“What’s in the sauce that makes this so good anyway?”
“Nice try. We can talk my miracle sauce later. Let’s do some work.”
Vinnie had been talking about mirror therapy for weeks, and Matilda thought it sounded ridiculous, like voodoo. Still, he was in front of her and he’d carted a mirror all the way to her house, so she reluctantly did what he said. She straightened her knees and let Vinnie position the mirror between them so that when she looked down, she saw her intact foot on one side and its mirrored image on the other. “Oh,” she said.
“Move your left foot,” Vinnie said. She did and the optical illusion was of two perfect feet, moving in concert. “Scratch your toe,” he said, “the one that’s been itching.”
“How?”
He pointed. “Scratch the itchy spot on your left foot, but keep looking in the mirror.”
She leaned over and gently scratched. “Oh my God,” she said. “It helps.” She scratched harder. “I can’t believe it helps. I don’t understand.”
“Nobody understands, really. The simple way to think about it is that you’re helping rewire the old signals in your brain. You’re teaching your brain a new story.”
She moved her foot to the left and to the right, flexed and pointed and flexed again. She wiggled her toes. She rotated her ankle and the foot in the mirror, her missing foot, seemed like it was back and was working. She scratched again, it helped again. “It already feels better,” she said. “Not great but different.”
“Good. Four or five times a week for fifteen minutes. And use the mirror whenever the foot hurts or itches. Got it?”
Matilda nodded and smiled. “It sounded so stupid,” she said. “I didn’t want to go buy a mirror just to do something that sounded so dumb. Thank you, Papi,” she said. She spoke softly and put a light hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing the mirror.”
“It’s temporary,” Vinnie said, standing abruptly. The charge that shot through his arm, his chest, and other places he didn’t want to dwell on when Matilda touched him was dismaying.
“I’ll buy my own. You can have this back—”
“No, no,” he said. “I don’t mean the mirror is temporary; it’s yours. I bought it for you. I mean you still need to deal with the underlying problem.” He sounded angrier than he intended. Matilda was frowning. He took a breath. Stop. Rewind. He started again, keeping his voice even. “The mirror is just a temporary fix is what I meant.”
In her heart, Matilda knew Vinnie was right. Of all the things people had said to her over the past six months, all the useless advice and meaningless platitudes (God never gives you more than you can handle, everything happens for a reason) and quoting of Bible verses, what Vinnie said about elective amputation and losing her ankle made the most sense. Matilda grew up knowing that you didn’t get anything without giving something up. In her world, that was the prevailing logic. It was just a matter of knowing how much you were willing to lose, how many pounds of flesh, which in her case would be literal. (“If thy foot offend thee, cast it off”—that Bible verse she understood.)
When she was in rehab, one of the nurses told her Vinnie was someone they called a “superuser.” He healed so swiftly and learned so fast that he’d been chosen to test the cutting-edge prosthetic he wore. And here she was, barely able to hobble around on her clunky, ugly rubber foot. She was the opposite of Vinnie. She wasn’t a superuser, she was a superloser.
But more surgery, more rehab, better prosthetics? It would all cost money. A lot of money. “I don’t have that kind of insurance. I don’t have that kind of money, and I don’t know anyone who does,” Matilda said. She sounded defeated, resigned.
“Yes, you do,” Vinnie said. “You do.”