legs propped against the desk for balance, put the photos on my lap, and thumbed through them halfheartedly. They had maintained their glossy finish and crisp blacks and whites as though they’d been taken yesterday.

  The first photograph showed a railroad curving into the distance with a grassy bank that led down to a small river on the right. Beautiful forest trees lined this corridor. It could have been used in an art book as a good example of perspective.

  The second offered a different kind of perspective. I was jolted by the scene reflected: a VW van askew on the tracks, tilting down at an angle, the front two wheels between the rails, the back two resting higher, on cement siding. An ambulance and fire truck were partially visible on the sides of the tracks and in the background. Again, a tall forest provided the backdrop. Picture three was a duplicate.

  The next showed four small, numbered evidence marker signs extending into the distance. Something white lay on the rail bed. Maybe a piece of clothing? The van was off the tracks, near the trees along the right, its midsection bashed in.

  Picture five showed more little signs. I could see tire drag marks in the dirt leading to the van, which had been pulled off the tracks and toward the trees.

  Sign number one drew my attention. There was something in the dirt, but it was hard to see. I rolled over to a drawer and pulled out my magnifying glass, the one I’d used for more than thirty years when looking at mammograms.

  It was a shoe. Maybe a left shoe? I laid down the lens for a minute and stared out the window into the blackness of the night, wondering if it was my shoe or Dave’s. I took in a deep breath and looked again. There wasn’t anything sticking up above the top of it, so I was pretty sure it belonged to Dave. One of my most vivid memories of the accident was seeing a shoe with my severed foot in it lying a few feet from me and then watching someone place it on the gurney with me as I was lifted into the ambulance. It looked so prim and proper with the shoelaces neatly tied.

  The next three photos showed a brick road paved in a repeating scallop pattern with a railroad track crossing it, nothing else. Rather artistic for a mountain byway.

  Number nine was a full-on side view of the crushed passenger door, with an ice chest visible inside the van. I suspected it had cheese and bread in it, the remainders of our afternoon picnic outside the city of Ulm.

  I sat very still for a couple of minutes. Should I go on? I lived this story thirty-five years ago. I’m happy. I’ve never had nightmares. Is there a chance these pictures will trigger something bad?

  With one finger, I touched the top of photo nine and pulled it forward to see what was next. Some kind of vertical, linty, white artifact gave this photograph a surreal appearance. The van was still angled sideways across the tracks and tilting down. But in this one, the front passenger door was hanging open, and there was a train engine twice the size of the van abutting the driver’s side. An empty gurney with a white sheet and pillow was waiting on the ground. Several onlookers crowded the back left edge of the picture. The photograph was so still, yet charged with the emotion of something awful that had just happened but was already in the past.

  And then number eleven, with a different angle of the engine looming behind the van. God, it was huge. A real-life monster looking straight at me with headlight eyes and a black grille grinning grimly across its lower half. Two men on their hands and knees were leaning over something right up against the van. A third, dressed in white, hovered over them. Their heads were bent low near the ground.

  Again, I picked up the magnifying lens. Something was lying on the ground, barely visible between two of the men. I squinted and kept moving the magnifier up and down to focus as it dawned on me that they must be trying to talk to someone.

  Is that me? I paused. Maybe I should look at this in the morning. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t wait.

  I moved to a brightly lit corner of my office and circled the magnifying glass around the picture more thoughtfully, wondering who else I might recognize. A petite blond woman was talking to two men. Dave’s mom. Donna. The man with his back toward the camera was Dave’s brother. Mark. I suspected they were talking to the police. I had already read their official statements, which had been typed in German and English and were now yellowed by age. Photo eleven might portray the time when they were making their statements.

  I looked once more at the figure on the ground and knew without a doubt that it was I. Slowly, I laid down the magnifying glass and reran the vivid thirty-five-year-old memory reel in my mind. It happened so fast. I’d always remembered the passengers rushing off the train, shouting to each other in German and then lifting up the van to pull me out from under it. Now, I saw it in these glossy black-and-white photos from outside myself, at a distance from the scene.

  It’s strange how this did not change the way I felt. I looked down at my armless shoulder and touched the ends of both my very short legs. This is who I am, a triple amputee with no right arm and both legs off above the knees. Even after sitting still for a few minutes, I had no tears.

  I was going to die, but then I didn’t.

  And when I didn’t, I grabbed on to the hope that I’d live.

  I knew that if I did live, I could make it work.

  And when Dave hobbled into the ICU the next day and said that he hadn’t married my arms and my legs, that if I could do it, he could do it, I knew that we would make it work.

  I knew that I must expend all the energy I could muster to keep Dave from being discouraged. My strength grew while I helped everyone around me see the possibility of a bright future. I wanted to keep laughing and to hear laughter around me. There was no time and not enough energy to spend on being morose, going to dark places, or asking, “Why?” and “What if?”

  I gathered the pictures and tapped the edges to straighten them into a neat stack. The front picture showed a tranquil railroad curving into the distance with a grassy bank leading down to a small river on the right. It hid the rest. Sometimes h
iding prevents us from moving forward. Sometimes it’s the only way to move forward. Besides, it was a lifetime ago.

  Brian had been staying with us, and it had been a long week. Everyone was tired. The muffled conversation between Dave and Brian coming from the kitchen got louder. I busied myself at the far end of the house, waiting for things to settle down, but the argument reached out to me.

  “I’m thirty years old. Why can’t she stop worrying about me?” Brian said.

  I suspected it had something to do with my having told Dave how hard it was to get a good night’s sleep when I kept waking up at night, waiting to hear Brian come home.

  “Brian,” Dave said, “you need to give your mom a break. I know she worries, but there are reasons for that!” The tone had shifted from father-son to man-to-man.

  I started toward the kitchen but stopped when Dave proceeded, in a more measured tone: “I think it’s time you know what really happened when we got hit by the train. It might help you understand your mom a little better.”

  I held my breath.

  Brian said nothing.

  Dave continued, “You know we were on vacation in Germany with my parents and Mark and his wife.” He paused. “I don’t know how to say this . . . but it’s time you know that we didn’t really stall on the railroad tracks.”

  He hesitated, then went on. “We were lost. We’d been driving up a narrow mountain road, trying to get to Berchtesgaden. There was no place to pull over, so when my dad, your grandfather, saw a flat stretch of road ahead, he decided to stop there so he could look at the map. He had just turned off the engine and reached for the map when your mom saw a train coming around the corner. She yelled for him to get off the tracks. . . . Then we all saw it. Everyone yelled, but he couldn’t restart the engine.” His voice cracked as he continued.

  “It was a stupid mistake on my dad’s part. He was stubborn and determined to look at that map. That decision cost your mom her legs and her arm and forever changed our lives.”

  I went a few feet farther down the hallway and stopped again, wondering what Brian’s reaction would be. It was Dave who spoke. “A couple of nights after the accident, your mom told me she wanted to talk about what had happened. She told me she could remember everything: how my dad stopped the van so he could look at the map, how my dad and I and Mark got out of the car, how she fell out onto the tracks, how I picked her up. The train slamming into the van. When the train stopped, everyone got off and pulled the van off her. She never lost consciousness.”

  Brian said nothing.

  “I listened and told her that was the way I remembered it, too. We talked and we cried. We talked about our families and how difficult it was for them to see her so terribly disabled, to think that our lives would never be the same again. And then we talked about our future. How we wanted to have children. How important it would be for our families to help us if we did. We were pretty sure it would tear our families apart if your mom’s parents found out what had really happened. And we knew beyond a doubt that my dad would live with the guilt of his choice for the rest of his life.”

  I decided it was time to join the conversation; plus, I wanted to see how Brian was reacting to this news.

  As I approached the door, Dave said, “So, we made a pact that night. Rather than tell our families—and everyone who knew us—that my dad stopped on the railroad track to read a map, we would tell them that our van stalled on the track.”

  They both turned toward me as I came into the kitchen and picked up where Dave had left off. “Even though it was only three days since the accident, I already knew that it was going to take every ounce of energy I had to learn how to walk, learn how to use my left hand, go back to work. I wanted to get that behind me as fast as possible. We both knew exactly what had happened. It would do us no good to spend time and energy on blame, what-ifs, or whys. What was done was done.”

  Brian stood quiet but not alarmed.

  I continued, “One of the hardest things for me from day one was seeing how devastated our families were. I quickly realized that I was the only one who could make them feel better. That it was my job to get them to laugh and believe that we were going to be all right. This little white lie was the only way we knew to take back control of our lives. I wanted to be happy, and I wanted everyone around me to be happy, too. . . . And, most importantly, I wanted Dad to be happy so he’d stick around and not leave me.”

  Dave leaned over and hugged me. “Olsie, I’d never have left you,” he said for the millionth time.

  The room was silent. Dave stood next to the stove. Brian leaned on the kitchen counter. Silver-haired dad and the younger blond son. No one spoke. It was as if the words were working their way in and through our son’s being. I could only imagine how it must feel to hear such a damning statement about his beloved grandfather.

  And then Brian turned and said, “It’s funny. It doesn’t matter. We’ve had a wonderful life, and what’s done is done.”

  Life was good, and the accident was part of the fabric of it. Our granddaughter, Sierra, has heard the train story many times and turned it into her own little reality show: Train Wreck. This reenactment played out in a vacation condo in Truckee, California, when she was five years old.

  “Save me, Grandpa! Save me! Is this the way it was?” Sierra said while lying on the floor. We’ve played Train Wreck umpteen times, and each time, she carefully positions her body so she is parallel to the grout lines in the tile floor. Each time, Dave checks her position, makes a couple of adjustments, and then nods his approval.

  “Okay, now save me!” she called.

  Dutifully, Dave went to the other end of the room, turned around, and ran back across to her, shouting, “I’m here! I’m here!” He hooked his hands under her armpits, pulled her up, and hugged her to himself.

  “Then what happened?” she asked. She knows, of course, but the telling and the doing, in every minute detail, are part of the game.

  “Well, the train hit us and tore your grandmother out of my arms and pinned her to the track,” he recounted while gently releasing her back to the floor, where she collapsed in a blond heap.

  He continued, “And then, after it knocked me off to the side, it dragged her down the railbed”—a concept I’m not sure she grasps yet. Sierra lay in a heap on the “tracks,” listening intently, eyes open and present.

  “Did it hurt, Grandma?” she asked as she turned toward me.

  No-Leg Grandma, as I’m called, is always sitting nearby when this game is being played, and I responded the same way I always do: “No, sweet face. I didn’t feel any pain; I just felt my breath being squeezed out of me.”

  “Grandpa, save me!” Sierra called out again.

  This is the part where Dr. Grandpa has to examine the limp body at his feet and check pulses, listen to breath sounds, open each eye and look at the pupils, and go through—without leaving out any detail—a finger-and-toe count before he can finally declare that she is in fine form, with no contusions, no fractures, and no residual effects from our pretend harrowing experience.

  I watched the scene play out and on cue chimed in, “Make sure she still has tickle spots that work,” which served to reanimate the flaccid five-year-old, who sprang up, laughing and squealing, before running out of the room.

  “Okay, Grandpa—your turn! I’ll save you!”

  As was expected, Dave slowly got down on the floor, spread out supine, and got his body and limbs in just the right position so she could run across the room and pick him up off the tracks.

  They’ve exchanged roles. She will never know how many times her grandfather has wished that he could have done just that on an August afternoon in Bavaria.

  Later that day, Sierra called out to me this time, “It’s almost time to go!”

  It was time to get the skis out, and our adventuresome, impatient, bubbly little granddaughter looked at me and said, “Get your legs on, Grandma!”

  CHAPTER 13:

  Eighty Thousan
d Miles

  O-dark-thirty. Out the door he went in his old, faded cotton shirt with its stretched-out neck, white tube socks, low-top Converse All-Star shoes, and baggy white shorts. Starting at a slow trot with measured breathing, he leaned forward and gradually picked up the pace. He had miles to go.

  I noticed him the first day of medical school. Dave was the blond, handsome, compactly athletic guy with the cute mustache and sideburns sitting below me in the anatomy amphitheater. He sat in the front row of every class, taking extensive notes, staring intently at the slides or the blackboard and watching the professor. I soon learned that he had a nearly photographic memory—a blessing and, eventually, a curse. He was so focused that he didn’t even notice my considerable efforts at flirting.

  He was driven to be the best. At everything. He studied compulsively, always seeking out extra material and opportunities to practice what he learned. Classmates turned to him for help, and he willingly and patiently tutored them. He was intense. He was complicated.

  He grew up relying on sports to serve as an emotional outlet and help maintain an even keel in life. But medical school was so time-consuming that he needed exercise which he could do at odd hours and which didn’t require money or other people to participate.

  So, running became his thing. Starting at 5:00 a.m., before the Inland Empire heat and smog settled in, he ran on silent, isolated, dark roads through orange grove after orange grove. He contemplated the first of thousands of sunrises. The beginning of the thousands of miles he would run, the thousands of thoughts that he would cycle through.