The third time Ellen got up to vomit, she didn’t bother going back to bed. The tile floor of the bathroom cooled her bare legs as she waited for the next bout, but after a few minutes she was shaking all over. So she crawled on hands and knees back out to the carpeted floor in the small entrance hallway between the outer door and the bathroom. She was shivering there half asleep when the knock came, the one she’d been expecting. With difficulty, Ellen got herself upright and opened the door a crack.
“Thank you, Marietta.” The day maid handed her a stack of folded, warm fresh towels and sheets. “I have another, if you can possibly manage.” In a pillowcase, this morning’s soiled load. Ellen gave the girl a twenty-dollar bill.
“You sure I don’t call doctor?”
“No, I’ll be all right. Now excuse me, I need to—oh, oh—” Ellen could barely push the door shut before she had to rush back into the bathroom.
She must have fallen asleep on the floor, because she woke there sometime later curled up under the sink, sore and chilled but without the violent stomach cramps. Slowly, Ellen washed her face and hands with warm, soapy water. One glance in the mirror made her shudder: pale, tightly drawn, bruised under-eyes. Back to bed. She made herself take three sips of water before inching back under the covers. Every motion spiked a nauseating crackle of pain through her head.
It had come on full strength over the weekend, this flu or virus or whatever it was—GI distress with fever, plus cough—but in truth Ellen had sensed its approach a day or two before then. She’d tried to ignore the wooziness, the aches, and the crippling exhaustion, and had made herself keep to the routine: arrival at Heaton by 7:00 a.m. for rounds and Mike’s breakfast; a full day of following him to appointments; TV; his dinner and tidying his room; evening preparation (“meds and bed”); back to Mologne around nine. But on Saturday the first appearance of a dry, barking cough drew ire from the weekend shift in the nurses’ station.
“You turn right around and get that checked out,” they told her, barring her way to Michael’s room.
“I’m fine,” Ellen said, irritated. Her mistake was to think their concern was for her. Didn’t she have enough to do around here besides run to the clinic for a simple head cold?
Uh-uh, they said. No infectious conditions on the ward. Period. Ellen protested; a set of regulations were produced (rules and regs abounded in this place, of course). An attending was pulled into the argument and made the final call. A digital thermometer was promptly inserted into her ear and the verdict read aloud: 101.3. She was sent packing with a photocopy of the clinic hours, a box of Emergen-C, and a guarantee that she could return twenty-four hours after she hit 98.7 with no symptoms.
The hotel phone rang, once, and stopped. A few seconds later, her cell phone rang. This was Wesley’s code to pick up, so she fumbled a hand out of the covers to find her cell.
“Hi,” she said, which triggered a thirty-second coughing fit.
“Jesus, Mom. You okay?”
“Fine. Wait a minute.” She coughed a wad of mucus into a tissue. “How is he? What’s happening?”
“It’s amazing. It’s literally amazing. They had him up on the track thing, you know, the one between the bars. And he just killed it, Mom. I mean, first time with the real prosthesis on, and Mike looked like he’d been wearing it his whole life. The aides were, like, literally laughing at how sick it was the way he went through all these exercises. He barely had to touch the bars.”
Ellen moved her head away from the phone to cough as quietly as she could.
“He did their first test strength routine, so that was, um, okay yeah I wrote it down like you asked—leg swings, heel strikes, grid work, and, uh … a couple others. What’s incredible is that even though what everyone hears about is the leg, the leg, this amazing C-leg that’s been invented, the real innovation is the knee. It’s called a PK, which stands for—”
“Power knee. I know,” Ellen said irritably. Who was the one who’d already been to a dozen appointments in the Gait Lab?
“Yeah, I was talking to one of the technicians, and he was saying that Mike’s going to be able to go up and down stairs pretty much the way you and I do. Like, step over step. Not, step, together, step, together. You know what I mean?”
Ellen did. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t there today, of all days, when Michael got his leg. What she wanted was to be wholly grateful to Wesley for snapping into action, for his excitement and all the calls and updates, for taking her place, but frankly it was hard to take, being instantly cut out of the action. Has he asked about me? She wondered fretfully. Does he even notice I’m not there?
The day of her quarantine from the ward, from the Gait Lab, from anywhere Michael or other recovering soldiers might be, Ellen had tried to persuade his team leader to reschedule or at least push it back a few days until she was well enough to accompany Mike to the lab. How else would he get there? We’ll take care of everything, she was assured. They were on a very specific schedule due to his suction measurements and the availability of the technicians. Ellen couldn’t imagine him there by himself, though, so as soon as she gave up on the doctors she got on the phone to Wesley. It was all arranged within hours: his flight the next morning, a rental car, his hotel room in Silver Spring. Whatever misgivings she had about Michael’s moodiness and how he and Wesley would do were put to rest that first day when they called together. Basically, they made fun of her; the first target was the notes and charts she had all over the room, still tracking his food and liquid intake long after the nurses asked her to.
“Mom, really? ‘Urine, volume and color’?” Wesley had hooted. “What do you do, take a good look after he goes?”
“Ask her what she did one time after I took an especially good shit,” she heard Michael say, laughing.
“Oh, God.” Wes groaned. “What’s been going on over here, you guys?”
“Tell him, Ellen!”
“Well, I…” There was no escaping it. “I put a smiley face next to the date, in the chart.” Couldn’t they let her collapse back in bed? “Now listen, if you see Dr. Rombardy, remind him about the swelling on his—”
But Wesley was laughing too loudly. “Mikey, you got an A! In pooping! Is that your first A ever?”
She hung up on them.
As she almost did now, with Wesley. But instead she forced herself to be cogent for the rest of the update about Michael in the Gait Lab, although she did hold the phone away from her ear when he described the hoagies they’d ordered for dinner with a couple of other guys on the ward. No, she didn’t need anything. Yes, she would call if she did. Fine, he could stop by tomorrow on his way to the ward. Drive carefully, etc. etc. Wait! Make sure the night shift had his cell number as well as hers.
In a few minutes Ellen felt herself tugged back down into the clenched state of dozing; not asleep and not awake, her body tightened with flu and her mind raced with images and memories.
Like the bitterly cold Saturday afternoon they’d sat in the frozen metal stands to watch one of Michael’s football games his senior year. To Ellen, everything about this giant public school seemed unfriendly—the ugly one-story buildings, the ragged fields, the rowdy teens in the stands, and even the few people her age, unsmiling parents who spat disparagement at the referees. But for Wes’s and Jane’s sake, she put a good face on it. She shushed their scornful privileged comments—about the cheerleaders’ sprayed and teased hair, or the way the announcer kept mispronouncing Realtor (for one of the team’s sponsors)—and tried to figure out which player was their Mike. None of them knew his number, and the boys all looked the same in their dingy white jerseys and white helmets. This was supposed to be the one area of his success, the one arena where Mike hadn’t screwed up or burned bridges. And yet as each quarter inexorably ticked down there was no action that distinguished one player over another, as far as Ellen could see. The cold wind took away the coaches’ screams before they reached the sparse crowd. All they could hear over the squealing PA system were the rattling metal stands and the satisfying click-crunch of helmets and pads crashing into one another, again and again.
Jane fled to wait in the car. Wes elbowed Ellen: “Aren’t you glad I never wanted to play?” he shouted, scarf over his mouth. And what had she said, cold and frustrated with this useless outing, what had she said without thinking? “Luckily, you never would have made it past tryouts,” maybe. Whatever it had been, her words made him turn away, visibly stung.
Meanwhile, all around them a chant rose up from the home stands: YOUUUU SUCK! YOUUUUU SUCK! YOUUUUU SUCK! Ellen was amazed by the hearty vehemence full-grown adults brought to it, hurling the words down vaguely toward the other team, or simply out into the gray windy day.
After the game, trying to salvage some part of this, she’d hurried down the unsteady riser to try to catch Michael as the players jogged off the muddy field toward the gym.
“Mike! Mike!” Ellen had called as the sweaty boys ran past, her voice high and desperate with need. None of the helmeted horde noticed or recognized or acknowledged her there, leaning over a railing. Did he hear her? Did he ignore her? Great game, she would have said. And claimed due credit for being there—wasn’t that what this was all about, after all?
“Exit on the other side,” a beefy security guard told her. All the players were gone.
Ellen coughed and coughed again. She squinted back up in the stands, mostly empty now. There he was, Wesley. Crutches propped alongside. Waiting for her, furious and ashamed, his half leg jutting out. How can he wear those shorts in this cold? A coughing fit winded her; she could never make it back up all those steps; she was stranded down here, far away from him. Wes held his shiny-pink stump in both hands and shook it at her—See this? See?—and he was laughing in a terrible way, laughing and shaking that misshapen chunk of bare thigh …
No! No, no. Ellen fought her way awake in her darkened Mologne House room. Coughing helped; she had to push herself upright to make it stop. At least the nausea had abated, for now. Sweaty, she wiped her mouth with a cloth. What a miserable nightmare. Not Wesley. It didn’t happen to Wesley.
What was worse than the dream (the half dream, for the football game had been real, and never seeing Mike, and her mean comment to Wes) was her waking relief, this unforgivable and utter elation that swelled within her every cell, as she realized anew—say it—that at least it wasn’t her real son, amputated, broken inside, trapped in this new lifelong hell, up there in Heaton.
Ellen put the side of her head to the wall and cried. The force of the shame and the relief. No, she’d never had to worry about gentle, brainy Wesley coming to this. At once it all seemed false and guilt-filled, every minute she’d spent at Mike’s side—every baby food jar, therapy session, PT trip. Was that why he was so prickly, so apt to pop off? Could he sense it too, that she was here on a technicality?
But that wasn’t right. She tried to think clearly, huddled in pain, sensing a new awareness pounding at the door of her illness. What about all that agony while he was gone? What about those months of wrenching anxiety, the unsent, unhinged letters? Had that been optional? A kind of made-up existential crisis she forced on herself in lieu of a real mother’s fear, a real mother’s pain?
All right, then. Reframe this. Consider the context. (Things she’d scribbled, a thousand times, in student paper margins.)
They’d faced the judge, across his enormous desk, that morning Ellen became Michael’s legal guardian. It was October, less than a year until he turned eighteen. The forms were reviewed and stamped; the two of them signed where they were told. Then a clerk was summoned, to be a second witness as Ellen read the oath out loud. It was a moment of surprising solemnity, amid the bureaucracy, compared to the nervous joking she and Mike had done in the car on the way over. After this I’m gonna call you Ma. Don’t you dare.
“I, Ellen Silverman, will faithfully and completely fill my duties as Guardian. I promise to, at all times, protect my ward’s interests and to make all decisions based on the best interest of my ward.”
Did that awkward repetition, my ward’s interests, best interest of my ward, bother her then? Had she broken the mood with a slight frown, always needing to assert her readerly superiority, if only to herself? Ellen pressed the damp washcloth to her mouth, tried to see herself back through the years in that judge’s office.
What had she known then about protecting Michael? That Ellen, in the courthouse, the one in the pressed skirt and good shoes. What did she even know about the phrase “transfemoral amputation”?
“But what if,” she said aloud into her room at Mologne. A sting of acid down her throat. What if the oath had said more? “Furthermore, I, Ellen Silverman, promise to tacitly support the war in Iraq and all U.S. military intervention thereof, including my ward’s voluntary participation in activities designed to maim, kill, and otherwise perform duties as per the orders of Commander in Chief George W. Bush. I promise to accept fear and terror for an unknown duration of time related to the following: the possibility my ward will be killed during war; the possibility he will kill during war; the possibility he will be kidnapped, tortured, and executed; the possibility that he will suffer. I promise to bear the fact that he will lose a limb. I promise to leave my job, home, family, and friends, to stay with him for an unknown duration of time while he heals. I promise to accept, if not understand, that my very presence will not ease and may even trigger my ward’s anger, frustration, and other symptoms. I promise…”
She fell back to sleep.
Sometime later, Ellen lurched out of bed, instantly dizzy. She felt her way to the bathroom, resigned to another bout of vomiting. But two thoughts blazed through her nauseated fog and she held them tight, understanding what had been shown to her. Now all the struggle to understand her place here fell away, all those questions about Michael and what if and if only … Guardianship, motherhood, these distinctions fell away because it was love, just love, its own reward. How could she not have seen? In the face of it, this simple love for Mike, she felt wordless, lightened.
And also wretched, weak. But there was Jane. Think about Jane. A bad mistake, her leaving. Ellen’s mistake. But she would fix things as soon as she survived this flu, or even survived these next few minutes. They would go to him together, and tell him. They would rise up and make the best of it. Because what you chose and what you were given made up a life.
And, oh, she needed her daughter. Jane, Jane. Come back.