All We Know of Heaven (6 page)

“What happens, then?” Leland asked. “Do they take her off life supports?”

“She’s not on life supports, you idiot,” said Molly. “Life supports are breathing machines.”

“There’s that thing in her neck.”

“That’s only if they have to give her oxygen all of a sud den. It’s taped over. She can breathe.”

“And she has a food tube.”

“I don’t think they can take that out. You have to get a judge to do that or something,” Molly said. “I’m not really sure.”

“Because she could just go on living if they don’t stop

the food,” Leland said. “I heard Mrs. Flannery say that they gave her four thousand calories a day or something.”

“Well, I really think you can’t just starve somebody. You have to give them food. It’s a law,” Molly said.

“So do they bring her home now?”

“My uncle said they could bring her home as soon as she gets her casts off and stuff. You can feed a person at home with that tube if they teach you how,” Molly said. “She could just lay there.”

“That’s sickening,” Leland told her, as they grabbed their books and ran for the commons. “Really, could you imagine just laying there with people looking at you and your mother putting ground-up food into your stomach? Just laying in your room? I’d rather be dead.”

“We have to pray she wakes up,” said Molly, embar rassed. “There’s not much time left, my uncle said. I pray, every night. I miss Bridget so much more than I thought.”

“More than Maureen?”

“No. But it feels like if Bridge wakes up, we’ll have a part of Maury back, too. I have weird dreams that Maureen is alive. And, Lee-Lee, they don’t grind up food and put it in the tube. It’s like diet shakes.”

“Are you going to go see her today?”

“She doesn’t know we’re there. I mean, I’ll still go some times. It’s a long drive, Lee-Lee. My dad is getting pissed about how much I spend on gas going back and forth. It’s an hour drive with traffic. You know Coach gives Danny some gas money to go see her. . . . Isn’t that sweet?”

“It is. It’s almost like he feels the way you do, that Maury is a part of Bridget. I wish somebody loved me that much,” Leland said. She and Eric had split up right after Christmas break. Despite being together at the accident scene. Eric was a pervert. He wanted to go too far and she was only a junior. She wasn’t going to do it until she was a senior. She and Caitlin had decided that a long time ago. Besides, he was a swimmer and did farmer blows with his nose after he got out of the pool. He was cute; but when she saw that, it made her want to puke. She wasn’t going out with any one now. She might as well get behind the Bridget effort. She said, “We should just designate people to go on certain days.”

“That’s good,” Molly said. “I’ll make a chart. I’ll do it in computer lab. But only once a week. I can’t keep up if I go more than that. I’m too tired. I have a paper to write in, like, fifteen minutes on Edna St. Vincent Millay, so I have to run.”

“Oh, I did that last semester. Just talk about how it was all about suicide.”

“Did she commit suicide?” Molly asked.

“No, she fell down the stairs,” said Leland. “But she was always writing poems about it.”

“That so creeps me out,” Molly said, shaking her head. “Another accident. If it can happen to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Maury, it can happen to anybody.”

“Yeah. Bridget was always a crazy driver. But Mau reen?”

“Don’t say that. I know what you mean,” Molly whis pered. “But it’s like you’re blaming them.”

“Well . . .”

“It was snowing and slippery. And Maureen’s leg was sore. And that curve has had a hundred accidents on it. My brother said they used to call it Dead Man’s Curve.”

“I’m just saying,” Leland went on.

“Well, don’t. Think how she’ll feel if she does wake up and finds out Maureen is dead.”

“It’s not like she killed her. That would have been worse.”

“Yeah, but still. I think about that all the time,” Molly said, and ran up the stairs two at a time. “Do you know they used part of Maureen’s bone to fix Bridget’s arm? Britney told me. Her sister Amber is a nurse there.”

“That is so gross,” said Leland, leaning against the rail ing.

“Now it’s like she’s always with her,” said Molly, and dis appeared.

Danny had heard all the stories: The O’Malleys had do nated one of Maureen’s kidneys to Bridget. Bridget would have one of Maureen’s eyes, or part of her bone. None of it was true.

But as the days grew longer, people just had to have something to talk about, he guessed.

He even knew some people talked about whether or not the Flannerys should let Bridget die, although the nurses

said that was ridiculous, that they would only start talking about stuff like that if someone was really brain-dead, not just brain-
injured
.

Danny tried not to admit he was beginning to give up. He loved her, but it was hard to see past the ugliness and the smell. Even he didn’t go every single day anymore.

At first people semicompeted in line to go in and see her.

The paramedics came, and Chief Colette. Coach Eddy came.

The cheerleaders came as a team every day at first. They played Bridget’s music and did the Bigelow Bulldog Stomp until the nurses made them shut up, although Danny didn’t know why.

Then it was just Britney and Leland and Molly. Then just Britney and Molly. They came every week. Danny didn’t get mad at the others.

It was like talking to the wall.

But he read his books for honors English out loud to Bridget, and he watched her soap opera:
Days of Our Lives
. Bridge and Maureen never missed it. Danny couldn’t see how a single thing had changed on the show in, like, fifty years. Half the time he missed most of school. But no one cared. Except Coach. Obviously he counted on Danny to cadet in freshman PE. But the other teachers just let him show up for tests mainly. He passed trig, but only with a

C. His father didn’t even ream him the way he normally would.

The nurses finally washed Bridget’s hair and pinned it back with Hello Kitty barrettes. She looked about ten years old. But she smelled good and they cut her nails. Somehow it was almost more awful. You could see how she might look forever.

The social worker said that it was fine to keep hoping and praying—the Flannerys were Catholic but not
Catholic
like the O’Malleys—but they had to prepare themselves for the fact that the Bridget they knew was gone forever.

“Even if she wakes up today, it’s going to be a long, hard road,” said the social worker, who had a smiley face name tag that read
NEELY
!.

“But she’s such a fighter,” Mr. Flannery told Neely.

“It’s her brain, though, and you have to understand that it doesn’t heal the way other parts of the body do. Some times, with people as young as Bridget, her youth is on her side and there are ways that the unbroken parts of the brain can take over some things for the broken parts. But if she wakes up, this will be just the beginning. There will be differences. Speech. Personality. Learning. Even when she seems to know who you are . . .”

“Know who we are?” Mrs. Flannery gasped. “She’ll know who we are!”

“Not necessarily, not at first,” said Neely.

“I know it will be different with Bridget,” said Mr. Flan nery. “You don’t know my daughter. She never gives up.”

One of their clients knew a woman who said that what Bridget needed was acupuncture and toning. A woman

they knew did it. Toning used these little tuning forks in specific ways to stimulate the brain. Acupuncture used little needles as thin as hairs.

The hospital staff didn’t see anything wrong with it, so the Flannerys brought this woman in with a little case of bells and needles. The nurses drew the line at burning some black stuff in the room, but they were okay with the rest.

But after three weeks, the woman said she wasn’t “hear ing” Bridget respond, and back she went to St. Paul.

Danny was alone in Bridget’s room, watching Kentucky play Wisconsin for a play-off berth, when it happened.

He felt particularly down that night, and the game did nothing to cheer him up. He was about to pick up his junk and leave when he noticed something out of the corner of one eye.

He jumped up. Bridget was trying to say something. Her eyes were open.

“Oh, Bridge,” said the boy-voice. “Oh honey, did you say something? Please say it again. Just one thing. Just a noise. Blink if you understand me. Please move your hand for me. Anything! Bridge, it’s been two months. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. If you don’t wake up now . . . Please, Bridge. Come on. What if Maury was here? You’d

. . . You’d tell her to gut down. Think of Maury. Fight harder for Maury. You have to fight!”

Mo-ry.

She did what she knew as thinking for her, the rope climb.

Moor—eee.

Mo-ruh. Mo-ruh-un. She was . . .

So she fought. She fought with every atom of her being, every pound of muscle, every electrical watt of brain cell. She wrestled like a wild animal to rip apart the smog and coils and wires and layers of plastic wrap that held her, and finally, in a voice so tiny and hoarse it didn’t sound human, she croaked, “Mo-ruh.”

He screamed.

The scream slammed against the back of her head and echoed over and over as if he had pulled it out of his mouth and dropped it down the quarry.

He screamed again, and a gallop of feet came slapping and tapping. “She talked!” he shouted. “I heard her! She said ‘Mother!’ I swear she did! Mrs. Flannery! She said ‘Mother!’”

She had said nothing of the kind.

wonderland
‌

Danny was not the type to brag; but he was sure it was he, not the lady with the little bells and pipes, who brought Bridget around. Why else would it be on their fourth anni versary, February 23? The twenty-third, and not the four teenth of February, because he’d been too shy to ask her to the Valentine’s dance.

She had to know that, somehow. It couldn’t be a coinci dence.

It was just a matter of time now. He would have her back. He could almost feel her, the tiny cup of her bare stomach; the soft, downy place at the base of her back; the taste of raspberries when he kissed her.

Three days later, on Saturday they bagged all the pic

tures and cards, threw out the flowers, and moved Bridget to rehab.

She was officially “awake.”

The cell phone artery spread the news: Bridget is out of the coma. She tried to talk! Molly called Danny at six
AM
on Thursday.

“Is it true?”

“It’s true . . . and what the hell time is it?” Danny asked. “Could you make sense of it?”

“I thought she said ‘Mother.’ Now I wonder if she said ‘Maureen.’”

There was a gap in the conversation. Molly was crying. Danny’s annoyance melted. “I prayed and prayed. I heard her saying ‘Maureen’ in my dreams. I’m not lying,” Molly told him.

“I’m going there in a few hours to see her. I’ll tell her you said hey.”

“Oh, Danny, that’s something I never expected to hear again!”

“Me either, Mol.”

On Saturday he didn’t have to be at the hospital un til nine, but Mrs. Flannery called him at seven. Not that he minded that much; he just wanted to sleep. It was as though his whole body dropped its guard when Bridget spoke. He could feel the ache in his neck and shoulders from how tight he had held them for these long weeks. Even lifting weights didn’t tire him enough so that he could relax. That first night after she spoke, he slept with

no twitches or dreams.

They got to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, entering at a dif ferent door, and the desk clerk told them to wait. Dr. Park and Neely, the social worker, wanted to talk with them for a little while, as the nurses were still “getting Bridget settled.”

The talk was so viciously depressing that Danny had no idea why they even bothered. It was like they were SAD that Bridget was awake, not excited.

Dr. Park said some nice things first, as if to get them out of the way. She said, “This is so wonderful. And you must be incredibly happy. This is just proof of everything we know about kids. They can turn around and surprise you. But, Mrs. Flannery, you can’t expect her to be the girl she was before the accident. Not now. Maybe not ever. And certainly not all at once. It’s a long, long road.”

“I know that,” Kitt Flannery said, and glanced at the doc tor, perturbed. What was all this gloom and doom about? “I’d like to see Bridget now,” she said.

The social worker sighed and lead them into the rehab unit.

As they went through the oversized doors into the bright blue-and-yellow striped ward, they passed a plaque on the door that read:
THIS UNIT IS ENDOWED IN THE MEMORY OF ALISON LEE CHRISTIANSON
,
WITH GRATEFUL HEARTS
,
FROM HER GRANDPAR
ENTS
,
LEE AND CHARLES COMPTON
. Danny shivered.

“You have to remember,” Neely told them. “This isn’t like a medical show on TV. It’s not like a movie even. In

a movie, they make months seem like overnight. You see one moment when they’re trying to stand the person up, and a minute later the person is walking along with a cane. What they leave out is months and months of frustration and hard work. And they leave out how pissed off the kids get.”

“I get it,” said Kitt Flannery.

But as they passed the doorways, she got quieter and quieter.

She tried to avoid looking in; but it was impossible.
They’re like monsters,
she thought as she glimpsed kids— some tiny, some already with hair under their armpits— with grotesquely, painfully twisted-in limbs and long strings of silver drool dripping from chafed and gaping mouths.
Dear God
, Kitt thought,
if she’s going to be like this, please take her.
Then, quickly, she mentally slapped herself across the face.

It was just three days since Bridget had awakened, but Mr. Flannery had to host an “Occasion.” It was a wedding with three hundred guests at the Bright Wing Country Club, which was why Mrs. Flannery had asked Danny to come with her. Mr. Flannery kept calling Mrs. Flannery on her cell every fifteen minutes until she finally turned it off.