Unconscious all the way in the ambulance to Saint Christopher’s Children’s Hospital, I have no memory of being taken into surgery. I have one hazy recollection of the recovery room, when I came out of general anesthesia, although I was then, by way of intravenous drip, immediately on painkillers that fogged my mind. I remember only my mother beside the gurney, looking down at me, so very beautiful. She appeared to be terribly aggrieved, as I’d never seen her before. My thinking was so muddled, I worried that something awful must have happened to her. I tried to speak but lacked the wit and energy. I remember also turning my head toward her, whereupon I could see she was holding my left hand in both of hers, and I thought how odd it was that I could not feel her hands pressed around mine. But then, when I wished to feel them, I could. Her warm fingers. Although she clasped my hand tightly, I detected her tremors, and I saw that she was shaking badly, not just her hands but her entire body. She said something, her voice far away, like voices in dreams that sometimes call to us from some far shore, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me, and so I slept.
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I was in the ICU for the first forty-eight hours, until they could be certain that all my vital signs were stable, but I remained in a painkiller haze—I don’t know what—maybe a morphine derivative. I slept more than not, and though my every dream should have been a nightmare, they were with one exception pleasant, although I barely recalled them when I woke. Nurses attended me from time to time, as did a man in a white smock with a stethoscope around his neck.
Although friends and family were usually restricted to short visits in the ICU, someone I knew seemed always to be there in a bedside chair when I rose from the slough of forgetfulness that was as real as the mattress on which I lay. I always knew who I was, of course, and approximately where I must be, and I knew these visitors and loved them, but the why of being there eluded me, or I eluded it, choosing amnesia over the intolerable truth. I think that I could have spoken there in the ICU, that my silence was not a consequence of either my injuries or the drugs. Perhaps I feared to speak because words mattered in our family—in the beginning was the Word—and when I spoke, thereafter would come conversation and with conversation the reality, the why. Mom was there, watching, sometimes putting cold wet compresses on my brow, sometimes giving me a sliver of ice with the admonition to let it melt in my mouth. In her absence, Grandpa Teddy appeared, and although I’d never previously seen him with a rosary—Grandma Anita, but not him—he always clung to one now, his fingers traveling from bead to bead, his lips moving and the words whispered. I should not have been surprised to see Donata Lorenzo, once our neighbor, my sitter, who in her widowhood had been counseled by my mother, heavier now than when I’d last seen her, wiping at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief prettily embroidered at the corners or twisting it into knots around her fingers. When I opened my eyes and saw Mr. Yoshioka in the chair, I thought of the photos of his mother and sister in the book about Manzanar, and I spoke for the first time since the bomb: “I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t know to what those words referred, but he came to the bed and took one of my hands and held it as my mother had held it. He said softly, “ ‘The summer storm Hid in the bamboo grove And quieted away.’ ” I thought I must be getting the hang of this haiku thing, because I understood that he was saying the worst had passed, that all would be better from now on. Something serious had happened to me, but nothing mortal yet.