One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (6 page)

It was Halloween the day I was discharged. All around me, patients rushed about in makeshift costumes: spray cobwebbing and aluminum foil adorned their chairs. Balloons tied to them bopped in the trailing air. For the first time in almost six months, no nurses woke me early, sponged me clean before I wanted, and dressed me for the day. My parents were there, packing my things, gathering my clothes and taking cards I’d received down from the wall. I had little to bring home. It didn’t take long to erase my presence. I felt sad to think another person would be admitted that day and assigned the same space that had been mine for so long. Sad for that unknown person’s fate, for the rough
months which awaited him, but sad, really, that I was leaving. No more complex than that.

I guess it was fitting to leave on Halloween. A day defined by masks. As trying, as painful, as my time there had been, it was an environment in which one could safely suffer and recover, away from the outside world. Now there were no illusions about the world to which I was returning, while all around me were patients pretending to be something else. Someone else. I said good-bye to a few nurses I knew, though no one who had been good to me seemed to be around. I looked into the gymnasium, which was half a party and half what it would always be, people struggling to reclaim their bodies, their lives.

Working at a machine designed to increase arm strength, Josh was absorbed in work. When I saw him, I felt my sadness, for a small moment, double. We had hardly been friends, just roommates separated by curtains, but he had been kind, a voice at night to laugh with, or complain. I went up to him, to say whatever good-bye I could. My eyes ached and I wanted now to leave, to go, to make this essential break with this place and the people in it.

“I’m leaving,” I said, the best I could manage, tearing, my breath in raspy stitches.

“Hey, hey,” he said, his right arm still strapped in. He couldn’t move. “You’re going to be fine. Don’t worry. You’re the only twelve-year-old I ever liked.”

He clumsily smacked my knee with his weaker arm. I laughed and then I left, descending in the elevator with my parents, who helped me into the van. We pulled away.

It was terrifying to no longer be a patient. To no longer be in rehabilitation. In recovery. Unspoken, but quietly feared, was the assessment, by doctors, nurses, and therapists, that you had reached an endpoint in this process. That your rehabilitation had come to its expiration date. That nothing more could be done. What awaited was the rest of your life.

My parents had lifted me into the front passenger seat of the van. I could see the interstate spooling away as my father drove and we talked with my mother, seated in the rear, behind my wheelchair where it sat in the van’s middle. Gradually, some of the gloom lifted from me: I hadn’t sat in a car seat in months, since before my accident, and somehow it was gladdening to see the roads and cars and the underpasses slipping behind us. It was some little vestige of an old life, an activity which possessed no meaningful context, and yet I felt like each mile eased the worry just a bit. So much still loomed: where at home I’d sleep; when I’d return to school. The weight never left my mind and I wanted to know. I asked my mother.

“Where am I going to sleep? Not downstairs?”

“No, Chan has traded rooms with you,” she said, leaning forward. “He’ll be downstairs. He’ll have your old room and the den. I know you hate that, but it’s best.”

“No, I know,” I replied. It was best. The only bathroom I would have any access to was upstairs, along with the kitchen and my parents’ bedroom. It was the only solution, though the bathroom was far too small for my wheelchair to even fit. My parents would have to lift me from my bed, naked, and carry me into the bathroom so that I could bathe, empty my bowels. Our house was fifty years old already, and small. I had understood, long before returning home, that it would be difficult for me to live there. I saw it in my mind and knew what would have to be done. To hear its confirmation was no surprise, yet it felt like one to a small degree.

“Chan isn’t too crazy about it, but he understands,” my father said.

“He agreed,” called out my mother from the backseat of the van. We weren’t far from home by then. I began to better recognize the low hills and the fields strangled by kudzu and the rare barn with
SEE ROCK CITY
emblazoned upon its roof.

“I don’t want any sort of party,” I said. “You remember that I asked that, don’t you?”

“We do, don’t worry,” said my father, looking into the rearview mirror as he turned off the interstate. “We’ll be home in a few minutes.”

“I just don’t want to deal with that. Not now. Not today.”

Then my father pulled over on to the soft asphalt shoulder of the off-ramp and switched on the van’s flashing emergency lights.

More lights, red and blue, began flashing behind us. A knock at the driver window. At first, only a blue field of officer uniform, then, lowering his face to ours, a state patrolman speaking.

“Is this the Guest family?” he asked, all gravity.

My father said that it was, that surely he hadn’t been speeding.

“I’m here to escort you. Welcome back home, Paul.”

He turned and went back to his cruiser, starting up the siren before pulling out, waving us to follow him. This might have been the last thing I had ever wanted, if I could have conceived of wanting this. I had no idea what it was, why a police escort blared through the streets of my small town. I wanted not to die but revert to some point in time when I was nonexistent.

My father was pleased by it all, driving slowly behind the car. He laughed, patting my shoulder vigorously, making turn after turn. People looked up from their yard work or their reading on their porches. Other cars pulled to the side of the road. Some waved, though they had no idea what was passing them. I hadn’t said anything yet.

“Whose idea was this?” I asked miserably. “Who thought of this?”

Neither of my parents replied. I don’t think the idea
was theirs, but they knew it would happen when we pulled off the interstate. Someone else, a friend of the family, a wildly misguided soul, someone with no gift of sense had devised it. All to welcome me back to my home and family and back to my life. I felt murderous, embarrassed, ready only to vanish.

When we turned at last into our driveway I could see our house. The sloping front lawn with a wild dogwood in its center and the backyard, fenced in, shadowed by the limbs of a large pecan tree. A ramp had been built, long and turning at right angles, rising until it reached our porch. A cement path led through the lawn, uphill to the ramp. All this was new. I’d enter and exit our home this way. Taught well the expense of everything my injury could ever touch, spilling ever outward, I knew it must have cost thousands, and my heart slumped in my chest. Some nights after my accident I would dream of sepia-tinted mushroom clouds. Seen in the old newsreels shown to us in school, to show what the end really would look like. I woke from those dreams startled, in a contentious sweat,
no no no
. Sitting there, imagining storms of fissure sprout around our house like weeds, I felt my heart slump in my chest. If I could be transparent, unseen, then I would not feel so bad.

People began streaming from the house and from inside the garage. They held signs above their heads and were applauding. People I knew from church, adults and their children, and relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents,
and friends from school I had not seen since before my accident, some close to me and some not. Some that had been at my accident. Adam. Jody wasn’t there and wouldn’t be in the future: I saw her once more, though she didn’t see me, years later, shortly before she died of cancer. Neighbors. Friends of family, who had tirelessly raised money and babysat and cooked, the sorts of things small communities are programmed to do when there is awful news. When there is a death.

Here I was, their tragic occasion, their almost death. They clapped in the growing dusk while my parents lifted me from the car seat and into the rented electric wheelchair. They shook their glittered signs at me, saying
notice
. Shouting
praise Jesus
and
amen
and weeping where they stood in the grass and I drove through them, nodding stiffly, making eye contact with no one, up the new ramp while everyone clapped all over again, as if there had been worry over the successful navigation of it all, clapping and clapping and clapping like a congregation of fools and for the first time since breaking my neck, I thought,
I want to die
.

I rode the short bus, awful slang for a bus intended for children with special needs. Every morning, just past seven, the short bus lurched to a wheezing halt in the street, a frenetic suburban artery. Cars waited in long chains on either side as I was raised from the ground by a screaming hydraulic lift. When I had been belted in and my chair strapped by the driver, she rammed forward again, jolting all her passengers to the bone. I hated it. Hated the everyday exposure to the plain impatience of all the drivers who waited, sometimes querulously honking their horns. Hated the ensuing jostle, the careless velocity through every pothole and over each speed bump which had the temerity to
appear in our path. And, though I was ashamed, a part of me hated the other passengers, who were blameless. Guilty only of their parents’ poverty, or the faulty replication of DNA, they greeted me with loud hellos, or wordless recognition, waving, clapping silently, laughing, turning to me to chat when the short bus began again. One girl, her voice all twang, who lived on a hill above a Church of God of Divine Revelation, always wore the same shirt. She always asked me the same question.

“Do you know who Ricky Van Shelton is?” she cooed. I didn’t. Her shirt showed me: he was mostly cowboy hat and serviceable pout, brooding with his guitar. A country singer, a knockoff of better, more authentic artists, but to her he was Elvis. Elvis reborn, I guess.

“I’ve never heard of him,” I said, trying to be honest. She suggested I listen to him sometime. “I might do that. Thank you.”

At first, this satisfied her, but only for a while. Soon, Ricky Van Shelton hardly mattered. And Elvis was a footnote. Older than me by a few years, she would sit in the rear row, to my left, and flutter until we reached school a few minutes away. I don’t know what was wrong with her, or what had happened to her, if she had been born impaired or, like me, in some way, injured, frozen in time. She was breathless, already sexual, though she was unaware. I stared ahead or at the roof of the short bus while we bounced about and she glowed.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she began to ask me every morning. At first, uncomfortable, I said no, which again was the truth.

“I would be your girlfriend,” she said, so plainly that it hurt. Her eyes were large and dark and her hair a knotty, untended brown. “If you wanted me to be your girlfriend.”

That word was fraught for her.
Girlfriend
. However much she understood of herself, she knew that there could be more. She knew desire.

Finally, after weeks of her eyes, her sad entreaties, I began to tell her that I did have a girlfriend, one who was very sweet. The same grief always took her face and changed it, and when I lied to her I longed for what I said to be true.

“That’s OK,” she would say, turning to the windows. “I’d still be your girlfriend, if you wanted me someday.”

I had not wanted to return to school two days after my discharge from Shepherd, but I did. Two weeks, I’d asked for. Time enough to return home and make sense of living with my family again. Time enough to prepare myself for a new school, junior high, with new teachers and new students. It loomed large in my mind. But my parents insisted, and had already made plans for my enrollment. I didn’t struggle with it. There were no arguments. Despite my desire for two weeks’ respite, I knew it was the best thing I could do. No
vember had come already. The air outside had begun to chill and become faintly brittle at night. The school year would soon be half over. Too late to salvage. I’d lose time, be held back, and that loss would be greater than the two weeks I wanted.

The junior high was old, built on a hill. Two stories but no elevator. Between classes, in rain, in sleet, I had to rush in a circuit around the campus, up a road, and back into the building. For two years I did this every day.

The school system provided a paraprofessional to write for and otherwise assist me: to help me at lunch and empty the catheter bag I wore around my calf, inside my jeans, when it filled up with urine. Her name was Louise. She was funny, outgoing, and had a gift for knowing when I needed her help and when to be transparent, to hang back, without inserting herself into my new life. It was only some years later that I realized how crucial that was, how lucky I was to work with someone like her.

I had harbored amorphous worries about my return to school. Beyond the early hormonal waves of fear which swamp every adolescent, when fitting in is everything, I fretted over what it would be like to enter class that first day, to be regarded by so many strange faces, how it would feel to join an already defined group. A class. A school. More than anything, I wanted to be invisible.

Those fears, multiplying in my blood, viral in their growth, were quashed by the teacher of my first class. I sat
there before class began, before the haranguing clatter of bells in the hallway, while students who I didn’t know filed into class, falling into their desks like surrender. When the hallways were empty, of students and noise, but before class began, she came to me, kneeling to make eye-level contact, usually a gesture I hate because it changes nothing that is different between us, and quietly said, “It’s good that you’re back and I’m glad you’re in my class.”

That was it. Nothing unctuous. Nothing grabby or glad-handed or intended to inspire me or notify me that I was an inspiration.

And it was true: it was good to be back and I was glad to be in class.

Ronnie began to ride the short bus not long after I did. He was lean, with long arms and splayed fingers. His hair, dark and slick, drew back from his forehead as if in retreat. His face narrowed to a point like a wedge and was scab-wet all over, malignant with acne. He wore heavy denim and his long-sleeved shirts were always stained. He never spoke. Not a word. I’m not sure he could speak and no one ever explained him to us, except to announce his name like a warning.

He lived in a trailer with adults I never assumed were his parents. Stooped and leathery, they rarely appeared, except to stand balefully beside the mailbox, smoking thoughtfully
while the bus shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open for Ronnie. When the driver had seated him, they went back inside their home, having said nothing.

When the short bus started up again, Ronnie would rock back and forth where he sat alone. He made noises. Little whimpers. Snuffles at first that might have been troubled sleep. None of us spoke while he rode with us, watching him lurch.

Once, when the driver had stepped off the short bus and no one’s eyes were on him but ours, Ronnie leaped up from his seat and moved lithely towards the back of the bus, where I sat. An obese girl, who was mute and had difficulty walking, sat across the way. He took her head in his arms, locked one around her throat, and was yanked away by the driver. The girl, weeping wildly, coughed and mewled and thrashed at the air.

He would take his fingers in his mouth, two or three at a time, and bite down on them, still rocking, until they bled from his mouth and down his chin and onto his shirt.

Still rocking.

A squeal now like the rasp of a saw through wood.

Still rocking.

And then, through all the short bus, through all its con
fined space, the stink of his shit would go, while he smiled and bled.

Every day for a year this happened.

We all tried not to breathe. To deny that air.

Every day on the short bus from which none of us could escape.