Chapter Twenty-SixKami
Despite my parents’ resistance, after almost a year and a half, I gathered my courage and returned to the rehabilitation facility to visit Thiago. His mother was there, and she hugged me when I arrived, hope glimmering in her bright, tearful eyes.
It wasn’t easy to return after so much time. It meant stirring up the pain, the tragedy, the loss, remembering dark days when I’d sat next to him, saying nothing, just crying because he wasn’t there with me. But the hardest part was walking into his room and seeing the state he was in.
The person lying in that bed didn’t look in the least like Thiago. He was sunken and thin—frighteningly so. His face looked like someone else’s, and his muscles were gone.
I wanted to take off running when I saw all those machines keeping him alive. I even wondered for a moment whether Taylor had been right, whether unplugging him would be the best thing for him.
What would Thiago think if he could see himself like this?
What would he have asked us, begged us to do, had he known he would be spending years lying in a bed?
I was scared—scared that I might be wrong—scared that what I thought was best for him was just my selfishness speaking.
For a few days, I sat there next to him, not sure what to say. I told him a little about my life, about Harvard, about why I’d decided to go there instead of Yale. It was weird at first, because I felt like I was talking to myself, but it got easier. Soon it turned into a kind of therapy.
The first sign that it was working came fast. Just two days after I started going to the facility, something small, almost imperceptible, occurred. But I saw it: One of his fingers twitched against the mattress.
The second sign, on the seventh day, was when his eyelids trembled.
I told the doctors about both, but none of them seemed surprised or especially hopeful. They told me they had seen brain activity, that they knew he was even dreaming, and his movements could have to do with that. At any rate, it was nothing out of the ordinary, they said.
But I knew otherwise.
It didn’t matter what they said. I was hopeful now, excited. When I told my parents I wasn’t going back to college that spring, all hell broke loose. My parents even spoke to Katia, but this time, she backed me up.
This was more important than everything else, and I wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t stop going to visit until I proved that Katia and I were right and Thiago opened his eyes. He would open them for me, for his mother, for his brother—his will to live was still burning inside him, I knew that. And a life spent in a hospital, being tended to by doctors and nurses, would never be enough for him. He was hungry to live.
Two weeks later, there was too much evidence to ignore—he was changing, and the doctors had to start paying attention. Thephysician overseeing him explained to us that there were drugs used to try to bring patients out of a coma—they had tried them with him before but hadn’t had any luck. Maybe this time would be different. But he told us not to get our hopes up. Reawakening after that long was very, very rare, let alone a full recovery.
It was a slow process, but he responded well. He had spasms and tachycardia, but slowly and steadily, they brought him back to us.
His mother and I were elated. It was working: Thiago could hear me. He wanted to come back. He wanted to come back to me.
I knew it. He had to.
I told him everything. I told him Taylor and I had gone out again for a few months. I told him that our relationship had started off well but had become more and more complicated. I told him I’d been selfish, that I’d gone to Harvard and gotten back with Taylor because it had been my way to hold on to him, Thiago.
It wasn’t easy to confess, but I’m convinced that those talks were key in Thiago’s recovery, and he finally awoke.
That’s right. Thiago woke up.
Two years. Exactly two years passed before Thiago Di Bianco decided to open his eyes.
It was a day like any other, but it was a day I’d remember for my entire life. It was a rainy, cold day. Christmas was around the corner. The third Christmas since the shooting had happened. I was twenty years old now. Time had flown by, but at the same time, it had been frozen, frozen for Thiago, for his mother, for Taylor, for me. Time freezes when the person you love is locked in a struggle between life and death.
I was with him when he opened his eyes, and I’m telling it this way because nothing ended up how I thought.
Was he happy to see me?
Of course he was, although when it happened, he didn’t know where he was, or who he was, and he remembered nothing aboutthe shooting. It took him a few days to orient himself, to remember why he’d been in a coma for two years.
It wasn’t easy filling in the blanks for him, or watching his reaction when the doctors told him about his brain injury and everything that had happened to his body after being unconscious for so long.
That was when the hard times came, when we started to understand that what had happened to Thiago could have many aftereffects. Too many.
He got frustrated when he struggled to speak, unable to communicate using even the most basic words.
