All We Know of Heaven (15 page)

“Well done,” said Shannon. “Well done.”

That night Maureen sat next to Charles and Zoe in the hospital’s little theater and watched the old version of
The

Parent Trap
. It was better than the new one. Zoe was funny and sweet. She was fifteen and had been a figure skater. She fractured her skull when her pairs partner dropped her. Every kid in rehab, except the little babies, seemed to have been something great. And from that day until she left, Maureen visited Zoe’s room every afternoon to watch
Days.
Zoe’s speech was much better than Maureen’s. But Zoe’s mother had told Maureen that Zoe would never be mentally more than ten or twelve years old. She would al ways have to live with her parents.

How did they know? Maureen doubled her efforts.

She asked Jeannie to bring her sheet music; and when the music therapist came in, Maureen begged for fifteen minutes of piano “lessons.” Within two weeks she had be gun to sight-read. After two weeks she could play songs from
The Lion King
—but only with her left hand. Her right hand was still too weak. Still nobody could believe that she’d actually learned something new, and something that was traditionally linked with math.

At night, she squeezed her exercise ball until her right hand ached and sweat trickled down her breastbone. She asked Shannon for something more challenging than the ball. Shannon gave her a device that looked like a sling shot. Its rubber-tipped metal legs were so far apart that Maureen could barely grasp both of them.

“When you can squeeze that closed, you’ll have most of the use of that hand again,” Shannon told Maureen.

Dr. Park began to hold out the hope of home to her like a scoop of ice cream just out of her reach. When she could walk three steps without holding on to anything . . . even the walker . . . When she could read three sentences aloud with no mistakes . . . When she remembered past tenses . . .

Maureen stayed up late, unlocking, unwrapping, peel ing away the plastic around the items in her brain. . . . I go to the store. I am going to the store. I went to the store. She squeezed the ball and the slingshot. Without telling any one, and knowing it was dangerous, she walked to the bath room alone. Once the nurse, Ben, caught her; but instead of grabbing her arm, he nodded and simply watched her carefully, closing the door so Maureen had her privacy.

The last week in April she began to have anxiety attacks: Rag Mop was dead; that was why they wouldn’t let her go home. Tommy’s baby had died. They didn’t want her to know. That’s why they wouldn’t let her go home. Mary brought baby Maura to see her and asked her to stand godmother.

“Sit godmother,” Maureen said. “Is Rag Mop okay? “He’s fine. He sleeps on the foot of your bed every night,”

her sister-in-law said. “Is Tommy fine?” “He’s fine.”

“Where is Danny?” “At school, I think.” “Where’s Mom?”

“She should be here any minute.”

“Is Rag Mop dead?”

Mary stopped for a moment before she said, “No, Maury.

Rag Mop is fine. He’s at home, waiting for you.”

Finally, Jeannie brought the little dog to the hospital again, though, strictly speaking, there were no animals allowed on the ward except the fish in the giant aquarium and the zoo animals that educators from the Minneapolis Zoo brought to the auditorium.

Two days after Jeannie brought in the dog, Maureen asked again if Rag Mop was dead.

But Dr. Park told Jeannie not to worry. “Most kids with brain injury ask the same question every couple of min utes. You could walk out of the room and come back after getting a soda out of the machine and she’d greet you as if she hadn’t seen you in weeks,” Dr. Park told her. “That’s how short we thought her memory would be, but instead she is on the high end of the memory curve. She’s just stressed out. Her mind is whirling.”

In the last week, as her ticket out, Maureen had to do the equivalent of a marathon.

She had to get up, get to a chair, pull on a sports bra and panties, get into pajama pants and a T-shirt, put on her own socks, pour her own cereal out of a box, remember to ring for the nurse and tell her that she had to go to school at exactly nine in the morning, write a full sentence, read aloud, take a vision test, sing one verse of a folk song from memory after hearing it only two times, then walk to the

front door of the ward and back to her room without any help in locating it.

And Maureen did it all.

As she left the schoolroom for the last time, Maureen sang to Shannon, “If I had a hammer, I’d hit you in the knee.”

Shannon laughed uproariously.

After it was all over, Maureen slept for fourteen hours.

Finally, with fistfuls of prescriptions—antibiotics for her bladder infection, pills to help her establish a regular sleep schedule, anxiety medication to use as needed—and a binder of instructions and the gear for exercise, Maureen was released. As they did each time a kid went home, the nurses lined the hall and clapped. But Maureen felt some thing other than the pride and sense of celebration.

In the big, echoing lobby, she was seized by a crippling fear. So many people, so many open spaces and strange faces. It was as though she’d just hatched out of an egg. She thought of the blue-and-yellow striped halls of the unit with longing. She was safe there. Everything she thought she wanted so passionately to see and be in—the smells and sounds of spring, the sights and privacy of home—now seemed huge and threatening.

“I’m not really. I’m not real. I’m . . . I’m not ready,” she told Jeannie. She could see white vans with loops of wire on top and big letters on the sides. “Real. Feel. Ward. Safe. Have rehab. Have rehab.”

“We can wait for a moment,” Jeannie said. “Daddy is go ing to go around back where the ambulance is so that we

can avoid those TV people out there. Here’s Molly, Maury.” Molly had just run between rows of reporters and gave

Maureen a hug.

Maureen was stunned to see that Molly was dressed in a couple of T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops.

“Where is your coat?” she asked. “Cold. Coat. Cold.” Because she knew what the repetition meant now, al

though it still gave her the creeps, Molly said, “Maureen, it’s spring! It’s sixty-eight degrees outside!” She could see the reporters with their microphones gazing in at them and knew it would terrify Maureen if they began to shout questions at her. Even now a nurse was trying to see what legal issues they could use to get the trucks to move. Care ful planning went into choosing Sunday afternoon for the time to release Maureen. But the reporters had their sources, and were vigilant. Finally, the reporters were told by a hospital spokesperson that they were blocking access for patients. Reluctantly, they moved to the outer parking lot, where at least they would see the O’Malley family car and be able to follow.

That was Molly’s cue.

“See you at home, Maury,” she said, darting back toward the emergency bay.

The news vans did follow Bill as he headed for home. But it was Molly Schottmann who had volunteered to sit in the backseat, a cap with a fake blond ponytail attached to it on her head.

Jeannie and Maureen came later in the ambulance.

So, just as he had headed the crew that drove Maureen to the ED that night four months before, Carl was at the helm when the ambulance brought her home.

Jeannie was on top of the world. Her tulips had never looked so regal. Pat and Jack had come home, although it was finals week, and Henry had cleaned the house from the top down. Mary and Tom had steaks on the grill. Although Maureen would have to return two days a week to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, there was talk of a physical therapist in Bigelow who might do some of the work on a private basis. Bill had found a music teacher who would come to give Maury private lessons and bought an old upright piano from the parents of a student.

A return to some kind of ordinary life seemed possible, and ordinary had never seemed so precious.

Across the street, the Flannery house was silent, the blinds drawn.

Bill saw Sarah peek out of her bedroom window, then slip back inside as he walked down the drive to meet the ambulance.

The medics set up her wheelchair and slid Maureen into it. Bill unloaded her walker. Maureen waved shyly at her brothers, who gradually realized she wouldn’t break and rushed to kiss her and hug her. Bill began to push her up the front path.

But Maureen stopped him.

“Walk,” she said. Bill pressed his lips together and helped his frail daughter stand up.

She took her last few steps down her front walk as she had taken them four months ago—on her feet, without the use of her walker, while news photographers perched in trees and lay on the sidewalk to capture the moment. Her right foot dragged like a reluctant puppy, and she had to stop twice to get her balance. But she made it.

When she got to the steps, Bill scooped her up and car ried her in. While the boys unloaded Maureen’s bags and bags of equipment, which filled every available inch of floor space in the laundry room, Bill settled Maureen for the moment in his own big blue leather recliner.

He watched as she ran her hands over the arms of the chair. She glanced quizzically around the room, examin ing the fireplace, grinning at Rag Mop’s excited dance on the carpet in front of her. For a moment, Bill nearly rushed forward, thinking that Maureen was about to fall, but she was only bending down to smell the leather. She stroked it again and gazed up at him, a puzzled frown on her face.

“Daddy?” she asked, as though he had just returned from a long trip.

“Yes!” Bill said, and dropped to his knees. “Okay, Daddy. I am now,” said Maureen.

prom night
‌

After the nationwide splash of photographs for the “Risen from-Dead Girl Comes Home,” Henry wrote the final blog entry.

May 4

Luke 15: 4–6 What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilder- ness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice

with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.

One day before my birthday, my sister came home from Anne Morrow Lindbergh Children’s Hospital and Clinics. What a mouthful! No wonder they call it “Anne’s House”!

She was on her way home on December 23 last year, but it turned out to be a trip that took four months and involved some of the most heartbreaking and heartwarming events of any of our lives.

Although we would never have asked to have something like this happen, we have learned so much from it.

We have a new respect for the dedication and training and care that doctors give every day. We have, maybeevenmore, a greater understanding of how much devotion and compassion nurses and therapists have—every hour of every day.

It has been nearly five months since Maureen was injured and believed dead. But not one day of that time has she complained. She has grown angry and frustrated. She has had to do things over and over. She gets tired and discouraged. But she keeps us all going; and she comes roar ing back, more determined than ever, after every setback.

And you—all of you, here in our hometown,

and in Minneapolis and in Turin and Barce lona and El Paso and Miami and Juneau—have helped us to keep going, too.

Yeats wrote,

Out of sight is out of mind:

Long have man and woman-kind Heavy of will and light of mood, Taken away our wheaten food, Taken away our Altar stone;

Hail and rain and thunder alone, And red hearts we turn to grey, Are true till Time gutter away.

But our hearts never turned to grey, though they stayed true, because we were inspired by you and by our sister’s courage. Someday, I hope I will be able to tease her again and trip her again (yes, brothers look forward to these things!) and jump out from behind her door and make her scream.

For now, just seeing her sitting at the table trying to copy every letter of the alphabet is like watching an artist carve a statue out of a block of marble. We just don’t know how she does it. But every day, Maureen does it because she has to.

It was the longest winter of our lives.

Now it is spring. Maureen is alive and getting better.

Next year, she will go back to Bigelow High

as a junior with a special tutor provided by the state’s coordinator for disabilities services.

We will never forget the grief of this winter. As Shakespeare wrote,

For being both to me, both to each friend, I guess one angel in another’s hell.

We will never forget Bridget Flannery, who was like another little sister to us.

But we hope we have all learned to treasure life more fully and be better human beings.

With friendship, William Henry O’Malley

Henry was going to petition his college that his blog be counted as a literature course. There were more than a hundred entries. He realized that petitioning for credit was fairly slimy but figured that sympathy was on his side. He also had searched Shakespeare and Yeats for appropri ate quotations for each entry, so, in a sense, it was a literary endeavor. And his mom was always good for a quote from Grandma’s old Bible.

Though Maureen had only been home for a week, Molly and Danny planned a “quiet” surprise birthday party for her the following Saturday.

Inevitably, word got out. All of the cheerleaders, along with about sixty other class friends—everyone but the weirdest Goths and even some of them—came to welcome

Maureen home. They brought her music boxes and ear rings and bracelets and sweaters, gift certificates for books and movies, stuffed animals, and a big straw hat for read ing in the sun—all tributes for the miracle of her being re stored to them. Brandon Hillier gave her a lawn chair that popped open on its own. Danny planted a rose tree where Maury could see it from her hospital bed in what used to be Coach’s office (she couldn’t manage stairs yet). The girls on the squad and Eddy chipped in and bought her a DishDelish jogging suit and a new letter jacket with her se nior letter on it—despite the fact that she would never be a cheerleader again.