The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  When you crest a hill half a mile from the warehouse, you pause, turn, and notice the quality of the light, how even in the hard, cold days before Christmas, the weak morning sun turns the smokestacks and factories of downtown Rhinelander into friendly things, peaceful and benign. You think about the most beautiful light in the world, the sunrise behind the barn due east of your mother’s house, sixty-five miles away. No one knows what you think about the quality of light. Few know that you love horses or that you have plans to breed chickens or that you long for love or that you have hardened yourself to never receiving it.

  That’s fine by you. It used to be fine, in any case. It was fine before the day two years ago, when your brother Eric asked you to run a 5K race. He was running a 10K, and he thought it would be nice to have company. You refused—you didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. You didn’t want to deal with people looking at you, with them thinking things.

  But he was insistent. That was the day you started running. Since then, you haven’t been so sure about things. You’re forty-five now, and you’re not so sure you know what people think. You’re not so sure about the life you have spent so much energy constructing.

  You’re not so sure it’s enough.

  You don’t remember anything from before the accident, and you know that’s a blessing, a small one in a life filled with blessings that are too small for most to see. You don’t remember the chicken coop behind your house, or how Eric played the saxophone, or how the family’s black Labrador, Snowball, howled along.

  You were six, a kindergartner, and it was October, and you were running across the street in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, on the outskirts of Milwaukee, to see your best friend’s new toy truck. His grandmother had been visiting from North Dakota and he was hollering for you to come see it, so you broke from your older brothers, Eric and Mark, and darted into the street. Approaching from behind a curve at the bottom of a hill, the driver of a pickup truck happened into the worst moment of his life. On one side, a little boy and his grandmother and his toy truck and five other children, all waiting for the school bus. On the other side, your brothers. All of them gaping at you, in the middle of the road.

  You were wearing a hooded nylon Packers jacket and a piece of the pickup truck’s grillwork stuck to it. Your shoes came off—still tied, with the socks still in them—as your body skidded down the road. It skidded fifty or sixty feet before a man in a VW Beetle jumped out and stopped you. There wasn’t a visible mark on you.

  The driver who hit you slammed on his pickup’s brakes, jumped out, and ran to the nearest house, pounded on the door. The woman who answered said, “Calm down. It’s one of Barb’s. She’ll have already called an ambulance.” And she had. Your mother had seen everything.

  The ambulance took you, unconscious, to Waukesha Memorial Hospital. Your pelvis had cracked in two places, and your large intestine was torn open. Doctors removed your teeth, which had been broken and loosened by the impact. They performed a colostomy, put a brace on your left leg and a cast on your right one, which they put in traction. Your mother arrived with your kindergarten class photo, taken a few weeks earlier. She shoved it at one of the doctors. “This is what you got,” she said. “I don’t care what you do, just get him back to me alive.”

  With the cast and brace and all the bandages, the only part of you anyone could see was one foot, so your mother stroked that foot. She called her mother, who lived next door, and told her to take care of your brothers, to get them to school, to make everything as normal as possible, and when doctors told her you had suffered a terrible blow to your head, that your brain was severely damaged, that you would never walk or talk again, that your intellect would never progress beyond that of an eight-year-old, that you would die by the time you were thirteen, she said nothing, kept petting your foot.

  Nothing happened for days—or a week or two weeks, no one remembers—and when your grandfather was visiting, doctors told him they’d have to perform an operation to relieve the swelling in your brain, and the procedure was risky, it might kill you, but that if they did nothing, you would certainly die. They told him that everyone should prepare for your death, and he asked the doctors if they had told your mother, and when they said they had, he told them he was sure your mother was taking care of everything, and he was right. Your mother had called the funeral parlor.

  She brought in a tape recorder and the tape she had made. The chickens and Snowball. Eric wailing on his saxophone. She strung ornaments from the wires above your hospital bed. You were still unconscious, but she talked to you. She brought in the teenagers from the YMCA who had taught you and your brothers music and judo and swimming. Eric and Mark kept going to school and every day their teachers asked, “Has he talked yet?” and every day they had to say no.

  You needed blood, more than your mother and her family could provide. She told a neighbor and the neighbor said not to worry, her dad was a foreman at the Waukesha Motor Company, he could do something. He told all the shifts, “Okay, there’s a little guy in the hospital, and he needs blood, and need I remind you, all your vacation vouchers go through me?”

  You awoke from the coma, but you didn’t speak, and then one day you did. You don’t remember what you said, but your mother does. You said, “No!”

  The doctors told your mother you should be moved to a rehab facility, where you could live out your days. If living was the right word.

  Your mother was a hard woman, who by her own admission liked horses better than dogs, and dogs better than most people. She was poor—your mother didn’t believe in euphemisms—working for her brother, who owned a greenhouse. Your father had been gone for a while. (“Oh, he was a loving man,” says your mother. “He loved tall and short. He loved blond and brunette and redhead.”) Your mother was under no illusions about the comforts you’d receive at home. But she grabbed a nurse and together they wrestled you onto an air mattress and they shoved the air mattress into the back of your mother’s green Pinto station wagon, and for what doctors thought would be a few miserable years, you went home.

  She wouldn’t let you have a wheelchair. Your mother was a hard woman, and she knew she would die one day, and if by some miracle—some great, undeserved blessing—it happened before you were gone, she knew you would have to be hard, too. She wrestled you onto that air mattress six days a week for months, slid you into that Pinto, and drove you to the physical therapist and the occupational therapist and the speech therapist.

  It was the left side of your brain that had been injured. (Hemiparesis was the technical diagnosis.) Because of that, you had trouble with balance, and weakness and nerve damage in the right side of your body—right-handed before the accident, you would have to become a lefty. The left side of your face was partially paralyzed. Your speech was impaired. You needed medication to prevent seizures, medication you would take for years. To the doctors’ surprise, your brain started growing again, but it didn’t work like it used to.

  So you learned to read, then you forgot. You learned arithmetic, then forgot. You learned to talk, then forgot. You had to learn things over and over again.

  Your mother loved musicals, and trying to sing along with her was sometimes easier than trying to talk. She and your grandmother also read you stories from baby books, showed you how to add two plus two. Even today, your mother can quote pages from If I Ran the Circus. If asked, she said you had problems. She refused to use the word “handicapped.”

  Whenever visitors came over, they brought you toys, and your brothers were delighted, because they’re the ones who got to play with the toys. GI Joes were the best of all. Eric, ten, was unfailingly kind, solicitous. He had always been that way. Serious, quiet, he had announced when he was five that he wanted to be an ichthyologist and asked for a bathyscaphe for Christmas. He would go on to become a high school physics teacher before making the suggestion that would change your life. Mark, eight, wasn’t unfailingly anything. Wild, unpredictable, impulsive, he would spend his teenage
years running a high school loan-shark operation, employing teenage muscle to keep the enterprise efficient, joining the army right out of high school, then, after that, becoming a long-haul trucker. Mark teased you, commandeered your GI Joes. But woe to any other child who picked on you—and there were a few, before Mark and his gang got hold of them.

  A blizzard came that first winter home, cutting power, closing the roads. Eric nailed blankets over the windows, spread blankets over the living room floor. One of your mother’s girlfriends had a husband with a snowmobile, and he brought you your antiseizure pills.

  Your mother was poor, but she knew that education was important, and she knew what a comfort music could be, and she made your brothers take piano lessons, so she made you take them, too. Your right hand didn’t work? Big deal, her brother had a boy with Down’s syndrome, and when he was over, your mother gave him a saw and told him to go outside and get some wood for the fireplace.

  If your cousin with Down’s syndrome could saw wood, you could learn to play the piano. Your mother explained the situation to your brothers’ music teacher, told her what she wanted. What she needed. And your brothers’ music teacher found a composer—a veteran of the Crimean War who’d had his right hand blown off. He had composed music for the left hand only. You learned how to play the piano left-handed.

  You would grow into a man who built a life alone, a safe strategy that could keep out teachers who thought you were slow, doctors who called you stupid, children who teased you. You remember most of them. But you don’t remember everyone.

  At Clarendon Avenue Elementary School, there was a foot race, and you had trouble walking, never mind running, but all the kids had to compete. One of the fastest kids in your class was also one of the most rotten. A mean lowlife destined for a bad end. That’s what your mom remembers hearing about him. But she also remembers him finishing the race, and then looking back, and seeing how far you had to go, and jumping back on the course, and finishing the race again, right behind you, not making fun of you, but keeping you company.

  There were the pills and the one-handed music lessons and everything else, but your mother had refused to sue the man who had hit you. He hadn’t been drinking. It was an accident. He had kids, too. That’s the way she saw it. She had fired her lawyer because he had decided to research the assets of that man. She had yelled at that lawyer, too. How dare he?! And she had yelled at the judge, the judge who told her to sit down and shut up, and who told her lawyer she should sue or be reprimanded for being financially irresponsible. “That man didn’t get up that morning and decide, ‘I’m going to wipe out a six-year-old!’” she yelled at the judge.

  Your mother got by. Your uncle paid her every week you were in the hospital, but not long after you got out, she returned to the greenhouse, and she got into a squabble with your uncle’s wife, so she took other jobs—waitressing, wrapping meat at one deli, taking orders at another.

  If you were pouring milk into your cereal bowl and you spilled it all over, your mother grabbed a towel and cleaned it up, but she left it to you to make yourself another bowl. You fell down a lot and when that happened, she wouldn’t even stop talking, she’d just reach down and put you on your feet and if you fell again, she would pick you up again.

  Your broken bones healed. Doctors reversed the colostomy. Because of the brain damage, you still walked awkwardly, but you fell less. You talked more. And to others, it might have looked like a happy fable: Little boy suffers grievous injury, through tough love and support finds his place in the world. But you hadn’t found your place.

  If your mother didn’t know it then, she would soon enough. You were in second grade. It was a spring afternoon, and your mother had come to the school. She might have been hard, but she could also be fun. Every so often she’d stop by school and gather you and your brothers, and maybe a few other kids, and take all of you to go feed the ducks, or to go fishing, or to just sit by a lake and play.

  She was on her way to your classroom when she saw you in the hall. You were throwing books and ripping paper. You had reasons, you knew that, and she did, too. The right side of your body didn’t work well. Neither did your mouth. You knew answers and couldn’t say them fast enough and you knew that people thought you were stupid, and you weren’t. Your mother knew how frustrated you were, and if she had been someone else, she might have held you, stroked your head, comforted you.

  She snatched you up and she paddled you, right in the school hallway, and people were watching by now, they had heard the commotion and they were shocked, but they didn’t know what she knew, they didn’t know what she told you that day, dragging you out to her car.

  “You can’t do all the things the other kids do?” she said. “Tough. You are going to have to deal with it.” She was not religious—she had her reasons, generations old and having nothing to do with you—but now, to her sobbing, raging second-grader, she invoked God.

  “God never said anything about fair,” she said. “He said you got a chance.”

  After that, she grabbed a marker at home and she scrawled this onto your school bag: “Failure is not falling down. Failure is not getting back up.” She wrote the same thing on the refrigerator.

  She read to you every day. She did math problems with you. She paid you and Mark a penny each for every fly you killed. She let you play horseshoes, and didn’t let you see how that terrified her, and everyone else in the vicinity. And she might have softened, might have let you slide when things were toughest, might have given you a break. But she didn’t.

  The doctors had told her to make sure your clothes had Velero fasteners, so that you’d be able to get in and out of them yourself. But she knew the easy cruelty of children, knew the taunts you would easily incite without pasting Velero targets all over yourself. So she made you shirts with giant buttonholes, and she bought big buttons and she sewed those on and she told you that you were going to learn how to button your clothes.

  That first night she and her mother—your grandmother—stood in your room and watched you. When you got to the last button you—and they—realized you had miscalculated, that the two sides were misaligned by one buttonhole. Your grandmother moved to help you. “Get back! If you can’t keep your hands off, you should go home,” your mother snapped. “He needs to learn to do it himself.”

  And as you unbuttoned your shirt, with your good left hand and your claw of a right hand, your grandmother stood with her own hands clenched behind her back, to keep them from reaching out to you, and she wept.

  Your mother watched, dry-eyed.

  Your mother took you to a support group for people who had suffered brain injuries and their families. When one of the mothers of another young man, also brain-damaged, said, “I’m a survivor, too,” your mother snapped, “Oh, no, you’re not. You’re a parent. This is your job!”

  You were put in special classes in high school, and hated them. Other kids would frown and whimper if they couldn’t answer a question and then an advisor would do the work for them. You didn’t want anyone doing your work. You studied Latin because rolling those strange words around your tongue seemed to strengthen it and German because thinking sentences through in that language helped you express them in English.

  By the time you were a sophomore in high school, Eric had left for college and Mark’s loan-sharking business was booming and his friends—Speedy and Ben and Rich—were your friends. One of them was gay, and your mom was worried that he was a bad influence on you. Not because he was gay. Because he was sneaky. If you were gay, that was fine, but she wanted you to be gay because you were gay, not because you were lonely and one of your loan-sharking brother’s sneaky friends was a predator.

  When you were a senior, six weeks before you were due to graduate, your mother got a call from your school. You had walked out of a class and nobody knew where you were. She found you on State Highway 83, headed north. She asked where you were going and you said you didn’t know. But you were going. You refused to re
turn to Mukwonago High School that day, or ever again.

  What was the point? You knew you’d never be able to speak well, you’d never be able to tell people everything you were feeling, everything you were thinking. And what you were feeling and thinking was a mess. You were taking Depakene and Peganone to prevent seizures. Your right hand didn’t work properly, and sometimes, especially when you got tired, you limped and listed and there were long silences between your words. You knew you’d always put people ill at ease. What kind of life was that?

  You knew what other people thought. You knew what life would be like. You knew what to do. You took a fitful shot at killing yourself. You don’t like thinking about it. You don’t like talking about it.

  Your mother took you to the hospital, where a psychologist told her you were a “dullard.” Your mother had found a one-armed composer. She had managed to wrestle you and that goddamn air mattress into her goddamn Pinto. She had found you the blood you needed, and taught you to speak again, and willed you to button your own shirt. So of course she could find a doctor who would take the time to listen to you. To see you. To know you. And she did. He worked in Milwaukee, and he was kind and he listened. And understood. He understood that life was hard, and that life for someone with brain injuries was nearly intolerable, and that all the medications you were on took the “nearly” out of it. He knew how you felt.