My Own Two Feet

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. It wasn’t what I saw, at first, that made me realize where I was. It was the smell—something antiseptic--and a faint odor of blood. When I opened my eyes, the light washed over everything. I couldn’t take in one single image, so I closed them and opened them more slowly. I was in bed, saw my feet straining under a sheet pulled tight at the corners. They were tipped toward each other, sad and unused. I heard the voices of other people in the room. One was a man, leaned over the bed—too close, delicate networks of wrinkles under his eyes. He had an olive complexion and was handsome, still had most of his hair, though clearly middle aged. He wore a polo shirt and smelled slightly of body odor. Dark, corky hair covered his forearms. There was a woman, also, leaned against the wall at the far side of the room. She was younger but with the same skin tone. They must be related, I thought.

“Look! She’s coming around!” he said. “Call the doctor!” He was so close, my eyes fluttered with his breath.

The girl put a hand up to her chest. I thought she looked like a picture, wearing a sundress belted at the waist. She backed out of the room, eyes never leaving me.

Then there were feet shuffling and the bang of a door hitting a rubber stopper.

I was in a hospital. My stomach swelled under the covers.

The man gripped the rails of my bed tightly. I wanted to wave them away, but for the pain. The pain was four walls that threatened to crash in on me. I went to open my mouth to ask for help but didn’t know how.

A woman in dark blue scrubs came in, stethoscope draped around her neck. She moved with quick steps. The girl did not come back.

A tight belt pulled painfully around my middle. Why was the man so happy? He laughed and repeated a name. My name? Over and over, he said, “Lynn, I can’t believe it!” “Lynn, you’re up. You came back to me—to us!”

The woman in scrubs motioned for him to step away from the bed.

I didn’t know who I was. More accurately, I didn’t know who I was to the people around me. Each time the pain subsided, this awareness flared. I was a person, yes, but one without a past. I must be dreaming.

I bent over with a contraction. The man next to me rubbed my back sympathetically.

“Don’t” I said breathlessly, falling back against the bed.

The woman in scrubs took charge. “Listen to me. You’re having a baby. You had a fall and you’ve been in a semi-comatose state. Your husband brought you in.” She nodded at the man. She flashed a light into my eyes. “We’re going to take care of you.” She pressed on my abdomen and asked, “Do you know where you are?” “What is your name?” When I didn’t answer, she muttered, “We’ll take care of that later.”

“Ooooh…” I moaned, my voice not feeling like mine. She lifted my robe.

“You’ll have to leave,” she told the man who raised his arms in disbelief.

I tried to draw my knees up, but I was too large. I teetered on the edge of belief as if reality were the top of a tall diving board.

I choked the question out between breaths, “I’m having a baby?” I didn’t remember being pregnant.

My daughter was born at 8:04 p.m. I didn’t see her again until I left the hospital. 

***

“Though this is unusual, spontaneous delivery in this case is not completely uncommon,” the doctor said. The man who she said was my husband sat next to me at the head of my bed. He clasped his hands and kept rubbing one in the palm of the other. The doctor folded her arms and legs across her body as if she had all the time in the world for me.

The man took my hand. It was clammy. I felt too low in the bed, but I was afraid to move. I took my hand away, straightened the sheets across myself protectively. He shifted in his chair. The doctor looked straight at him.

I hoped that she would say it, not me. I hoped she could see what was happening to me.

Then she did, looking directly into my eyes, “It’s also not uncommon for you not to remember things.” Pause. “With a head injury.” She got up and shone a penlight into my eyes again.

My husband jumped out of his seat and paced. “Things!” he muttered to no one, but we could hear. “We’ve been married for five years!”

The doctor subtly pushed her hands down as if to say, “You’re making it worse.”

“Is there someone you can call for her?” And to me, “Is there something we can bring you? Anything at all?”

She tried, even in the question, for me to remember. I couldn’t. Everything felt strange and dangerous. My husband had stopped pacing but was standing, arms folded. He put a hand to his forehead. “Yes, a sister. She’s close to her sister. Of course. Oh geez, I didn’t have a chance to call.” He stumbled over his words. “She lives out of—away--, and everything happened so fast.” He left then, saying he’d check on me later but also had to feed the baby who was in the NICU.

The doctor assured me they would work with me, that there was a good chance everything would return to normal. She patted my feet as she left. “I’ll make sure they give you space. If there’s anything you want, no matter how silly you think it is, they should bring it to you.”

A certain color, picture, a smell. Anything could bring the memory back.

I learned there were three of them: a brother (my husband), his younger sister, and his mother, who had been in the delivery room, but I hadn’t noticed. That I didn’t live close to my family. These three—and now the baby-- were my family. My heart beat hard when he told me all this, as if I might be winning the lottery or hearing a bad diagnosis, I didn’t know which.

A suffocating fog filled the place of my memory. Or, I was locked in a white walled room with nothing but a clock where, except for its ticking, the passage of time was meaningless.

They came and went, sat across from my bed for hours. The mother read or did crossword puzzles. My husband always pulled his chair close and made attempts to hold my hand, but I felt better with him gone.

***

No one had come into my room for a while. The light was difficult to perceive behind the heavy curtains, though I felt a shift. I kept looking towards the door for the clock, but it was above my head. Six o’clock. The letter “B” was in my head. Where did I live? Bay St. Louis? Bakersville? Barataria? None of them sounded right. Had they told me? They could have. Maybe I never asked. The letter swirled in my head for some reason or none at all.

A soft tapping at the door. “Come in.”

My mother-in-law struggled to enter. She was squat and shriveled with osteoporosis and held a glass baking dish covered in foil. Once inside, she lifted it in triumph. “You hungry!” she exclaimed in accented English. “They all go eat but this is better. Spend all that money, for what?” Her eyes were kind.

I sat up. Lasagna. It did smell good, and it was still warm. She soothed herself with conversation. “It’s ok you don’t remember. You will. You will.” She nodded. “Accident happen always.” And after a while: “You remember. He’s a good man.” 

Her reassurances were like missiles in a war. The truth was buried with them.

“How did I get here?” I asked.

“You have something,” she indicated in the air next to her own lip. She gave me a hand towel from her purse. I wiped a bit of sauce away. Odd thing to have in your purse. “He call us right away. Say you fall. Your stomach” she puffed her cheeks, drew a big circle in the air, “And your blood pressure… ” She whistled to indicate a drop. She waved a hand. “You women doing too much.”

“Where’d they find me?” Maybe knowing would jog my memory of the house to which I would soon return.

She shook her head. I didn’t want to pressure her. She bobbled with a slight tremor, wrinkles gathered at the corners of pursed lips. She raised her shoulders. “There was blood here,” she pointed at her own nose. “I know you don’t remember.” She didn’t say, “anyone,” or “anything.”

Maybe I could learn to love them. When she left, I picked up the small hand towel and pressed it to my face. It was expensive, thick and soft, monogrammed with the letters LM. Lynn Morgan? Lynn Mitchell? Who was I? Though it didn’t smell like anything, it felt familiar. The absence of odor was telling.

“There was blood,” the old lady had said. Just under my nose, like she showed me? On the wall? Beside me? Was there a pool of it under me? I felt behind my ears on both sides. Where was I injured?

If I weren’t so scared, I’d ask for a mirror. I held my hands up. Thin, brown marks circled my wrists like tennis bracelets. It had been explained to me that I was a self-harm risk, and my wrists had been cuffed to the hospital bed--nights only. Surely, bad things had happened here, but I was just as sure worse things happened to put me here. As I drifted to sleep, my husband’s face flashed in my mind, a sun at the center of an otherwise black galaxy of thought.

***

The night nurse came in to take me to the toilet. She was blonde and cheery. She guided me carefully to the en suite and asked if I could make it to the commode if I used the handrails. I nodded. We made it back to the bed. “Look at you!” she exclaimed. “And all by yourself!” Except it wasn’t. I suddenly wanted my things.

“Do I have a purse?” I asked. Then, more urgently, “I want my purse, my things. Please.”

She stared at me for a beat and then remembered herself. “Sure! It’s not much,” she warned me, “but you’re certainly welcome to it.” She left and came back quickly with an opaque white bag, bulging slightly. I unzipped it and dumped everything. There was a bloody shirt, a pair of stretchy pants, and underwear. A watch, too. Apparently, everything I’d had on that day. Leaning over the bed, I cried.

She comforted me. “Don’t worry! You’re doing so well. You’ll get to go home soon! I can call the social worker for you, hon,” she said when I didn’t stop crying. “She’ll be in first thing. There-there.”

***

We were alone for the first time that night. “Why are you here so late?”

“The baby eats every two hours.” He took my hand and rubbed the top of it, still dotted with a small mark where one of the IVs had been placed. “Your sister will be here tomorrow. And then hopefully, we can go home.”

“She called?”

“We talked to her.”

Why hadn’t he brought the phone to me? Voices could help you remember. That’s what the doctor said.

“I know you don’t remember, but we have a good life. I’ve been good to you.”

Instead of answering him, I asked, “What is my sister’s name?”

“Cecelia.”

I felt nothing. I turned over to go to sleep. I would get better when Cecelia came.

I felt the washcloth under my hand and thought to ask. “What’s my name?”

“Lynn Murphy. We’re the Murphys.”

I rubbed the embroidered letter, felt its smooth indentation in the fabric. I remembered. Not him, but I remembered something. I held the small towel up. “This is ours, and…” I sputtered my words, “I would heat it up in the microwave.” I laughed, a small sound.

“What?” he didn’t understand.

“I’d rub the warm cloth over my face.” I’d make it almost too hot to stand, especially when I was tired or fed up. “I washed my face with it.”

He smiled but didn’t get it.

***

That night I remembered what really happened. It was like a dream tinged with the horror of reality, the meaning blurred but the images in sharp relief. An old family picture where someone had to point out a relative because maybe they’d lost weight or got really tall so that you forgot what they looked like except the person you couldn’t remember was yourself. Like you didn’t remember being in the picture at all.

It was morning and the doctor had just left. My husband helped me pack up. I didn’t tell him that I remembered. I imagined he wanted my mind to stay a blank slate of memory, a tablet he could scribble on in meaningless, uncaring circles.

“What happened?” I asked in the quiet of her wake. We were waiting for the social worker because we were leaving.

“You fell,” he said. “Because of the baby, the weight of the baby.” Like his mother, he gestured with his hands. “Your blood pressure...” I turned away from him, threw some small soaps in a plastic bag.

Later, the social worker asked, “Is there any reason you shouldn’t go home?” She read the question off a list. My husband stood behind her and to the right, in front of the door. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay either.

“No,” I answered. “I remember enough,” though I didn’t.

She didn’t say anything just then. I wondered if she could feel my lie. “I’ll be back,” she said. “Just a few more things, and then you’re free to go home and be with your family.” She smiled wide and closed lipped.

My husband rocked on his feet, hands in pockets. He moved slightly to let her out. Again, he said to me, “Things will get better. You’ll see. We have each other, and now our baby.” He smiled.

The social worker returned with handouts explaining the baby’s stay in the NICU--probably for a few more days--, but we could visit.

“You’re going to be ok,” the social worker reassured me, arm around my shoulder.”

I wasn’t listening, but I smiled too, knowing I was on my own. I grabbed my bag of used clothes and soaps and looked at her. “I know. I’m ready to go.”