Left Neglected

Chapter 18





I’m in the gym, sitting at one of the long tables, copying a picture of a cat. I finish and put my pencil down, satisfied. Heidi looks it over.

“You really are good,” she says.

“Did I get the whole cat?”

“No, but what you drew is far better than what I could do.”

“What did I miss?”

“The left ear, the left whiskers, and the left paws.”

I inspect the two sketches, going back and forth between the original cat and my cat. They look exactly the same to me.

“Oh,” I say, my voice dropping.

“But you got both eyes and the left sides of the nose and mouth, and most of the body on the left. This is really good, Sarah. You’re including so much more than you did when you first got here,” she says, shuffling through the pages of drawings I’ve copied so far this morning.

I have improved. But really good is a really big stretch. Charlie and Lucy could copy the whole cat. And I still can’t. And today is my last day.

Heidi places the next sheet on the table, an elaborately detailed picture of a city square populated with buildings, cars, people, a fountain, pigeons, far more complex than any picture I’ve been asked to replicate during my stay here. I take my pencil in hand, but I freeze up, unsure of where to place the tip down. I have to find the left side of the entire scene. Then I have to draw everything in that maddeningly impermanent space, including the maddeningly impermanent left side of each thing I find there. Then I also have to find the left side of each thing on the right side of the scene—the left side of each car, each pigeon, every person, the left half of the fountain. I notice a dog walker to the right of the fountain, but then I become hopelessly drawn to a man holding a bouquet of red balloons to the right of him, and the dog walker disappears. How on earth am I supposed to tackle this? This is probably the picture I was supposed to be able to copy on my last day had I fully recovered, taken from the final pages of some rehabilitation textbook, hundreds of pages ahead of the Chapter I’ve been hopelessly mired in.

“What’s wrong?” asks Heidi.

“I can’t do this,” I say, panic swelling at the back of my mouth.

“Sure you can. Try starting with the buildings.”

“No. No, I can’t do this. I can’t even copy a cat.”

“You did great with the cat. Take it one thing at a time.”

“I can’t. I can’t go home like this, Heidi. How am I going to do everything I’m supposed to do?”

“Calm down. You’re going to be fine.”

“I’m not fine. I’m not. I can’t even copy a cat.”

“You got most of the cat—”

“I went to Harvard, and now I’m an idiot who can’t copy a cat,” I say, choking back tears.

Before the accident, I could make quick sense of any sheet of paper—complicated cost analyses, org charts, decision trees. Now, a page from Charlie’s Where’s Waldo? would probably bring me to my knees. I look back down at the picture, hunting for the guy with the red balloons. Waldo’s gone.

“Hold on a sec,” says Heidi.

She swipes the city square picture off the table, probably to keep me from melting down any further, and runs out of the gym. I try to hold it together until she returns, feeling like my freak-out needs an audience to be most effective. Where did she go? Maybe she’s looking for an easier task, something I can readily master and feel good about, so we can end my last session neat and tidy on a positive note. Or maybe she’s gone running to Dr. Nelson and is pleading with him to reverse the decision to send me home. She can’t even copy a cat!

“Okay,” she says, carrying a canvas bag and returning to her seat next to me. “Take a look at this picture.”

She centers a white sheet of paper on the table in front of me. I see two simple houses, one on the top half of the paper and the other on the bottom. They each have two windows and a front door. They’re identical in every way.

“Which one would you rather live in?” asks Heidi.

I wouldn’t want to live in either of these dinky little houses.

“They’re the same,” I say.

“Okay, but if you had to pick one, which one would you live in?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then just pick one for me.”

I study the twin houses one last time, searching for something subtle in one of them that I might’ve missed, an extra pane in one of the windows or a missing shingle on one of the roofs. Nope, they’re the same.

“Fine,” I say, pointing to the top one.

Heidi smiles, delighted for some unknown reason by my choice of hypothetical residence. She pulls out my red, L-shaped bookmark and places it on the paper.

“Okay, scan left. Find the red edge.”

My eyes crawl west along the white page until I see red. Then I roll my gaze to the right of the red margin, and I’m stunned by what I find drawn on the page, so unmistakable, so obvious. I see two simple houses, identical in every way, except that the left half of the bottom one is consumed in fire.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“Do you see it?” asks Heidi.

“The bottom one is on fire.”

“Yes! And you chose the top house!”

“So? I had a fifty-fifty chance.”

“It’s not chance. Your brain saw the whole picture. You’re just not always conscious of what it’s seeing on the left. But your intuition told you to pick the top house. You need to listen to that intuition. You’re not an idiot, Sarah. Your intelligence is intact.”

I guess. But so what if my brain sees the whole picture? If it doesn’t share what it knows with me in a way that I can be conscious of, then what good does that do me?

“You’re so lucky. There are so many people here who can’t think anymore or remember anyone or talk or move. Imagine if you couldn’t talk to Bob or your kids or if you couldn’t remember them or hold them.”

Many times over the last month, I glimpsed the unfathomable devastation that the human body and mind can survive. In the cafeteria, in the hallways, in the elevator, in the lobby, I would suddenly bear witness to missing arms and legs, missing pieces of skull, deformed faces, memories erased, language strangled, tubes and machinery supporting nutrition and breath. I always forced myself to look away and told myself I was being polite by not staring. But in truth, I didn’t want to see anyone worse off than me because I didn’t want to explore one inch of the perspective that Heidi just posed—that I was lucky.

“And you could’ve easily died, Sarah. You could’ve died in that accident or in surgery or after surgery. You could’ve crashed into another car and killed someone else. What if your kids had been in the car with you? you’re so lucky.”

I look her in the eye. She’s right. I’ve been so focused on what’s horrible and unfair and terrifying about my condition that I hadn’t acknowledged what is positive about my condition, as if the positive had been sitting quietly by itself on the far edge of the left side of my condition, there but completely ignored. I can’t copy a whole cat. But I can recognize it, name it, know what one sounds and feels like, and I can copy most of it, enough for anyone who looks at it to know what I’ve drawn. I am lucky.

“Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for reminding me.”

“You’re welcome. You’re gonna be fine. I know it. And …”

She leans down, reaches into her canvas bag, and presents me with a bottle of white wine wearing a festive red ribbon around its neck.

“Tada! For the next time I see you, my living room or yours.”

“Thank you,” I say, smiling. “I can’t wait.”

She places the bottle of wine on top of the burning house on the table and hugs me.

“Trust your intuition. It’ll guide you,” she says, holding me in her hug.

“Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for everything,” I say and squeeze her a little harder with my right arm.

Her cell phone vibrates. She lets go of me and reads a text message.

“I have to make a call. I’ll be back in a minute, and we’ll get you ready to go home.”

“Okay.”

Alone in the gym for the last time, I let my gaze wander around the room. Good-bye, parallel bars. Good-bye, mirror. Good-bye, poster. Good-bye, puzzles and games table. Goodbye, bowls and beads. Good-bye—wait.

I go back to the poster. Something’s different. I’m aware only that something about the poster is different without being able to pinpoint precisely what is different for a few seconds, and then I see it, so unmistakable, so obvious, like the burning house.

The picture on the poster is of two hands, not one. And the hands aren’t clenched into individual fists, ready for battle. The hands are clasped together. Holding hands. And the word above the hands in red letters isn’t Attitude. The word above the holding hands is Gratitude.

I start to cry, loving this poster that I’d been looking at all wrong. I think about Heidi and Bob and my kids and even Martha and my mother and all the help and love I’ve been given and all that I have. I think my brain saw this whole poster the whole time and kept drawing my attention to it, trying to show me. A part of me, unspoken and unconscious and intact, always knew what this poster was about. Thank you for sharing this with me.

I’m going home today, unable to copy a whole cat but able to see this whole poster, filled with gratitude.