Finding a Voice (14 page)

I
heard voices. They seemed to be very far away. I tried to open my eyes, but they just wouldn’t open. I didn’t want to wake up yet. My thoughts were hazy and I couldn’t bring them together to make sense. There was only this vague feeling that it was better to sink back into the dreamless place I had emerged from than to struggle out of it.

When I opened my eyes, there was another pair looking right back at me. It took me a minute to focus and comprehend that they were Mom’s eyes.

I raised my head and looked around. I was in a bed with a pale green curtain pulled around it. Mom was beside me in a chair and her head rested on the bed, her hands folded under her chin.

‘Welcome back,’ she whispered.

‘Where was I?’ I felt confused.

‘Places I will only dream of going,’ she said.

It was slowly coming back to me now. Running from the school. The journey to the cabin. The fateful fall. The long night. The epic trip back to the road. Chris. Where was he?

‘Where is Chris? Is he okay?’ I hoped that I didn’t have to
explain who he was.

‘He’s okay, Jo. Had the ride of his life I’d say,’ Mom said. ‘Paramedics picked him up in a helicopter.’

‘I’m sorry, Mom. I screwed up,’ I apologised. ‘I guess I’m in pretty big trouble.’

‘I don’t think you can come close to matching me for screwing up.’

She reached over and gave me an awkward hug. I wished I could enjoy this rare contact, but my arms hurt too much. I thought of my leg, which strangely didn’t seem to hurt, and tried to sit up to look at it. I couldn’t seem to do it.

‘Don’t try that yet,’ Mom said, finding the crank to raise the head of my bed. ‘They have you on the heavy-duty drugs, and believe me I know all about them. You don’t want to be moving too much.’

My head slowly rose with the bed and I could see what must be my leg now. It was raised on a pillow and it was huge. There was a long red line down my shin and metal bits poking out by my ankle. I reached out to touch it, but was stopped by a clear tube attached to the back of my right hand.

‘Guess you have figured out by now that your running away days are over for a while,’ Mom pointed out the obvious. ‘It’s broken in a couple of places. I was a bit disappointed that there’s no plaster cast though. I was thinking we would be able to cover it with names of obscure authors.’

I managed a smile. The anger I had felt toward her was gone. It was good to hear her quirky comment.

She fluffed up a couple of pillows and set them on either side of me. Then she raised a plastic cup of water with a straw in it to my lips. I had never known her to be so mom-like. Only the slight shake of her hands and her eyes darting toward the curtain opening betrayed her usual nervous energy. When I dutifully took a sip, Mom sat down and took my free hand.

‘I’ve been waiting for hours to talk to you. I have to say it, while I still have the nerve. Are you okay to listen to my rambling one more time?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘I’ve been terribly afraid, Jo. The last couple of months I’ve seen you growing. I was afraid to lose you. You’re always so strong, so capable. And you know I’m not. I don’t cope very well. We both know I’m a total disaster.’ She gave a bit of a laugh.

‘Mom, it’s okay, you’re––’

She held up her hand, stopping me.

‘No need, Jo. Let me go on.’ She wasn’t ranting, just quietly saying what she had obviously been preparing to say. ‘I’ve used you so much to keep me centred. And it’s not fair. These last couple of days, I’ve met people in your life I didn’t even know existed – and they really care about you.’

Tears were streaming down Mom’s face now. I wanted
to slip into my usual role of comforting her, making things okay, but she was gripping my hand so tightly, I couldn’t move.

‘I might not show it in the right ways, but I categorically love you. I did from the moment I felt you do your first back flip in my uterus. I don’t want to trap you. I’ve talked to your grandma. If you want, you can go live with her. I’ll let you go, Jo.’

‘No, Mom!’ Now I was crying too. ‘I love that you’re weird and spontaneous and just … you.’

I meant it. As inconvenient, and difficult as it was at times, I was connected with her in a way that couldn’t just be erased. I didn’t want the suffocating safety of living with Grandma. But I knew now that I didn’t want to be Mom’s caretaker either. It was too much for me. It was too much for both of us.

‘We need help. We never ask for it, but now we need to.’

Mom just nodded, fresh tears streaming down her face.

It was not until the next afternoon that I got to see Chris. I had spent the day before in and out of sleep, too foggy most of the time to think very clearly even in between doses of painkillers that knocked me back unconscious. But when I woke the next day, all I could think about was seeing with my own eyes that Chris was okay.

I wasn’t sure that he would ever want to talk to me again though. Not only had I not been able to help him, but I had very nearly made things much worse. It seemed ludicrous now that I would have even considered it possible to just take him away to another city and find him some new life. How would I, on my own, have done that exactly? What had I even been looking for? During the long night in the cabin I had accepted that Chris might hate me forever for what I had done, and I had decided that it didn’t matter as long as he was alive. Now I was ready to face my mistakes and that meant seeing Chris, at least to apologise and say goodbye.

As it turned out, that was not going to be so easy. I brought up the subject with the first nurse I saw, who came around at 6a.m. to check on me. It was all business in the hospital. First, my temperature was taken.

‘Good. It’s back to normal,’ the nurse commented.

‘What about Chris? I know he’s here. Is he okay?’ I asked.

‘Well, I can’t actually comment on that sweetie,’ the nurse put me off, getting busy taking my blood pressure and checking the bag of fluids that flowed into my hand.

‘But I need to know. I need to see him,’ I insisted, fully awake and alert for the first time since waking up in my pale green tent.

‘We have this thing called patient confidentiality,’ the nurse explained. ‘I can’t tell you that someone else, who is not related to you, might be recovering just fine. Someone
might have had moderate hypothermia, but luckily been taken to hospital in time because of another person’s bravery, and I couldn’t tell you that. I also wouldn’t be able to tell you, just for example, if someone got very exited when they saw a picture of you on the news.’

My first reaction was to smile. I wanted to hug the nurse for her kind gesture. Then I processed the rest of the information – my picture on the news. I knew I could be in very big trouble at school for taking Chris away. But the news?

Apparently though, Chris and I disappearing hadn’t exactly gone unnoticed. When Mom came in later that morning, she handed me the local Saturday paper.

‘You didn’t make the front page, but page two isn’t such a bad effort,’ she said.

I opened it to the second page. There was a picture of Chris – the one where he was painting, that had been in the brochure. Beside it was a picture of me – a bad school picture from the year before. Then there was a short article:

‘Wow, I think I
am
in trouble, Mom,’ I said, when I had finished reading the article.

‘You could say that you have stirred the pot of complacency, Jo.’ Mom was as clear as ever. ‘Newspapers don’t always get the whole, or even the right, story. Notice the part about you being covered in blood? Not true. I was here to meet you before you went into surgery, a few scrapes on your hands, but other than that no blood.’

B
ut in the early afternoon, sure enough a police officer did come to talk to me. The nurse came in and called Mom out, and then they both came in with the police officer, uniform and all. My heart sped up a little, but I thought back to the fear of being in the cabin, not knowing if Chris was okay, and knew that any trouble I was in didn’t matter. Chris was alive and nothing else mattered.

Right away, the officer let me know that he was not here on a social visit.

‘Hello, young lady,’ he greeted me. ‘I suppose you know that you are very fortunate that everything has turned out as it has.’

I nodded, holding tight to my confidence that everything would be okay.

‘It is a very serious offence to take someone, or hold someone, against their will. You are only lucky that juvenile law applies to you, but consequences can still be serious. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Again I nodded.

‘Is it okay if I ask you a few questions?’ the officer asked,
taking off his hat.

‘Yes. I’m ready,’ I said, prepared to share everything.

He took out a small notepad and a pen.

‘So I understand from Mr Jenkins that you were assisting Chris at lunch time on Thursday. But at the end of lunch, when Florence came to collect him, you were both gone. Can you take me through what happened?’

I took a breath and then just told him the whole thing. I started with Chris’s communication: H O M E S A D and my sudden decision to run with him. I told him the details of getting to the cabin, the fall, the seizure, the fear that Chris might be very sick and even die. I just spilled out the truth.

The officer’s expression didn’t change through my lengthy retelling. He just nodded in encouragement. When I was done, he flipped back through the notes he had taken while I talked.

‘You mentioned that Chris told you that he was sad at home, and that this prompted you to make the decision to run away. Can you explain that a bit? Chris can’t talk, from what I understand.’

‘He can’t talk with his voice. And he’s a bit stubborn, so he never wanted to use picture symbols to talk and that’s what people were trying to teach him when he was a young kid. But somehow he learned to read, and his spelling isn’t great, but he can dictate messages.’

The officer wasn’t writing notes anymore. He was looking
at me with his mouth open.

‘And you know this because?’

I didn’t think he believed me at all.

‘We have a way of talking. Can you show me your cell phone?’

I explained to him how Chris tapped his head, the same way someone would use the number pad to write a text.

‘Why doesn’t anyone else know about this? It’s the first I heard he could communicate.’

‘Because I’m stupid and thought I had to sort Chris’s whole life out before I let anyone know,’ I supposed. And there was more. ‘Plus, I think it was that I thought it was something special that only I could talk with Chris. In a way I didn’t want to share that. I thought I could be the one to make everything perfect, and I just couldn’t. That was wrong, and selfish.’

‘So if I went in to ask Chris questions, he could answer me?’ the officer asked.

‘If he wanted to he would. I can’t promise he will.’

‘And tell me, I had down that Chris is, how do you say…’ He flipped through his notes again, finding an underlined bit. ‘Intellectually impaired, probably in the moderate range? Are you saying that isn’t true?’

I smiled, remembering a similar conversation with Mr Jenkins.

‘I don’t know. Does it matter? It’s not like someone who
isn’t as smart, or even isn’t able to use words to talk, can’t let you know how they feel. You just have to listen.’

I sat clutching the pieces of torn paper, with their hurried letters scrawled on them. I had shown the officer how to use the system, mimicking the way that Chris would respond with his head while the officer practised by asking me questions. Then I had pleaded to see Chris, just for a short while, and to explain to him that someone new was going to use the communication system to ask him questions.

‘He just might be more likely to talk to you, if I set it up first,’ I tried. ‘That is, if he’ll ever talk to
me
again.’

‘I suppose so. But I’ll leave it to the nurse to make sure he’s okay with seeing you,’ he had warned.

So now I was being wheeled to see him. He was in a room just down the hall. There were three other beds in the room, but all of them were empty. The head of Chris’s bed was propped up and he was hooked up to an IV much the same as the one the nurse wheeled along with my wheelchair. I was relieved to see the smile I was used to seeing on his face.

‘Remember, only five minutes,’ the nurse reminded me, as she parked my wheelchair nearby – too far for me to reach Chris’s bed. I was learning what it was like to rely on someone else for movement.

‘Is it okay for you to bring me right up to Chris? We need
these cards to talk, and I need to put them on the bed.’ I indicated the pieces of paper in my lap. I saw the nurse hesitate. ‘It’s not like I can do a runner out the door with him now.’

The nurse smiled and inched my chair right beside him and then headed out the door. I took a deep breath and looked Chris in the eye, hoping he would know how sincere my next words were.

‘First, I’m so sorry, Chris. I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t mean to drop you in the river and I understand if you will hate me forever.’ I had practised these words on the way down the hall.

‘Do you hate me?’ I asked, prepared for him not to answer. He did though, a definite head tap to the right, ‘No.’

‘I only have a few minutes, and then the police are going to ask you questions. So, it’s up to you, anything you want to say to me?’

He tapped to the left.

‘Okay. I’m going to listen this time.’

Chris had never been so definite and fast in his head tapping. N O T M E S A D J O S H O M E S A D. Then he stopped responding.

It took a minute for me to figure out the words. Then I did and I understood my mistake.

‘Not me sad. Jo’s home sad,’ I read out. ‘Is that right, Chris?’

An emphatic ‘yes’.

Chris had not been telling me that he was sad in his own
home; he had been worried about
me
and the problems I had in
my
home. I had misread him completely. Presumed that he
must
be sad to live in the group home. During all my rambling every lunch hour I had thought I was just talking to myself. But Chris had been carefully listening to me, really caring, even knowing I was sad without me even talking about it.

Even though we only had a few minutes together, I had to just sit and take that in before I prepared him to talk to the police. I didn’t have any experience in having a friend. It had never occurred to me that Chris might be sad for
me
. It was the strangest thing – knowing that he cared that I had been sad, suddenly made me happier than I had ever been.

But it wasn’t the time to tell him any of this. The nurse was back to take me to my room. I had to let Chris know about his next conversation – if he chose to have it.

‘I’m only allowed to be here a few minutes, and I think the time is up,’ I said, nodding my head toward the nurse. ‘There is a police officer here, and I’ve showed him how we talk. He wants to ask you about me taking you from the school.’

Chris’s eyes were intently on mine, and his brows furrowed.

‘Please, Chris. Talk to him. I don’t care what you say. Just … it’s your first chance to talk to someone, and he’s promised he’ll listen.’

That’s all that I had time for. The nurse wheeled me away and the police officer walked in to Chris. I wasn’t worried. Whatever he said was going to be okay. As long as he chose to say
something
.

I knew that Chris could be stubborn when he wanted to be, but I should have known by now that he also seized opportunity when it came along. The officer had promised that he would give me an honest report of how it went, as long as it was okay with Chris, if he said anything at all. It was nearly an hour later when he returned, still carrying his little notepad.

I looked at him expectantly, half dreading what he might have to say to me. He was shaking his head when he sat down and I felt my face drain of colour. I was in trouble.

‘I’ve a lot to report back to you,’ he said. ‘Chris had a lot to say it seems. I didn’t exactly think you were lying about him talking to you, but I didn’t believe he would say so much. He wants me to tell you all this by the way.’

The officer opened his notepad.

‘This was his response to my question about being taken from the school by force. And I quote: Surprised, but I trust Jo. She my friend. Only wants to help me. Nobody listened before. Gives me a voice, first time ever. Please don’t put her in jail. I need her. Everything okay with us. No jail please.’

‘He said that?’ I was incredulous. Chris had never been able to say that much before.

‘And you are right. His spelling is atrocious. Took me ages to get it right.’