Can You Forgive Him?
Eleanor had read about a man in Maryland, Dr. Evans Almendinger, who ran a place called the Institute for Human Potential, where they worked with brain-injured children. The idea was that if one part of a person’s brain had been damaged or maybe even ceased to function altogether, some other part of his or her brain could be trained to take over some of the tasks normally handled by the injured portion. Now, with the money from the sale ofThe Cork People,she could bring her son to the institute.
Dr. Almendinger was not a physician or a neurologist. In the book he’d written, Triumph over Brain Injury,he spoke of children he’d worked with in other parts of the world who’d experienced injury and trauma from war or other disasters but, through their work with Dr. Almendinger, managed to live active, productive lives. One story in particular had captured Eleanor’s attention. In India, some years back, when he was on some kind of medical mission, a woman had come to him carrying her nine-year-old daughter, who’d been unable to walk or speak since a near-drowning accident that took place when she was three years old. For six years, the child had mostly lain on a mat, only vaguely responsive. Then the mother brought her to Evans Almendinger.
He taught the mother a series of exercises designed to reprogram the girl’s muscles. They created a series of flash cards for the girl. At first it seemed preposterous to imagine she’d respond, but slowly, miraculously, she had begun to do so. By the time Dr. Almendinger left Mumbai, the girl was walking and talking and doing math.
Eleanor knew better than to run any of this by Cam. For Cam, the yoga practice he and Toby had established the year after the accident, and the physical therapy routines he’d designed for their son,were all Toby needed. And it was true, Toby had made real progress, especially physically. Cam had no interest in hearing about anything more.
Maybe the thought was too painful, that more might be possible. The more you hoped for, the greater the disappointment when it didn’t work out. Or maybe—more likely—Cam was just more able to accept life as it was. But if Eleanor wanted to bring Toby to Maryland, and Toby was okay with it, he wouldn’t stand in the way.
“It’s your money,” Cam said. “If you want to spend it chasing after some so-called experts, and it’s okay with Toby, that’s your business.”
Three weeks later—with Al working as an intern at a computer start-up, Ursula waitressing at a hotel in Ogunquit—Eleanor and Toby headed to Maryland. Because Toby was afraid of flying, Eleanor drove, seven hours, for their consultation with Evans Almendinger, but after it was over she called up Darla to report on the meeting. (Not Cam. Eleanor had learned, long before this, that Cam no longer wanted to discuss their children with her, or anything else.)
“You know, I told myself a long time ago I wasn’t going to chase after any more miracles for Toby,” she told Darla. “But this man makes so much sense.”
In the printed materials sent to her from the center he ran, the head of the clinic was referred to as Dr. Almendinger, though it was unclear what kind of a degree he possessed. Eleanor didn’t actually care. Conventional medicine had so little to offer her son. If some outlier got results, she wasn’t about to ask for his credentials.
The institute was housed in an old private school that had closed down years before. Clients were expected to stay at a motel down the road. “You won’t be spending much time there,” Dr. Almendinger’s assistant, Gillian, explained to Eleanor when she checked in. “You’ll be in training sessions every waking hour.”
They met with Dr. Almendinger first, so he could evaluate Toby. He shone a light into Toby’s pupils and tapped his knee with a rubber mallet—all the usual routines. But he also wanted to talk with Toby. He showed him a ball and tossed it to him. Toby didn’t catch the ball, but he actually tried, which was unusual for him.
Every day for a solid two weeks Toby and Eleanor attended trainings together. The idea was not simply to provide help for Toby during their time with the staff, but for Eleanor to learn the kinds of exercises she could do with him when they were back home. At first Toby couldn’t do most of the things they showed him in their training sessions, but he didn’t object, either, and after a few days he began to enjoy being around the other children in the program. Until now, his main companion had been Elijah—though more and more, even Elijah, loyal as he was, had been moving out into the world, playing with his friend Abner from kindergarten. Though Toby had attended special schools for years now, along with all the tutoring, none of the training he’d received before came close to what they found at Dr. Almendinger’s clinic.
During their time in Baltimore, Eleanor made friends with a few of the other parents—a couple who had flown there from Denver with their mildly brain-injured daughter, and another whose twin sons had both suffered from oxygen deprivation at birth.
Nights after the children were asleep, the parents sometimes gathered on the balcony at the motel—close enough that they could hear their children if they woke—to share their experiences. It was the first time in all the years since the accident, Eleanor realized, that she’d had the chance to talk about what it had been like for her, after.
“His father was supposed to be watching him,” she told the others. “He didn’t notice when Toby wandered off.”
“Can you forgive him?” one of them asked her.
“If you notice,” Eleanor said, “I came here alone.”
On their last day in Baltimore, they had a graduation for the eight children in attendance for the program and the parents who’d brought them. When it was Toby’s turn to get up, he recited a poem, “Fog,” by Carl Sandburg.
“The fog comes on little cat feet,” he began. Just the idea of Toby saying that line would have seemed, to anyone who knew him, impossible two weeks earlier.
“It sits looking over harbor and city, on silent haunches—”
He paused. Looked out at the dozen or so people assembled in the room, all but one a stranger until a few weeks ago.
Eleanor held her breath. A dreamy look came over Toby’s face, as if he was considering the scene. The fog. The harbor. The catlike haunches.
“... and then moves on.” Then came the most surprising part of the evening. Toby broke into the most radiant smile. Except for rare times with Elijah, or alone in the goat pen (but Eleanor was seldom present for those), she had not seen her son look so happy and proud in years. But she saw something more than joy on his face. At that moment, for an instant anyway, she saw the old Toby again.
Back at the motel, their last night, Eleanor wished she could tell someone what had happened. She knew Al didn’t like talking about Toby anymore. She preferred pretending he didn’t exist. Ursula would have been happy to hear the news, if she hadn’t been at her job. No way to reach her.
The one she really wanted to call was Cam. She didn’t, of course.
She called Darla.
82.
Crazies Out There
Most people Eleanor knew in Brookline were married—and even more so, in Akersville, when she made her regular trips back to attend her daughters’ school events. Very possibly they were married unhappily. They might even be cheating on their partners or they just never had sex—with anyone—anymore. But they showed up in twos at school events and Al’s or Ursula’s games, which were the main social events on Eleanor’s calendar besides conferences with the team of therapists who worked with Toby and, on her rare trips to New York, meetings with her editor.
