Coming To Terms With His Disability
James Jacobson leaves the rehab hospital to return to Virginia
Jim was still restless sitting on the edge of his bed at the rehab facility. He kept glancing at the neurophysiology book at the foot of the bed when to his surprise Dr. Giordano who had performed his surgery was standing next to him.
“They tell me that you’re leaving for Virginia tomorrow, Mr. Jacobson.”
Jim startled, turned to look at him.
“Dr. Giordano, what a surprise to see you.” He paused. “Yes, I’m going back home for a while.”
“How do you feel?”
“A little fatigued, but otherwise okay. I don’t know if I could ever thank you enough for putting me back together again.”
“My pleasure. It is because of cases like yours that I became a neurosurgeon.”
“You didn’t have to come up to see me.”
“Don’t worry. I was already here to see another patient.”
“By the way here’s that neurophysiology textbook you lent me, I was going to mail it back to you from Virginia.”
“Don’t worry about it. Please keep it.” He paused, “That’s a great textbook, isn’t it? Clear and easy to understand. Neurophysiology and Brain Chemistry by Dr. Jacob Bertelsmann and Dr. Anderson Carmichael. You know I knew Professor Carmichael. His son was my mentor in residency. Afterwards, his father couldn’t speak a word, a head injury in a car accident. But he could write beautifully.”
“Makes me realize how lucky I am then to still be able to speak,” Jim commented.
“You know there’s been a shift in thinking in the last couple of years. Maybe there’s a way to regenerate tissue. I think there’s a chance you can make a complete recovery,” Dr Giordano noted.
“No more weakness, no more headaches, no more pain in my legs. No more nightmares. No more strange noise in my ears, or weird auras around objects and things wouldn’t taste totally different to me.” Jim sighed. “Man, I’m a whiner. Sometimes I even make myself disgusted. I need to feel normal again.”
Dr. Giordano took one last look at the wound on Jim’s forehead. “It seems to be healing nicely, it seems odd that the bullet wound went right through that birthmark.” He also examined the back of his head.
“I’ve got to get back. Good luck.” The doctor reached out his hand and they shook.
After the doctor left him, Jim picked up the book and put it in his bag by the bedside. He resolved to lie down on the bed to rest a moment. When he put his head on his pillow within a couple of minutes he was asleep.
When Julie pulled up to the curb in front of the rehab centre, Jim was sitting on a large suitcase with a small satchel on his lap. He seemed happy to see her as she stopped the car and got out.
“Where did you get that suitcase?” she asked him.
“From my Russian friend Sergei. I’m borrowing it for a while.”
“And what’s inside it?” she asked.
“A lot of things,” he responded. “Nigel’s tapes, those artefacts from Father Michael, some books I’ve read and some clothes.”
“You know it’s still not too late to change your mind. I can take you to Nigel’s house. It’s ready now and I have a key.”
“You are certainly persistent,” Jim commented.
“Look we have time. I could take you over there, have one last look and we’ll be on our way.”
“This is something you want me to do. Go over that house to look around?”
“Yes. I want you to see the life which was stolen from you.”
“They’re dead and the house was burned, and my father and Burgess almost died. Even for the few days I was there, these are not happy memories.”
“There was a lot of love in that house, before the end. It’s a tragedy you never got to know your mother. I knew her from the time I was a child and your father what a beautiful man. That beautiful life was in that house. Do you think it’s an accident we met on that train? Despite the kidnapping, we ended up together anyway. God found a way. Before you go I just want you to see.”
“OK, let’s go. One last look for your sake,” he agreed.
He loaded his things inside her trunk, and they went on their way to Bayside, Queens.
When they arrived at the house it looked exactly as it had before the fire except the windows were boarded up and Julie parked at the curb and opened Jim’s door. Taking his cane from the back seat, Jim stood beside the car and waited for Julie to open the front gate.
“I can’t tell you how many times on holidays and parties I used to run up this sidewalk to the front door,” she halted a moment on the burnt red brick walkway.
“Your mother would be there with a plate of Greek cookies and Baklava and she’d always say the same thing, ‘Are you being a good little girl, Julie? Baklava is only for a good little girl’ Unfortunately, I was always a persnickety child. But she gave them to me anyway.”
When Julie opened the front door and stepped inside, Jim stood outside a moment reluctant to go inside. He looked into the house through the open door and it looked substantially as he remembered it. He scanned around the living room and could see everything in its proper place.
“How did you do this?” he asked her. “Dry all these things? Everything was soaked in water.”
“It took months,” she answered. “But it was a labour of love for me.”
She walked into the living room and sat down in an overstuffed chair, pulling her legs beneath her.
“I used to sit here sometimes when I was a little girl, in this very chair.” Then she got up from the chair. “I want to show you the rest of the house.”
She led him around appearing very much like a little girl, first to the kitchen, to Nigel’s study, then upstairs to the bedrooms. He was surprised at how close it was to his memory. When she insisted he go to the backyard, saying “Please, let’s go outside,” he was even more reluctant, but she insisted and he acquiesced. He stood on the door landing looking at the lawn and the strangest feeling of Déjà vu overcame him, not that he had been at the door before as he had been with his father and Burgess, but that he had stood before in that doorway exactly under these same circumstances. It was this feeling that had been haunting him for weeks since he had awakened in the hospital, a feeling that recurred a number of times in different locations, as though he was reliving a sequence of events a second time.
“I know it’s painful,” she began. “But this is where you could have had a life had it not been stolen from you and this is where you could have a new life, a second chance like mine.”
“It all sounds very touchy-feely. I know you think a person can simply change lives the way they change a piece of clothing. But I think it’s more complicated than that. There are unintended consequences for every decision we make. I have a life in Hadleyburg and as much as I hated my life there, I’m not ready for this life here.”
“There’s one thing more,” she told him. “Something I found while I was cleaning this up.”
She went to a cabinet and removed what looked like a photo album. “This was your mother’s.” She handed it to him.
“I’m surprised that this survived the fire,” he commented.
“There are other things,” she told him. “But they can wait.”
There were what must have been a hundred photos of him as a baby, before the kidnapping, and he sat down on a chair and looked at them. Tears began to well in his eyes and in rivulets slid down his cheeks as he turned the pages. He stared at the young faces of Nigel and his mother, before age had taken the beauty and energy of youth and for a moment the images transported him back in time to another world.
“You see how much she loved you,” Julie spoke softly. “It’s written on her face.”
“For a campaign to try to make me stay, this is very effective, but I can’t. I sense I have unfinished business in Hadleyburg.” He paused a moment. “I’ll do this. I’ll make you a promise. I’ll come back here, I promise. But not now, not today. Today we go to Hadleyburg.”
“There is one other thing,” she continued.
He smiled. “This is very important to you, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Alright, tell me what else.”
“I found out something else, which I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you.”
“What is it? The suspense is killing me.”
She paused a moment.
“I just can’t. I’ll tell you when we get to Hadleyburg.”
“You’re going to make me wait until Virginia?”
“It’s about Frank Glen and your father. But it can wait. I’ll tell you everything when we’re in Virginia.”
“Alright, I’m ready to go,” he told her.
She put the photo album back in the cabinet and turned off the lights and then both left the house. As Jim walked with his cane back to the car, Julie grabbed his right hand when he became unsteady.
“I’ll say one thing,” she said. “We have a guardian watching over us.”
She opened the door and helped Jim climb into the car.
