Will & I (11 page)

Upon our announcement, the crowd, including the other debutantes and their dates, burst into applause. I hurried to meet up with Serena. I wasn't thinking about my walking at all, just getting there. Athletic, lanky Serena was beautiful in a white dress. We'd been on the same soccer team in the second grade. When we joined, the applause became more forceful. Some of the people stood and continued their ovation. This quickly became contagious and included everyone. As I hurriedly hobbled down the runway, dragging my left leg like it was dead weight and holding tight to Serena for balance, I looked out and spotted my mother and father. They were beaming with proud smiles and watering eyes.

I felt hollow.

 

18

My therapy quit showing immediate results the way it had done up to then. Since coming home I'd shown hardly any improvement. The thought of stagnating terrified me. I'd start to get scared and anxious, wanting to grab on to something, to keep my progress from receding, but nothing was there.

The smothering began almost immediately as well. My mother would have breathed for me, if she could. Both she and my father were skittish around me, not trusting me to do even the smallest things for myself. Not just them—everybody was like that. It was as if overnight I'd become a not-exactly-human reminder of others' mortality. But I couldn't take out my anger on everyone, so I took it out on my parents. At one point, in a fit of frustration, I told my mother, “Thanks for life and money.” She started crying. But Candy, whenever I flew into a rage, would just smile and make me repeat myself as I grew more and more furious.

When I'd been home for about a month, I received a letter from Eleanor. I still hadn't totally recovered from the trauma of her visit to my hospital room, but she had called me a few times at the treatment center, and that had gone a little better. All I could say intelligibly on the phone was yes and no, but hearing her voice had been a shot of adrenaline. She'd talked mostly to Candy, to find out how I was doing, though one time she had asked for me. Whatever else she'd said then, she mentioned that she and her most recent boyfriend had broken up, which blotted out the rest.

Her letter was in reply to one I'd written her. She began by saying that it had been a very long, very strange time. There was so much she wanted to ask me. What did I think about another visit? She had her spring break coming up in April, maybe she could come over my birthday. Then she wrote about UVM. She didn't like Vermont—she thought it was too claustrophobic—and her parents were getting a divorce. She wanted to be closer to home, so she was going to transfer after that semester. In addition to the letter, she sent along a copy of a book she had recently read.

I set the letter down. I was filled with lighthearted ecstasy and reality-crushing dread at the same time. Eleanor had made herself vulnerable to me once. It felt like maybe she was doing that again. Another person's trust—as opposed to just concern and pity—felt within my reach.

And the dread? I was scared of how she would react to me, that she might expect to find me more or less as I'd been before, which is not what I was. Also I was scared of having more of my memories destroyed. What would we do? Where would we go? Maybe she could be my keeper for a few days.

I wrote back telling her of my apprehension. I needed to be stronger before I could see her again. She responded immediately. She said she understood if I didn't want to see her, she just wanted to see me. She didn't want me to feel pressured. She didn't want to lose touch again, though, and she thought that might be happening. But she agreed—letters could work.

Around the same time, I got a letter from Will, who'd gone to Spain on a study-abroad program—which I found out later was our parents' idea. He and a friend from Sewanee were living in San Sebastian with a guy from Boston and a Swedish girl. His Spanish wasn't that great, but his new roommates were fluent, so he was able to draft. It was a miracle that he'd been allowed to go at all. Months earlier, he'd been busted while driving some people home after a concert in Athens, Georgia. He passed a Wendy's on the way to the apartment where he was staying, and screeched into the exit side of the drive-through. A cop on patrol nearby witnessed this and pulled him over once he got back in traffic. He gave Will a DUI test, which Will passed, but then he found half an ounce of weed one of the guys tried to hide in the back of the car. He arrested Will after no one claimed it. In a fit of frustration, when Will refused to divulge where the marijuana had come from, my father punched him, and later scared the shit out of him by convincing him he'd been given six months in jail. But in the end, Will's lawyer was good enough to keep the judge from making an example of him, and my mother resumed referring to him as “my little jailbird.” His letter made me laugh and filled me with envy. He was having adventures. He'd been thrown off a train one night somewhere in rural France—Dax, he thinks—because they didn't have the right tickets, then almost got arrested by the border guards at the desolate station for having improper documentation. He sounded happy. But all I could think about was how permanently far away all of it seemed.

*   *   *

My twenty-first birthday arrived. I was in my bathroom trying to shave with my spastic left arm when I heard Candy calling my name from down the hall. She knew from experience not to surprise me and my jumpy reflexes. There were usually ten or fifteen minutes between my parents' leaving for work and Candy's pulling up. I suspected they sat in their car at the bottom of the driveway until she got there, but I couldn't bring myself to check. It was the only time I had completely to myself. In that quarter hour or less I found a stillness that wasn't possible otherwise, and somehow felt less alone.

“The big two-one,” Candy said, and collapsed back into the leather chair in my room. “You already had a beer this morning?”

“Right.”

“C'mon,” she said, “now you're legal. How's it feel?”

I didn't even have to think about it. “Sometimes like I'm the oldest person alive, and sometimes like I'm three.”

She smiled. “Aw, man, it's not that bad.” But then she nodded.

I went and put on my bathing suit. She and I had discussed that today would be my first time back in the pool. I'd been looking forward to it. The therapy exercises I could do in the water were limitless. I knew the water would still be cold—it was only April—but the occasion was momentous. I would be able to look back and see my twenty-first birthday as the day I began my real recovery.

We walked out back and down the steps to the pool. My weak toes made it harder to walk barefoot than with shoes, especially on that pebbled cement. Without the platform of a shoe under them, they were liable to fold up under my feet. I held on to the rail at the steps and stuck one of my toes in the water. It was even colder than I'd expected. I looked at Candy and winced.

“Nobody's making you do this,” she said. “You'll still be a hero as far as I'm concerned.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

She laughed.

I walked around to the ladder by the deep end. I began to get goose bumps just thinking about the cold. I held on to the ladder and began to rock back and forth. With a final thought of
to hell with it
, I tried to leap out. My foot might as well have slipped, as I didn't leap at all, but instantly became horizontal and hit the water with a loud smack. Before the frigid shock could register, I knew something was wrong. The stroke had taken away my ability to hold my breath underwater. My soft palate, in the back of my throat, was so weak (it's still quite weak), it couldn't keep water from flooding in through my nose. My body turned rigid and started to sink. The water stung as it came flooding into my throat, while I floundered at the surface gasping for air and swallowing what seemed to be half of the pool. I never got scared, though. I never had time. Before fear could come into play, Candy had jumped into the water with her jeans and tennis shoes on, grabbed my shirt, and was paddling us both to the shallow end.

“You okay?” she said breathlessly when we could stand up. The soaked sleeves of her sweatshirt were draped over her hands.

I nodded and coughed some more. “Jesus,” I said. “I would've been fine.” At the time I may have believed this, though it's obvious in hindsight I would have drowned.

That morning Candy had told me she wanted us to drink a beer together before she left. I knew she no longer wanted to, but we ceremonially sat at the kitchen table and toasted anyway. Her clothes weren't dripping any longer—she hadn't wanted to put them in the dryer for some reason—but she was still shivering. She tried to be serious and say that, no kidding, I really was a hero. She could never have imagined this day. I thanked her, and she left before she finished her beer. I drank the rest of mine in silence. Then I went to the bathroom and threw it back up.

A day came, a few months later, when my parents said it was time to let Candy go. I was finished with outpatient therapy, so I no longer needed the rides. And at home I needed less and less caretaking. Not that I was fully recovered, but I could do things for myself. I had progressed, or adapted, enough to bathe and dress myself at least. I was ready for her to go, too. As much as she helped me, she was in the way of my independence.

On the afternoon before what was supposed to be her last day, she said she'd see me tomorrow, but even in the moment something told me that I wouldn't see her. Neither of us needed a “last day.” She wanted to end on a good note. Before me, everyone she'd worked with had been elderly and was not going to get any better. When the person either moved into a nursing home or died, Candy moved on. She'd said before that she might give up being a sitter after me. As strange as it sounded, she really couldn't stand hospitals. She didn't know what she would do next.

Candy had grown up in Birmingham during the height of the civil rights struggle. She remembered riding through downtown as a little girl and having to lie on the floor of the car. She'd given birth to a son at eighteen, out of wedlock, and moved to Alaska, where the boy's father left her. She went through a string of relationships before meeting the man she was married to when I met her, an old high school boyfriend who'd adopted her son. She saw all things as temporary, the way I'd come to see them. Both of us viewed an emotional, stock-taking goodbye as unnecessary and insincere. We said we'd keep in touch.

 

19

Dewin tells me that when I first came to him, I used to “snort” when I tried to sing. That was the word he used. My voice would catch, and a sort of snorting would come out. I can't remember the sound, but I trust his memory. If I thought I could stand listening to it, I'd go back through the years of CDs of our lessons until I heard it. He remembers that when we started working together and needed to communicate between lessons, I'd get someone else to call for me, because my voice wasn't intelligible. I'd forgotten that, too. He says he knew I was making progress when he called my phone one day and could understand my words on the greeting. He says he notices that when I make the right sound with my mouth, my body straightens. Untwists. The tongue is a “rudder,” he says. Set it right, and the body will fall into line. He says he can actually watch this happen with me, watch the shoulder I tend to hitch start settling into place, and the one I tend to let drop rise, until they're level. The vowels I was making had more symmetry than my damaged body.

“I know that the voice will find a way, if you can get a sound out, to be as symmetrical as possible. I don't know the extent to which you lost the muscles to control what happens in that process. I'm not sure how much the vowels have taught other parts of your brain to hold that part of your throat open, and how much we just reanimated what was already there. I think there's probably a combination of things going on, that you're learning new neuronal pathways to get to what you need.”

I said that the lack of control was why the speech person I eventually saw dismissed me as a lost cause.

“Well, he was wrong,” he said. “Or maybe what he was right about was that you had lost the control, but what he was wrong about was your ability to work around the problem. I think the body's ability to grow toward solving its problems, the brain's problems, and the physics of those vowel sounds, and the acoustics, were kind of reaching toward each other to figure it out. It's been slow, but hey, it's been a steady ascent.”

One of the things that makes Dewin a good teacher for someone like me is all the work he's done with boys' choirs, helping adolescents whose voices were changing. He explained to me that the reason teenage boys' voices crack like that has to do with the change in their body mass. They're getting heavier, and as a result their body is becoming a different instrument. It's changing from a viola to a cello, or from a cello to a bass, but there's a period where they're in between, and all that new muscle mass is untrained, it's soft. That's when you get the cracking between octaves. During that period, Dewin said, these boys would do a lot of the same things with their bodies I was doing, trying to build a “leverage device.” Only I was starting from much farther back. They were trying to strengthen their voices. I was trying “to relearn, as an adult, this elegant relationship of physics that we learn as infants.”

Still, all that experience made him a good empathizer. He can look at a certain outward gesture and know immediately what inner phenomenon, what contortion of invisible muscles, has produced it. Sometimes he'll have me sing while holding a plastic knife in my teeth, to keep me from trying to help the sound with my lips. He told me this is akin to how Demosthenes, the Greek statesman and orator, taught his students 2,400 years ago. He'd have them put pebbles in their mouths to speak around. There are moments, in Dewin's studio, when I feel like a human sculpture he's working on, slowly, without ever laying a hand or a hammer on me. He's telepathically changing the configuration of the musculature in my body. He does this for all his students, but with me it's more visible. Seven years in, people understand me at dinner parties (not that I go to many). I have developed a falsetto.