Jeannie thought that if there was just one more thing she “needed to know,” she might lose her mind altogether.
But of course he was correct.
“We’ll all come around when she gets home,” Molly told Jeannie and Bill one day when they ran into her at Apple Creek Mall, where they were buying clothing without zippers for Maureen, whose newest task was learning to dress herself. “I think the hospital is just such a downer.”
How could Jeannie prepare Maureen for the inevitable? No one except a mother wanted to sit for an hour and try to make sense of a few sentences scrambled like Scrabble tiles tossed randomly on a table. The OT said that Maureen’s speech would improve as she learned to manage a new way of communicating. She would always have to think before she spoke. It would be excruciating at first, then only difficult, then second nature—and probably not a bad idea even for people who didn’t have brain injuries.
On the THESETWOGIRLS blog, Molly had taken to referring to herself as Maureen’s best friend, which prompted some nasty comments from someone who took the nickname A Forgotten Friend.
“Who does Molly think she is?” A Forgotten Friend wrote. “We were there the night it happened. Caitlin Smith and Leland Holzer and Britney Broussard were at the hospital. Molly was off visiting her relatives and didn’t even know about the crash until she showed up in the morning for the meet. Really! Who wants total attention here?”
THESETWOGIRLS turned into a sort of sniper fight. “Who sold a picture of poor Maureen to a newspaper for a thousand bucks?” wrote someone who signed himself OneGuy. “I think some people are jealous that they aren’t getting asked to be on TV anymore. They thought they were going to be the next Katie Couric!”
An anonymous post read, “What do you expect from a cheerslut?”
Molly shot back: “Well, all you so-called friends gather around! It’s pretty lonely up there in the rehab ward for Maureen! I don’t see you guys when I go up there. If you were all there for the crash, how come you’re not there for her now? Was it oh-so-fine being there for Bridget but not Maureen? Huh?”
Henry’s blog remained daily and steadfast.
April 12
1 John 4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.
A huge day! Maureen took her first walk alone. Three steps! She was holding on to the railings in the PT center, but barely. And she definitely walked! She wasn’t pulling herself along with her arms. My dad was there and he burst out crying. Although Maureen still doesn’t completely recognize Dad, which makes him very sad, she is getting to like him—which of course she would! He’s her dad, after all.
Most of the damage to Maureen’s brain—we THINK—was in what is called the primary motor cortex, which is part of the frontal lobe; and most of that was in the part that controls the movement of her right leg. There was some damage to the part that controls the planning and the movement of the hands, too, on the left side of her brain—so that the right side was affected. But I guess that when the swelling went down, there was less damage than they thought there was at first.
Maury’s job is really hard. Because of the trauma, she has to relearn things she could already do, like decide how to reach for a glass based on where that glass is in space. Otherwise her hand could shoot past the glass or knock it over. She might be able to touch the glass but not be able to close her fingers around it. As best as the doctors can tell, Maureen’s memory loss is from the psychological trauma, not actual brain injury. It might all be in there, but she has to work to bring it out. Or some of her perception of her life may be gone for good, and she’ll have to “learn” it the way a kid learns a story. She’ll have to memorize events from her own life.
A good example is this: When we show Maureen videos of a picnic or a birthday, she can remember everyone in the pictures, even our father. But she can’t remember him when he is actually in the room with her.
What’s really, really weird is that some people who came into the hospital and appeared to be far less “hurt” than Maureen may never be able to do the things she can do already.
Although she may get a bunch of the strength back in her right side, especially her hand and arm, the way the brain works is that things that are controlled by the one side happen on the other side. Most of the damage was on Maureen’s right side sort of in the middle. So she is using her left hand more strongly every day. She will probably come out of this as a mostly left-handed person. And she will probably never be very good at writing in journals or doing embroidery. At least not for a year or more. But she made the letters of her name, and they were legible, though very shaky. The tutor thinks that she may need a scribe to do papers in school. Eventually, she will learn to use a word processor. Relearn, that is.
Okay! Maury will finally get her Mac!
I forgot to say, Maury has gone “back to school.”
The school at the rehab unit is a room with books and materials for all ages. The teacher was shocked when she started to show Maury the alphabet, and Maury pushed it away and began to read from a book. She couldn’t say all the words, but she could follow them. Dr. Park was completely amazed. It wasn’t a children’s book either. It was To Kill a Mockingbird, which the teacher was reading aloud to the other kids.
Maury is eating on her own now. She eats regular food, cut up. She is getting used to her new teeth, and there are none of the problems we were afraid of with her chewing and digestion. She is even sitting in the shower, though the weakness on one side makes it hard and she needs help with some of the many “shower ops” girls have to do.
Her hair is growing back! That’s a big plus for Maureen. The skin grafts have taken. She made it VERY CLEAR that she would rather give up her long hair than have little thickets of new hair sticking up on the one side.
So last week a stylist from a very upscale salon in Minneapolis (thank you, Claire!) came and gave Maureen a sassy Euro cut. She looks so different, but she says it feels like her head has its clothes off. We are praying that the doctor is right and that she can start coming on an outpatient basis in a few weeks. We really want her home. We know it will be hard, and she’ll have to sleep in a hospital bed with sides so she doesn’t get up at night and injure herself. We know that she is going to be short-tempered when she can’t do things. But if you saw where she started from and where she is now, you would see it is all worth it.
Thanks again, Mrs. B., for taking over for Mom at Holy Mother of Sorrows. Thank you to A., H., L., T. M. M., and so many others for your gifts and prayers. Maureen loves the stuffed dog that looks just like Rag Mop. The other day when her friend Danny came in, she made the dog say “Bark! Bark!”
Her friend Danny was Maureen’s most steadfast visitor outside of her family.
Maureen looked forward to his visits, and Jeannie and Bill noticed. At first they worried. Jeannie thought that Maureen might be trying to replace Bridget in Danny’s life. Bill didn’t think that. It was normal for a girl to want to look nice for any boy.
“But, Bill, what if she never has that kind of life as a girl again?” Jeannie asked.
“That’s nonsense. People who are paraplegic get married. Maury’s a long way from that,” Bill insisted.
So they took special care to make sure that her hair was clean and her teeth were brushed before Danny came. That made Maureen more comfortable and less likely to get agitated. One day Maureen struggled with a question the whole day. She kept grabbing at her mother’s wrist and sniffing.
“Fumes,” she said. “Bubs. Bubbles. Fumes and bubbles. Calling.”
Finally, Lorelei asked, “Is what you want cologne, Maury?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Maureen cried.
Cologne was in short supply on the unit. The nurses weren’t allowed to wear any. Lorelei called down to the gift shop. There were only herbal scents, but the pink ladies sent the whole batch up for Maureen to sniff. She picked attar of tea rose, and Jeannie bought the bottle. When Danny Carmody c
ame, she slipped him a note that said, “Say how nice her perfume smells.”
Danny hugged Maureen.
“You smell like a rose,” he said. To his shock, Maureen kissed him on the mouth.
Jeannie said uncomfortably, “That’s just the impulsiveness we’re supposed to expect. Maury doesn’t have an editor in her brain right now. She’s going to say whatever she thinks and do things without thinking about them beforehand. I’m sorry!”
“Not sorry!” Maureen insisted. “I like to kiss him.”
Danny was not sorry either. He realized that it had been four months since he had kissed a girl, not counting his mom.
Danny pushed Maureen in her wheelchair—now one without head supports—out onto the roof terrace.
The lights of Minneapolis were just beginning to wink on.
Now that it was spring, Danny had gone out for baseball; he felt he needed something to do. A couple of girls had asked him if he wanted to hang out, but he felt it was way too soon for that. If he got good enough at baseball, he could play American Legion in the summer. Between that and working for his dad, it would pass the time. But practice meant he was coming up to see Maureen in the Cities in the evening rather than right after school. And he didn’t stay as long, because he was so tired out.
It was a beautiful night, though. Maureen opened her coat and let the breeze tickle her throat. Her short hair was like long blond feathers now; to Danny, she looked like an extremely pretty little boy.
“The whole…,” she said, pointing down.
“The whole world,” Danny said.
“Help,” said Maureen, struggling to stand. She put out her hands and struggled to get up. Then she leaned against him, so light and small, as they looked out at the river of cars flowing through the loops of the highway. “I want to home.”
“Of course you do. Pretty soon,” Danny told her.
“I miss Brid-get.”
“So do I.”
“I miss her not as much with you.”
It was the same for him. Together, they almost kept Bridget alive in their minds. That was the reason he kept coming, Danny realized, not only because his life was just an empty pit. He felt closer to Bridget with Maureen than he felt at Bridget’s grave, where a pink headstone had been erected reading BRIDGET KATHERINE FLANNERY: OUR WILD IRISH ROSE.
It was all so sad; but when he was with Maureen, he was reminded of the other side of the sadness—the up side, if there was one, of losing Bridget. He saw Maury’s guts, how hard she struggled every day for the things that he took for granted. He saw her pump the air with her fist when she lifted a spoonful of peas to her mouth.
Danny asked her how she did it, how she put up with all the drooly kids and the constant stretching of her legs and the battering of the questions and instructions. (“Do you know what the date is, Maureen?” “Read me the time on the clock, Maureen.” “What is nine times twelve, Maureen?” “What’s your address, Maureen?” “Come on, Maureen. Try again. Now harder. Try again. Punch my hand. Again!”)
She shrugged. “Cheerleading. This is not as bad,” she said.
Danny laughed out loud. Maureen had made a joke!
“Danny. Just alive,” she said. “Hate therapy, but it’s the price being alive.”
“Do you remember anything about that night?”
“No.”
“Anything?”
“Trying to find…” Danny eased Maureen back down into her chair. She made a circular design with her two hands.
“Doughnuts? The rings of Saturn?” he teased her. She didn’t get mad, just shook her head and rolled her eyes. Finally he said, “CDs.”
“Yes.”
“So you were reaching for the CDs in the backseat.”
“Yes.”
“And then.”
“That’s all.” She couldn’t tell him that this might have been another time that she recalled, any one of hundreds of times they’d been in the car. She seemed to be able to see Bridget driving, but she knew that and couldn’t be sure it was a memory or information. She could clearly visualize Bridget’s face turning to her and the headlights of another car, but that had happened a hundred times, too. Maureen had worked at this. She could not remember the names of any of the cheerleaders except Molly. There was not one teacher whose name she remembered. There was not one class she could say she’d taken.
Gone.
Zip.
She could no more have done trigonometry than she could have climbed Mount Everest.
But she knew that Bridget had been chosen for sophomore representative for the homecoming court and she hadn’t. Everyone forgave Bridget for being a cheerleader. But they dissed all the others. Maury hadn’t even gone to the dance—too humiliating. She just sat at Bridget’s, playing poker with little Sarah for kitchen matches.
“When did you start to remember who you were?” Danny was asking.
“Lots of time before I come say something.”
“So you knew for a long time….” How would that have felt? Having Kitt and Mike here with her, knowing she wasn’t Bridget? It must have been a torment, like slow torture. “That must have sucked.”
“Sleep,” she said, with a big smile.
“You slept a lot of the time.”
“Yes. I don’t like her anymore.”
“Who?”
“Kitt. She will not come.”
“Maury, you have to understand. If Mrs. Flannery come…I mean, came up here, the memory of thinking it was Bridget would just drive her wacko, I bet. She was here so long thinking it was Bridge.”
“My mom come.”
“But she’s your mom!” Danny insisted. He hadn’t really talked to the Flannerys since the memorial, but he thought Maureen was being unfair.
“No, my mom come to Brid-get.”
“Oh, your mom came when she thought you were Bridget.”
“I heard her.”
It was dark, and the wind was beginning to kick up. Danny pushed her back inside. When they hugged, she clung to him. He felt her hard little spine and the softness of her breasts under the nightgown. He would have to be careful that she didn’t confuse being pals with something else.
As he was leaving, Danny turned back to Mrs. O., who was sitting in her chair, knitting a baby blanket for her new granddaughter, Maura. “Maureen said a funny thing.”
“What?”
“She said you came up here when…you thought she was Bridget.”
“I did. But no one was here. She was still in a coma.”
“She knows, though. She told me. She heard you.”
“She did?” Jeannie put down her knitting. “I had to go to…well, to the doctor. I had…Well, it didn’t turn out to be anything but a cyst. Bill drove me because my nerves were shot. And I just came in on an impulse. She was still on the other floor. I spoke to her and said we loved her.”
“She knew it was you. She’s mad that Kitt doesn’t come to see her.”
“Well, I’m sure in time…”
Danny wasn’t so sure.
The days passed, spring racing along in the world, plowing forward like steps in wet sand in the rehab ward. Maureen began to use a walker. The physical therapist pushed her every day to keep going, just one more step, then just to the end of the counter. Once, exhausted and sweaty, Maureen slipped and fell to her knees. She wasn’t hurt at all; but when the PT helped her up, Maureen tried to spit in her face. Nothing came out, but Shannon Stride said, “Don’t you dare. You’re fortunate, Maureen. Do you know how much harder it’s going to be when you go home? Is there going to be a bathroom with a shower three steps from your bed? No. Is there going to be a button for you to call someone whenever you want to change the channel on the TV and you can’t reach the remote? No. You have to win yourself back, Maureen. The prize is what you had before. Yeah, it sucks. All this work to be not quite as good as you were before. But remember. Kids here would give their eyeteeth to be able to do what you can do.”
“I got no
eyeteeth,” Maureen snapped.
“But you have so much else. You look normal. You got so lucky. You think they want to look the way they do? You ever look at the pictures in their rooms? You think they weren’t as cute as you before? You ever talk to them? Or are you too good for them?”
Maureen was ashamed. With every ounce of her strength, she pushed toward the end of the nurses’ station countertop.
“Well done,” said Shannon. “Well done.”
That night Maureen sat next to Charles and Zoe in the hospital’s little theater and watched the old version of The Parent Trap. It was better than the new one. Zoe was funny and sweet. She was fifteen and had been a figure skater. She fractured her skull when her pairs partner dropped her. Every kid in rehab, except the little babies, seemed to have been something great. And from that day until she left, Maureen visited Zoe’s room every afternoon to watch Days. Zoe’s speech was much better than Maureen’s. But Zoe’s mother had told Maureen that Zoe would never be mentally more than ten or twelve years old. She would always have to live with her parents.
How did they know?
Maureen doubled her efforts.
She asked Jeannie to bring her sheet music; and when the music therapist came in, Maureen begged for fifteen minutes of piano “lessons.” Within two weeks she had begun to sight-read. After two weeks she could play songs from The Lion King—but only with her left hand. Her right hand was still too weak. Still nobody could believe that she’d actually learned something new, and something that was traditionally linked with math.
At night, she squeezed her exercise ball until her right hand ached and sweat trickled down her breastbone. She asked Shannon for something more challenging than the ball. Shannon gave her a device that looked like a slingshot. Its rubber-tipped metal legs were so far apart that Maureen could barely grasp both of them.