All We Know of Heaven

  “Now it’s like she’s always with her,” said Molly, and disappeared.

  Danny had heard all the stories: The O’Malleys had donated one of Maureen’s kidneys to Bridget. Bridget would have one of Maureen’s eyes, or part of her bone. None of it was true.

  But as the days grew longer, people just had to have something to talk about, he guessed.

  He even knew some people talked about whether or not the Flannerys should let Bridget die, although the nurses said that was ridiculous, that they would only start talking about stuff like that if someone was really brain-dead, not just brain-injured.

  Danny tried not to admit he was beginning to give up. He loved her, but it was hard to see past the ugliness and the smell. Even he didn’t go every single day anymore.

  At first people semicompeted in line to go in and see her.

  The paramedics came, and Chief Colette. Coach Eddy came.

  The cheerleaders came as a team every day at first. They played Bridget’s music and did the Bigelow Bulldog Stomp until the nurses made them shut up, although Danny didn’t know why.

  Then it was just Britney and Leland and Molly.

  Then just Britney and Molly. They came every week.

  Danny didn’t get mad at the others.

  It was like talking to the wall.

  But he read his books for honors English out loud to Bridget, and he watched her soap opera: Days of Our Lives. Bridge and Maureen never missed it. Danny couldn’t see how a single thing had changed on the show in, like, fifty years. Half the time he missed most of school. But no one cared. Except Coach. Obviously he counted on Danny to cadet in freshman PE. But the other teachers just let him show up for tests mainly. He passed trig, but only with a C. His father didn’t even ream him the way he normally would.

  The nurses finally washed Bridget’s hair and pinned it back with Hello Kitty barrettes. She looked about ten years old. But she smelled good and they cut her nails. Somehow it was almost more awful. You could see how she might look forever.

  The social worker said that it was fine to keep hoping and praying—the Flannerys were Catholic but not Catholic like the O’Malleys—but they had to prepare themselves for the fact that the Bridget they knew was gone forever.

  “Even if she wakes up today, it’s going to be a long, hard road,” said the social worker, who had a smiley face name tag that read NEELY!.

  “But she’s such a fighter,” Mr. Flannery told Neely.

  “It’s her brain, though, and you have to understand that it doesn’t heal the way other parts of the body do. Sometimes, with people as young as Bridget, her youth is on her side and there are ways that the unbroken parts of the brain can take over some things for the broken parts. But if she wakes up, this will be just the beginning. There will be differences. Speech. Personality. Learning. Even when she seems to know who you are…”

  “Know who we are?” Mrs. Flannery gasped. “She’ll know who we are!”

  “Not necessarily, not at first,” said Neely.

  “I know it will be different with Bridget,” said Mr. Flannery. “You don’t know my daughter. She never gives up.”

  One of their clients knew a woman who said that what Bridget needed was acupuncture and toning. A woman they knew did it. Toning used these little tuning forks in specific ways to stimulate the brain. Acupuncture used little needles as thin as hairs.

  The hospital staff didn’t see anything wrong with it, so the Flannerys brought this woman in with a little case of bells and needles. The nurses drew the line at burning some black stuff in the room, but they were okay with the rest.

  But after three weeks, the woman said she wasn’t “hearing” Bridget respond, and back she went to St. Paul.

  Danny was alone in Bridget’s room, watching Kentucky play Wisconsin for a play-off berth, when it happened.

  He felt particularly down that night, and the game did nothing to cheer him up. He was about to pick up his junk and leave when he noticed something out of the corner of one eye.

  He jumped up. Bridget was trying to say something.

  Her eyes were open.

  “Oh, Bridge,” said the boy-voice. “Oh honey, did you say something? Please say it again. Just one thing. Just a noise. Blink if you understand me. Please move your hand for me. Anything! Bridge, it’s been two months. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. If you don’t wake up now…Please, Bridge. Come on. What if Maury was here? You’d…You’d tell her to gut down. Think of Maury. Fight harder for Maury. You have to fight!”

  Mo-ry.

  She did what she knew as thinking for her, the rope climb.

  Moor—eee.

  Mo-ruh. Mo-ruh-un.

  She was…

  So she fought. She fought with every atom of her being, every pound of muscle, every electrical watt of brain cell. She wrestled like a wild animal to rip apart the smog and coils and wires and layers of plastic wrap that held her, and finally, in a voice so tiny and hoarse it didn’t sound human, she croaked, “Mo-ruh.”

  He screamed.

  The scream slammed against the back of her head and echoed over and over as if he had pulled it out of his mouth and dropped it down the quarry.

  He screamed again, and a gallop of feet came slapping and tapping. “She talked!” he shouted. “I heard her! She said ‘Mother!’ I swear she did! Mrs. Flannery! She said ‘Mother!’”

  She had said nothing of the kind.

  wonderland

  Danny was not the type to brag; but he was sure it was he, not the lady with the little bells and pipes, who brought Bridget around. Why else would it be on their fourth anniversary, February 23? The twenty-third, and not the fourteenth of February, because he’d been too shy to ask her to the Valentine’s dance.

  She had to know that, somehow. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  It was just a matter of time now. He would have her back. He could almost feel her, the tiny cup of her bare stomach; the soft, downy place at the base of her back; the taste of raspberries when he kissed her.

  Three days later, on Saturday they bagged all the pictures and cards, threw out the flowers, and moved Bridget to rehab.

  She was officially “awake.”

  The cell phone artery spread the news: Bridget is out of the coma. She tried to talk! Molly called Danny at six AM on Thursday.

  “Is it true?”

  “It’s true…and what the hell time is it?” Danny asked.

  “Could you make sense of it?”

  “I thought she said ‘Mother.’ Now I wonder if she said ‘Maureen.’”

  There was a gap in the conversation. Molly was crying. Danny’s annoyance melted. “I prayed and prayed. I heard her saying ‘Maureen’ in my dreams. I’m not lying,” Molly told him.

  “I’m going there in a few hours to see her. I’ll tell her you said hey.”

  “Oh, Danny, that’s something I never expected to hear again!”

  “Me either, Mol.”

  On Saturday he didn’t have to be at the hospital until nine, but Mrs. Flannery called him at seven. Not that he minded that much; he just wanted to sleep. It was as though his whole body dropped its guard when Bridget spoke. He could feel the ache in his neck and shoulders from how tight he had held them for these long weeks. Even lifting weights didn’t tire him enough so that he could relax. That first night after she spoke, he slept with no twitches or dreams.

  They got to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, entering at a different door, and the desk clerk told them to wait. Dr. Park and Neely, the social worker, wanted to talk with them for a little while, as the nurses were still “getting Bridget settled.”

  The talk was so viciously depressing that Danny had no idea why they even bothered. It was like they were SAD that Bridget was awake, not excited.

  Dr. Park said some nice things first, as if to get them out of the way. She said, “This is so wonderful. And you must be incredibly happy. This is just proof of everything we know about kids. They can turn around and surprise you. But, Mrs. F
lannery, you can’t expect her to be the girl she was before the accident. Not now. Maybe not ever. And certainly not all at once. It’s a long, long road.”

  “I know that,” Kitt Flannery said, and glanced at the doctor, perturbed. What was all this gloom and doom about? “I’d like to see Bridget now,” she said.

  The social worker sighed and lead them into the rehab unit.

  As they went through the oversized doors into the bright blue-and-yellow striped ward, they passed a plaque on the door that read: THIS UNIT IS ENDOWED IN THE MEMORY OF ALISON LEE CHRISTIANSON, WITH GRATEFUL HEARTS, FROM HER GRANDPARENTS, LEE AND CHARLES COMPTON. Danny shivered.

  “You have to remember,” Neely told them. “This isn’t like a medical show on TV. It’s not like a movie even. In a movie, they make months seem like overnight. You see one moment when they’re trying to stand the person up, and a minute later the person is walking along with a cane. What they leave out is months and months of frustration and hard work. And they leave out how pissed off the kids get.”

  “I get it,” said Kitt Flannery.

  But as they passed the doorways, she got quieter and quieter.

  She tried to avoid looking in; but it was impossible. They’re like monsters, she thought as she glimpsed kids—some tiny, some already with hair under their armpits—with grotesquely, painfully twisted-in limbs and long strings of silver drool dripping from chafed and gaping mouths. Dear God, Kitt thought, if she’s going to be like this, please take her. Then, quickly, she mentally slapped herself across the face.

  It was just three days since Bridget had awakened, but Mr. Flannery had to host an “Occasion.” It was a wedding with three hundred guests at the Bright Wing Country Club, which was why Mrs. Flannery had asked Danny to come with her. Mr. Flannery kept calling Mrs. Flannery on her cell every fifteen minutes until she finally turned it off.

  “We’re running out of money,” Mrs. Flannery had told Danny as she got into the car. Danny couldn’t imagine that the Flannerys—the Flannerys, who had shrimp every Sunday—could ever run out of money. “I mean, we have to accept these dates. Winter is slow anyhow, and all this…” Kitt had begun having terror dreams about the piles of unopened medical bills that lay on the computer table. They might have to sell the house. Mike should never have bought a BMW, even used. Their insurance had eighty percent of this covered and seventy-five percent of that. But just the PICU costs were already more than a hundred thousand dollars, a third of their yearly income.

  It didn’t matter; but it had to be faced.

  And so did this.

  Kitt tried to be cheerful and nonchalant, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jeans and tugging on her red sweater; but Danny saw the horror on her face as they made their way toward Bridget’s room.

  A teenaged boy with tiny, swizzled-in legs who was strapped into a wheelchair with leather supports on either side of his shaved head tried to grab Mrs. Flannery’s hand as they passed him in the hall.

  A big, pretty, red-haired nurse pushing the wheelchair said, “Rob, quit flirting!” The kid made a goofy face Danny supposed was a smile. Mrs. Flannery swallowed hard.

  There were more kids with a teacher in what looked like a schoolroom. Some of them had shaved heads with stitches still visible on them. Only small portions of Bridget’s head had been shaved. When she’d called last night, Britney told Danny they would just tell Bridget she had a faux-hawk when patches of her hair started to grow and stick straight up. Before the accident, Bridget’s hair had only been trimmed at the ends—never cut. Not since she was seven and had demanded a short haircut like the one she’d seen on a German figure skater.

  Were those kids in the schoolroom boys or girls? Danny wondered. It had to be a school. There were books and a blackboard. One kid’s head was swiveling around and his arm was working up and down. How could anyone think they could pay attention to the teacher? How could the teacher stay sane?

  The gray-looking mothers in baggy denim jumpers sat knitting in rockers beside the kids’ beds or wheelchairs or pushed the kids around so they could look up at the TV. There was a nice, big-screen TV in every room, and Neely said the kids also had a theater where groups came to sing and football players and race car drivers came to visit them. The mothers were completely into staring at the kids. Every few seconds they reached out and wiped away the spit. The kids’ faces were all raw from the spit and shiny with Vaseline. Some of them were babies, in cribs with gigantic high sides. Are they really babies? Danny thought. Or something worse?

  Neely led them to a nursing station, and a rehab nurse, who introduced herself as Lorelei, handed Kitt some forms to sign.

  She has to face this work every day, Danny thought.

  “What can we do to make Bridget get better faster?” asked Kitt, as she bent to the forms.

  “There really isn’t any way. It happens on nature’s clock,” said Lorelei. “The best thing you can do is keep her stimulated. Music. Books on tape. Get the home movies put on DVD and bring ’em in.”

  “Won’t that just make her sad?” Kitt asked, thinking of the scads of discs they had of Bridget’s competitions, made at her request so that she could study where she went wrong and correct it.

  The nurse shrugged.

  “Kids sometimes do better at accepting things than we do,” she said.

  “But is there ever any real…Does anyone get better?”

  “Of course!” said Lorelei. “We’ve had kids so much worse off than your girl walk back in here a year later to show us their navel rings! I mean it! I have the best job in the world.”

  “What happened to them?” asked Kitt. “The ones here. I mean, to make them that way?”

  “Some motor vehicle accidents, like your daughter. Some drownings. A couple of interrupted SIDS cases. Some diving accidents. You name it. The boy we just passed? He fell off a stool in his kitchen onto a tile floor. That’s all. He was horsing around with his younger brother when he was six….”

  “But he’s big now….”

  “Well, he’s sixteen, Mrs. Flannery. And he’s an outpatient. He has to come every week to keep those muscles worked and stretched out, or they’re going to wither up.”

  Was this what was in store for her daughter? What would the children, Sarah and Eliza, think? They’d barely seen their sister since the accident. They’d never seen her in the PICU. Mike forbade it. The doctors advised against it, in case it was to be their last memory of Bridget—and even if it was not, a traumatic picture that would last for the rest of their lives. Sarah was only thirteen. Eliza was eleven. How would they adjust…to the worst? Come to think of it, what would Kitt…how would Kitt learn…what these mothers knew? They were all mothers. It seemed that fathers were banned from the rehab floor. How many careers had been relinquished, friendships lost, social lives erased? Kitt had expected to be getting ready to take Bridget on her first round of college tours now. Bridget in her microskirt over her leggings. Bridget casually doing a back walkover and landing just inches short of the bench at the kitchen table, supple as Catwoman. Bridget, her face shining with sweat, proudly on top of the pyramid at the homecoming game. Bridget in her first strapless dress—a creation that seemed to be made of sugar glaze that fell down her sweet, beautiful little body like icing…Oh please, dear God, Kitt prayed. She would never want to live this way. I would never want to see her…. I couldn’t…And then she mentally slapped herself across the face again.

  How could she be such a fool?

  How could she forget that first terrible revelation about Maureen? How? Kitt Kelliher, she said, using her maiden name as she did when she was angry, Get over yourself.

  As they entered Bridget’s bright pink room, with its border of daisies stenciled around the top, Kitt said, “Danny, you don’t have to stay. I’ll be here all day anyhow.”

  “I can stay,” Danny answered.

  What a darling boy, Kitt thought. She fought against Bridget and Danny being so serious so young—she knew they were sl
eeping together already—but now she thought, If Bridget comes out of this at all and looks anything like herself, Danny will probably be one who would stick by her. Kitt hoped that would happen. Danny was as steady as the stars.

  “You go home now. Your own mother hasn’t seen you in weeks.”

  “She does say that,” Danny admitted. “I’m sorry. It probably sounds rude.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll call you if she wakes up anymore.”

  And after he left, somehow Kitt fell asleep in one of the chairs that were so much more comfortable than the ones in the PICU, probably because people were here for the long haul.

  Dr. Park, the compact Asian woman who headed the department, popped in to check on Bridget; and though she clattered around a bit, Kitt didn’t wake. The little girl did, though, her eyes blazing. She shook her head violently. No! No!

  “What’s up, peanut?” Dr. Park asked.

  “No-oot!” Bridget said, obviously furious that it took so long. “No-oooot!”

  “New?” asked Dr. Park.

  “NO!” Bridget snapped, obviously meaning what she said.

  “We’ll get it out in time, honey. Don’t worry. Let me take a look at your eyes, please. Can you blink for me, Bridget?” Bridget shut her eyes tightly. Dr. Park was pleased at the show of spirit.

  She glanced at the girl’s mom, crumpled in the chair like a fashion doll thrown down by a child. She thought it best to let her sleep while she could.

  a slow storm turning

  Slap. Slap. Bump. Bump.

  She was conscious, but what did that mean?

  She didn’t want to look at this woman. This woman didn’t smell Mom-smell.

  Nothing seemed to have a name; and then, up would pop a name, like a message appearing in the window of the little 8-Ball they had when they were little. My sources say yes.

  She knew that the sounds and smells meant people like the people before: people-there-all-the-time with soft shoes and people-who-came-and-went with hard shoes. These were the sounds-from-before, from the lights-and-darks. But this was a different place that didn’t stink. It smelled a little like a house.