All We Know of Heaven (13 page)

to stay with her sister in Wisconsin for a short while un til she can face life again.” Kitt’s sister, Sherry, smiled and waved. He stopped again, for about five minutes. People looked around nervously. But then he started again. “The O’Malleys are our friends. They will always be our friends. Well. I just wanted to say that. Yeah.”

Father Genovese got up and led them all in the Lord’s Prayer.

Then Danny Carmody walked to the front of the room. He looked down at a card, then put it into his pocket.

“I just want all of you to know that Bridget was an amaz ing person, more amazing than anyone I’ve ever met. And I know she wasn’t afraid that night, because she was never afraid of anything in her life. I would imagine she would not be afraid of death, either. If she can see us, she’s prob ably glad that the news trucks are here, because Bridget had no doubt that she was going to be famous in her life. On the red carpet. Not this way. But she probably doesn’t mind.” There was mild laughter. “I have a message for all of you from Maureen. She wants you to know she loves Bug—that was her name for Bridget. She misses her as much as I do, probably as much as anyone except her own mother and father and sisters do. I think it’s important to remember that.” In the silence, Kitt’s thin, keening cry was the only sound. The news cameras pressed close. Henry Colette got up to tell them to get the hell out. “I wish this didn’t hap pen. I wish we were all together again. I will always love Bridget Flannery. But we have to love Maury, too. We all

lost something out there on County G that night. The Flan nerys lost most of all. None of us will ever be the same.”

He sat down.

His mother gave him an odd look. So did other people. He felt scratchy and hot in his suit, which was a little too short in the arms. Then, just as the caterers began to open tables and lay out silver bowls and platters, Mr. Flannery tapped him on the shoulder. Danny put his hand out to be shaken, thinking Mr. Flannery was going to thank him.

But he asked, “How dare you bring up Maureen at my daughter’s memorial?”

Danny felt like Mr. Flannery had punched him in the gut. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would mind. She asked

me to.”

“You didn’t mean to be offensive,” said Mr. Flannery. “But it was completely wrong, Danny. Maureen is getting better. Bridget can never get better. You have no idea what we’re feeling.”

“Actually, I think I do,” Danny replied, surprising him self.

“What? A kid crush? This was our child! Listen. Just . . . I’m not saying you’re a bad kid. But you remind Kitt . . . just . . .”

“Well, okay. I won’t come around.” “Just for now.”

“Fine.”

When Mr. Flannery turned his back to tell the men where to put the food, Danny and Ev took off.

homecoming
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Over the next two months, Jeannie met other mothers on the ward—each of them clutching her own shot glass of hope the way Jeannie’s grandmother used to wrap her long fingers around her hot whiskey and sugar.

“You’re so brave,” she told one woman whose son had been airlifted from up north. The boy had been a piano prodigy at ten but was hurt diving into a shallow pond at his cousin’s birthday party. That had been a year ago last summer. Every time he was about to go home, he got a fever or bronchitis and was readmitted to a medical floor. And then he had to come back to rehab. His injury was not only to his movements but also to his mind. “I’m not brave,” the mother, whose name was Denise, told Jeannie as they

strolled the long corridor, Denise pushing Charles in his wheelchair toward the soft-drink vending machines. “You do for your child what you do for your child. Everyone here does that. You did it when they were babies, and they need for you to do it again now.”

“Skank!” snarled Charles, snatching at the vending ma chine with a hand cocked sharply at the wrist.

“He doesn’t mean me. It’s okay, honey,” said Denise. “With the brain, it’s like being obese. The more you have to lose, the more you can lose, or so it seems. But it’s also true that the more you have to lose, the more you know you’ve lost.”

Jeannie was submerged again in the wave of guilt: Maury was doing so much better than most of the kids. She was recovering more words each day.

Her regimen of physical exercises was endless. Maureen came back from physical therapy sweating as though she’d been at a long cheerleading practice. They had her bending her knees and raising her arms overhead to improve her range of motion after the shoulder injury. They taught her to use exercise bands and little dumbbell weights. Jeannie sometimes watched Shannon barking out orders, “No, I said squeeze that ball! Do you want that right side at all! I said squeeze it, missy! Don’t you throw it away!”

Shannon was like a mean sergeant in some bizarre army. That her daughter should have to undergo this after every thing she’d already endured . . . but it was for the best. It was all for Maureen’s own good.

And when Maureen went home, Jeannie would have to do the same things with her every day.

But Jeannie didn’t know if she was adequate to the task of helping her child.

She thought that kids cramming for medical school ex ams must feel this way. There was so much to learn. They all said it would become routine once Maureen had done it a few times. Muscle memory, Shannon insisted. Dr. Park, so encouraged by Maury’s progress, was beginning to talk about home, perhaps by May. Jeannie was horrified.

It was too soon.

She barely knew her way around the rehab! But she tried to count her blessings.

Jeannie felt okay about leaving Maureen overnight now. There was always someone from the family there. Henry came almost every day, as did Jeannie and Bill. Danny came several times a week. The cheerleaders came, too, but not with Danny. The story was slowly draining away from the front pages. There was so much to be grateful for that it

seemed absurd to worry.

Jeannie remembered her vow to live life now, and tried to enjoy those moments that weren’t a trial.

Molly and Taylor and Britney came to deliver a get-well CD with the most raucous dance music they could find. They did the Bigelow Stomp as they had for Bridget—well, as they had when they thought Maureen was Bridget. And as Maureen watched from her wheelchair, clapping in de light, Molly did back walkovers all the way down the hall of

the ward. All the rehab kids were enchanted. One guy was so enchanted that he showed Taylor his penis. Taylor burst into tears and ran for the elevators. She never came back.

For Maureen, the visits were bittersweet.

Seeing Molly do the things she once could do—and knowing that Molly wasn’t as good as she and Bridge had been—reminded her of her great hefty bag of losses. Bridget. The two of them in tumbling class. In their teeny Bulldog uniforms when they were in second grade, the two mascots for Bigelow High. Her aching, stubborn muscles could remember how it felt to throw herself confidently back and touch the floor, to jump and almost touch her outstretched toes, to slip down into a split.

Never again. Never, never again.

Part of her wanted Molly—refreshing, healthy, pretty Molly—to go away and stay away. But when they weren’t there, Maureen wanted all of them to come back.

One day when Molly visited alone, Jeannie could tell that there was something on her mind. And sure enough, Molly walked out into the hall and motioned for Jeannie. She asked if they could speak privately for a moment. From her room, Maureen roared. She hated it when peo ple talked about her outside her hearing. With a troubled face, Molly confessed, “I knew it was her all the time. I had dreams.”

Jeannie nodded and admitted something she hadn’t even told Bill. “I had dreams that she was talking to me. I had dreams that she was telling me she was here. I thought

she was trying to tell me that heaven was wonderful. Now I think it’s possible that if you’re close to someone, that per son can kind of hear your voice in her head. And maybe you can hear her thoughts.”

“Like ESP?” Molly asked.

“Who knows?” Jeannie answered with a shrug.

“I guess I was closer to her than anyone except Bridge,” Molly said. “I mean, she was closer to Bridge than I was, not that I was closer to Bridge than I was to Maureen. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. . . .”

“I know,” Jeannie told her.

“So I kept thinking, Why am I dreaming about Mau reen? Not Bridget? And still, I’m really, really happy for you. I hope you forgive us for going on the TV. . . .”

“We do.”

“It was just all so exciting and so strange. I’ve read about other times it happened now, before this. But then I thought it was the first time it had ever happened. It was so scary and thrilling to be part of it!”

“It was.”

Maury shouted to them, “Hell-OH!!”

Laughing, Jeannie and Molly hurried back into the room. “You might have lost some teeth, but you found a tem

per!” Jeannie said.

You try living in a shell and see how polite you are
, Maureen thought. But she only said, “Yes. I did.”

“Keep it up,” Molly told her, and Maureen could almost feel what she was going to say next. “You need that fighting

spirit! By fall you’ll be back on the squad.”

Was Molly stupid? Or only trying to be nice? Maureen knew she would be lucky to be able to sit in the stands for a game by next fall. When she left, Molly said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

But she didn’t.

When the spring days started to lengthen and the flowers bloomed, Jeannie began wheeling Maureen out onto the roof terrace to see the daffodils and trilliums budding in the big tubs and boxes out there. Visiting Maureen had be come a daily grind. The drama was over.

The cheerleaders’ visits dropped off. The kids were doing term papers.

The prom committee was having meetings twice a week.

It was only natural.

It broke Jeannie’s heart.

And for Maureen it was devastating. There were days when she actively fought the therapists and nurses. She cussed them with words her mother didn’t realize that Maureen knew. Why not just stay in bed? This was going to be her life anyway. Why should she let people push and prod her like a baby? Put stupid stickers on a chart when she walked a step alone on the rubber mats between the railings? She grew so depressed that rehab sent a psychol ogist to talk to her.

“I hear you’ve been refusing your therapy,” the man

said. He wore a jogging suit and Nikes. Probably this was supposed to make kids feel he was “one of them.” Maureen put a pillow over her face. “You’re only hurting yourself, Maureen. If I were you, I’d want every bit of power back that I could have.”

“You not me!” Maureen spat at him. “Fat. Fat butt.” The man clearly wanted to be seen as a jock type. But his gut betrayed him.

“But if I were you, I’d stop feeling sorry for myself,” he continued, shrugging off the insult.

Maureen burst into tears of rage.

The psychologist handed her a tissue. Why did people always do that? Didn’t they know how good an accumula tion of tears felt? When you cried, you wanted to drown in your tears, let them course down your neck and into your ears. It felt real.

“I loose my face. I can not walk! Bridget die. My head hurts all day. Sorry? For me? Sorry? Yes. Why not?” She looked around for something to throw. She was getting good at throwing things.

“Yes, feel sorry. Feel sad about Bridget. Feel hurt that you got slammed. But Bridget died. You didn’t. You can sit here until your legs shrivel up into wet noodles or you can fight. I think Bridget would have fought,” said the man.

Later, in the hall, he told Jeannie that Maureen was grieving entirely appropriately for her situation. The happy zombies were the ones who really worried him. He also said she might need weekly counseling later, that it would

be worse when she was at home. Friends would be flipped out by her blurting and her impulsiveness. They would all promise to visit every day and then stay away. Here, her astonishing progress won her superstar treatment. Back among fully abled people, she was going to seem like a freak. The dumbest baggy pants guy would be more with the program than Maureen was. It wasn’t that he wanted to say these things, the psychologist told Jeannie. But she needed to know.

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 zip pers 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 tilestossedrandomlyonatable. The OTsaidthat 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 diffi cult, 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 refer ring to herself as Maureen’s best friend, which prompted

some nasty comments from someone who took the nick name 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 thou sand 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 Mau reen! 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?”