Crash

by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

  I don’t remember the words of the letter beyond “congratulations” and “we’re pleased to inform you…” I don’t remember our words to each other either. I only remember my husband’s viselike embrace and a wave of relief at not having to uproot my family for what I thought would surely be the most stressful years of my life.

  Neil was in the middle of the college application process when the crash occurred. He had applied to just five schools. His college essay was entitled “Go for My Knees.” In it he recounted an incident that occurred during his high school’s production of Romeo and Juliet, in which he played Tybalt. Neil had learned fight choreography from Shakespeare & Co. in that play. He would go on to win an award for his own fight choreography from the Massachusetts High School Drama Guild.

  One night, in their recurring fight scene, Romeo jousted with Tybalt/Neil, jabbing his sword repeatedly at him. Usually Neil was able to judge his steps, knowing just when and where to turn, back up, or leap forward. But on this particular night, Neil misjudged the space around him and fell backward off the stage and onto the floor at the feet of a surprised front row. The audience gasped. Hal, playing Romeo, was unsure if Neil was badly hurt. Neil was momentarily dazed.

  “Get up, Tybalt,” Romeo finally called down to Neil.

  “Tybalt, rise.” The other student-actors followed Hal’s lead, improvising.

  Neil finally shook his head and grabbed his sword. He crept stealthily up the four stairs onto the stage, looking menacing, circling an uncertain Hal.

  “Go for my knees,” Neil whispered to Hal to cue him as to where to pick up the fight scene Neil had interrupted by flying from the stage. Their swords resumed clashing. The audience cheered, unaware that the fall was not part of the original script.

  In the essay Neil wrote about his ability to take a negative and turn it into a positive. He used his fall as a metaphor for the obstacles life throws our way and his leap back onto the stage as a sign of his ability to adapt and make the most of the hand he was dealt. The essay persuaded. He got into Skidmore on his second try.

  The acceptance came one day while Neil was still at school. The envelope was fat, so I figured the news had to be good. When Neil came home, I eagerly handed him the manila package, then waited, biting my tongue. He unfastened the bracket and peeled off the tape from the flap, pulling out a stack of paper. He read the cover letter. He was silent for so long I began to worry that he’d been rejected. Finally, he looked up.

  “Why am I not happy?” he asked.

  My heart crumpled. Why, indeed. When Neil had first sent out his applications, life was good. He and Trista had chosen to remain a couple even though Neil would be two hundred miles away at school. She had probably read his essay, remembered the stage fall, maybe offered her own take on the moral of the story. Now here he was, accepted but alone. I put my arm around him, but he ducked out from under my embrace.

  “I’m going over to the Zincks,” he told me, stuffing the contents back into the envelope.

  “Don’t you want to tell Dad first?” I asked.

  “I promised Trista she’d be the first to know,” he answered. Now I guess the least he could do was to tell her parents.

  The door bumped shut behind him.

  31

  Sailing Away

  It was a warm, sad day when Saul and I drove Neil the 238 miles to his temporary new home in Saratoga Springs. The road trips Neil and I had taken the year before to look at potential colleges were fun-filled. We had chosen CDs that we both liked, not a difficult task since Neil is a fan of the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and early-seventies rock. (With Dan it had been Nirvana and Green Day.) I can remember every song we listened to like a soundtrack of our journey. This day was different. We alternated between NPR news stories and silence. Although it was only August, as we drove farther north and west, the occasional tree sported an early burst of rusty-orange leaves.

  We found Neil’s dorm room (Johnson Hall) and took the elevator to his floor (the eighth). His roommate had gotten there first, claiming the bed nearest the inner wall and also the most convenient closet and desk. Neil had to squeeze past his roommate’s bed to reach his closet. His bed was pushed up against the window.

  Neil hates heights.

  The campus is surrounded by sugar maples, white spruce, and pines. The views from the dorm room were spectacular, the smoky blue outline of the distant Adirondacks undulating along the horizon in the rising heat.

  I tried the window. To my dismay it opened. Saul and I looked at each other, the same worried thought in our heads: Eight floors is a long way down.

  Neil had been in therapy since the accident. He remained on antidepressants. Now that he was in college, we would hook him up with the mental health services here, part of the Student Health department, located, as it turned out, on the first floor of this very building. He had never been actively suicidal or expressed any thoughts of harming himself. Nevertheless, the eighth floor worried us.

  We helped Neil unpack. His roommate slid color-coordinated stackable storage bins under his bed. Neil pulled rumpled shirts out of a black garbage bag and stuffed them in his drawers. The roommate’s mother plucked a brand-new green-flowered quilt from a zippered plastic case, its Bed Bath and Beyond stickers still in place. Neil threw a musty, pilled blue blanket on top of his bed over wrinkled sheets. He hadn’t let me help him pack.

  Dan had been the same way, wanting to pack for college himself, using trash bags and pillowcases instead of more conventional travel trunks.

  “Trash bags conform better than suitcases,” Dan said every time I offered to buy him luggage.

  There were awkward introductions and some small talk between the new roommate and us. Neil cleared his throat a lot, shuffled his feet, and eventually turned his back to us, pretending to set up his computer. We could leave now, his body language was saying. He would be fine. We finally did, reluctantly, waving at our son as the elevator door closed.

  The tears started almost immediately on the car ride home. Every song on the radio seemed to remind me of something else I would miss about Neil.

  Neil was moving on. He had been looking forward to going to college. To getting out of Newburyport. To going somewhere where nobody knew him. To stop being that kid in the accident. The one with the dead girlfriend. .

  He wanted to start fresh, his heart in the wind. I turned up the volume and cried.

  32

  Eight Floors Up

  What should have been the time of Neil’s life, his college years, turned out to be one long struggle. Neil had always been very bright and done well in high school without much effort. Now the maximum effort on his part yielded mediocre grades. He took advantage of every type of assistance available to him: the campus writing center, tutors, tape-recorded lectures, note-taking service. But all his efforts only produced Bs and Cs.

  It wasn’t just academically that Neil struggled either. Life was difficult for him socially as well. He suffered from short-term memory loss. He would be introduced to people then not remember them. When he came into a group of students, he would hang back, unsure if he had already met them or not. He’d get phone calls from friends returning calls he didn’t remember making. His self-assurance faltered.

  “I just don’t think I have the confidence for the classroom anymore,” he told me at one point, his dream of being a teacher starting to sink away from him.

  Watching Neil struggle through his freshman year, we decided to have him tested by a neuropsychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital before his second year, to make sure there wasn’t any other help we could get for him. The testing was a grueling four hours. Neil enjoyed som
e of the cognitive challenges but resisted the more personal questions, especially when it came to Trista. He gave the doctor monosyllabic answers while staring at her coldly. (“Well-defended” the psychologist called it.) Some of the testing I stayed for. For other parts I was asked to leave. Neil was over eighteen at this point, and sometimes it was frustratingly difficult to get doctors and nurses to give information to me, his mother.

  The conclusions the neuropsychologist came to were nothing we didn’t already know about our son. He suffered from memory loss. He was depressed. The psychologist was impressed with his intellect. He compensated for his losses in interesting and complex ways. She suggested all the things that were already in place for Neil: counseling, extra help at school.

  We also brought Neil to the neurologist for a follow-up appointment. They did a CAT scan of his head that showed some cerebral atrophy or “post-traumatic volume loss.” Since it had now been a year since the accident, the changes, they told us, were permanent.

  The neurologist was very upbeat, noting all that Neil was accomplishing: walking without a limp, speech intact, going to college. And it was all good. But they didn’t see what we saw. Neil had changed. His personality wasn’t the same. It was subtle at times, but it was there. Neil’s very fine, dry sense of humor was in little evidence these days. In many ways he reminded me of my mother after her stroke. She worked hard in rehab. She relearned how to walk and talk. But she was changed. She rarely was the one to start a conversation, though she could keep up her end of one already going on.

  One night in late April of Neil’s sophomore year at Skidmore, things came to a head. It was reading week, and students were preparing for final exams. We knew Neil was stressed. We had been talking with or e-mailing him almost daily. But that night we got a phone call from the mother of one of his high school friends. Her daughter was in college up in northern Vermont; she and Neil were in pretty close touch. But lately Neil had been sounding more strained to her, more desperate. It scared her. Finally she called her mom, who called us, our bedside phone waking us from sleep.

  I called Neil right away. His voice sounded panicked.

  “What am I supposed to do, Mom?” he kept asking. “Just what am I supposed to do?”

  I thought about his bed jammed up against that eighth- floor window.

  The stress of final exams, the difficulties with his memories, the social challenges—everything was closing in on him, weighing him down like stacked stones. It was late at night. I kept him on the phone for almost half an hour until he had calmed down. He had a counselor on campus whom he saw from time to time. He was going to hang up and call her. In the meantime I called Security to go check on him. I contacted the head of Mental Health Services on campus, who would also look in. He also gave me the name of a private therapist in town, feeling that perhaps Neil needed something more than his department had to offer at this point.

  All this time Saul was following me around the living room as I paced the floor, phone in hand. I had used all of the professional know-how I could muster. I reached for my husband, feeling drained.

  “What else can I do?” I asked, more rhetorically than anything else, feeling I had covered all my bases.

  “What about Anna?” Saul offered.

  Of course. I quickly called Anna Smulowitz, an adult friend of Neil’s, his old drama coach who had recently become an ordained minister. The hour didn’t matter to Anna. She was trained to help and was a good friend to us all. Anna listened to my ardent but abridged version of events. She promised to reach out. At that point I threw on some clothes, tossed a banana and a bottle of water in the car, kissed Saul good-bye, and began the four-hour-plus trip to New York.

  The sky was just beginning to lighten, salmon-colored stripes appearing in the east, when I pulled into the parking lot of Johnson Hall. I rode the elevator up to the eighth floor and gently knocked on Neil’s dorm door. He opened the door and scowled.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, seemingly ignoring the events of the previous night.

  “I just wanted to see you with my own eyes, Neil.”

  “I’m fine,” he muttered.

  I peeked behind him into his room. His desk was lined with pill bottles: antidepressants and Advil.

  I put an arm around Neil’s shoulder. He ducked my hug but let me rub his shoulder and smooth his curls. His roommate was gone, spending the night with a girlfriend somewhere. I wondered if that was one reason Neil escalated so in his worries. I wondered if his roommate usually helped neutralize things for him. But I wouldn’t have the answer to that today. Neil wasn’t talking. He was mad that I had called Security to check on him. Angry that I had driven all that way to see him. He insisted he was fine and that I leave immediately.

  I offered to take Neil home with me right then and there. I would bring him back for finals or he could not go back at all. Just stay home. It would be his choice. But Neil was not about to go anywhere. He wanted to finish the year with his friends. I admired his persistence even as I agonized over him. But he did look okay. I did feel better seeing him. I had accomplished what I came for, to see him with my own eyes. I gave him the name of the private therapist, and he promised to make an appointment.

  I called Anna from my car in the parking lot. She told me that they had had a long, good conversation the night before. She would have called me, she said, but it ended so late she didn’t want to wake me. I laughed and told her where I was.

  “He’ll ask for help if he needs it, Carolyn. I promise he will.”

  As desperate as Neil had sounded on the phone, as angry as he was this morning, I still felt comforted by Anna’s words. She would not be that reassuring if she were worried about his safety.

  This was such a precarious place to be as a parent. I felt better seeing Neil for myself, touching him with my own hands. But I couldn’t fix him. I couldn’t make everything better for him. I was relying on other people in his world to take care of him for me. His friends, a therapist, a roommate. I had done everything I knew how to do to keep him safe and supported. I just hoped it was enough. I just hoped he could draw his own support from somewhere within himself too.

  33

  Replay

  Neil came home for Christmas break after his first semester at Skidmore complaining of knee pain. He’d been living on Advil at school and told me sometimes the knee even got swollen toward the end of the day. His orthopedist at the Brigham had told him that he generally liked to leave the hardware in his patients forever. But sometimes the metal continued to cause pain.

  “That usually happens with skinny people,” he said, adding, “If it still bothers you in a year, Neil, we’ll take it out.”

  I made an appointment with the local orthopedic surgeon at Anna Jaques Hospital. He took x-rays of Neil’s leg and agreed to do the surgery. It would be an outpatient procedure; Neil would be in and out the same day.

  It was January 7, one year to the day since the crash. I didn’t acknowledge the anniversary to Neil. If he didn’t remember or realize the significance of the date, I didn’t want to remind him. This is something I would struggle with on many anniversaries over the years. Trista’s birthday. The anniversary of the day they started going out. (They had celebrated their six-week mark eating chocolate pudding out of wine glasses.) Did Neil think about her on those days after so many years had passed? If he was thinking about her, then was I a bad mother for not acknowledging his pain and loss? But if he wasn’t thinking of her—if he was truly trying to move on—wouldn’t I just be scratching at scabs that have just barely begun to heal?

  I drove Neil to the hospital that morning. I stayed with him while t
he nurse got him ready. Seeing him in his flimsy johnny with his curls tucked under a paper OR cap stabbed my heart in déjà vu. The last time he was dressed like that he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. Now he looked at me with clear eyes and a shy smile. I blew him a kiss as they wheeled him away.

  The nurse showed me to the lobby to wait for my son.

  “It shouldn’t be too long,” she assured me. “I’ll come get you when he’s out.”

  Neil had opted for general anesthesia, not wanting to be awake while they worked on his leg. I thought back to the last time he was under anesthesia. Then he was unconscious at the same time as Trista. Now he was out cold all alone.

  I pulled my notebook out of my bag. Ironically, the drunk driver was due in court for sentencing in a few weeks, and I was working on my victim impact statement.

  “As I write this letter, Your Honor, I am sitting in a hospital lobby waiting for word as to how Neil’s surgery went. It is the second operation in a year. The second necessitated by the actions of the man standing before you today.”

  Tears stained the page and smeared the ink. It was all so unfair. Neil’s first Christmas break from his first year of college, and where is he? Under the knife. Trying to relieve the chronic ache of a joint. It sounded like something an eighty-year-old man should be doing, not a college student in his prime. He should be off traveling. He should be skiing. He should be at parties. Not under anesthesia. Not in another hospital bed. Not again.

  I put away my notebook and tried to read a book I’d brought. I could not focus on the words. Even the insipid stories in the People magazines in the lobby couldn’t distract me from my angst.

  Finally the surgeon came out to the lobby. Things had gone well. He recommended another six weeks of physical therapy. We’d get in as many sessions as we could before Neil went back to school.