Free Will & I by Clay Byars Page A

neck that we thought was cancer, but it turned out to be benign. She’s eventually going to have to have it drained.” She had begun to walk around and inspect the equipment in the room as she was talking. All I could think about was her boyfriend at the motel waiting for her to get back.
    I felt trapped like never before. I don’t remember ever being as mad at my mother. The thing that made me mad was terrible. It was watching Eleanor see me like that, and seeing that I had transformed into someone on the outside of her life. Now I would question my entire history with her. I released the emotion the only way I could: I burst into tears.
    Her back was momentarily to me, and since there wasn’t any accompanying sound, it was a few seconds before she noticed. To her, it must have looked as if someone had pressed a mute button. She glanced at the door. “Wait,” she quickly said. “I’m sorry. Don’t do that.” But I couldn’t quit. Then she began to cry as well.
    She sat down on the side of my bed and picked up my cold, improperly circulated hand with both of her warm ones and held it in her lap. A few minutes later, we both stopped crying. When she stood up, I knew she was about to leave. I was exhausted and relieved, feeling as if I’d run a marathon in the ten minutes she’d spent in the room. She didn’t say anything. She came up beside my head and kissed me on my lifeless lips and walked out.
    I knew Will would be surprised at seeing her again so soon, but that he also wouldn’t say anything. I could hear her crying again as soon as she was outside the door. I tried to blink my eyes dry before anyone else could see me. Will came in and said that he would see me the next weekend. He was heading back to school. He saw my face and looked away.

 
    13
    A day came when they said it was time to remove my tracheotomy tube. This would allow me to transfer to another unit, the main campus, which was self-contained like a college campus. It was also closer to home, in both senses. I’d have a bigger room there and my own bathroom. I no longer needed a doctor’s constant supervision.
    I was used to them taking the tube out, to clean off the mucus. This time, though, they didn’t put it back in or hook me up immediately to oxygen. They put a bandage over the hole in my throat, the stoma. They didn’t even have to stitch it up. It formed a scab and closed itself. They’d been gradually weaning me off anyway, so this wasn’t a shock. Breathing through your neck isn’t as strange as you may think, either. A stoma is just another way to get air into your lungs.
    Now that I could feasibly talk, which a stoma hooked up to an oxygen tank doesn’t allow, I couldn’t. I was able to let out only a monotonous, inarticulate whisper. But it wasn’t a regular whisper, a familiar whisper. It was different. It was mushy, like trying to walk in deep snow. I couldn’t make sounds with it like I used to, and I couldn’t swallow without some food going into my lungs. I don’t know if I allowed myself the fully formed thought My voice will never sound the same again , but I must have known it, or feared it, which was just as bad. I was devastated. Partly I was pouring other frustrations into it, but partly this—hearing those first nonwords come out—was the real reality check on the narrative of unimpeded progress we’d subscribed to since the stroke, that it would be “only a matter of time” before I’d be “completely back to normal.” This wasn’t normal, this sound coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t coming from someone with a direct line to a normal past. I’d been telling myself it would eventually be okay, but this … I couldn’t see around this.
    I made the ambulance trip again, but in a wheelchair this time. They secured the chair in the back, with me facing out the rear window.