You Can Stop Humming Now by Daniela Lamas

Author:Daniela Lamas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PIATKUS
Published: 2018-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Ben had been home about a month. As Andrea told me her son’s story, from the drugs to the cardiac arrest to the brain injury, Ben sat with us at the kitchen table, dogs lazing idly at our feet. I felt uncomfortable at first, talking about Ben with Ben beside me, although he didn’t seem to be listening and surely didn’t seem to mind, even when his mother described how close he had come to dying. He was there, a solid physical presence, but it wasn’t really clear how much of the whole thing he could understand. He didn’t remember the injury or much of the year that preceded it, so it seemed to Andrea that his mind had tried to fill in the blanks with the data he had. After seeing so many patients with shaved heads and scars on their skulls while he was at inpatient rehab, he’d decided that he must have been in a car accident, or maybe he had been shot. Every time someone told him what had actually happened, it seemed like the first time he’d heard the news.

But memories from high school and college lingered.

“What did you play?” Andrea asked Ben of his years in high school sports.

He spoke quietly but clearly. “Football…”

“Do you remember anything else you played?” Andrea probed.

He scrunched up his face as though he were digging through a storage facility for that album he knew must be there somewhere.

Andrea gave him a clue. “You went to the mountain?”

He thought a bit longer.

“Snowboarding team,” he replied. I felt relieved, and stifled my inclination to exclaim, “Good job!”

Perhaps Ben did not know what had happened to him, but I wondered if he knew that his life was different, that he could no longer call his friends to plan a trip or grab the keys and leave the house in a huff. Ben and his brother, Greg, had always made each other laugh, and sometimes they still could. They’d cracked up over something silly in the back of the car the other day, and it felt as though a bit more of Ben had emerged again, and that was great. But most of Ben’s friends, even the ones who had been the most attentive when he was in the hospital, had stopped coming by as they returned to their new jobs and apartments. Some still visited occasionally, but it was hard, because even if Ben enjoyed spending time in their company, it wasn’t obvious. He wasn’t the one to initiate conversations or make plans.

I wondered if on some level he was saddened by all this loss, even if it was beyond his ability to articulate the feeling. Andrea thought about this, too. When Ben said he didn’t want to go out to a place where she knew his friends might be or shook his head when she asked him to bring his wheelchair into a store, she wondered whether he felt self-conscious. It was hard to tell. It seemed equally possible that

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