Darla brought lemon bars. Phyllis left a Bible on the table. Walt came by with his checkerboard. “I was thinking I could play this with your boy,” he said.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Alison said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Walt told her. “We’ll have a good time sitting out in the sun, moving the pieces around on the board. It might be nice for him, and a help to your mother.”
The one who really rose to the occasion, though, was Cam. Cam, who had never even taken one of their children to the dentist before and had a hard time keeping the names of their teachers straight from one year to the next, got on the phone, talking to doctors in places as far away as Denver and Atlanta, where they worked with children with brain injuries. He brought home photocopies of articles about innovations in brain rehabilitation from the state library and researched facilities where Toby could work on language, rebuild muscle tone. Cam’s parents—never much involved—had offeredto pay for treatment, but every place Cam contacted said the same thing after reviewing Toby’s scans. Prospects for rehabilitation, with brain injury of this kind, were minimal. Expectations should be kept low.
Cam didn’t let this discourage him. “Those doctors don’t know everything,” he said. “They don’t know Toby.” He sent away for a book by a woman who had invented a way to teach her brain-injured daughter to communicate with sign language and another book about foods that stimulated the growth of new brain cells, and then he cooked them. He joined a support group of parents of children who were brain injured—a term Eleanor was unable to utter. Tuesday nights, he made the hour-long drive alone to meetings.
Cam tried bringing Toby to the playground. He buckled his son into the toddler swing and pushed so gently that the swing barely rose.One, one, Toby has fun.
“Home now,” Toby said, after Cam climbed with him to the top of the slide, trying to guide his newly limp body down. Toby had always loved the slide, and fought to stay longer on the playground every time they went there.
“Go home,” Toby repeated. “Home.”
Back in the kitchen, where they set him in his chair—his frog cup in front of him, and the Beatrix Potter bowl he’d always loved—he stared blankly out over the heads of the other children. Their amazing geologist. The boy destined for Carnegie Hall. The web-footed swimmer who might one day have swum the English Channel. The child who had told them he’d been a buffalo in a former life. The child who spoke to God.
Now he said nothing. Just reached for a piece of bread and silently chewed it.
43.
Bad Things, Good People
Everything changed.
For Eleanor, the rooms of their home had become almost unbearable. As much as possible, she retreated to her desk now, staring at the blank page of her drawing pad. It was easier to put in long hours working than to spend her days with her son, confronted with the constant picture of what it meant that the boy she had raised and adored for four and a half years had disappeared, replaced by this odd little red-haired stranger.
She was angry now, all right. At Cam most of all. But there was a terrible secret she admitted to no one. She was angry at Toby, too.
There was nothing rational about this, but Eleanor had to work hard not to snap at him when he couldn’t answer some simple question she asked or go up the stairs without getting on all fours, or when—this was the worst—she spoke to him and he looked through her as if he had no idea who she was. To Eleanor, it was as if the person responsible for the disappearance of her beloved son was this strange, silent imposter, cleverly disguised in a similar body—with the same flaming hair, but otherwise unrecognizable. She wanted the old Toby back, and though she told herself it made no sense, she resented the person now occupying his place at the table.
That fall, she set up a room for herself in the barn—the place Cam had once used for his woodshop. The place became her hideout. She would rather work all day at her drawing table in the barn—all day, and all night—and earn money to pay Phyllis than sit watching the boy flipping listlessly through the pages of a magazine or staring out the window at their empty bird feeder.
Ursula had always been the most tender one of Eleanor’s children, but now she revealed a kind of compassion that had been largelyhidden before, probably because until this awful moment, it hadn’t been needed. Ursula was heroic. She became her brother’s tireless defender and protector, with no consideration of the cost to herself. From the moment Ursula got out of bed everything she did and said seemed driven by two impulses: to help her brother and to make her family happy again.
She fixed pancakes for Cam and Eleanor—breakfast in bed—also muffins and cookies and bowls of popcorn, like in the old days, when they piled onto the couch to watch movies together. Phyllis did most of the housework now, but Ursula took on special projects—sitting with Toby on the floor for hours, reciting the numbers, pointing out shapes, reminding him of the names for things. She hung up all the clothes that had accumulated on the floor in Alison’s room. She Dustbustered Eleanor’s workspace. She arranged Toby’s Ninja Turtles in interesting places—scenes intended to inspire her brother to play, only he never did anymore.
One night, Ursula set the table with candles and the plates they only used on Thanksgiving, with an artificial rose that appeared to have been taken from a cemetery in a vase at the center of the table. No special occasion, but there had been a segment onPhil Donahuethat week about the importance of keeping the romance alive in marriage.
“You two need to have a candlelight dinner, like in the movies,” she told Eleanor. She had put on a Dolly Parton tape and made sandwiches for the rest of them to eat upstairs so their parents could have privacy. She had been disappointed by Eleanor’s choice of outfit for the special dinner, but—sensing her mother’s reluctance to change into something fancier—ran upstairs to her room. She came back with a crown from her dress-up box.
“I guess we’d better act romantic,” Cam said, as Ursula pushed the Play button so “I Will Always Love You” started—maybe their daughter had failed to recognize, this was a sad song—and left them to be alone. “We don’t want to disappoint our daughter, right?”
After the accident, Cam had stopped showing up for softball games. For a while everyone figured he’d be back. That September—no Labor Day party that year—he told the team they’d better find a new first baseman.
He needed to spend more time with Toby, he told his teammates. But there was an element of self-punishment, too. What did it matter if a man made a brilliant catch on a long ball to right field and tagged the runner out on first, if he had failed to protect his four-year-old son from drowning?
Ursula did not announce this to any of them, but she had checked several books out of the library: a joke book, designed to liven up their silent dinnertimes; a book calledLove, Medicine & Miracles,by a doctor she’d seen onPhil Donahue(a different episode); and a book from the Personal Growth section, located with the help of Mrs. Jenkins, the librarian.
The most helpful book, in Ursula’s opinion, wasWhen Bad Things Happen to Good People,written by a rabbi whose son had been born with a terrible disease that made him turn into an old man by the time he was Ursula’s age, seven, which meant that he’d died when he was fourteen years old. This rabbi, a man named Harold Kushner, wrote the book to figure out how to stay happy after something terrible happens, and according to him this was possible.
As a second grader, Ursula found the book difficult reading, but she stuck with it—sounding out the words, working her way through the chapters late at night in her bed when everyone else in the family was asleep. After she finished it she wrote a letter to the author, Harold Kushner, in which she explained about her brother Toby, and how sad her parents were, and asked his advice—explaining first, regretfully, that they weren’t Jewish, but she had a dreidel.
Harold Kushner had written back to say that a person didn’t have to be Jewish to have a relationship with God. He suggested some parts of the Bible that she and her parents might find comforting, but when she tried to share these with the two of them, her mother had looked at Ursula as if she, too, were brain damaged.
“What kind of God would let something like this happen to Toby?” she said. She didn’t yell at Ursula, but she sounded mad. “You’re wasting your time with that book.”
“Ease up, El,” her father said. “Ursula was just trying to help.”
