Sometime in those hours after surgery, I came to realize that I couldn’t move my legs or feel them. I would have been afraid if my arms had also been unresponsive, if my hands refused to obey me. But I thought of what Mr. Yoshioka had lost in his life, of what Mrs. Lorenzo had lost, of Grandpa without his Anita, and I flexed my hands and played imaginary chords and melodies on the bedsheet, and I knew, no matter what, I’d be all right, though there was still the matter of the damper, sostenuto, and una corda pedals. Don’t think about that, not now, not yet. Even then, I held at bay the why of being in the hospital, held tenaciously to forgetfulness.
The one nightmare came, so they tell me, at nine o’clock the second night. In sleep, my mind approached what it couldn’t admit when I was awake: I am in the bank, under the airborne stampede of steel horses, following the golden feather to the briefcase. Fiona moves toward an exit. My father in business attire makes his escape. I turn to see Amalia and Malcolm. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” The blast. The sweet girl seems almost to take flight, angel that she is. But does not rise on white wings. Does not rise. Collapses and does not rise, a girl no more, a broken bird, a tangle of ragged clothes and torn flesh and lifeless bones.
I woke screaming and couldn’t stop, and the nurses rushed to my cubicle, and soon they brought my mother. “Amalia’s dead!” I told her as she sat on the bed and took me in her arms. “Amalia’s dead, oh, God, she’s dead, Mama.” Of course they knew that she had perished—and not she alone. The only revelation I had for them was what I said next: “I killed her! It’s me, I did it, I killed Amalia!” My mother held me and assured me that I had killed no one, but I refused to accept absolution so easily. “You don’t know, you don’t. I should have told you, you don’t know everything I should have told you.” She said that Mr. Yoshioka had explained everything to her, that nothing I’d done had been sinful or even wrong, that I’d done what any child my age might have done under those circumstances, that perhaps if I’d done anything differently, Fiona Cassidy might have killed me long ago. What happened at the bank was something else altogether, one of those terrible things that seemed to be happening more every year.
I couldn’t rely upon the excuse that I’d done what any child my age would have done, for as I had once said to Mr. Yoshioka, I was not my age, an assertion to which he had agreed.
“But you don’t understand,” I insisted. “Maybe even Mr. Yoshioka doesn’t. They didn’t just steal all that jade stuff at City College. They did worse. It was them at the bank. Fiona … and Tilton. I saw them. They had briefcases. They put down the briefcases and left.”
She stiffened with shock, and I believed that she must realize what had become clear to me: that if she had never become pregnant with me, if my father hadn’t married her but instead had followed some other path in life, Amalia would be alive, Amalia and however many others had died at the bank. Because I was born, Amalia died.
From where I sit nearly half a century later, I understand the fallacy of that reasoning. But in the aftermath of the bank, in my grief, I believed that it must be inarguably true.
After a while, when I couldn’t be adequately calmed, a nurse injected a sedative into the IV port, and I fell into an unwanted sleep in my mother’s arms. I did not dream again that night.
In the morning, when Mom visited, I asked her if anyone knew what had happened to the Lucite pendant that I’d been wearing.
To my surprise, she said, “It was still around your neck when the paramedics found you, sweetie. They took it off you in the ambulance.”
She produced it from her purse and gave it to me. Within the shapen heart, the feather lay soft and white.
82
Wednesday, with all my vital signs stable, they moved me from the ICU into a private room. I didn’t need traction, or an orthopedic corset. Mine wasn’t what they called an “unstable injury” that needed time to heal. It was plenty stable, all right. My spinal cord had been severely impacted, and that was the end of the story. No surgeon in the world, then or now, could repair the damaged nerve tracts.
During the few days that I remained in the hospital, receiving treatment for my lesser wounds and undergoing tests to determine the extent of my disabilities, the nurses could do little more for me than turn me regularly in bed to prevent sores from forming as a result of my immobility and lack of sensation in my legs.
Physical therapy began on Thursday. The therapist worked my legs for me, flexing my ankles and my knees, which someone would have to do for me daily from now on, to prevent my joints from locking and my muscles from contracting as the result of paralysis.