Eye Contact Page 5

  “Seriously, what’s going on? You look like you’re ill or something.”

  “I said I’m fine. I just need to eat something,” I insisted while stepping onto the elevator. She stayed on the other side as the doors started to close, looking at me like she smelled something foul.

  Chapter 6

  Andie

  You would never know that the resident of 814 Melrose Avenue was agoraphobic. The house was well maintained, the lawn and landscaping always manicured, complete with flower beds that added cheer and colorful curb appeal. There was even a wreath on the door that changed with the seasons, but inside, my mother was struggling. She was undergoing in-home therapy sessions twice a week and consistently reported to me that she was improving and becoming more comfortable, but outwardly, I never saw a difference. I saw her folding more and more into herself as time went on, and while it broke my heart, I didn’t know how to help her.

  Luckily, my parents had always been financially intelligent and had made wise and conservative investment choices throughout their lives. My father had excellent life insurance coverage, setting her up to not want for anything after he passed, and for the past few years, my mother had fortunately qualified for disability coverage. I’d been able to make a few arrangements along the way to make her everyday life easier, including regular grocery delivery, bundling of her mail with doorstep drop-off, and a scheduled lawn service. All of those things combined with visits as often as I could work them in meant she’d been able to maintain appearances of normalcy and still remain connected to me. She even had a few close friends from her teaching days who continued to have a presence in her life throughout the years. They’d come over at least once a month and call it a book club, but I suspected their conversation rarely stayed on the topics of the book. The fact that she had good friends who cared about her took a huge burden off of me, and they were actually really sweet women.

  Although I was always closer to my father, I spent the majority of my time as a child and adolescent with my mother. She homeschooled me from a young age, way before homeschooling became so mainstream and common. I remembered she always demanded perfection. She saw that I was smart, quick to learn, and intellectually gifted, and she never accepted anything less than a stellar academic performance from me. My uncanny ability to remember pretty much anything I read or studied made it pretty simple for me to meet her expectations, which for me were always just normal. My father was always amazed at my gifts and used to tell me my brain was the “most brilliant mind he had ever seen.”

  When I was six years old—already testing at a reading level of a fifth grader, per my mother—my dad came into my room early one morning and told me he wanted me to play a little game with him. Wanting to do anything to please him, I instantly agreed and my interest perked up. He handed me a sheet of paper with typed wording on it, a few lines of text from some pathology report.

  Specimen, obtained via punch biopsy from the left axillary, is bisected and entirely submitted in one cassette for microscopic examination.

  It certainly wasn’t language that meant anything to me at the time. He asked me to look at the sheet of paper for a few seconds. When I started to read it to him, the words awkward to pronounce and not meaningful since I didn’t know the definition of most of them at that point in my life, he stopped me.

  “No, don’t read them to me left to right—read them to me backward.” He gently took the paper out of my hand and finished his strange request. “Can you tell me the words on the paper backward? Starting with the last word you read and going the other way, can you tell me what you saw?”

  I found it peculiar but had no trouble immediately reciting the words that were imprinted on my mind as if the paper was still right in front of my eyes.

  “Examination microscopic for cassette one in submitted entirely and bisected is axillary left the from biopsy punch via obtained specimen…but that doesn’t make sense, Daddy.”

  “Unbelievable,” he murmured with astonished eyes and an exhalation as he pulled me into a tight hug.

  Having no idea what the point of the ‘game’ was but feeling happy that I had so obviously pleased him, I was excited. His approval meant everything to me. I overheard him telling my mother what had happened later that evening when I was supposed to be asleep.

  “She’s got a photographic memory, Kathy! A true textbook case of photographic memory. You should have seen it.”

  “Oh, Frank, you need to leave her alone,” she retorted. “You’re going to make her feel like a freak. I don’t want you putting pressure on her. She’s just a kid.”

  “I’m not. I would never, but do you know what this means for her?” He spoke quickly and with such excitement in his voice. “She can do anything—be anything!”

  “Right now I just want her to be a kid. She’s six years old, for Pete’s sake.”

  That night, my little six-year-old mind couldn’t grasp what they were arguing about exactly, but things did begin to change after that day. My mom, having seemed to disapprove of my little reading test at the time, soon after started giving me little tests and tasks of her own. She was always so amazed by my ability to recall anything visual put in front of me. It started with words and progressed to art. Paintings, drawings, even photographs, placed in front of me for a few seconds at a time and then taken away, with questions about colors, shapes, down to small details, all of which I was able to see right in front of me like the image was branded into the blank space before my eyes. When her questions were answered, almost always correctly, her facial expressions revealed shock and awe and shear amazement, but never a look of satisfaction. I constantly got the feeling that she was forever on a quest to stump me, wanting me to fail. I think I somehow felt it would get back to my father and he would be disappointed, an idea I hated.

  My lessons got more and more advanced, increasing in difficulty, and I seldom got to have any downtime. I rarely did things like watch television or movies and hardly ever got to play on any sort of playground. We did occasionally go to the beach, it being only a short drive away, and I got plenty of exercise, but it was in the form of workout videos in our den that I did with my mother. My ‘recess’ time was dancing around with Jane Fonda, Denise Austin, or Richard Simmons, and I could grapevine with the best of them with Jazzercise moves for days.

  When little details of my upbringing like this had creeped out in conversation with Rowan, she was always flabbergasted at how “sheltered” and “deprived” I was, but I never felt that way. It was my normal and I didn’t feel all that different now as an adult considering how odd my childhood sounded to her.

  ***

  When I entered the house, announcing my arrival to my mom, it was quiet except for the faint mews of her cat greeting me in the foyer.

  I set her few days’ worth of mail on her counter and noticed that her kitchen was immaculately clean, per usual. You would never find a dish or bowl in her sink. It appeared as though she hadn’t even been downstairs yet, which was odd since it was just after eleven AM. As the sweet orange tabby cat named Cheetoh intertwined himself around my feet, rubbing his head against my legs, I saw that his bowl was empty so I scooped some dry food from the pantry into it and made my way upstairs.

  “Mom?” I called out as I approached the top steps.

  “I’m in here,” she replied as I rounded the corner and entered her master bedroom, still not seeing her but hearing some noise coming from the closet. I careened my head into the entry of her huge walk-in closet space to see her seated cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks and stacks of folded clothing.

  “What. In. The. World?” I thought out loud.

  She glanced up and smiled. “Good morning.” She said it like what I’d just walked into wasn’t the least bit strange.

  “Why are you on the floor? What are you doing?”

  “I was bored, so I decided to go through all of my clothes.” She spoke so matter-of-factly, but I couldn’t believe how much stuff l
ay all around her. Taking a quick inventory, I looked around to see that from wall to wall, plenty of her clothing was still hung up, color-coded on the hangers in the same order you would see in a rainbow, with brown, black, gray, and white items on the far end. On the floor were no less than fifteen stacks of neatly folded articles of clothing, as high as they could go without toppling over, and she sat in the center of them while continuing to fold more from a stack of crumpled things at her side.

  “These are all of the things I don’t want to keep. Wanna look through them before I box them all up to donate? I watched this God-awful program last night about how Americans are living in such excess, obsessed with materialism and status symbols of wealth when people are literally starving overseas without shoes and simple things like sanitary napkins. We take so much for granted over here and I just can’t in good conscience continue to…” She rambled on and on, quickly stepping onto a political soapbox my attention wandered from as I mentally calculated how many boxes I would need to procure for her to get rid of the “reject piles”, as she referred to them. “You should really go through your things as well. We need to declutter our lives and give our excess to the less fortunate.” Her suggestion sounded more like an order than a request.

  “Yeah. You’re probably right, Mom.” When she got on her obsessive rants, I found it best to humor her and feign agreement, even if I didn’t feel the same way, rather than contest her. The research I had done on social anxiety and agoraphobia went into great detail about the tendency to display obsessive-compulsive tendencies and said that to best diffuse any tense situations, it was recommended to not do anything to outwardly disrupt the behavior when it was at its height. Simply and calmly redirect their attention, the experts advised. “I can get you some perfect boxes from the hospital from Darryl. He’s our supply guy for the ER and he’ll hold some aside for me if I ask him.”

  “That would be fantastic,” she agreed.

  “Do you have any particular charity in mind to donate the clothing to?”

  She looked thoughtful for a moment and declared with a shrug that she hadn’t in fact put much thought into that part of her mission yet. “What do you think?”

  “Well, there are a few great local charities that would love the donations, I’m sure. There are plenty of people right here in our city who don’t have their basic needs met. Plus, it would probably be pretty expensive to ship all of this clothing overseas.”

  She nodded in agreement and said she’d let me handle it, assigning her momentary obsessive episode as my new responsibility.

  “Sure, Mom,” I replied, accepting the task. “I’ll take care of it on my next day off.” There was no point in attempting to argue. It wasn’t worth it. “So, listen, I came over here to see if you wanted to try to go out today.” Her hands ceased in folding a t-shirt and she looked up sharply. “Nothing crazy, maybe just out for a drive together, just the two of us.”

  “I don’t know, Andie.” Her eyes were defeated and sad all of a sudden, and I felt a pang of guilt in my chest for ruining her pleasant mood. “I have so much to do around here today and my friends are coming over tomorrow night.”

  “What do you have to do? The house is spotless.”

  “I, uhh, I have to straighten up the bathroom, and I need to make my appetizers. Those goat cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped dates take some time, you know.” She stuttered and fidgeted, and I knew I wasn’t going to be successful, once again.

  Interrupting her stream of excuses, I reassured her, “It’s okay, Mom. We don’t have to go anywhere today. I was only suggesting a change of scenery.”

  “I’m sorry, Andie,” she lamented, sullen and depressed. “I’m just not ready.”

  “It wasn’t my intention to upset you. I was only trying to be nice.”

  “I know,” she affirmed as she stood up from the floor. The small beads of sweat covering her forehead and upper lip that I noticed as she passed by me were like a neon sign flashing just how nervous my harmless suggestion had made her. Wanting the best for my mother above all, it was a punch to the gut. It was getting increasingly more difficult to predict what would trigger her into a full-blown panic attack. Some days were great and almost normal while others were quite friable with the littlest thing setting her off in a downward spiral of hysteria. I should’ve recognized by the fact that she’d been in a full obsessive-compulsive fit for who knew how many hours before I arrived that it was not the day to ask her to venture out of the house for the first time in years. For a smart person, I really was quite moronic at times.

  She took a few minutes to compose herself in the bathroom while I meandered downstairs in an effort to give her some space. When she joined me, she had freshened up and applied some makeup, a gesture more for her than for me. I was in the process of heating up an indulgence of some leftover baked shells and cheese I’d found in her refrigerator for us to eat for lunch when she entered the room, announcing that “Something sure smells good!”

  We ate in a comfortable silence, both of us avoiding anything more than trite small talk. I thanked her for lunch and let her know I would be back in a few days with some cardboard boxes to package and haul her donations away to the local homeless shelter downtown. She asked me if I was working the following day, and I lied, saying yes even though I was off until Friday, and she told me not to work too hard. She hated that I worked twenty-four hour shifts and was always so insistent that I get enough rest; I reassured her that I would and left, exhaling a huge breath of relief while descending her driveway. It wasn’t lost on me that, regardless of what kind of harrowing medical challenge presented itself, I actually looked forward to being at work more than having a casual lunch with my mother.

  Chapter 7

  Andie

  The ICU was eerily—dare I even think the word—quiet when I entered the unit, and no one paid me any mind as I made my way to room seven. Vaughn Bennett was resting in his bed, looking the exact same as he had when I’d left him two days prior. The ventilator rhythmically emitted its breathy sounds and his monitors beeped with each pulse of his heart. His skin had better color and his abrasions already looked to be improved in their healing process even though not much time had passed since his accident.

  “Mr. Bennett, it’s Dr. Fine,” I said to introduce myself, never knowing just how much the patients could hear and were aware of in their sedated states. “I’m going to listen to your heart and lungs now.”

  I carefully shifted his blankets and gown to place the stethoscope bell directly over his skin and listened for the strong lub-dub sounds I was looking for. When moving the bell around to hear different breath sounds, his vitals seemed unaffected.

  “Your breathing sounds great, Mr. Bennett. We’re going to try to get you off of this ventilator soon.” I pressed the button on the side of his bed, signaling that I needed a nurse in the room.

  One entered shortly after. “Afternoon, Dr. Fine. You need something?”

  “Yes. Are you taking care of Mr. Bennett today?”

  “I am, and he’s doing great so far. Did you have a chance to look at his lab work yet?”

  “No, I came straight in to see him first. Is everything stable?”

  “Yes,” she answered, her voice perky and high-pitched. “Everything is improving nicely. His ICP is stable and was optimal for getting him off the vent so Dr. Bowers ordered SBT QID for fifteen minutes each time.”

  “Really?” I was surprised the spontaneous breathing trials to test his lungs off the assistance of the ventilator had already begun but trusted that Dr. Bowers, although an arrogant prick most of the time, knew what he was doing. “When did you start that?”

  “Yesterday, in the evening. He’s had three SBT periods already and did quite well.”

  I saw the algorithm in my head and rattled through it aloud. “And have we decreased his sedation?”

  “Oh, yes. Significantly. He’s been arousable this morning and responsive to pain. They plan to remove the intracranial pres
sure bolt this afternoon too.”

  I turned my attention to him in the bed and paused. “And still no family or visitors?”

  “None, ma’am.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “No problem. If you don’t need me in here right now, I have to hang a med in my other patient’s room.”

  “Of course, yes. I’m fine in here,” I replied, excusing the nurse, which was even better for me—I hated examining my patients in front of an audience.

  “Mr. Bennett,” I asked, bending at the waist to lower my head closer to his. “Can you hear me? Can you try to show me you can hear me?” I placed my hand into his and gently touched his forearm. “Try to open your eyes or squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

  I saw and felt no response. Releasing his hand, I extracted my pen light from my lab coat pocket and approached to check his pupillary reaction. When I shined the light into his right pupil, getting a brisk and even constriction in reaction, he squeezed his lids shut, as if pained by the bright light.

  “Yes, Mr. Bennett, that’s it. Does that bright light hurt you?”

  No other response was noticeable until I shined the light into his other pupil and his lids squinted closed to fight me, just as with the other eye.

  “Can you try to wiggle your fingers or toes for me?” I so badly wanted to see some physical acknowledgement of his willingness to fight and readiness to climb out of the medically induced coma he was trapped in. His pointer finger on his right hand, the side of the bed I was standing on, lifted ever so slightly, followed by the middle finger, and I beamed with excitement.

  “That’s it. Perfect.” I grasped his fingers in an effort to offer a praising squeeze but upon contact, I felt a jolt of energy, like a static charge zapping through me. Startled, I looked to his face; it displayed nothing, but his heart rate had increased, just like it had the other day. Also, he was attempting to take respirations on his own. The ventilator was programmed to deliver sixteen breaths per minute but showed that twenty-two had actually been exchanged as the most recent reading.