Today was Sam’s birthday. She was not going to tire herself out so much that she had to use her cane to walk to the office.
She pushed herself up onto the edge of the pool. She quickly showered off the salt water. The tips of her fingers were furrowed and rough against the Egyptian cotton towel. Somewhere in the back of Sam’s mind, her mother’s voice told her that the body’s response to being submerged so long was to wrinkle the pads of the fingers and toes in order to improve grip.
Gamma had been forty-four when she’d died, the same age that Sam was now.
Or at least would be in another three and a half hours.
Sam kept on her prescription goggles while she rode the elevator up to her apartment. The chrome on the back of the doors showed her wavy reflection. Slim build. Black one-piece suit. Sam ran her fingers through her hair to help it dry. Twenty-eight years ago, she had walked into the woods behind the farmhouse with hair the color of a raven’s feather. Almost a month later, she’d awakened in the hospital to find a shock of white stubble growing from her shaved head.
Sam had gotten used to the double-takes, the surprised looks when strangers realized that the gray-haired old woman in the back of the classroom, buying wine at the supermarket, walking through the park, was actually a young girl.
Though admittedly, that wasn’t happening nearly as much lately. Sam’s husband had warned her that one day, her face would finally catch up to her hair.
The elevator doors slid open.
The sun was winking through the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined her apartment. Down below, the Financial District was wide awake, car horns and cranes and the usual din of activity muffled behind the triple-paned glazing.
Sam walked to the kitchen, turning off lights as she went. She exchanged her goggles for her glasses. She put out food for the cat. She filled the kettle. She prepared her tea infuser, mug and spoon, but before boiling the water, she went to the yoga mat in her living room.
She took off her glasses. She ran through a series of stretches to keep her muscles limber. She ended up on the mat, legs crossed. She rested the backs of her hands on her knees. She touched her middle fingers to her thumbs in a light pinch. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and considered her brain.
Several years after she had been shot, a psychiatrist had shown Sam a homunculus of the motor areas of her brain. The man had wanted her to see the path the bullet had traveled so that Sam could understand the structures that had been damaged. He wanted her to think about those structures at least once a day, to spend as much time as she could muster in contemplating the individual folds and crevices, and to visualize her brain and body working in perfect tandem as they had before.
Sam had resisted. The exercise seemed some part wishful thinking, most part voodoo.
Now, it was the only thing that kept her headaches at bay, her equilibrium in check.
Sam had consequently done more in-depth research of the brain, seen MRIs and studied dense neurological tomes, but that first drawing had never been replaced as a guide through her meditation. In her mind’s eye, the cross-sections of the left motor and sensory cortices were forever highlighted in bright yellow and green. Each section was labeled with the correspondingly influenced anatomy. Toes. Ankle. Knee. Hip. Trunk. Arm. Wrist. Fingers.
Sam felt an analogous tingle in the different areas of her body as she silently examined the factions that made up the whole.
The bullet had entered her skull on the left, just above her ear. The left side of the brain controls the right, the right side the left. In medical terms, the injury was considered to have taken place in a more superficial portion of the brain. Sam had always found the word superficial misleading. True, the projectile had not crossed the midbrain or lodged deep into the limbic system, but Broca’s Area, where speech takes place, Wernicke’s Area, where speech is understood, and the various regions that controlled movement on the right side of her body, had been inexorably altered.
Superficial— [soo-per-fish-uh-l] of or relating to the surface, frivolous, cursory, apparent rather than real.
There was a metal plate in her head. The scar over her ear was the size and width of her index finger.
Sam’s memory of that day remained fragmented. She was certain of only a few things. She remembered the mess that Charlie had made in the bathroom. She remembered the Culpepper brothers, the smell of them, the almost tangible taste of their menace. She did not remember witnessing Gamma’s death. She did not remember what steps she took to crawl out of the grave. She remembered Charlie urinating on herself. She remembered yelling at Zachariah Culpepper. She remembered her raw, aching need that Charlie should run, that she should be safe, that she should live no matter the cost to Sam.
Physical therapy. Occupational therapy. Speech therapy. Cognitive therapy. Talk therapy. Aqua therapy. Sam had to learn how to talk again. To think again. To make connections again. To converse. To write. To read. To comprehend. To dress herself. To accept what had happened to her. To acknowledge that things were different. To learn how to study again. To return to school again. To articulate her thought processes again. To understand rhetoric and logic and motion, function and form.
Sam often compared her first year of recovery to a record on an old turntable. She awoke at the hospital with everything playing at the wrong speed. Her words slurred. Her thoughts moved as if through cake batter. Working her way back to 33 1/3rd seemed impossible. No one believed she could do it. Her age, they all felt, could be the magic component. As one of her surgeons had told her, if you were going to be shot in the head, it was good to have it happen when you were fifteen years old.
Sam felt a nudge at her arm. Count Fosco, the cat, was finished with breakfast and wanted attention. She scratched his ears, listening to his soothing purr, and wondered if she was better off forgoing the meditation and simply adopting more cats.
She put on her glasses. She went back to the kitchen and turned on the kettle. The sun was tilting across the lower end of Manhattan. She closed her eyes and let the warmth bathe her. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that Fosco was doing the same. He seemed to love the radiant heat under the kitchen floor. Sam couldn’t get used to the sudden feeling of warmth on her bare feet when she woke in the morning. The new apartment had modern bells and whistles that her last apartment had not.
Which was the reason for the new apartment—that nothing about it reminded her of the old.
The kettle whistled. She poured her mug of tea. She set the egg timer to three and a half minutes in order for the leaves to steep. She got yogurt from the fridge and mixed in granola with a spoon from the drawer. She took off her regular glasses and put on her reading glasses; her eyes had never been able to adjust to multifocal lenses.