Waiting for Annie
Jean Ryan
I want to know why a thirty-five mph collision that left just a small blue welt on Annie’s forehead has put her in a coma.
The doctor brightens at this, having been asked something he can answer. “It’s a question of swelling,” he says, uncapping his fountain pen and reaching for a pad of paper. With amazing speed he draws three profiles of a human head: erect, tilted forward, flung back. He is very good at this; he could make a living at it.
“When her head hit the steering wheel, the brain moved forward, hitting the front of the skull, and when her head went back, the brain bumped the back of the skull. The swelling developed from two places.”
We talk about her brain, how when it swells there is no place for it to expand and how this raises the intracranial pressure; as the pressure builds the blood flow decreases and the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. This makes sense to me although I have never pictured Annie’s brain as the spongy grey organ you see in science books.
The office is dimly lit, and instead of charts and X-rays there are pictures of national parks; even my chair is soft and considerate. We talk for almost an hour, about things that might or might not happen. The doctor is a mortal with red hair and fleshy pockmarked cheeks, and I know I want too much from him. “Aside from monitoring pressure there’s not much we can do,” he admits. “We know so little about coma.”
How many times has he spoken these words? How many people have sat in this chair, burdening him with their hopes? The skin droops around his sad blue eyes. You should have been an artist, I think, as I close his office door.
I navigate toward Intensive Care, my terror of hospitals turning the corridors into eerie aqueous chambers. Twice I get confused and have to ask one of the floating white coats to help me. At last I arrive and for a moment I stand outside the glass doors, reluctant to enter this grim science project, this vault of dormant lives.
At least Annie can breathe on her own. They call this the vegetative state, which means I should not become overly excited when she twitches, coughs or moans, as these can be reflexive. I look at the narrow bruise on her forehead, more noticeable against her pallor. Her deep-set eyes are closed, her mouth slightly open. I wipe some spittle from her chin and smooth her hair back from her face. “Annie,” I say, a greeting and a test.
There is a bolt-like apparatus on her head where they have stuck in a tiny tube that checks the pressure inside. I am told this causes no harm as they send this device into the “silent part” of the brain where no important functions take place. Nothing seems more fantastic to me: that they can pilot this thing in between her circuitry. There is tubing in her nose, as well as her arms, and some kind of sensor is attached to her earlobe. She is at the moment more machine than person.
She makes a sound and I jump. “Annie,” I urge. I reach for her hand, squeeze it. Her fingers are cool and remote. I tuck her arms closer to her sides and pull the sheet higher.
A nurse comes up behind me. “Time to leave, honey.”
I give her a nod and take a last look at Annie, my long-limbed broken doll.
Last night I spent wedged on an orange vinyl couch in the hospital lounge. Scattered around me were other wakeful souls too distraught over their loved ones to attempt conversation. Now, driving back home to Berkeley, I pass by the bay without bothering to look at it. My eyes burn and my unwashed face feels like it’s covered with a fine web. Drivers are frowning, zipping by me. There is no sympathy on the open road.
Over and over I force those drawings on myself. Brain hitting bone, forward, then back.
All that Annie is−every gesture, quirk and mood−has become two and a half pounds of damaged tissue.
I push open the front door and the cats rush in ahead of me. Hungry, winding around my legs, they have no time for my grief. As soon as I fill their bowls they turn their backs on me.
After I check the phone (there are no messages from the hospital) I can’t think what to do. There is probably mail in the box, though I see no point in getting it. The lamps and furniture, the pictures on the wall−nothing seems familiar or significant. Searching for touchstones I go back to the kitchen and scan the wall calendar, but the events−a play, a haircut, dinner at Chez Panisse−are inconceivable. A fear expands in my chest: the idea that I am not up to this, that I won’t be able to manage the tasks expected of me. My heart begins to pound and I look to the cats for help. One is washing her face and does not answer me, the other is on the sofa trying to sleep; when I call her name she flicks her tail in warning.
Taking deep breaths, I try to remember my role in all this, the papers I need to locate, the people I need to call. Annie’s mom, she’s the first. Again I dial the number and again there is no answer. This is the number she gave us six months ago, but the operator tells me there is no Key West listing for a Ms. Janet LaMarche. Which is no surprise: Annie’s mother has had at least eight addresses in as many years, and some of these were boats. I am not well-acquainted with Janet, having seen her only twice, but I know she’s not big on sentiment−holidays pass without a word from her. Strangely Annie doesn’t seem to mind: They must have an understanding, a pact I’m not privy to. While Annie describes her mother as “exotic,” I employ a different word, one I keep to myself.
Tomorrow Kerry flies in from Colorado. I have not seen him in a year and a half, since he left us to live with his father. I like to evoke the child version of him, the tow-headed four-year-old who took his world on trust. Our first year together was a state of grace: Annie and I were head over heels, still getting to know one another and adoring each new discovery, and in the bargain I had Kerry. I had never wanted children of my own and the ease I felt with Kerry, the swiftness of my devotion, surprised me. As he grew older and began pulling away from us, groping for a life of his own, I braced myself for the changes I saw coming. It’s not easy for two women to raise a boy, and while there was no real discord at home, I know there must have been awkwardness, maybe even trouble, at school. While I didn’t fault Kerry for leaving us, the news came like a blow to the chest. I’ve never shared this hurt with him, nor am I likely to; if he harbors any resentment toward me—and he very well may—he has been equally discreet.
Rick is not coming; he is busy managing his steakhouse in Denver and wants to be “kept informed.” We’re not talking about an offshore hurricane, I wanted to say. Am I expecting too much? I know it’s been eleven years since the divorce, and I know I’m the last person he wants be in the same room with, but for Kerry’s sake if not Annie’s, shouldn’t Rick have come along, at least for a day or two? The dearth of family appalls me. I think of Annie’s errant mother, and her father who was killed in a car wreck, and her sister who died of cancer—all who have loved her and are not here.
I spend a long time on the phone, with friends, insurance agents, Annie’s employer, the nursery I manage. I say the same things so many times that the words become simple tools stripped of feeling. Afterward I wander into the kitchen, open a can of tomato soup and pour it unheated into a bowl. I am not hungry but I feed myself anyway, swallowing the soup in small, steady spoonfuls, like medicine.
First by his walk, I recognize Kerry. He is taller and his dark blonde hair is now black. He keeps his head low as he lopes down the ramp, pretends he’s not searching for me.
“Kerry!” I open my arms; he allows a brief hug before backing off. “Hey,” he says.
I pat his leather back as we walk down the hall. “You’ve grown so tall!” I say, feebly. I am aghast of course at the black hair hanging in his face, the rips in his blue jeans, the heavy martial boots.
“How was your flight?”
He shrugs. “Boring.”
“Well that’s probably a good thing.” I’m hoping for a smile but don’t get one.
“How’s mom?”
“I haven’t heard from the hospital so I guess there aren’t any changes. We’re headed there now.”
In the car I tell Kerry what happened. “She was on Grizzly Peak road. A collie ran out and when she swerved to miss it she hit a tree.”
I look at his profile and my stomach flutters. He has Annie’s long straight nose; she’s there in the set of his mouth, too.
For a moment he says nothing, and then, in a rush: “So what do they think−is she going to be okay?”
I put my hand on his arm. “They don’t know, Kerry. But she is breathing on her own, which means that her brain stem is functioning, and they haven’t had to drain off much fluid.” I try to explain to him what I’ve learned about coma, but I see his discomfort and stop.
“I can’t get through to your grandmother in Florida,” I tell him. “Have you heard from her?”
Kerry snorts. “Not likely.” He turns and looks out at the bay, green and rippling in the March wind. “You know she’s fucking nuts.”
I am fighting rising nausea. We are back in the slick halls of the hospital, and that smell−half sweet, half antiseptic−is following us.
“I hate these places,” Kerry murmurs.
“You’re not alone.”
I try to prepare him for the sight of his mother. “She’s hooked up to a lot of equipment.”
“Duh.”
Oh Kerry, please be nice. We don’t say another word until we walk into ICU and approach Annie’s bed. The circles under her eyes are darker today. I check her heart rhythms on the monitor and let out my breath.
“Annie?” I try.
Kerry, whom I have forgotten, is pointing to the bolt in her head. “What’s that?”
“It’s for checking the pressure in her brain−it keeps her head steady.”
His face starts to crumple; I put an arm around him and he shakes it off.
“Talk to her,” I say.
“Why,” he demands. “She can’t hear me.”
“Maybe she can.”
“Mom,” he says finally. “It’s Kerry.”
There is only the hum of the machines, and her chest rising and falling. I lay my hand on her shoulder and bring my mouth close to her ear. “We’re here, Annie,” I whisper. Even her scent is missing.
He’s not going back, Kerry says, as we pull out of the parking lot. “What’s the use?”
I do not tell him what I’ve heard: that talking to a coma patient might help, that the brain, acting on cue, working in the dark, may attempt to heal itself.
“It’s okay, Kerry. You don’t have to.”
Suddenly his fist slams the dashboard. “Fucking dog!”
This house seems too small for him now, or maybe it’s his wrath the rooms can’t contain. The cats, dismayed, have gone into hiding; even I am disturbed by this strange male presence, so unlike the eager youth who once lived here. I watch him pick up the TV remote, slap it against his palm a few times, then smack it back down on the coffee table. What am I supposed to do with him?
“Come in here,” I say, “keep me company while I make us a sandwich.”
Kerry tromps into the kitchen and yanks a chair out from the table.
“Why are you so mad?”
“She’s just lying there,” he snarls, “and no one’s doing a fucking thing.”
I keep my eyes on the bread I’m buttering. “For one thing,” I tell him, “they are doing everything they can. And for another, I think you’re wearing out that adjective.”
He crosses his leg over his knee and starts tapping his fork against the heel of his boot.
I put the sandwich in the skillet and turn to face him. I know he’s scared, I know that’s why he’s angry, but I can’t do this.
“This is an awful time, Kerry−we have to help each other through it. I can’t be fighting you right now.”
He stops the fork, nods at the floor.
I slip into the cold expanse of the bed and contemplate Annie, trapped in some distant dimension. Her mind is still active, the doctor said, it just isn’t communicating with her body. “In coma,” he said, “the brain attempts to rewire itself to compensate for the damage.” Which makes me think of science fiction movies: a brain with a life of its own.
I don’t feel any anger; for me there is just the waiting.
We met one morning at the herb nursery where I work. I was watering flats of basil when I saw her strolling down the rows in a blue work shirt, her khaki trail pants stuffed into her boots. She was gangly and unselfconscious, and her mouth was set in a soft smile. I watched her sniff the scented geraniums and the garlic chives, and then I watched her walk up the gravel path to where I stood. I was flooding the seedlings by then and had to turn off the water when she started to speak. The first thing I noticed was her deep-set eyes, large, grey-blue, slightly crazed; and then her wide, easy grin. There was no discernible style to her ash blonde hair, which fell in loose coils around her face and neck. On her shirt and hands were small, colorful spatters of paint.
“I want an herb garden,” she said, “and I don’t know anything about plants. Not a thing,” she added, smiling.
I asked her about the size of the garden, and the amount of sun in her yard, and just which herbs she had in mind, and that’s when we decided I would do the job. I did this kind of side work from time to time and so our beginnings were innocent enough. I probably should have packed up my tools and driven away, though, as soon as I started looking forward to those spring weekends in her Montclair backyard, when she would come outside and chat with me after working in her studio (Annie is an artist. She creates the most wonderful canvases, not of scenery or figures, but of colors, gorgeous, haunting colors that make you feel all sorts of things). While I stretched string lines and cut out chunks of sod, we shared pieces of our pasts, who and what we admired, where we’d been or wanted to go. I loved the quickness of her mind, her far-ranging interests; how she didn’t aim for cleverness or approval but spoke without artifice and maligned no one. Kerry, who was four then, would often dig in the dirt beside me. On the mornings he wasn’t there, when his father took him on errands, Annie would sometimes light a joint, which we genially passed, and kneeling in the soft earth, listening to her stories, watching her exuberant gestures, I let myself fall more deeply in love. If there was a key moment, a point at which I could have walked away, no harm done, I missed it. By the time I finally kissed her, right there under the sun, no force on earth could have stopped me.
Kerry was all she wanted and the only thing Rick gave her.
Tired of trying to sleep I get up at 4:10 a.m. and hear faint laughter coming from the TV in Kerry’s room. He doesn’t answer when I tap on the door, so I turn the knob and take a look inside. He is lying on the bed, fully dressed and sound asleep. On the small black and white screen Lucy and Ethel are stuffing chocolates into their mouths. I watch them a moment, more comforted by their silliness than amused, before crossing the room and banishing them with a click. The screen crackles softly and goes blank.
I am sitting at the table stroking our cat Emma and staring at the pepper grinder when Kerry comes into the kitchen. He is subdued this morning, and Emma, who was ready to flee, settles back into my lap.
“You have any Coke or Pepsi?” he asks, and when I say no he surprises me by pouring a cup of coffee, which he modifies with milk and four spoonfuls of sugar.
“I called the sheriff in Key West,” I tell him. “I’m having them look for your grandmother.”
“Whatever.” He stirs his coffee and I notice the tattoo on his arm. It’s a dark blue cockroach, about two inches long.
“Why a cockroach?” I ask him. I really want to know.
“It’s the only thing that lasts,” he says, defiant, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Whatever you do to it, it survives.”
“Was it painful?”
He shakes his head.
“They can take those off, can’t they?”
“Who cares?”
You will care, I manage not to say. When you are forty, you will care. I wonder what Rick thinks of that tattoo, why in fact he allowed it—Kerry is still a minor.
“What are you going to do today?”
He stretches his long legs out in front of him and scratches his shoulder. “Guess I’ll go up on Telegraph Avenue, see what the freaks are up to.” He yawns then and in his wrinkled brow I see a vestige of his childhood face. In ways that elude expression, in ways grown nearly useless, I know this boy; I carry his youth with me. Impossible, this new version of him. The dark trace of beard, the scatter of pimples, the sheer size of him astonishes me.
“Have I mentioned,” I say, “how great it is to see you?”
Before he can stop it, a grin escapes.
The doctor is encouraged. They have removed the cranial bolt, as the pressure in her brain is returning to normal. She is also showing some “localized reactivity” and her pupils are contracting when light is shone on them. This is not a profound coma, the doctor adds, and there are many indications that point to recovery.
My heart is beating in my throat.
“She is responding to pain,” he continues, “and she is starting to blink, signs that the cortex is waking up.” But then he rubs his eyes with his meaty red hands and I know there is something else he is obliged to tell me.
“It’s important to remember,” he begins, “that every brain is unique. Sometimes we expect the worst and are happily surprised; sometimes it works the other way.” It’s possible, he explains, that Annie could persist in a vegetative state, that she might be able to sleep and wake, to swallow and digest, without ever regaining consciousness.
This information seeps in slowly, horribly. I will not be free of it.
I tell him that I don’t understand this, how someone can be both dead and alive.
He brings his hands together, palm to palm, and clears his throat. “The persistent vegetative state is a cessation of thinking,” he says. “In PVS the cortex is damaged but the lower parts of the brain, the autoregulatory responses, still work. The body is kept alive.” He gives a slight shrug. “With some help from us.”
PVS. So it’s common enough for an acronym.
“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he says quickly. “The swelling was minor in Annie’s case and now it’s gone. She is showing definite improvement.”
I get to my feet, wobbly, and he rises from his own chair and places his hand on my back as he walks me out his door. “Try to be patient,” he says. “Remember that the brain is always working on behalf of the organism. Protecting it.”
I look at him askance. “So Annie’s in a coma for her own good?”
“Essentially.”
Organism. A week ago Annie was a person. I can’t imagine seeing her that way—that simply— ever again. Even if she is fully restored, I can’t imagine being able to forget this.
Today they let me spend a longer time with Annie than usual. Freed from the bolt and the nasal tubes, she looks almost normal and for a few seconds I allow myself the fantasy that she will wake when I whisper her name.
Someone has placed a chair next to her bed and obligingly I sit down. Picking up her hand, I tell her everything that comes to mind, and though she makes no sounds, twice I see her blink. I talk to her about Kerry and the cats, and just as I start to tell her about all the cards and flowers she’s gotten, her mouth yanks down and I see tears slide toward her temples. A moment later her expression is placid again.
I sprint out of the room and find a nurse.
“She just cried! She was crying!” The nurse, who remains calm, follows me back into the room. She checks the monitors and opens Annie’s eyes and speaks her name, and then she turns to me and says, gently, “Sometimes they do that. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Kerry is hunched over the photo albums when I get home. He looks up at me, expectant, and I muster a cheerful tone.
“They think she might be waking up.”
His eyes widen. “No kidding?”
“She’s responding to certain tests, and they’ve taken some of the gadgets off her.”
Kerry slaps his knee. “That is so great. So did she say anything?”
“Not yet,” I say brightly.
He follows me into the kitchen. “I bought this for dinner.” He opens the fridge and pulls out a large cheese pizza. “I was going to get pepperoni but then I remembered you don’t eat meat.”
“How sweet, thank you.” I make him suffer a hug.
Should we heat it up now?” he asks.
“Sure.” We sit down at the kitchen table, me with my glass of wine and Kerry with a giant bottle of Coke. “I bought this too,” he says, lifting his drink. “Things cost more here than they do in Denver.”
“Do you like it there?”
“It’s alright. I skied a lot this winter.”
“How’s the restaurant business?”
“Pretty good, I guess. Dad’s opening another one in August.” This pleases me only insofar as it bodes well for Kerry’s future. “He wants me to bus tables next winter but I don’t want to. I want a job at a ski resort—ever heard of Winter Park?”
I shake my head.
“It’s huge,” he says, throwing his arms apart. “A ton of trails. Me and my friend Ethan are going to rent a condo there and work the lifts. We can ski for nothing.”
I lean back in my chair and listen as he tells me about his plans to join a ski patrol and learn rescue. He is talkative today, full of smiles, and I am delighted by this shift in his mood. Every so often one of Annie’s expressions will cross his face, or his hands will move precisely like hers, and each time this happens I rejoice.
It is not until after dinner, when Kerry is watching television and I am washing dishes, that the fear moves back in. A deft shadow, it creeps up from behind, settles between my shoulders. I see myself feeding Annie, bathing her, rocking her; she is looking right through me; she is looking at nothing. I pull my hands from the water and grip the edge of the sink. A low wail escapes me.
“Jane?” Kerry says. I feel his hand on my shoulder. Awkwardly he starts patting me. “It’s okay, she’s getting better. Don’t cry,” he pleads. And shamelessly, knowing he is not strong enough, I fall apart in his arms.
I wait in the hall as a physical therapist finishes working with Annie, manipulating her arms and legs to help preserve muscle tone. She has been moved to another wing of the hospital, one with pictures on the walls and fewer machines. Now she sleeps in a room with a window, surrounded by the flowers they disallowed in Intensive Care. I place some roses next to her bed, hoping the scent will find her.
Yesterday when I was talking she turned her head to me. Hearing, the doctor affirms, is the last sense to go and the first to return. She is also moving her limbs more, which is another good sign, but what we are waiting for is “perceptivity,” something that can’t be coincidence.
There is a bit of color in her cheeks now and the shadows under her eyes are not as dark. I pull the chair close to the bed and watch the feelings that come and go on her face. Sometimes her eyebrows will raise as if she’s surprised, sometimes she will scowl; but what I witness most often, what pulls me to my feet, is her mask of anguish. Whenever I see that grimace, I picture her brain as a labyrinth of bad dreams, a reddish-black netherworld through which she is stumbling.
Never does she smile.
The house is reclaiming me. I am watering plants, filling bird feeders, scouring stains from the sink. I accomplish these tasks unwittingly, as if a part of me, aware of what must be done, is stepping in.
Some things in the house do capture my interest: Annie’s paintings. I find myself contemplating them for long moments. My favorite is a canvas she calls “Day Break.” Gradations of deep blue on top, dark green on the bottom and a pencil thin layer of brilliant orange in between. The effect is stunning. “Do you see the paintings in your mind,” I once asked her, “before you start? Or do they surprise you?” She concentrated a moment. “I do see them first. I have this idea and then the colors take over for me.”
All these new circuits the doctor speaks of, this re-wiring that is going on while Annie sleeps, what will it mean to her art? Will she want to paint the same way? Will the colors be as lovely?
Will she want to paint at all?
Running errands, I stop at Seconds on Shattuck and speak with Annie’s employer, a portly man with florid cheeks and kind eyes. Annie, who adores vintage clothes, makes quite a lot of money mending them. She has worked for James for over six years and he has been good to her in many ways—we stay in his condo whenever we visit Lake Tahoe. Now he stands before me, asking about Annie and wringing his hands. I tell him the signs are promising and in a rush of emotion he hugs me hard. Then he clasps my hands between this own and tells me that he is here for me, that if there is anything he can do for me, anything at all, please let him know. The same thing happens when I stop at the nursery. The owner is there, covering for me, and with teary eyes she tells me that wants to help in whatever way she can. Our friends are behaving in similar fashion, though everyone is hesitant, circumspect, not wanting to ask too many questions or offer reassurance they might wish they hadn’t.
Kerry and I are sitting on the deck after lunch watching a pair of yellow finches peck at the feeder. Annie’s red tulips nod in the breeze and the astilbe is pushing its soft stems skyward. Even as we speak, the magnolia unfurls its slick pink petals. Spring is gaining momentum.
Worried that Kerry is growing restless, I tell him I will understand if he wants to head back to Colorado. “You can come back when she wakes up.” I always use the word “when,” not “if,” in my conversations with Kerry. “It might take a while,” I add. “No one knows.”
He shakes his head. “No. I want to stay.”
I look out at the tulips, bending so easily, and tell him what the doctors have told me: that Annie will not wake up like people do in the movies. That she will have to relearn things, that this will take time.
He narrows his eyes, processing this information, then folds his arms on the table and says, “So I’ll help.”
I have doubts about a fifteen-year-old boy caring for his mother in this fashion—I have doubts about my own ability—but I don’t share them. I look at his profile, so young, so dogged, and what I say is, “Thank you.”
Kerry shrugs and, keeping his eyes averted, says, “I’d do the same for you, if you were the one who got hurt.”
Gratitude takes my breath away. I can’t speak. This keeps happening, this overwhelming thankfulness I feel when someone is kind to me. Even a smile from an unknowing shop clerk brings me to my knees.
The next day Kerry comes to the hospital with me. From the folder he’s carrying I see he has a plan. We pause at the door of Annie’s room, which is partly open, and slowly he leans in and looks at his mother. The folder in his hand is shaking.
I look at the monitors, as I do every time. Green numbers on a black screen, changing subtly, and a graph at the bottom, the translation of her heart. I don’t know what all these numbers mean—seeing them is enough.
Annie is very still today. I lower my eyes to the sheet on her chest, wait for the rise and fall. Has she lost ground? Those promising signs, were they misleading? I think of what the doctor said the first time we spoke. “We know so little about coma.”
“How does she look?” Kerry whispers.
“Fine,” I tell him, “and you don’t have to whisper—it’s better if we don’t.”
He nods knowingly. “That’s why I brought this.” He opens the folder and takes out a few sheets of paper. “It’s something I had to write for biology class. It’s about bees. You know how mom loves them.” She does. We have rusty garden art in the shape of bees and there are several photographs in the house: bees among the lavender stalks, bees in the yellow centers of Shasta daisies—close-ups that Annie took in the garden. This report must be something Rick sent him, along with his school books—his teachers are giving him assignments, work he can do to keep from falling too far behind.
So we sit down next to her bed and Kerry reads his report on bee colonies and why they are in trouble. Fascinated, I listen so closely that at first I don’t see the arm that Annie has raised. Kerry stops reading and we both stare at her arm, waiting for it to do more. Slowly it descends to the sheet.
“What does that mean?” Kerry says, his voice thick with excitement.
“Hard to say. But I think it’s a good thing.”
Two days later, two weeks after the accident, Annie looks at me. Not long, maybe four seconds, but I know her eyes and I know she was there.
Her doctor was right. People don’t wake up like you might guess. It happens fitfully, one false start after another. Annie is full of surprises that first week. One moment she is lying there and the next she is sitting. Several times she throws off the sheets and walks stiff-legged around the bed. Occasionally she answers a question, and occasionally I can make sense of it.
The doctor is exultant. He is in here every chance he gets, demonstrating ways I can help her. The learning is slow. Over and over, I show her how to dress, how to use a fork and knife, how to brush her teeth. There may be lingering problems, the doctor cautions: lowered stress tolerance, delayed responses, sluggish abstract reasoning. “A full recovery,” he says, “may takes months.” At last they let me bring her home.
Because she has trouble enunciating, because she often puts words in the wrong places and calls her belt “that round cow thing,” a speech therapist comes twice a week, along with a physical therapist and a neuropsychologist who charts her cognitive achievements. We are all pitching in to rebuild her.
Good to his word, Kerry is helping, more than I could have guessed, and not just with errands and housework. At first he hung back, alarmed by his mother’s faltering progress, but then he began watching the therapists, learning from them, and by now he is invaluable: I do not believe she’d be doing this well without him. And with a job to replace his anger, Kerry has benefitted, too. Another piece of good news: Janet has been found. She was sailing with friends off the coast of Venezuela and will be here by the weekend.
Yes, Annie is coming along. Soon Kerry will be leaving and I will head back to work and Annie will take up where she left off. It will be some time before she starts mending garments again—her hands are not altogether dependable yet—but she already begun to paint.
Last night she was at her easel mixing shades of blue, her hand moving tentatively. After a moment she paused and regarded the empty canvas. I interrupted then, asked her if she saw the pictures in her head the way she used to. She looked up from the palette and smiled at me. “Yes. Why?”
She has no recollection of the accident, or her coma, and she is fascinated by my account of her ordeal. “I cried?” she says, incredulous. To her it’s just a story. She can’t imagine how far she’s traveled, the terrible journey behind her smile.
(This piece originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in Other Voices, Spring/Summer 1999 Vol. 11, No. 30.)
The doctor brightens at this, having been asked something he can answer. “It’s a question of swelling,” he says, uncapping his fountain pen and reaching for a pad of paper. With amazing speed he draws three profiles of a human head: erect, tilted forward, flung back. He is very good at this; he could make a living at it.
“When her head hit the steering wheel, the brain moved forward, hitting the front of the skull, and when her head went back, the brain bumped the back of the skull. The swelling developed from two places.”
We talk about her brain, how when it swells there is no place for it to expand and how this raises the intracranial pressure; as the pressure builds the blood flow decreases and the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. This makes sense to me although I have never pictured Annie’s brain as the spongy grey organ you see in science books.
The office is dimly lit, and instead of charts and X-rays there are pictures of national parks; even my chair is soft and considerate. We talk for almost an hour, about things that might or might not happen. The doctor is a mortal with red hair and fleshy pockmarked cheeks, and I know I want too much from him. “Aside from monitoring pressure there’s not much we can do,” he admits. “We know so little about coma.”
How many times has he spoken these words? How many people have sat in this chair, burdening him with their hopes? The skin droops around his sad blue eyes. You should have been an artist, I think, as I close his office door.
I navigate toward Intensive Care, my terror of hospitals turning the corridors into eerie aqueous chambers. Twice I get confused and have to ask one of the floating white coats to help me. At last I arrive and for a moment I stand outside the glass doors, reluctant to enter this grim science project, this vault of dormant lives.
At least Annie can breathe on her own. They call this the vegetative state, which means I should not become overly excited when she twitches, coughs or moans, as these can be reflexive. I look at the narrow bruise on her forehead, more noticeable against her pallor. Her deep-set eyes are closed, her mouth slightly open. I wipe some spittle from her chin and smooth her hair back from her face. “Annie,” I say, a greeting and a test.
There is a bolt-like apparatus on her head where they have stuck in a tiny tube that checks the pressure inside. I am told this causes no harm as they send this device into the “silent part” of the brain where no important functions take place. Nothing seems more fantastic to me: that they can pilot this thing in between her circuitry. There is tubing in her nose, as well as her arms, and some kind of sensor is attached to her earlobe. She is at the moment more machine than person.
She makes a sound and I jump. “Annie,” I urge. I reach for her hand, squeeze it. Her fingers are cool and remote. I tuck her arms closer to her sides and pull the sheet higher.
A nurse comes up behind me. “Time to leave, honey.”
I give her a nod and take a last look at Annie, my long-limbed broken doll.
Last night I spent wedged on an orange vinyl couch in the hospital lounge. Scattered around me were other wakeful souls too distraught over their loved ones to attempt conversation. Now, driving back home to Berkeley, I pass by the bay without bothering to look at it. My eyes burn and my unwashed face feels like it’s covered with a fine web. Drivers are frowning, zipping by me. There is no sympathy on the open road.
Over and over I force those drawings on myself. Brain hitting bone, forward, then back.
All that Annie is−every gesture, quirk and mood−has become two and a half pounds of damaged tissue.
I push open the front door and the cats rush in ahead of me. Hungry, winding around my legs, they have no time for my grief. As soon as I fill their bowls they turn their backs on me.
After I check the phone (there are no messages from the hospital) I can’t think what to do. There is probably mail in the box, though I see no point in getting it. The lamps and furniture, the pictures on the wall−nothing seems familiar or significant. Searching for touchstones I go back to the kitchen and scan the wall calendar, but the events−a play, a haircut, dinner at Chez Panisse−are inconceivable. A fear expands in my chest: the idea that I am not up to this, that I won’t be able to manage the tasks expected of me. My heart begins to pound and I look to the cats for help. One is washing her face and does not answer me, the other is on the sofa trying to sleep; when I call her name she flicks her tail in warning.
Taking deep breaths, I try to remember my role in all this, the papers I need to locate, the people I need to call. Annie’s mom, she’s the first. Again I dial the number and again there is no answer. This is the number she gave us six months ago, but the operator tells me there is no Key West listing for a Ms. Janet LaMarche. Which is no surprise: Annie’s mother has had at least eight addresses in as many years, and some of these were boats. I am not well-acquainted with Janet, having seen her only twice, but I know she’s not big on sentiment−holidays pass without a word from her. Strangely Annie doesn’t seem to mind: They must have an understanding, a pact I’m not privy to. While Annie describes her mother as “exotic,” I employ a different word, one I keep to myself.
Tomorrow Kerry flies in from Colorado. I have not seen him in a year and a half, since he left us to live with his father. I like to evoke the child version of him, the tow-headed four-year-old who took his world on trust. Our first year together was a state of grace: Annie and I were head over heels, still getting to know one another and adoring each new discovery, and in the bargain I had Kerry. I had never wanted children of my own and the ease I felt with Kerry, the swiftness of my devotion, surprised me. As he grew older and began pulling away from us, groping for a life of his own, I braced myself for the changes I saw coming. It’s not easy for two women to raise a boy, and while there was no real discord at home, I know there must have been awkwardness, maybe even trouble, at school. While I didn’t fault Kerry for leaving us, the news came like a blow to the chest. I’ve never shared this hurt with him, nor am I likely to; if he harbors any resentment toward me—and he very well may—he has been equally discreet.
Rick is not coming; he is busy managing his steakhouse in Denver and wants to be “kept informed.” We’re not talking about an offshore hurricane, I wanted to say. Am I expecting too much? I know it’s been eleven years since the divorce, and I know I’m the last person he wants be in the same room with, but for Kerry’s sake if not Annie’s, shouldn’t Rick have come along, at least for a day or two? The dearth of family appalls me. I think of Annie’s errant mother, and her father who was killed in a car wreck, and her sister who died of cancer—all who have loved her and are not here.
I spend a long time on the phone, with friends, insurance agents, Annie’s employer, the nursery I manage. I say the same things so many times that the words become simple tools stripped of feeling. Afterward I wander into the kitchen, open a can of tomato soup and pour it unheated into a bowl. I am not hungry but I feed myself anyway, swallowing the soup in small, steady spoonfuls, like medicine.
First by his walk, I recognize Kerry. He is taller and his dark blonde hair is now black. He keeps his head low as he lopes down the ramp, pretends he’s not searching for me.
“Kerry!” I open my arms; he allows a brief hug before backing off. “Hey,” he says.
I pat his leather back as we walk down the hall. “You’ve grown so tall!” I say, feebly. I am aghast of course at the black hair hanging in his face, the rips in his blue jeans, the heavy martial boots.
“How was your flight?”
He shrugs. “Boring.”
“Well that’s probably a good thing.” I’m hoping for a smile but don’t get one.
“How’s mom?”
“I haven’t heard from the hospital so I guess there aren’t any changes. We’re headed there now.”
In the car I tell Kerry what happened. “She was on Grizzly Peak road. A collie ran out and when she swerved to miss it she hit a tree.”
I look at his profile and my stomach flutters. He has Annie’s long straight nose; she’s there in the set of his mouth, too.
For a moment he says nothing, and then, in a rush: “So what do they think−is she going to be okay?”
I put my hand on his arm. “They don’t know, Kerry. But she is breathing on her own, which means that her brain stem is functioning, and they haven’t had to drain off much fluid.” I try to explain to him what I’ve learned about coma, but I see his discomfort and stop.
“I can’t get through to your grandmother in Florida,” I tell him. “Have you heard from her?”
Kerry snorts. “Not likely.” He turns and looks out at the bay, green and rippling in the March wind. “You know she’s fucking nuts.”
I am fighting rising nausea. We are back in the slick halls of the hospital, and that smell−half sweet, half antiseptic−is following us.
“I hate these places,” Kerry murmurs.
“You’re not alone.”
I try to prepare him for the sight of his mother. “She’s hooked up to a lot of equipment.”
“Duh.”
Oh Kerry, please be nice. We don’t say another word until we walk into ICU and approach Annie’s bed. The circles under her eyes are darker today. I check her heart rhythms on the monitor and let out my breath.
“Annie?” I try.
Kerry, whom I have forgotten, is pointing to the bolt in her head. “What’s that?”
“It’s for checking the pressure in her brain−it keeps her head steady.”
His face starts to crumple; I put an arm around him and he shakes it off.
“Talk to her,” I say.
“Why,” he demands. “She can’t hear me.”
“Maybe she can.”
“Mom,” he says finally. “It’s Kerry.”
There is only the hum of the machines, and her chest rising and falling. I lay my hand on her shoulder and bring my mouth close to her ear. “We’re here, Annie,” I whisper. Even her scent is missing.
He’s not going back, Kerry says, as we pull out of the parking lot. “What’s the use?”
I do not tell him what I’ve heard: that talking to a coma patient might help, that the brain, acting on cue, working in the dark, may attempt to heal itself.
“It’s okay, Kerry. You don’t have to.”
Suddenly his fist slams the dashboard. “Fucking dog!”
This house seems too small for him now, or maybe it’s his wrath the rooms can’t contain. The cats, dismayed, have gone into hiding; even I am disturbed by this strange male presence, so unlike the eager youth who once lived here. I watch him pick up the TV remote, slap it against his palm a few times, then smack it back down on the coffee table. What am I supposed to do with him?
“Come in here,” I say, “keep me company while I make us a sandwich.”
Kerry tromps into the kitchen and yanks a chair out from the table.
“Why are you so mad?”
“She’s just lying there,” he snarls, “and no one’s doing a fucking thing.”
I keep my eyes on the bread I’m buttering. “For one thing,” I tell him, “they are doing everything they can. And for another, I think you’re wearing out that adjective.”
He crosses his leg over his knee and starts tapping his fork against the heel of his boot.
I put the sandwich in the skillet and turn to face him. I know he’s scared, I know that’s why he’s angry, but I can’t do this.
“This is an awful time, Kerry−we have to help each other through it. I can’t be fighting you right now.”
He stops the fork, nods at the floor.
I slip into the cold expanse of the bed and contemplate Annie, trapped in some distant dimension. Her mind is still active, the doctor said, it just isn’t communicating with her body. “In coma,” he said, “the brain attempts to rewire itself to compensate for the damage.” Which makes me think of science fiction movies: a brain with a life of its own.
I don’t feel any anger; for me there is just the waiting.
We met one morning at the herb nursery where I work. I was watering flats of basil when I saw her strolling down the rows in a blue work shirt, her khaki trail pants stuffed into her boots. She was gangly and unselfconscious, and her mouth was set in a soft smile. I watched her sniff the scented geraniums and the garlic chives, and then I watched her walk up the gravel path to where I stood. I was flooding the seedlings by then and had to turn off the water when she started to speak. The first thing I noticed was her deep-set eyes, large, grey-blue, slightly crazed; and then her wide, easy grin. There was no discernible style to her ash blonde hair, which fell in loose coils around her face and neck. On her shirt and hands were small, colorful spatters of paint.
“I want an herb garden,” she said, “and I don’t know anything about plants. Not a thing,” she added, smiling.
I asked her about the size of the garden, and the amount of sun in her yard, and just which herbs she had in mind, and that’s when we decided I would do the job. I did this kind of side work from time to time and so our beginnings were innocent enough. I probably should have packed up my tools and driven away, though, as soon as I started looking forward to those spring weekends in her Montclair backyard, when she would come outside and chat with me after working in her studio (Annie is an artist. She creates the most wonderful canvases, not of scenery or figures, but of colors, gorgeous, haunting colors that make you feel all sorts of things). While I stretched string lines and cut out chunks of sod, we shared pieces of our pasts, who and what we admired, where we’d been or wanted to go. I loved the quickness of her mind, her far-ranging interests; how she didn’t aim for cleverness or approval but spoke without artifice and maligned no one. Kerry, who was four then, would often dig in the dirt beside me. On the mornings he wasn’t there, when his father took him on errands, Annie would sometimes light a joint, which we genially passed, and kneeling in the soft earth, listening to her stories, watching her exuberant gestures, I let myself fall more deeply in love. If there was a key moment, a point at which I could have walked away, no harm done, I missed it. By the time I finally kissed her, right there under the sun, no force on earth could have stopped me.
Kerry was all she wanted and the only thing Rick gave her.
Tired of trying to sleep I get up at 4:10 a.m. and hear faint laughter coming from the TV in Kerry’s room. He doesn’t answer when I tap on the door, so I turn the knob and take a look inside. He is lying on the bed, fully dressed and sound asleep. On the small black and white screen Lucy and Ethel are stuffing chocolates into their mouths. I watch them a moment, more comforted by their silliness than amused, before crossing the room and banishing them with a click. The screen crackles softly and goes blank.
I am sitting at the table stroking our cat Emma and staring at the pepper grinder when Kerry comes into the kitchen. He is subdued this morning, and Emma, who was ready to flee, settles back into my lap.
“You have any Coke or Pepsi?” he asks, and when I say no he surprises me by pouring a cup of coffee, which he modifies with milk and four spoonfuls of sugar.
“I called the sheriff in Key West,” I tell him. “I’m having them look for your grandmother.”
“Whatever.” He stirs his coffee and I notice the tattoo on his arm. It’s a dark blue cockroach, about two inches long.
“Why a cockroach?” I ask him. I really want to know.
“It’s the only thing that lasts,” he says, defiant, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Whatever you do to it, it survives.”
“Was it painful?”
He shakes his head.
“They can take those off, can’t they?”
“Who cares?”
You will care, I manage not to say. When you are forty, you will care. I wonder what Rick thinks of that tattoo, why in fact he allowed it—Kerry is still a minor.
“What are you going to do today?”
He stretches his long legs out in front of him and scratches his shoulder. “Guess I’ll go up on Telegraph Avenue, see what the freaks are up to.” He yawns then and in his wrinkled brow I see a vestige of his childhood face. In ways that elude expression, in ways grown nearly useless, I know this boy; I carry his youth with me. Impossible, this new version of him. The dark trace of beard, the scatter of pimples, the sheer size of him astonishes me.
“Have I mentioned,” I say, “how great it is to see you?”
Before he can stop it, a grin escapes.
The doctor is encouraged. They have removed the cranial bolt, as the pressure in her brain is returning to normal. She is also showing some “localized reactivity” and her pupils are contracting when light is shone on them. This is not a profound coma, the doctor adds, and there are many indications that point to recovery.
My heart is beating in my throat.
“She is responding to pain,” he continues, “and she is starting to blink, signs that the cortex is waking up.” But then he rubs his eyes with his meaty red hands and I know there is something else he is obliged to tell me.
“It’s important to remember,” he begins, “that every brain is unique. Sometimes we expect the worst and are happily surprised; sometimes it works the other way.” It’s possible, he explains, that Annie could persist in a vegetative state, that she might be able to sleep and wake, to swallow and digest, without ever regaining consciousness.
This information seeps in slowly, horribly. I will not be free of it.
I tell him that I don’t understand this, how someone can be both dead and alive.
He brings his hands together, palm to palm, and clears his throat. “The persistent vegetative state is a cessation of thinking,” he says. “In PVS the cortex is damaged but the lower parts of the brain, the autoregulatory responses, still work. The body is kept alive.” He gives a slight shrug. “With some help from us.”
PVS. So it’s common enough for an acronym.
“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he says quickly. “The swelling was minor in Annie’s case and now it’s gone. She is showing definite improvement.”
I get to my feet, wobbly, and he rises from his own chair and places his hand on my back as he walks me out his door. “Try to be patient,” he says. “Remember that the brain is always working on behalf of the organism. Protecting it.”
I look at him askance. “So Annie’s in a coma for her own good?”
“Essentially.”
Organism. A week ago Annie was a person. I can’t imagine seeing her that way—that simply— ever again. Even if she is fully restored, I can’t imagine being able to forget this.
Today they let me spend a longer time with Annie than usual. Freed from the bolt and the nasal tubes, she looks almost normal and for a few seconds I allow myself the fantasy that she will wake when I whisper her name.
Someone has placed a chair next to her bed and obligingly I sit down. Picking up her hand, I tell her everything that comes to mind, and though she makes no sounds, twice I see her blink. I talk to her about Kerry and the cats, and just as I start to tell her about all the cards and flowers she’s gotten, her mouth yanks down and I see tears slide toward her temples. A moment later her expression is placid again.
I sprint out of the room and find a nurse.
“She just cried! She was crying!” The nurse, who remains calm, follows me back into the room. She checks the monitors and opens Annie’s eyes and speaks her name, and then she turns to me and says, gently, “Sometimes they do that. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Kerry is hunched over the photo albums when I get home. He looks up at me, expectant, and I muster a cheerful tone.
“They think she might be waking up.”
His eyes widen. “No kidding?”
“She’s responding to certain tests, and they’ve taken some of the gadgets off her.”
Kerry slaps his knee. “That is so great. So did she say anything?”
“Not yet,” I say brightly.
He follows me into the kitchen. “I bought this for dinner.” He opens the fridge and pulls out a large cheese pizza. “I was going to get pepperoni but then I remembered you don’t eat meat.”
“How sweet, thank you.” I make him suffer a hug.
Should we heat it up now?” he asks.
“Sure.” We sit down at the kitchen table, me with my glass of wine and Kerry with a giant bottle of Coke. “I bought this too,” he says, lifting his drink. “Things cost more here than they do in Denver.”
“Do you like it there?”
“It’s alright. I skied a lot this winter.”
“How’s the restaurant business?”
“Pretty good, I guess. Dad’s opening another one in August.” This pleases me only insofar as it bodes well for Kerry’s future. “He wants me to bus tables next winter but I don’t want to. I want a job at a ski resort—ever heard of Winter Park?”
I shake my head.
“It’s huge,” he says, throwing his arms apart. “A ton of trails. Me and my friend Ethan are going to rent a condo there and work the lifts. We can ski for nothing.”
I lean back in my chair and listen as he tells me about his plans to join a ski patrol and learn rescue. He is talkative today, full of smiles, and I am delighted by this shift in his mood. Every so often one of Annie’s expressions will cross his face, or his hands will move precisely like hers, and each time this happens I rejoice.
It is not until after dinner, when Kerry is watching television and I am washing dishes, that the fear moves back in. A deft shadow, it creeps up from behind, settles between my shoulders. I see myself feeding Annie, bathing her, rocking her; she is looking right through me; she is looking at nothing. I pull my hands from the water and grip the edge of the sink. A low wail escapes me.
“Jane?” Kerry says. I feel his hand on my shoulder. Awkwardly he starts patting me. “It’s okay, she’s getting better. Don’t cry,” he pleads. And shamelessly, knowing he is not strong enough, I fall apart in his arms.
I wait in the hall as a physical therapist finishes working with Annie, manipulating her arms and legs to help preserve muscle tone. She has been moved to another wing of the hospital, one with pictures on the walls and fewer machines. Now she sleeps in a room with a window, surrounded by the flowers they disallowed in Intensive Care. I place some roses next to her bed, hoping the scent will find her.
Yesterday when I was talking she turned her head to me. Hearing, the doctor affirms, is the last sense to go and the first to return. She is also moving her limbs more, which is another good sign, but what we are waiting for is “perceptivity,” something that can’t be coincidence.
There is a bit of color in her cheeks now and the shadows under her eyes are not as dark. I pull the chair close to the bed and watch the feelings that come and go on her face. Sometimes her eyebrows will raise as if she’s surprised, sometimes she will scowl; but what I witness most often, what pulls me to my feet, is her mask of anguish. Whenever I see that grimace, I picture her brain as a labyrinth of bad dreams, a reddish-black netherworld through which she is stumbling.
Never does she smile.
The house is reclaiming me. I am watering plants, filling bird feeders, scouring stains from the sink. I accomplish these tasks unwittingly, as if a part of me, aware of what must be done, is stepping in.
Some things in the house do capture my interest: Annie’s paintings. I find myself contemplating them for long moments. My favorite is a canvas she calls “Day Break.” Gradations of deep blue on top, dark green on the bottom and a pencil thin layer of brilliant orange in between. The effect is stunning. “Do you see the paintings in your mind,” I once asked her, “before you start? Or do they surprise you?” She concentrated a moment. “I do see them first. I have this idea and then the colors take over for me.”
All these new circuits the doctor speaks of, this re-wiring that is going on while Annie sleeps, what will it mean to her art? Will she want to paint the same way? Will the colors be as lovely?
Will she want to paint at all?
Running errands, I stop at Seconds on Shattuck and speak with Annie’s employer, a portly man with florid cheeks and kind eyes. Annie, who adores vintage clothes, makes quite a lot of money mending them. She has worked for James for over six years and he has been good to her in many ways—we stay in his condo whenever we visit Lake Tahoe. Now he stands before me, asking about Annie and wringing his hands. I tell him the signs are promising and in a rush of emotion he hugs me hard. Then he clasps my hands between this own and tells me that he is here for me, that if there is anything he can do for me, anything at all, please let him know. The same thing happens when I stop at the nursery. The owner is there, covering for me, and with teary eyes she tells me that wants to help in whatever way she can. Our friends are behaving in similar fashion, though everyone is hesitant, circumspect, not wanting to ask too many questions or offer reassurance they might wish they hadn’t.
Kerry and I are sitting on the deck after lunch watching a pair of yellow finches peck at the feeder. Annie’s red tulips nod in the breeze and the astilbe is pushing its soft stems skyward. Even as we speak, the magnolia unfurls its slick pink petals. Spring is gaining momentum.
Worried that Kerry is growing restless, I tell him I will understand if he wants to head back to Colorado. “You can come back when she wakes up.” I always use the word “when,” not “if,” in my conversations with Kerry. “It might take a while,” I add. “No one knows.”
He shakes his head. “No. I want to stay.”
I look out at the tulips, bending so easily, and tell him what the doctors have told me: that Annie will not wake up like people do in the movies. That she will have to relearn things, that this will take time.
He narrows his eyes, processing this information, then folds his arms on the table and says, “So I’ll help.”
I have doubts about a fifteen-year-old boy caring for his mother in this fashion—I have doubts about my own ability—but I don’t share them. I look at his profile, so young, so dogged, and what I say is, “Thank you.”
Kerry shrugs and, keeping his eyes averted, says, “I’d do the same for you, if you were the one who got hurt.”
Gratitude takes my breath away. I can’t speak. This keeps happening, this overwhelming thankfulness I feel when someone is kind to me. Even a smile from an unknowing shop clerk brings me to my knees.
The next day Kerry comes to the hospital with me. From the folder he’s carrying I see he has a plan. We pause at the door of Annie’s room, which is partly open, and slowly he leans in and looks at his mother. The folder in his hand is shaking.
I look at the monitors, as I do every time. Green numbers on a black screen, changing subtly, and a graph at the bottom, the translation of her heart. I don’t know what all these numbers mean—seeing them is enough.
Annie is very still today. I lower my eyes to the sheet on her chest, wait for the rise and fall. Has she lost ground? Those promising signs, were they misleading? I think of what the doctor said the first time we spoke. “We know so little about coma.”
“How does she look?” Kerry whispers.
“Fine,” I tell him, “and you don’t have to whisper—it’s better if we don’t.”
He nods knowingly. “That’s why I brought this.” He opens the folder and takes out a few sheets of paper. “It’s something I had to write for biology class. It’s about bees. You know how mom loves them.” She does. We have rusty garden art in the shape of bees and there are several photographs in the house: bees among the lavender stalks, bees in the yellow centers of Shasta daisies—close-ups that Annie took in the garden. This report must be something Rick sent him, along with his school books—his teachers are giving him assignments, work he can do to keep from falling too far behind.
So we sit down next to her bed and Kerry reads his report on bee colonies and why they are in trouble. Fascinated, I listen so closely that at first I don’t see the arm that Annie has raised. Kerry stops reading and we both stare at her arm, waiting for it to do more. Slowly it descends to the sheet.
“What does that mean?” Kerry says, his voice thick with excitement.
“Hard to say. But I think it’s a good thing.”
Two days later, two weeks after the accident, Annie looks at me. Not long, maybe four seconds, but I know her eyes and I know she was there.
Her doctor was right. People don’t wake up like you might guess. It happens fitfully, one false start after another. Annie is full of surprises that first week. One moment she is lying there and the next she is sitting. Several times she throws off the sheets and walks stiff-legged around the bed. Occasionally she answers a question, and occasionally I can make sense of it.
The doctor is exultant. He is in here every chance he gets, demonstrating ways I can help her. The learning is slow. Over and over, I show her how to dress, how to use a fork and knife, how to brush her teeth. There may be lingering problems, the doctor cautions: lowered stress tolerance, delayed responses, sluggish abstract reasoning. “A full recovery,” he says, “may takes months.” At last they let me bring her home.
Because she has trouble enunciating, because she often puts words in the wrong places and calls her belt “that round cow thing,” a speech therapist comes twice a week, along with a physical therapist and a neuropsychologist who charts her cognitive achievements. We are all pitching in to rebuild her.
Good to his word, Kerry is helping, more than I could have guessed, and not just with errands and housework. At first he hung back, alarmed by his mother’s faltering progress, but then he began watching the therapists, learning from them, and by now he is invaluable: I do not believe she’d be doing this well without him. And with a job to replace his anger, Kerry has benefitted, too. Another piece of good news: Janet has been found. She was sailing with friends off the coast of Venezuela and will be here by the weekend.
Yes, Annie is coming along. Soon Kerry will be leaving and I will head back to work and Annie will take up where she left off. It will be some time before she starts mending garments again—her hands are not altogether dependable yet—but she already begun to paint.
Last night she was at her easel mixing shades of blue, her hand moving tentatively. After a moment she paused and regarded the empty canvas. I interrupted then, asked her if she saw the pictures in her head the way she used to. She looked up from the palette and smiled at me. “Yes. Why?”
She has no recollection of the accident, or her coma, and she is fascinated by my account of her ordeal. “I cried?” she says, incredulous. To her it’s just a story. She can’t imagine how far she’s traveled, the terrible journey behind her smile.
(This piece originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in Other Voices, Spring/Summer 1999 Vol. 11, No. 30.)
