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P
ART
T
WO

Los Angeles

C
HAPTER
13

T
he bedroom was still dim, with only faint shards of daylight piercing the skewed plastic mini-blinds. As her eyes focused, the headache set in. Claire took a moment to remind herself that the tiny apartment was home now. She felt sluggish, almost drugged. She had slept too long and now she was sorry. Too much sleep or too little, either way it drained the life right out of you, she thought. Her Swiss-efficient body clock, the one that woke her early and rushed her out the door to Rancho by eight every morning, had somehow failed. There was silence where there should have been a rush of mental lists and plans.

She called the nurses’ station outside Nick’s room. Lydia answered. She liked Lydia, who always had the name of a grocery store or restaurant near the facility written on a piece of paper before Claire could even ask. Lydia informed Claire that the therapist was on her way to take Nicholas to his mat class. All was well. Claire checked her watch. Nine o’clock. Mat class, followed by speech therapy, followed by rest time, followed by lunch. Thursdays. She tucked deeper into the warm sheets.

 

The flight out to Los Angeles the previous month in a chartered air ambulance Learjet had taken just over two hours. The plane carried Nicholas, the medical transport team, the critical care nurse, Michael, Claire, and the three bags she had assembled for a stay of undetermined length. Drs. Hoffman and Sheldon had added the convincing coda to Michael’s argument for Rancho Los Amigos with their assurances that Nicholas was, indeed, strong enough to be transferred, and that timing was of the essence.

Michael returned to Denver just two days after their arrival in LA, after handling the registration at the hospital and meeting Nicholas’s team. On that afternoon, Claire had watched in the pale yellow room, with its framed photos of jonquils, irises, and butterflies as Michael appeared to search for words of farewell that would not break his composure. She watched as he spoke to what he surely saw as the damaged, withered shadow of his son.

“I’ll be back real soon, pal. You’re gonna do just great here,” he had said, his hands wrapped around Nicholas’s clenched fist, his eyes focused somewhere far away.

The unspoken message was not from father to son, but from husband to wife.
You’ll make sure they fix him.
She needed no reminder. She only had to look at Nicholas in the low, padded-wall-framed bed, with his left arm and leg propped up on a mound of pillows, his left foot relentlessly pointing down and inward, and the Frankenstein scar on his still patchy skull.

“Fuuckk,” Nicholas responded in a loud, slow slur. “Fuuckk.”

Claire stepped in next to Michael on Nicholas’s right side—his “good” side—and bent down to stroke his spiky hair. She whispered that everything was going to be okay, that they would help him here.

“Fuuuuckkk,” he moaned again, staring out the window over her shoulder.

Michael walked around to the left side of the bed where Nicholas had perceptual difficulties. He clutched the edge until his knuckles went white, and shook his head as if he were trying to shake loose the urge to throw something hard against the wall. Claire’s cheek prickled. She wanted to remind him that Nick’s behavior was to be expected at this stage, that he didn’t even realize who they were or what he was saying. But there was no point. Nothing seemed to penetrate the barrier he’d erected around himself. After several moments of congested silence, Michael bent over and kissed Nicholas on the forehead and turned to walk out of the room, his gait no longer a confident swagger, but the lumbering of a shattered, struggling man. “I’ll talk to you soon,” he said in a distant voice.

I guess it’s just the two of us now,
Claire thought as she stood glancing around the forced lemon cheer of the room. The moment shouldn’t have come as a shock. Still, she trembled. She wanted to crawl into bed next to her boy and hold him tightly, but the walls that kept him safely in also shut her out.

 

In her apartment bedroom, Claire flipped on the television with the remote and lingered in the cocoon of her sheets for another half hour. After the third weather report she made her way to the shower. By the time she’d dressed and finished breakfast it was already ten thirty, and she finally admitted the horrible truth to herself.
I can’t go there now.

Then the fantasies began. A day off, she caught herself thinking. A trip to the Getty, maybe a movie. A walk on the beach. The possibilities rolled like film credits through her mind, and before she’d even made a conscious decision, Claire was out the door of her adequately cheery abode in the Casa Del Sol Apartments in Downey, California—just ten miles southeast of downtown LA, a convenient half mile from Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Hospital, and a million miles from anywhere she’d ever thought she’d be.

When she pulled off the Pacific Coast Highway, she saw the giant boardwalk carousel sitting motionless. She parked near the pier and removed her sunglasses uneasily, as if she’d just come from the eye doctor’s. The sun should have been a vibrant presence overhead by then. The shoreline below should have been pocked with joggers’ treads and gull prints, and surfers ought to have been clamoring for dominance on curling green swells. But the sky loomed gray, shrouding the Santa Monica foothills in fog. The air was damp and penetrating. Whitecaps dotted the coast and waves churned sand and spewed foam, leaving the appearance of frost on the surface. The gloom had done its steely best to discourage visitors.

Claire raised the collar of her sweater and moved toward the water, feeling comforted by the emptiness. No doctors, no wheelchairs, no stale antiseptic odor. No one. Only the rhythmic clapping of the waves and the salty mist glossing her cheeks. She hugged her body and inhaled deeply, feeling the sharp air travel from her nose down through her lungs. As she exhaled, the tightness in her chest released in subtle increments. She stretched her arms above her head, then let them fall to her sides and sat down on an incline at the edge of the shore. Her spine curved and her body loosened. Kicking off her shoes, Claire dug her feet into the sand until they found dampness. She noticed chipped ruby polish on her wandering toes, and smiled for the first time in days.

She and Nicholas had been in Los Angeles for over a month and this was her first visit to the beach, her first day away from him. Under other circumstances, nothing would have kept her from the water for so long. Its comforting rhythm always nourished the California native in her in a way the Rockies she so adored couldn’t quite. But the thought of a trip to the beach had never occurred to Claire, not until that morning. The long string of days at the hospital with Nicholas, seeing him through his various tests, his appointments with the physical therapists, the doctors, the occupational therapists, and all the rest were finally starting to exact their toll. Nick’s constellation of problems had seemed insurmountable from the moment they had arrived at Rancho, even though the doctors tried to prepare her and Michael for what their son would have to endure in the quest to increase his independence. But Claire was mostly alone with this new reality, and her inability to make some notable contribution to Nick’s recovery had started to weigh on her like a two-ton block of ice. Jackie came out when she could, but her visits were short and almost painful in their savage reminder of just how different Nick was from that boy who’d taught Allie and Miranda to ski a few short years ago.

A gust of wind rang in Claire’s ears. She closed her eyes to listen, and the ocean swelled inside her head, its strong briny perfume like liquid memory. She squeezed her eyes tighter, seeing herself at Monterey Bay with her eighth-grade science class, giggling at the sea otters at play in their kelp beds, secretly holding hands on the boat with a blue-eyed freckle-faced boy named Calum. She saw Nicholas wading in the tide pools on Cape Cod for hermit crabs; Nicholas running into the surf on Kaanapali at full adolescent throttle, his face tan and grinning.

The wind receded. Claire stood and walked down the short incline. The cold tide washed over her toes, and she jumped from one foot to the other until her ankles warmed to the temperature, remembering how Nicholas would mock her silly Indian dance just before leaping onto her back and sending them both headlong into the waves.

Though Nicholas had grown far more communicative as the days and weeks passed, he still experienced serious concentration problems, mood swings, and disorientation. The muscles of his left arm and leg, though not paralyzed, still failed to work properly, rendering him mobile only by wheelchair. Claire would watch helplessly during the long minutes it would take for him to assist in his own transfer from bed to wheelchair with the help of the therapist and the mechanical lift—minutes punctuated by the frustrated grunts and expletives she began to repeat silently in her own mind like a perverse cheer. She waited for him to call her “Mom,” to respond to her as if she weren’t just another nameless nurse, and she imagined how tightly he would hug her on that day. After a tense and discouraging visit by Michael at the two-week mark, punctuated by his own angry outbursts and inscrutability and complete avoidance of any of her attempts at addressing their relationship, Claire became convinced Michael would put off returning again until Nicholas showed signs of actually recognizing people. She still suspected he preferred the physical distance since it made his emotional distance easier to maintain. But she tried to reassure herself that people deal with tragedy in different ways and in different time frames, tried to maintain a clear vision as she concentrated on the daily routine.

She learned to place Nicholas’s water cup, the TV remote, anything he needed on his good side, to approach him only from the right, to remind him to wipe the left side of his mouth after eating. She held his hand when his arm or leg would seize, and she read to him and played Go Fish with him, grateful for any small smile this would elicit.

But the lingering image that had sent Claire home shaken and depressed the previous night was the same image that haunted her as she walked the shoreline. She had been watching from the rear of the therapy gym as Nicholas’s physical therapist stood several feet away from his wheelchair and served a beach ball to him. Earlier in the week he had been able to return five serves and seemed excited by his progress. There was even discussion of Nicholas playing in a group soon. “I’ll ace ’em,” he’d repeated for several hours. “I’ll ace ’em.”

What a cruel difference a few days made. The brightly striped ball floated and arced toward his knees, but Nicholas swung his arm too soon and missed swatting it back to her with his open palm. Amy moved closer and they tried several more times. Claire could see the frustration mounting on his face, and his familiar squint of determination. The ball bounced off his forehead and he flailed his arm, trying to catch it before it dropped to the floor. She smiled and nodded encouragingly at him from the back of the gym, her fingers laced tightly in prayer beneath her chin. Get this one, she chanted silently, get it, honey.
Please.
Then she felt an icy pain rise in her chest as Nicholas struggled and failed again to make contact with the large, inflatable ball—her boy who had played varsity hockey and lacrosse in ninth grade.

Nicholas, his face red and angry, wheeled his chair toward Amy with his right hand. Claire watched the young therapist kneel and place her hands on the frame to stop him. “No!” he screamed. “Fuuuck.” Sweat dripped from his temples and tears streamed down his cheeks as he continued yelling expletives. Claire felt a wretchedness she’d never known.

Nicholas keened and grunted as they wheeled him back to his room, the seat belt around his torso the only barrier that prevented him from hurling himself face-first onto the floor. Claire’s hands shook on the handle of the wheelchair.

“Please, do something. Please help him,” she whispered.

Amy placed her hand over Claire’s. “We’ll try again tomorrow, Nicholas,” Amy repeated in a soothing tone. “This takes a lot of practice, and some days are better than others. We’ll try again.”

“That’s it, that’s all you can do?”

“I know this is difficult to watch, Mrs. Montgomery, but it’s all part of his recovery process.” Nick dug his fingernails into the healing IV scab on his left arm until he began to bleed.

“But I want . . . to hit . . . the . . . ball,” Claire heard him gasping from just outside the door to his room. Amy and an attendant hoisted Nicholas’s thrashing body back into the bed and tried to redirect his energy. She walked over to a small cluster of chairs by the nurses’ desk and sat down to cry.

Moments later Amy tapped her on the shoulder. “Mrs. Montgomery?”

Claire startled. “Why is this happening? What should I do?”

Amy pulled up a chair next to her. “That was a natural fight-or-flight reaction to his frustration. Patients in this stage are working from some of their most basic instincts. I know it may not seem like it, but he’s gained so much strength since he started with me, and I’m confident we’re going to see a lot more improvement. He’s a fighter,” she said, standing and glancing into Nick’s room. “Look, he’s already calming down. Why don’t you just give him a few more minutes and then go in and be with him.”

When Claire returned to Nicholas’s room, she saw that his arm had been bandaged. His breath appeared calm and even, and he smiled vaguely at her as she approached the bed. She took his hand and held it.

“Where’s . . . my toothbrush?” he asked her after several minutes.

“Do you want to brush your teeth, Nicholas?”

“Where’s the . . . toothbrush. I want the toothbrush,” he said, louder.

Claire retrieved his toothbrush from the bathroom sink and placed it in his right hand. He stared at it for several seconds and then tried to raise it with a shaking hand, but it fell from his grip. His eyebrows furrowed and his breath quickened. She quickly placed it back in his palm. Nicholas lifted the toothbrush once again and began to brush the right side of his cheek. Claire guided his hand and the toothbrush back toward his mouth, but he dropped it on his chest and looked away. She moved out of view and closed her eyes.