Resurgence (16 page)
“Then you’re probably aware that neurology has many subspecialties,” he says as preface to a minute or two of spoken boilerplate.
She listens without bothering to take notes.
“When Mr. Isaacs arranged for this interview, he vouched for your preliminary knowledge of Mr. Elliot’s treatment, so I’ll assume you’re aware it was a team effort—an interdisciplinary effort, I should say.”
“I am aware,” she says with a slight edge of impatience. “I am also aware Mr. Elliot’s perceived neurological deficit wasn’t a precise fit with any single one of those disciplines, hence the team approach.”
They match redundancy with redundancy for another couple of minutes. Traumatic brain injury, nontraumatic brain injury, acquired brain injury, cerebral hypoxia, losses in areas of cognition, language, memory, concentration, reasoning, and problem solving are a few of the terms and conditions falling on her now deaf ears as she questions why Nate recommended that she interview this particular doctor, a Behavioral Neurologist, according to her notes.
“It was only after Mr. Elliot’s physical condition had improved enough for him to endure longer and more intense periods of verbal probing that anyone considered that we could be dealing with a dissociative disorder.”
Laurel keys on the words “endure” and “intense,” and winces as she tunes back in. The doctor reinforces her understanding that a dissociative disorder is usually brought on by extraordinary stress, and that can include witnessing as well as experiencing an overwhelming event.
“Such as a catastrophic accident resulting in loss of life,” she says.
“Yes,” he answers. “That’s the obvious factor in Mr. Elliot’s case, but my findings could point to a stressor other than the obvious.”
“Oh?” Laurel is all ears now, pen and pad at the ready.
“Yes. And because this form of acute mental decompensation does not automatically preclude all forms of cognition—the reason Mr. Elliot could cooperate, and to some extent, actively participate in his physical rehabilitation—he was able to react to a specific stimulus in a way that suggested the accident itself may not have been the precipitating cause of his retreat.”
“Good lord! What could be worse than witnessing your own near-demise and the demise of your passenger?” Laurel blurts. “And do I really want to know what the specific stimulus was that produced this reaction?”
“No question that an accident of this magnitude was adequate to send him into hibernation, as he called it on his recent visit here. But before I go on, I want to assure you the stimulus was nothing faintly medieval. I refer only to the verbal probing mentioned earlier, and to a specific instance when the therapist used a later entry point. Allow me to explain.”
“Please do.”
“Toward the end of Mr. Elliot’s stay with us, we drilled him over and over with details of the accident.”
“Who supplied those details?”
“Nate Isaacs, Mr. Elliot’s manager, who was first on the scene, as you’re probably aware.”
“I am.”
“The goal was to find an entry point, pinpoint the moment or event within a series of events that caused him to shut down, and employ it as a reverse catalyst, so to speak. Until this particular day, all the emphasis was placed on events leading up to the accident and the accident itself—with no results, I should add. But when the therapist began inputting details of the immediate aftermath and the rescue effort—”
“Who was the therapist?”
“I was.”
“I thought so. Please continue.”
“I got a reaction. His face registered anger at first, then contorted with what’s best described as anguish. He frowned intensely—mightily. His brows knit until they resembled a pair of caterpillars in conflict—dueling caterpillars—and then it was over as suddenly as it occurred. I immediately repeated the stimulus, to no avail, and subsequent efforts failed as well, but that isolated incident became the basis on which we felt we could send him home with legitimate hope that he might one day be reachable.”
All she can think of for a moment is dueling caterpillars and what a writer with a knack for nonsense verse could do with that hilarious imagery. Then whimsy escapes her like air leaving a burst balloon and the image that remains is of Colin, shipped home with nothing but hope to cling to. But it was legitimate hope, the man said.
“Ms. Chandler? Are you still there? I have time for a few questions if you have any.”
“I do and I’ll be brief. What did you say when you produced this reaction? Do you remember your exact words?”
“Yes. I was speaking of his wife’s death and sparing none of the gruesome details. It was when I said ‘your wife was decapitated in the accident’ that he reacted as I’ve described.”
“I see,” she says and stiffens slightly. Of all the gruesome details recounted to her by Nate that difficult night in his Manhattan kitchen, this is the detail she least wanted to hear designated the ultimate stressor. Better that Colin would have withdrawn for another reason, one less apt to suggest that he couldn’t deal with the ghastly circumstances of Aurora’s death, and perhaps did not want to go on without her. But why should this matter now? The woman is dead, after all, and by all outward signs, Colin’s love for her is dead too.
“Is he ever likely to flash back on that stressor?” Laurel says.
“I’m inclined to doubt it. Of course if he encountered a precise set of provocations or was met with another monumental stressor—and the odds against either are astronomical—he might return to the galvanizing event, which is not to say that he would again withdraw, I hasten to add.”
With a flourish of banalities designed to conceal her low opinion of the doctor’s contribution, she steers the conversation to an end. She sets aside the legal pad containing a generous sampling of doodles and opinionated comment in addition to the dutiful notes taken on the supposed stressor. Stressor. Not a word she’ll use again. Not if she can help it. If Nate were not an ocean away and perhaps not even awake yet, she would have more questions for him right now than she did for Dr. Kice.
Her eyebrows may well be in dueling caterpillar mode as she saves her work and shuts down the computer. She leaves the room without determining if the answering machine is activated and the fax machine set to receive. Doesn’t really matter, she doesn’t really care. Not while she’s in the grip of this wholly unexpected and unexplainable fit of jealousy that stays with her until she enters Simon’s room in time to catch him surfacing from his nap.
He’s as apt to cry as display one of his diffident smiles when he’s waking. Toward encouraging the smile, she singsongs the first Jeremiah Barely-There verse she ever heard and is rewarded with a snatch of laughter sufficient to chase away any lingering specters of Aurora, headless or otherwise.
“Silly,” he says.
“Yes, darling . . . silly indeed.”
Three days after the phone session with the Denver neurologist, Christian Thorne is unexpectedly available to add his contribution to the writing project.
“I didn’t think you’d have time for this until after the memorial concert,” Laurel says as they enter the winter parlor, his choice of venue—apparently everyone’s choice of venue when it comes to private discussions. The most recent, last night’s argument with Rachel about her wrongheaded desire to leave Terra Firma, is still fresh in her mind when Laurel, armed with a fresh legal pad and a clutch of pens, gets comfortable in her usual armchair with the usual little cat on her lap.
“I’m making time,” Chris says and settles on a straight chair at the game table, where his pensive demeanor reminisces the day they all tried to make sense of an untimely death. He begins without urging, falling somewhere in between Rayce Vaughn and Nate Isaacs as a narrator. He’s neither as voluble as Rayce, nor as adept as Nate, but that doesn’t hamper his ability to get the story across. Well spoken despite an admitted lack of formal education, he does, however, have a tendency to wander. Her first page of notes therefore includes a generous sprinkling of doodles reminiscent of the written record of the phone interview with the Denver doctor
After his lengthy and disjointed description of Colin’s first few months at home, impatience gets the best of her and she intrudes with questions that probably should wait until later.
“What did he say first?” she asks. “Were you there for it?”
“You mean was there a fuckreka moment?”
“Fuckreka?”
“Sorry, that’s a Rayce expression. He’d say that instead of ‘fuckin’ eureka’ whenever there was one of those big light bulb moments of comprehension. But that’s not the way Colin came out of it, luv. His reentry was gradual-like. He came back to us a little at a time.”
“I see.”
“One day he’d show a flicker of interest in one thing, another day he’d spark on something else. The lot of us were most hopeful the day he scooped up Simon, who was screaming as usual, and attempted to quiet him. I guess if you wanted to pick a first word, it could be ‘shhhh.’”
Chris goes on to describe a dozen other instances when Colin reacted either to Simon or Anthony, not always with utterances, sometimes with actions. Gestures. Fatherly gestures. She lets the word pictures warm her for a moment before posing the obvious question about the boys’ reaction to their father’s reemergence.
“Our Simon didn’t show much reaction beyond his usual need to be comforted. You gotta remember this started happening almost a year ago, so the lad wasn’t yet two, and not that practiced at walking and talking himself when Colin started coming round.”
“Oh, of course. And Anthony, how did he respond to his father’s renewed attention?”
“Anthony . . . well, I guess you know the lad’s had a bit of a rough go of it, so getting his dad back was a massive event in his young life. When communications really began opening up—when Colin began talking to him regularly and telling him funny stories, the lad could hardly be torn away from his dad to go to school. Didn’t want Colin out of his sight for a minute, and who could blame him, virtual orphan he was for all those months.”
“What of you and the others who rallied around the cause? Were you following any specific protocol?”
“If you mean professional protocol, no. We called ourselves the band of mates and went at him without a song sheet, as Rayce liked to put it.”
“So by exposing him to constant stimuli—your presence, evocative music, pertinent readings, reminders of his stage career—you were just winging it. No one from the Fortescue Center laid out a plan for you to follow.”
“If you mean Dr. Kice—again, no.”
“Then you know the good doctor and what he felt was the catalyst to Colin’s disconnect.”
“I met with Dr. Kice both times I looked in on Colin in Denver, so I was familiar with what he was doing. But I wasn’t always in agreement. Especially not near the end of Colin’s stay there when Kice went rather brutal with all the emphasis put on the blood and gore of the matter.”
‘Blood and gore of the matter’ readily translates to ‘gruesome nature of Aurora’s death’ in Laurel’s mind. Until now, she didn’t realize how much she wanted Chris to share her disdain for that theory until her held breath came out in a quiet sigh of relief at his reply.
Leaving nothing to chance or misinterpretation, she then dares ask if Chris and the so-called band of mates ever raised the subject of Aurora in a less jolting way.
“Yeah, she inevitably got mention, goin’ all the way back to when Nate first told the unresponsive Colin she died in the accident. That was back in Michigan, but I guess you’d know that. What you maybe don’t know is that when Colin came back to us, it was like he already knew she was dead. Nobody had to tell the responsive Colin. In fact, early on in the coming-out period I heard him telling Anthony his mum was gone for good, and he didn’t sound at all broken up about it—he sounded like it was old news he was telling over for the hundredth time.”
“Well, they say comatose patients often absorb bits and pieces of what’s said in their presence,” Laurel says.
“I think you’re forgetting he was never in a conventional coma, and because he wasn’t, I think he’s actually aware of everything that went on round him at the time, and just chooses not to dredge some of it up.”
“I see. He’s told me he can’t remember much of anything that happened after . . . after he recovered Aurora at the truck stop.”
“Can’t or won’t? And who’d blame him if he did want to keep all that shite buried.”
Before she can pursue that theory, Gemma Earle raps on the open door and enters carrying a tea tray with Simon fast on her heels.
“She fixed me,” Simon says of Gemma, and clambers onto Laurel’s lap without thought for either the cat or the writing materials resting on the arm of the chair. No real harm is done, so he’s allowed to remain while she and Chris go through the motions of taking a break neither of them want. When they resume, with Simon playing on the floor with his endless supply of snap-together blocks, Laurel takes a new direction.
“Nate said that when you and Susa came to Michigan to take the baby home, you all recognized that even if Colin could be fully restored in mind and body, he’d never be the same person he once was.”