“Now what?” I asked, managing to keep most of the fluttering panic out of my voice. “I mean, my hand. My leg. Are they going to—? When are they going to—?”
“Too soon to know any of that,” the doctor said briskly. He wasn’t looking at me any more, he was doing something with his notes, and that made the panic surge higher. “The neurologist will be around to have a—”
“I just want a, a, a—” I couldn’t come up with the word, and I was afraid this was where he would put on that toddler-quelling voice and tell me to stop asking questions and behave myself—
“We understand you can’t give us any guarantees,” my father said, quietly but firmly. “We’d just like a general idea of what to expect.”
After a moment the doctor nodded and folded his hands on top of the notes. “There’s often some damage after an injury like this,” he said. “Yours seems to be relatively minor, although I can’t say anything definitive based on a bedside assessment. One common effect is seizures, so you’ll have to be watchful for those, but they usually peter out over time. We’ll be referring you to a physical therapist who can help with the left-side weakness, and there are occupational therapists available if you find yourself having trouble with concentration or memory.” His tone was so matter-of-fact and reasonable that he actually had me nodding along, like all of this—seizures, occupational therapist, stuff straight out of some melodramatic medical show light-years away from my real life—was perfectly normal. Only some tiny peripheral part of me began to understand, with a sickening drop, that this was in fact my real life now. “You can expect most of the improvement to come over the next six months, but it can continue for up to two years. The neurologist will . . .”
He kept talking, but out of nowhere I was swamped by a tidal wave of exhaustion. His face doubled and blurred to nonsense; his voice receded into a faraway meaningless gabble. I wanted to tell him that I needed those painkillers now please, but summoning up the energy to talk seemed impossibly hard, too much for anyone to expect of anyone, and the pain went with me down into a thick treacherous sleep.
* * *
?I was in the hospital for just under two weeks. It wasn’t that bad, all things considered. The evening of my chat with the doctor, they (apologetically, with some autopilot mumble about overcrowding) found me a single room, which was a relief: the neurotic woman in the other bed kept crying and it was starting to grate on me, drill its way into my dreams. The new room was bright and airy and quiet, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back for having good health insurance even though I hadn’t expected to need it for decades.
I did a lot of sleeping, and when I was awake there was usually someone with me. During the day it was mostly my mother, who had ditched work and thrown everything into the department’s lap—she teaches eighteenth-century history at Trinity—as soon as she got the phone call. She brought me things: a fan because the room was mercilessly hot, endless bottles of water and juice and Lucozade because I needed to stay hydrated, art postcards and bunches of tulips, snacks I had liked as a kid (Monster Munch, cheesy popcorn that smelled violently of vomit), cards from my aunts and uncles, a baffling assortment of books, a pack of cards, a hipstery Lego-plated Rubik’s Cube. I touched almost none of it and within a few days the room was getting a weird overgrown look, as if random stuff was popping up on every available surface through spontaneous generation and sooner or later the nurses would find me buried under a heap of cupcakes and an accordion.
I’d always got along well with my mother. She’s smart and spiky and funny, with a keen sense of beauty and a lovely, expansive capacity for happiness, someone I would have liked even if we weren’t related. Even when I was a mildly rebellious teenager, my fights (standard-issue stuff, why can’t I stay out later and it’s so unfair that you give me hassle about homework) had been with my father, almost never with her. Since I’d moved out of home I had rung her a couple of times a week, met her for lunch every month or two, out of genuine affection and enjoyment, not duty; I picked up odd little presents for her now and then, texted her funny things Richard said that I knew she would appreciate. Even the look of her warmed me, her long-legged unselfconscious stride with coat flapping, the wide fine arcs of her eyebrows quirking together and up and down in tandem with whatever story I was telling. So it came as a nasty surprise to both of us when her hospital visits drove me crazy.
For one thing she couldn’t keep her hands off me: one of them was always stroking my hair or resting on my foot or finding my hand among the bedclothes, and even aside from the pain I was finding that I loathed being touched, so intensely that sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from jerking away. And she kept wanting to talk about that night—how was I feeling? (Fine.) Did I want to talk about it? (No.) Did I have any idea who the men had been, had they followed me home, maybe they’d spotted me in the pub and realized my coat was expensive and— At this stage I spent most of the time foggily but firmly convinced that the breakin had been Gouger and one of his Borstal buddies, getting revenge on me for having him booted out of the exhibition, but I was still much too confused about the whole thing to explain it to my mother even if I had wanted to. I retreated into grunts that got ruder and ruder until she backed off, but an hour later she would circle back to it, unable to help herself—Was I sleeping all right? Was I having nightmares? Did I remember much?
The real problem, I suppose, was that my mother was badly shaken up. She put a lot of willpower into covering it, but I knew the artificial, over-calm cheerfulness from childhood crises (OK, sweetheart, let’s get the blood cleaned off so we can see whether you need to go to Dr. Mairéad for the blue glue! Maybe she’ll have stickers again!) and it set my teeth on edge. Occasionally the fa?ade slipped and a terrible, raw horror showed through, and that sent me into paroxysms of sheer fury: obviously she had had a bad couple of days, but now I was out of danger and she had nothing to worry about, her hands were both working perfectly, her vision wasn’t stuttering and doubling, nobody was giving her speeches about occupational therapy, what the hell was her problem?
All I wanted to do, almost the moment I saw her, was pick a fight. Whatever else the head injury had done, it didn’t stop me doing that—on the contrary: most of the time I could just about form simple sentences, but going on the attack seemed to unleash a new and ugly fluency. All it took was one misstep from my mother, one phrase or look that flicked me on the raw—and even at gunpoint I couldn’t have justified why certain things counted as missteps, but they did—and we were off.
“I brought you peaches. Will you have one now? I can wash them in the—”
“No. Thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“Well”—dialing up the cheery note, bending to rummage in the stuffed plastic bag beside her chair—“I brought pretzels, too. How about those? The little ones that you—”
“I said I’m not hungry.”
“Oh. All right. I’ll leave them here for later.”
The soupy, martyred forbearance on her face made me want to throw up. “Jesus, that look. Can you stop giving me that look?”
Her face tightened. “What look?”
“Oh, poor dear Toby, he’s not himself, must make allowances, the poor thing doesn’t know what he’s saying—”
“You’ve been seriously hurt. Everything I’ve read says it’s normal for you to be a bit—”