Page 40 of Brain Damage

Angela gives me a funny look. “It’s for the same thing as yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have the same thing on your arm!”

“No, I don’t.”

“Go look in a mirror, honey.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about. I don’t have a sling on my left arm.

Or maybe I do? Where is my left arm? It’s so hard to find anything on the left. I need Amy to help me find my arm.

“Come on, Jamie,” I hear Natalie saying. “It’s your turn.”

I look over at Jamie. He’s sitting in a wheelchair, his arms folded across his chest, staring down at his lap. He’s not smiling. He has always had staples in his head, but today they are gone. The incision is still there, caked with old blood, surrounded by shaved hairs. I guess somebody took out the staples. He’s healing, at least on the outside.

“I don’t feel like it,” he says, quietly but firmly.

“Don’t you want to get better?” she says. She adds, “For your son?”

He lifts his eyes to look at Natalie. “I’m never going to get better,” he mumbles. His fingers scrape absently at the incision on his skull. “This is stupid and pointless.”

“Come on, Jamie,” Angela pipes up in her gravelly voice. “None of us are any good at this. We’re all just getting better. You want to get better so you could go home and see your kid again, right?”

Jamie looks around and sighs deeply. I know how he feels. There are times when I don’t feel like doing something, but then everyone’s around me and telling me I’m going to let everyone down if I don’t do it. So I usually end up doing it.

“Okay, fine,” he mumbles.

Natalie and Steve take him to the ballet bars. He doesn’t do great. He’s no better than he was when I first saw him walk a few days ago. Lurching and all over the place. When he makes it down the length of the parallel bars, Natalie needs to help him get back into his wheelchair without falling on his ass.

Jamie drops his head into his hands. “Damn,” he says.

Natalie puts her hand on his shoulder but he won’t look up. “Jamie, listen to me,” she says. “You’re going to get better. Dr. Williams says based on your brain scan, you’ve got a really good chance of your ataxia improving.”

He still doesn’t lift his face from his hands.

“Jamie, look at me,” she says.

He slowly lowers his hands. His eyes are red rimmed and wet.

“You’ve just got to work at it,” she says. “You can’t give up. Okay, Jamie?”

“Okay,” he whispers.

Again, I know how he feels. There are a lot of times when they tell me not to give up. And I keep going, even though inside sometimes I feel like I want to give up more than anything.

28

BEFORE

I’m on my honeymoon, and my husband and I aren’t speaking.

After our argument about Clark quitting his job without telling me, and then subsequently accusing me of being a bitch, I stormed out. It probably wasn’t the most mature thing for me to do, especially when he was trying to apologize, but I just couldn’t be in the room with him anymore after that.

So right now, I’m sitting in the lobby bar of our hotel, sipping on something called a Bahama Mama. It’s actually quite tasty, but all I care about is that it has rum in it, which is slowly numbing the sting of Clark’s words.

What sort of person quits his job without telling his wife? How could he do that? And why would he extend our honeymoon without me? Who does that?