Everyday Lies by Tanya Crosby

Author:Tanya Crosby
Language: eng
Format: epub

One-way conversations sucked.

Gigi’s condition remained unchanged. She didn’t appear to recognize Gillian, or anyone else for that matter, and despite the futility Gillian felt during her visits, she couldn’t spare herself the grief. A caregiver filtered in and out of the room without her grandmother’s acknowledgment. Offering Gillian an obligatory smile, the woman checked the position of Gigi’s bed, fluffed her pillow, then took a manual heartbeat, laying two fingers across the bulging vein at Gigi’s wrist. She closed her eyes, counting, then opened them again and walked out of the room without a word.

This had become routine—this coming and going of caregivers. But there were no monitors in Gigi’s room. Her condition was no longer critical. Nearly two months after her event, it simply was what it was. Hope for recovery diminished by the day.

In some cases of global aphasia, patients benefited from therapies—a speech/language pathologist, for example. But according to her doctors, Gigi’s aphasia extended beyond Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas—the cortical areas responsible for the production and comprehension of human language. She also suffered a condition called hemiplegia, which was a sort of paralysis on one side of the body, as well as facial apraxia, which was the inability to coordinate facial and lip movements.

Sometimes, now and again, Gillian thought she detected something—if not recognition, perhaps a spark of cognition—like a fried lightbulb that somehow flickered on and off, not precisely burnt out, though somewhere along the path was a faulty connection. Occasionally, if the wire were readjusted a Planck length, the light flickered on for the briefest instant. As Gillian viewed it, if a connection existed, no matter how faulty, there must be hope.

This was the reason for her continued visits, and it was also why she didn’t share her own recent visit to the hospital with Gigi. It was Gillian’s worst idea of hell—the visceral image of a working brain behind the paralytic face, one that could hear and understand, and therefore worry, but never quite able to assuage its torment by asking a single question.

It was inherently the same as being trapped alive in a coffin, but this coffin was flesh and blood and bone, and nevertheless deteriorating day by day.

She reached out to take Gigi’s left hand, caressing the delicate skin with the tips of her fingers—very gently, because the skin appeared so fragile that it felt as though it would tear.

The physical contact didn’t elicit so much as a blink from Gigi.

“Remember Baby?” Gillian asked, getting no response. “She’s doing great,” she continued. “She misses you, Geeg.” I miss you. She swallowed an immense wave of grief that threatened to bring tears. “I hired some help,” she said, free to ramble, because although Eli had been so kind as to drive her around, he’d insisted upon staying outside.

Who could blame him? Gigi wasn’t his grandmother. Nobody in their right mind wanted to wallow in other people’s misery.

“Hey, so, Geeg, do you remember that guy you tried to hire . . . the one on Anthony Street .

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