Stronger (6 page)

I probably said, “Thank you for being here.”

There was no place I’d rather have been. That was what Erin told me later. She said that when she saw me smile, she knew I was still her person. And she knew this was where she wanted to be. With me.

I didn’t sleep that night, so I was awake when the FBI agents arrived early on Wednesday morning. Again, they gave me a stack of photographs without explanation. Again, I studied every face. None looked like the guy I had seen, and only a few fit my general description. I think they were looking for accomplices. They wanted to know if I had noticed any of these people in the crowd. I told them I hadn’t. The guy had been alone.

“We’d like to bring in a sketch artist,” they said.

“Sure,” I replied.

“But only after his surgery,” a nurse added.

The original amputation of my legs had been an emergency procedure. They chopped through my knees and sealed the wounds to save my life. Now I needed a formal amputation to even my legs and shape my stumps for prosthetics. Legs the same length would mean the same amount of work on both sides. Over time, this would help prevent back and hip pain, common problems for people with artificial legs. The better this surgery went, explained my surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey Kalish, the easier it would be for me to walk again.

And that was all I wanted. I wanted to walk.

The surgery took several hours, as Dr. Kalish separated each layer of skin, tissue, and muscle in my legs. He cut each layer a little shorter than the one beside it, angling inward with the outer layers longest. Lastly, he sawed off the ends of my femurs and tucked the muscles, then the arteries, then my fatty tissues and nerves, around them. My skin came last, pulled together at the ends to encase everything inside. Like a sausage. When I woke up that afternoon, I was four inches shorter, and my legs were on fire. Bloody bandages were wrapped around the ends, but there were no stitches. The wounds would be left open for a few days, so that blood and fluid could drain.

When the FBI sketch artist arrived soon after, the nurses weren’t happy.

“It’s up to Jeff,” they told the FBI while glancing at me, clearly trying to convince me to send them away. They wanted to catch the bombers as much as anyone, but I was in a delicate condition. I had just woken up from major surgery. I had bleeding wounds. I was susceptible to infections, infarctions, and a hundred other types of medical-sounding stuff.

I hate medical-sounding stuff.

But I wanted to work with the sketch artist. I wanted to do my part. We went over it again and again: talking, erasing, drawing. Stopping while I tried to picture the face of the killer, the guy who stared at me, all business, secretly excited by the fact that he was taking my life. It took two hours, but in the end, I was amazed. The drawing looked exactly like the guy who had stood beside me.

That evening, the press later reported, the police found a suspect in store surveillance video taken near the scene, along with a possible accomplice. My description was essential, they said, because FBI experts had been sifting through hundreds of hours of footage, featuring thousands of faces. It was vital to narrow the focus.

I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know how much I really helped, because the FBI agents never came back. I meet with the FBI every month, just like many other victims, so they can fill me in on the case, and ask me a few questions if needed, but they don’t tell me much.

I talk with state and local cops all the time, though. I meet them at charity events, or they come over and shake my hand when I’m out.

“We heard about what you did,” they tell me. “Identifying those guys.”

“It was nothing,” I say. “Just trying to do my part.”

“No, Jeff,” they tell me. “It wasn’t nothing.” Sometimes I feel like they want to tell me more, but they can’t. I understand. It’s an ongoing investigation. It’s strictly need-to-know, and I’m a civilian. I don’t have a need. “You should be proud,” they tell me. “You’re a big part of this. You got the ball rolling.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, laughing. “But you guys are the heroes. You nailed them.”

“No,” they always say. “We’re not heroes. We were just doing our jobs.”

6.

P
eople always want to know how I felt in those first few days. Was I guilty that I hadn’t done more to stop the bombing? Was I angry? Was I afraid? Was I Boston Strong?

No, I was happy to be alive.

Besides that, I was in pain. It was intense physical pain, the kind that doesn’t leave you much energy for anything else. It was kind of like when you really have to go to the bathroom, I mean, like a real emergency, when you think you might not make it. You can’t focus on anything else, right?

My pain was like that. The hospital had me on a four-hour cycle of pain medication, but even when the pills were at their strongest, I hurt. Everywhere. My arm where shrapnel had punctured it, my stomach where they had sliced me open for surgery. With both my eardrums ruptured, my head was always ringing. The burns on my back were so raw, it was uncomfortable to lie on them, but even more uncomfortable to move. I couldn’t yet roll onto my side, but every time I moved even a few inches, it felt like my skin was sliding off.

And every time my legs touched anything—the sheets, my IV tubes, each other—pain shot through my body. The nerves in my legs were lit up by the blast, and they were ready to fire. Mostly the pain was sharp, like needles, but sometimes it would increase without warning, until it felt like someone was pounding the ends of my legs with a baseball bat. Coffee would cramp my legs, so I only drank it once in the hospital. Certain sounds and smells would set off convulsions in my thighs, sending pain cascading through my torso and down into my phantom limbs.

I tried to ignore it. I had a morphine button I could push, but I tried not to use it. I talked with my family. I tried to watch the news, but all they talked about was the bombing. And every time they talked about the bombing, sooner or later, they’d show pictures of explosions and blood, and they’d show that photograph of me in the wheelchair.

So I watched a lot of ESPN, drowning the hours in scores and highlights. It was late in the hockey season, but early for baseball. The Red Sox were in Cleveland. I watched as Victorino slapped in a few runs, and Aceves melted down in the sixth, but I was watching from a different planet. I was on a lot of medication; I felt best when the world just floated past.

I knew I needed to stay positive, especially around Mom. That was my priority. Mom had always struggled. She had worried about me all my life, even when I was a little kid. I didn’t have to see her red eyes and drawn face to know this was killing her. So I never told her about my pain. I called her in right after taking my medicine, so I was less likely to wince or have a panic attack. I tried not to complain.

“I knew there were two ways you could go,” Mom tells me now, her hands still shaking. “You could be…” She stops. Mom doesn’t say
depressed
, because she doesn’t like that word, but that’s what she means. “You could have taken it hard, Jeff. Or you could be Bauman.”

That’s her nickname for me. Mom calls me Bauman or Bo. Jeff is my dad’s name.

“I don’t know if you remember…”

“I don’t, Mom,” I tell her, knowing what’s coming.

“… we were all standing over you.”

“I know. It’s creepy.”

“And you opened your eyes. This was early, maybe Tuesday, so we weren’t expecting it. We didn’t know what to say. Your eyes went from one person to the next, and nobody was sure whether you recognized them or not. Finally, you tried to speak. But you couldn’t. So it must have been Tuesday, right? Anyway, I bent down so you could whisper in my ear.

“ ‘What is this,’ you whispered, ‘a funeral viewing? Everybody sit down.’ ”

Mom usually cries when she tells that story. I’ve heard it five times, and maybe four of those times she’s ended in tears. That’s how important it is to her.

“That’s when I knew,” she says. “You were still my Jeffrey. You weren’t going to be… sad. You were Bauman strong.”

I’m not sure about Mom’s story. There are certain parts of it that don’t quite work. I was in the emergency intensive care unit, for one thing, so only two people were allowed in my room at a time. I know my family constantly broke that rule (we aren’t the best at following rules), but how could the whole family have been there?

And when I woke up, I was on a breathing tube. How could I have whispered even those two sentences to her?

But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe her. In fact, I know it’s true, that the moment
must
have happened, because it means so much to her. I know Mom. I know how her worry would have crushed her. She cries now, listing the things I can’t do: play hockey (I quit playing when I was thirteen), ride a bicycle (I don’t even own one), run a marathon (that was never gonna happen). I can imagine how she felt, worrying that I would never smile and be happy again.

And besides, my brother Tim tells a similar story. In his version, everyone was there, and he was squeezing my hand, asking if I knew who he was, when I made the joke.

So maybe it happened on Wednesday, after my third surgery. Or maybe it happened on Monday night, before my second surgery. Maybe they had me off the breathing tube for a while, before slicing open my stomach and poking around inside me.

It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter if it never quite happened like that. Everybody has a story about those days, which they swear is true, even though none of the stories are the same. They say it happened on Tuesday, while someone else swears it was the next week.

Or they say, “I remember, because I was there,” when someone else knows for certain, for
certain
, that he was the only one in my room.

I don’t remember my funeral visitation joke, but it feels right, because that was exactly how I tried to be: the same Jeff. Happy-go-lucky. Smiling. Making a joke out of everything, even the worst of things.

It was hard. Mom fidgeted whenever she was in my room, like she didn’t know what to do with herself. Like she was scared to be around me. Aunt Jenn did most of the talking. Mom stood in the background, staring at me, in a way that said both
I love you more than anything
and
I am so sad when I look at you
.

She felt sorry for me. I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me.

And she kept asking me how I was doing.

I hated that question.

What did she want me to say?
I love it here! I’m doing swell!

Most of my relatives were like that. They were too attentive: asking me if I was all right every time I winced, wondering what they could do for me. Even my brother Tim treated me like an invalid.

“Jeff, you all right, bro? Want me to call the nurse? How about some water? Does your leg hurt?”

Yes, jerk-face, my leg hurts! My legs feel like Popsicle sticks some asshole kid snapped in half.

It was better with Erin. With Erin, I didn’t feel any pressure. We could sit in the room together, barely talking, and be happy.

I never doubted her. We had been together for only a year. Less than a month before the bombing, we had broken up. She would never have just left me lying in the hospital, but she could have drifted away. She liked routine. She had a plan for her life. A legless boyfriend who needed her for emotional and practical support—who else was going to adjust my hospital gown?—was never in her plans.

Yet the first thing I did, whenever I woke up, was ask for Erin.

And she was there.

It was Erin who told me the investigation was stalled. She told me about the media crush. She told me that as soon as they walked outside the hospital, reporters were shoving cameras in her face. A British television show had lifted a picture of her and me together from her Facebook page. Now every station was showing it. It was the standard “before” picture of the legless man.

“Your dad keeps talking to the press,” Erin said sadly. I think she had this idea that, if we all stayed quiet, the attention would go away.

“It’s his decision,” I said.

She told me about other families in the intensive care unit, like the Odoms, who were from California. Mr. Odom’s son-in-law played for the Revolution, Boston’s professional soccer team. His daughter had been running in the marathon. His wife survived the bombing untouched, but a large piece of shrapnel had almost severed Mr. Odom’s leg at the hip. His wife and daughter had been at the hospital with him ever since.