There was a woman reading a magazine in the waiting room with Tom Cruise on the cover. A baby crying down the hall. At the water fountain, a mother was holding a child up to drink. Another child had spilled a bag of Cheerios on the floor. On the television mounted to the wall,Let’s Make a Deal.
“The thing we all need to hold on to right now”—this was the doctor, still talking—“is that Toby could have died this afternoon. In certain ways, he did. You were very lucky your husband was able to bring him back with the CPR. Another thirty seconds—maybe less—we’d be looking at a whole different story. But it would be toomuch to expect a human brain to survive that long without oxygen and emerge unscathed.”
No. No. No. No.Eleanor was shaking her head. Her whole body was shaking. Cam leaned in to put his arms around her. She pushed him away.
It had sunk in now. How this happened. The way she looked at him at this moment, she might have been confronting an assassin.
“You did this to our son,” she said. Her voice a whisper.
Cam crumpled. Those red curls covering his face.
“I would give anything...” he said. “I would do anything.”
“But there isn’t anything you can do now, is there?” she said, her voice unrecognizable to her own self. Ice. “That moment has passed.”
41.
We Are the Children
Toby’s hospital room, three days after the accident. Toby on the bed, his arms at his sides. There was a tube going into his arm—glucose, because he couldn’t eat—and a set of wires attached to his head that the doctor explained had been put there to monitor brain activity.
The four of them—Eleanor, Cam, Ursula, Alison—gathered by the bed.
“You might try talking to him,” the neurologist who’d been brought in to consult on Toby’s case suggested. “Even when we think nothing’s going on in there, sometimes the sound of a familiar voice, a familiar piece of music, triggers something in the brain cells.”
“I have an idea, guys,” Ursula said. “Let’s all sing to him.”
She tried “Thriller” first. When that got no response, she tried another one—her thin, pure soprano just barely audible over the sound of the machines.
We are the world
“You remember this one, right, Tobes?” she said to him.
Eleanor studied the expression on her son’s face as they sang to him. His full, beautiful lips, the constellation of freckles. The halo of red hair arranged on the pillow. Then she regarded her younger daughter. At that moment she understood what it meant to sing one’s heart out.
“... we’ll make a better day, just you and me.”
Nothing.
42.
Ball. Egg. Dinosaur.
They put the violin away. In those first days after they brought Toby home from the hospital, Ursula had played his record for him, sitting him down next to the turntable and setting the needle on the familiar groove. “It’s your favorite, Tobes. You remember this, right?”
If the notes reached some place in his damaged brain, nothing in his eyes or his strangely flaccid body gave indication of that. Toby stared blankly at Ursula, who stood next to the record player holding a ruler and waving her arms to the music, pretending to be a conductor.
“Will you just quit, for once?” Alison snapped at her. It wasn’t like her to speak to her sister in this tone of voice. Ursula set down her ruler.
He walked, but differently. Toby moved slowly through the rooms of the house now, and in the yard where he used to fly past in a blur of wild energy. In the old days, he was always on the move: to the woodshop, the garden, the woods, always going someplace, always fast. Now he drifted like a piece of milkweed on a still afternoon. Mostly he just sat there, turning the pages of a book, if one was placed in his hands, or staring at the sky. Sometimes he just studied the tip of his shoelace or an ant crawling up his pants leg. The head of a dandelion or a piece of grass was enough to occupy him.
Eleanor spent hours turning the pages of one of their old baby books with Toby on her lap, pointing out the names of ordinary objects, colors.This is a ball. This is an egg. This is a dinosaur.When she couldn’t take that anymore, she took downBaby’s First Hundred Words—not much more advanced, but a little.This is a farmer. This isa baker. This is a fireman.Toby never objected to sitting there. But he never responded, either.
Very often, Sally would place herself next to Toby, her tongue on his leg or arm, breathing quietly and snorting when a squirrel or the memory of a good bone entered her dream. He seemed to like this, as much as anyone could tell what Toby liked anymore. His face, once so animated, was drained of expression. His features were as beautiful as ever, but the effect was all different without his jokes, his Michael Jackson dance, that big voice, announcing his arrival in whatever room he burst into. It was unclear to Eleanor whether he said so little because he no longer remembered words, or because he just had nothing to say.
When he spoke, it was usually about wanting something to eat, his request offered up in a high, soft whisper. Hearing him speak in the strange new voice, Eleanor sometimes had to walk out of the room so the girls wouldn’t see her burying her face in her hands. Now and then, though, Ursula found her mother with her face pressed against the wall, or lying on the bed holding a pillow.
“Let’s just be happy he didn’t die, okay?” she said, stroking Eleanor’s hair.
