We’ve been going to Great Falls every weekend, me and Ben and Charlie and Tim. This is the first time I’ve gotten Tim to agree to stay home with Charlie. “Please, Tim. It’s so confusing for him, and Charlie really doesn’t need to be a part of this.”
When Tim conceded, he made me promise not to let Ed believe he’s my husband again. “I know the man’s in a rough place, Laura, but letting him believe something that’s not true isn’t going to help him get back to where he was.”
I was angry at the insinuation, but mostly because he’d foreseen a realistic possibility. Ed just needs something to grasp, something to ground himself. More of his memory returns every time we visit, and the doctors assure us this is a great sign, an indicator that he could get nearly all of it back at some point, but he is years behind: Benjamin is small and I am his wife. He is working out in Boulder. He’s trying out a new behavioral model for Penelope. He is speaking in clear if broken words, and concise, vivid sentences that have no articles or conjunctions, just the meat. His doctors say he’s starting to read again, slowly, like a child. The cat sat. The dog ran.
I hear myself say, “I can’t stop thinking about you,” the last time I was in our old house. I feel his anger, the finality of it. We were done then, in a way we hadn’t been before.
In the car, I tell Benjy, “I’m going to pretend your dad and I are still married today. He seems to think we are, and I think it might help him find more memories if I play along. Is that all right?”
Benjy is looking out his window across the grasslands. We’ve left the curves of the canyon, the wetness of the river, and now we’re out on the plains, everything gone gold in the late-summer heat.
“Antelope,” he says, pointing.
It’s a big herd, closer to the road than I’ve seen, and I can feel the longing in my son to go stalk them, belly-crawl through the furrows of stubbled wheat next to his father. Ed has told me our son is a good shot. My freezer is full of their bounty.
“Did you hear what I said, Benjy?”
“You’re going to pretend you’re married to Dad again.” He looks at me, and he is suddenly old, this boy of mine, resignation tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t care,” he says. “He isn’t Dad anymore.”
“He’s still your dad down in there. He’s just sick.” Again I find myself reciting facts to Benjy, though he’s heard them too many times now. The story is our lullaby, my go-to song to calm these fears. Hush-a-bye. Don’t you cry. Go to sleep, my little baby. I talk about the damage done to Ed’s brain during the surgery to stop the bleeding. I talk about the inadvertent deprivation of oxygen that caused the temporary paralysis. Benjy and I have checked out books from the library. I’ve sat with him, pointing to the different parts of the brain. “The frontal lobe does reasoning, movement, emotions, problem solving, and planning,” I repeat now. “Most of the damage was there, but there was also some damage to the temporal lobe, which does sound, memory, and speech. The doctors say the damage isn’t bad, and your father is a very strong man. He’s going to recover from this, Benjy.” I know he doesn’t understand, but it’s a story with a happy ending that I have to tell.
He’s going to recover Hush. Go to sleep. In the morning, your father will be mended.
I am a liar.
Benjy shrugs and returns to his staring.
— —
“He’ll be done with occupational therapy in about ten minutes.” Ed’s primary psychologist directs us to a small room off Ed’s. “Why don’t you two watch this last bit. I’ve found that it helps family members with their own communication techniques.”
We watch Ed through a two-way mirror. The voices are piped in through a microphone, and it feels like spying—furtive and wrong.
“This is weird,” Benjy says.
“It is.”
Ed is hunched over a notebook with a pencil gripped in his hand. He holds it like Chip would hold his pencils, his fist a clumsy paw wrapped around the instrument, the lead ripping paper. He is close enough for us to see his work.
“Write no,” his therapist says.
Ed scratches at the paper a few times, then lifts the notebook and throws it across the room, the pages fluttering, momentary wings in flight. “Fuhhh . . . ck. You.”
Benjy snorts at my side. “Dad cursed.”
“That’s not so different from the dad you know.”
The therapist working with Ed is a man named Martin whom we’ve met several times. All of us have taken a liking to him. He is patient and has a great sense of humor.
Now he says, “Great pronunciation, Ed.”
We can see Ed smiling. “He gets it,” I whisper to Benjy. “See?”
Benjy nods.
Martin retrieves the notebook, talking all the way. “Your speech is brilliant, Ed. I know the writing is frustrating, but I want you to try again.”
Ed shakes his head.
“One word, Ed. Just one, and we can be done with writing for the day.”
“Puh . . . Puh . . . Pen.”
“Oh,” I say. Pen. He is remembering Penelope.
“One word, Ed. Pen’s a great one. P. E. N. Let’s start even smaller, though. Try no.”
The pencil touches the paper. Ed squints in concentration, and I can see his broken brain trying to find the letters, the meaning, the instructions to send to the hand to move the pencil to prove the point. Straight up-and-down line, then a diagonal line from it to the horizon where it landed, then another straight up-and-down line from the bottom of that diagonal to the horizon where the top started. Lift pencil, move over slightly. Draw a circle, a round sun, a ball, a penny.
He makes marks on the paper, lines and dots. No letters, no words.
“Good,” Martin says. “Good try, Edmund. We’ll come back to it tomorrow.”
— —
We’re in a big common room now, cleaner and brighter than Boulder’s but similar. This is our usual meeting place. We regularly play board games, an activity suggested by Ed’s therapists. The distraction helps our conversation; it’s also hand-eye practice for him, sequencing, process.
Martin has brought Ed to us in his wheelchair. He has begun walking, but it is difficult and exhausting.
“What’ll it be today?” Martin asks. “Chutes and Ladders, checkers, Yahtzee? Go Fish?”
“Yahtzee.” Benjy loves Yahtzee.
Ed grunts an affirmation. I nod my agreement. “Good choice.”
Ed reaches for my leg as soon as Martin turns his back, his touch feral and needy. “Good. See. Laura.” He moves his eyes in the direction of his room. “Come. Bed.” His smile is leering, his excitement obvious.
Oh, God. I check to see if Benjy has understood, but he looks confused, not disgusted.
“We’re here to play a game with our son, Ed. Family time.”
He keeps his hand on my leg but smiles over to Benjy. The left side of Ed’s face has regained nearly all its muscle and movement, and it’s a relief to see symmetry in his expressions again.
Martin brings our game, and it is just the three of us at a small table in this common room for brain-injured patients. There’s one other man in the far corner, sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, staring vacantly out the window. There are no bars on these windows, no grates or screens, unlike the ones in Boulder. There are plants instead, books and magazines and games, all clean and ordered. It is nice but sterile, and I find myself wishing for the messy din of Boulder, the smiles on the faces of my students, sloppy artwork on the walls.
Benjy sets up the game, and over the noise of our dice, the shaking and scattering, I listen to him ask the simple questions we’ve prepared. Benjy wanted to ask about going camping; instead, I’ve encouraged him to ask where his father’s favorite camping spot is.
“I already know that, Mom. It’s up on Trout Creek.”
“Your dad might not know it, though, Benjy. We’re trying to help him remember.”
And so Benjy asks this new, strange father where he most likes to camp, looking away as the man tries to form words with his clumsy mouth.
“Trou . . . Ta,” Ed says.
“Trout Creek?”
Ed nods, and Benjy smiles, and my whole body tingles with the warmth of this word from Ed. This is how I felt the first time Benjy spoke, excited not for the word itself but for what it symbolized—this great start, this wide door opening into the world of language.
Ed’s fingers are exploring my leg again.
Benjy seems buoyed by the mention of Trout Creek, and he launches into one of his stories. “Do you know why Helena’s nicknamed the Queen City?”
Ed shakes his head.
“I just learned it from Hank. He learned it in school, so I’ll be ahead when I get there. There was gold here, and gold is worth more money than the copper they mine in other towns, and they were fighting over where to put the capital, so there was this great—rivalry.” A word he recently learned, also from Hank. Benjy loves new words. “The Helena folks were very fancy, so the copper kings called them Queen City.”
Ed snorts a laugh. “Why. Hel. Eh. Na. Be. Cap. It. Al?”
“Why did Helena become the capital?” Benjy scowls at the ceiling, an expression he’s taken from me.
Ed nods. Go on.
“I guess people like to feel fancy.”
“Hah!” A bark of laughter, more emotion than we’ve seen in Ed since he woke up. He struggles to lean forward, to drop his left hand onto his son’s knee, to pat it a bit too roughly. I’m proud of Benjy for not pulling away, though Ed’s face is terrifyingly close, his open mouth, his bad breath.
“Your turn, Dad.”
Ed pulls back, stealing his hands from our legs. His left arm is still clumsy, and the dice spill out haphazard on the table, one of them plinking to the floor. Benjy rushes over, calling out its number. He is adamant about not rerolling when a die goes astray. One night he argued with Tim about it over a game of Sorry! “Why should you get a redo when it’s your fault for throwing your dice too hard?” Tim conceded quickly. He doesn’t argue.
Ed picks up five sixes, and Benjy marks it for him, our scorekeeper.
“You’re going to beat me again, Dad.”
“This is still anyone’s game,” I say, taking the cup from Ed’s hand.
— —
Ed tires easily, and after one round of Yahtzee, he’s ready for a nap. Benjy says his goodbyes and heads to the television to wait while I return Ed to his room. I blather as I push his chair, a long string of words that describe things Ed should know. “The more you can talk about his life,” his doctors tell us, “the quicker these memories are going to come back.” I talk about Beau, whom Tim and I have taken back full-time, like Benjy. Sole custody now and likely forever. “We’re taking Beau to the lake for dummy throws,” I say. “He’s already anxious for duck season.”
Ed makes his hands into a shotgun, fires it toward the ceiling. “Duh. Ck.”
I talk about the perennials coming up in the beds at Third Street, the bleeding hearts, the wide leaves of hollyhocks. “The Lewises are back,” I say. “Eating all our peanuts.”
Ed slaps his leg. “Nuh. Ttt. Crack. Ers.”
He recognizes the Lewises, and it’s this that wets my eyes. Our birds.
I can’t cry in front of him, though, so I swallow and blink as I turn in to his room with its flood of flowers and balloons and gifts, every surface covered. His fans have sent their condolences—colleagues in Boulder, colleagues at the state, some of the legislators he wooed, the governor. There are also notes and gifts from bartenders and waitresses and lovers I’ve never heard of. Pete and Bonnie make regular visits, and Ed’s parents have rented a furnished apartment in Great Falls to be here during his recovery. All of us leave the room with bottles of whiskey to store away for him until he’s well and home. “No drinking,” the doctors say. I took two bottles home last week, and there’s another new one today, a regenerating whiskey plant.
“You want to lie down?” I park Ed’s chair next to the bed and come around in front of him, where he grabs for me, his good hand on my hip.
“You. Too.”
I kneel and take his hand into mine. “Not yet, handsome. You have to get well first.”
He rearranges his grip so he can bring my hand to his lap, smiling at me, his eyes bright. Feel that? I’m well enough.
I can hear one of those doctors saying, “This is a tough road. Trauma to the brain often exacerbates existing tendencies and character traits, usually in the—” He struggled to find a diplomatic way to put it. “Usually on the negative side rather than the positive. Let’s say someone’s a little messy; we often see that become worse after a brain injury, to the extent that a housekeeper might be needed.” What were Ed’s negative traits? Messy. Stubborn. A voracious appetite for food and drink and women. Of course Ed is ready for sex.
I take my hand back and stand, repeating, “Not yet, love. Not yet.”
I am devastated by the idea of Ed’s celibacy. The Ed I know would forfeit life entirely before accepting it under these terms.
His face reads fear suddenly, his eyes bouncing in discomfort like those of a disoriented beast. Panicky, ready to flee. I don’t know what has scared him, whether he’s heard my thoughts or whether it’s just one more wave of confusion that’s caught him and knocked him back under.
“Let’s get you into bed.” The physical therapists and nurses have taught us how to help Ed from chair to standing, standing to sitting on the bed, sitting to lying down. We brace ourselves as he heaves his weight forward. We lift his left leg onto the mattress after his right, the limb stiff and foreign, a dead thing tied to his body. The therapists have shown us how to massage the muscles, to loosen them back into the memory of motion. They tell us, “It’s just going to take time.” They tell us this over and over, but it has been nearly six months, and I don’t know how many months or years it will take to finally amount to Time.
I prop pillows behind Ed’s head and shoulders as his eyelids flutter. He snaps his eyes open and then closes them softly, just like my boys when they’re fighting exhaustion. I sit on the edge of his bed and watch as his breathing grows smooth and even. I push a thick swatch of hair back from his forehead, the dark flecked with gray I haven’t noticed before. This new Ed is aging quicker than his predecessor, and I worry that he’ll be an old man before he’s released from this place, withered and stooped, resting on a cane. We’ll all be our same ages, and we’ll gather around him, children at his feet, waiting to hear his stories, all the life he lived before this moment.