Chapter 14 — Long Road Back

Soon after I had started to talk, for the next few weeks, no one could seem to shut me up. It was like I was making up for all the lost time I had spent with a tube in my throat. Then, when the doctors decided I was ready, I’d be learning to walk all over again. At first, the nurses would help me get into the bathroom, then they’d start taking me down the hall.

I still could not see very well, only the lights that shined from above and the shadows that they made on the walls. Sometimes, the shadows had voices and hands that reached out to pull me back into their lair, like the day that I heard a voice calling my name as one that came from a distant nightmare, and a face peering out at me through the glass. “Pam, Pam,” I heard it say. “Pam! Pam!”

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

“We followed you here.” Then she kept on calling my name. “Pam, Pam.”

I started to scream, then one of the nurses turned me around. “She’s hallucinating.” The other one said. “Get her back into her room and have the doctor start an IV.”

When the nurse tried to put me back into bed, I started kicking and screaming before the doctor came in and I soon felt the tip of a cold steel spear slide into my veins.

“No! No! Don’t let me sleep! They’re going to kill me!”

“Who? Who’s going to kill you?” the nurse asked, grabbing both of my arms.

“Lost Eyes!” I screamed. “She’s going to kill me tonight in my sleep!”

The nightmares went on for the next few days, until the day they sent in a priest.

“Young lady,” he said in a slight lilting brogue. “No one can hurt you. God sent His angels here to protect you.”

“But I’m not sure if I even believe there’s a God.” I shrugged.

“Ah, but He still believes in you and He’s not going to let anything hurt you,” he calmly assured. “Just say this prayer each night before bed – ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear…’”

I said it with him, then again that night before I went to bed. Pretty soon the nightmares stopped, and I was finally able to sleep.

The next morning when I woke up, my mom brought her sister Loretta with her to see me.

“Come on, Pammy.” My mother said as the nurses came in to get me. “Show your aunt how well you can walk.”

When I tried to get up, my leg started cramping and I screamed out in pain.

“Will all of you just leave me alone?” I shouted pushing away both of their hands. “Don’t touch me or I swear I will kick you!”

“Remember, Pammy, no pain, no gain.” I heard my aunt Loretta tell me and I threatened to kick her as well, until my mom intervened.

“You don’t talk to your auntie that way!” she shot back.

“Why can’t everybody just leave me alone? Every day its Pammy this and Pammy that! Pammy you’ve got to try harder! Pammy you’ve got to ignore all the pain!” Then I looked at both my mom and her sister. “Let me ask you this, how many of you ever smashed open your head on the pavement?”

Then there were days when I felt pretty good and was sometimes able to walk on my own with nurses standing on either side. One day I made it all the way down the hall then turned around and walked back to my room. As I got back, I heard my mom, my dad, and her sister clapping, then the nurses joined in for a round of applause that lasted for minutes.

“You keep this up and pretty soon you’ll be running a marathon,” one of the doctors said as he came in the room and shook everyone’s hand. “My name is Dr. Tamari, Neurosurgeon. I’ll be doing the neoplasty.”

“A neo what?” my father asked.

“Neoplasty,” the doctor said. “It’s to protect her head while her brain continues to heal. The good news is that she’s stabilized enough to where we can do the procedure.”

“So, they’re going to need to cut her back open?” I heard my mom saying.

“Fuck that idea!” I shouted when I finally began to make out what they were saying.

“I’m sorry, doctor, Pam is still learning how to properly speak,” Loretta broke in. “I know that a doctor as nice as you will be taking good care of her.”

“Well, that is the plan,” he said looking more than a little confused. “Look, you folks get some rest. I’ll talk to you later.”

“See you, Tamari!” Loretta waved as he walked out the door.

When the day finally came, the nurses needed to hold me back down. “But honey, don’t you want to get better?” they asked me. “No!” I said, “I want to go home!”

Before long I was in a room with tubes sticking out of my veins and a large clear mask covered my face. My whole body was starting to shake, and the doctor held my arm on the table so that I wouldn’t pull out the needle. Then there was a circle of faces that danced all around in the light up above, speaking and chanting, casting their spells, summoning the rod of Asclepius. “Angel of God…” I started repeating. “Angel of God, my guardian dear…” Then suddenly I awoke in my room where my mom and dad and Loretta were waiting.

One day I woke up and rubbed my hand on the top of my head. “It’s gone! It’s gone!” I screamed. “All of my hair!”

“Don’t worry,” I heard one of the doctors say. By the sound of his voice, I could tell that he was much older, and he spoke in a thick middle eastern accent. “Yours will grow back!”

The doctors had me on some pretty heavy drugs and for a while so I couldn’t remember much of anything, but one day I woke up and heard Dr. Tamari talking to both my mom and my dad using words that neither one of them could quite understand.

“What the hell is an oculus lobe?” I heard my dad saying.

“The primary function of the occipital lobe is to control vision and to recognize objects.” Dr. Tamari responded. “Damage often results in vision loss, an inability to identify colors, hallucinations, and in extreme cases total blindness.”

“I see,” I could hear my dad saying while I heard my mother starting to cry. “And the other one that you mentioned, what about that?

“Yes, yes, the frontal lobe,” he said as he sighed heavily into the air. “That one’s more complicated. Common effects of frontal lobe damage are sudden behavioral changes, memory loss, impaired moral judgment, and lack of reasoning. It’s like becoming a child all over again.”

“Well at least she was always a good little girl.” I heard my dad say.

“Shut up Ron!” My mother snapped back. “Doctor is there any chance that she’ll fully recover? I mean, she’s only fifteen?”

“Ms. Vasquez, you just made my point,” he answered. “Her age is exactly what works in her favor. No offense, but if Pam was our age, she probably would not have survived the accident. What she needs now is a stable and nurturing environment, the more stable and loving, the better.

“Thank doc,” I heard my dad say as my mom began with a new round of sniffles. “We’ll do everything we can for her,” she promised before taking my hand and squeezing it softly. “Isn’t that right Ron?”

“You know it,” he said. “Boy, do you know it.”

For the next few weeks, I stayed in bed, then the nurses would come in every morning and I started going for walks down the hall. Then one day, my mom came to visit carrying both a box and a suitcase. “Pammy!” she said, “Great news! The doctor said I can take you back home!”

“What?” I asked her.

“You’re going home!” she told me.

“When?”

“Today! Today! Aren’t you excited?” Then she opened the box and put a long dark brown wig on top of my head.

“There you go!” She said sweeping back the long brown curls that hung down in my face. “Just like the Pammy we all remember!”

“But it hurts!” I objected trying to pull it back off my head.

“You’ll get used to it, honey.” My mother assured me. “You don’t want everybody to see all your stitches.

It was April 5, 1986, eleven and a half months after I died, and I was finally getting out of the hospital. There were hugs all around and one last bowl of ice cream, then I walked out of the hospital door and into a whole new world outside.

“Where are we going?” I asked my mom as she helped me inside of the car then sat down next to David in the front seat.

“You’re going to be staying with Ronnie and me,” she said.

“But what about dad?” I asked her. “Why can’t you just take me to dads?”

“His condo has stairs, remember? We don’t want you getting hurt. Besides,” she assured me, “I promise to take really good care of you. When you get better, I’ll take you shopping, and we can get you all new clothes. Would you like that, Pammy?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I still miss my dad.”

“You’ll still see your father,” She promised. “He’ll be picking you up on the weekends to take you to breakfast. You’ll be seeing plenty of him.”

For a month or so, things went pretty well. My mother cooked all of my favorite meals and slept next to me at night in her bed. Sometimes I would awake from a nightmare and she would get up and caress me until I went back to sleep, stroking the hair that had already started growing back on my head.

“There now, everything’s going to be all right,” she would tell me. “You have mommy here to protect you.”

Except for the night that she tried to kill me.

That night, she came to bed late when I was already asleep. But I could tell that she had been drinking. I heard her swearing and yelling at someone, even though there was no one else in the room.

“God, why did you do this to me!” she raged, shaking both of her fists at the ceiling. “First it was Loretta’s kids, now look at what you did to my daughter—my baby! She used to be so smart and so pretty but look at her now! You made her into some kind of freak—a retard—a vegetable! How dare you, Goddammit! How dare you! And Marty, what did he ever do to you? It must have been Pam’s idea to go there that night! I knew I should never have had her. If only I would have listened to the doctors and had her aborted, none of this would ever have happened!”

I opened my eyes to see waves of red hair and fiery eyes staring down into mine. She set down the glass she was holding then leaned over to where I was laying as I pushed myself up into the wall.

“And you!” She said writhing over to my side of the bed like a serpent hissing ominously through the grass. “It’s all your fault!”

“Angel of God. Angel of God,” I began to cry to myself as I felt her breath up against my neck.”

“Your God is not going to save you, you little bitch! You little fucking bitch!” she screamed. “Oh, sweet little Pammy, the good little girl that everyone loved—the girl who could do no wrong, daddy’s little girl! My God how you had everyone fooled!”

Then she started to hit me as her rings began to cut into my head. “You are the spawn of Satan himself! Shiva! Pele! Erebus! Begone, oh you daughter of darkness!”

I tried to hide from her under the covers, but she pulled off the blanket, ripping off patches of scalp still caught in the threads. “You are the reason Marty is dead! It should have been you that night instead of him!” She took a minute to regain her breath, then like the eye of the storm held for a moment by an angry vortex of spiraling rage, the beating started all over again. “You are the reason I drink! I never got drunk until after I had you! You little bitch—it’s all your fault that I drink!”

I don’t know how long the beating continued, at some time I passed out on my blood-covered sheets and my brother was holding my mother down next to me. He picked up the phone, then an ambulance came and took me away. Then when I saw him a few days later, he came with my father who took me back to stay at his condo. No sooner did we walk in the door then I asked my brother what had happened.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said, “and when mom came in, she saw you pulling out all of your stitches. That’s when we took you to the ER.”

I thought about everything that he told me but somehow it all just didn’t make sense.

“Are you sure?” I finally asked him. “Because that is not what I remember.”

Then he looked at me with stern dark eyes and grabbed me by each of my shoulders. “If anyone asks you, just remember everything the way that I told you.” Then he lowered his head and spoke in a voice that seemed like a threat. “And don’t you dare say anything else!”

I was now living back home with my dad and I even had the same room that I did on the day of the accident. Only this time, Loretta was sharing it with me, since my father asked her to look after me while he was at work. She usually slept on the bed right next to me, but then there were days that my father’s door opened, and it was her walking out in a robe. My cousin Susie was also living with us. Her and her friend Michelle stayed in the room right next to mine so it was like deja vu all over again!

One morning, I got up to go to the bathroom and I heard the door open in front of me.

“Hey, cuz,” Susie said.

“Hey, Sue.”

“I heard that you got banged up pretty bad. Feeling any better?” She asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Depends on what you mean by better.”

“Hey, you remember Michelle?” she inquired.

“No,” I answered. “Why, should I?”

“Her fucking parents threw her out and your dad said she could stay here with us.”

“That’s fine, I guess. Just make sure she doesn’t bother me,” I said before walking inside and closing the door.

For the next few weeks, Susie and I never talked about the accident. But there were times when I heard her in the next room telling her friend it was all my fault. Sometimes I awoke to the smell of weed coming in through my window and the two girls giggling inside of their room.

I would ask Loretta, “Hey, would you tell your daughter to knock that shit off. It’s making it hard for me to breathe.”

“Come on, Pammy, leave her alone.” Was all she would say. “Besides, it helps her get through all of the shit she’s having to deal with.”

“That she’s having to deal with!” I snapped. “What about all of the shit that I have to deal with, not to mention my fucking asthma?”

Sometimes, during the day, two of my neighbors, Neil and Jeff, would come over and take me for walks. By this time, I was starting to walk with a cane. I remember how I hated it since I didn’t like looking like “some fucking old lady” but it felt really good to finally get out. The days were warm, and the air was ripe with the smell honeysuckle that grew in our complex that time of the year. Sometimes, they would take me out in the evening, and we’d walk around by the swimming pool, the pale blue light shining out through the trees. I was still not able to see very well, but the smell of chlorine reminded me of those long hot summers in Yorba Linda when I would hang out at the Lopez’s house. Then there was the day I went for a walk and I heard Jeff saying hello to some lady, then as we got closer, I could hear her calling my name in a voice that was barely a whisper.

“Pam!” she said, “How is my BFF?”

“Erika? Is that you?”

“Do you have any other BFF’s?” she asked.

“It’s just that I can’t see you,” I told her. “The doctors tell me I’m legally blind. I’m also paralyzed in my left hand. See,” I explained holding it up.

“Let me get this straight. So, you are legally blind, partially paralyzed, and I am now barely able to speak?” she pondered. “Well, that’s pretty fucked up.”

“How did you end up losing your voice?” I asked her.

“The car accident, or don’t you remember?” She snorted. “I was sitting right in back of you when you put us all on Carbon Canyon. Crushed both of my lungs and fucked up my larynx. Took four operations before I could talk.”

Then Jeff reached up and put an arm around both of her shoulders. “But I still love her!” he said.

“I didn’t know that you two were dating?” I told her.

“There’s a lot of things that you don’t know,” she said. “We’ll have to sit down and catch up sometime.”

“Sure,” I said somewhat confused. “Hey, tell Marty I said ‘hello.’”

“Marty’s dead,” she snapped. “He’s been dead for over a year or don’t you remember? Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

She gave Jeff a kiss on the cheek and turned and walked back to her condo as Jeff and Neil led me back to my door. Then suddenly my mother’s words all came back to me like a flood. Marty is dead and it’s all my fault.

I spent most of my days either out at the pool or going to see my physical therapist. She made me a splint to wear on my hand and told me that swimming would also help me to open my fingers and all though things got better, I’ve never been fully able to use it—just dangles right there at my side, a placeholder for my MedicAlert bracelet. Sometimes I stayed in the pool all day until my father would come and get me for dinner. Sometimes, he took me out to his car and told me we were going to a fancy French restaurant—Jacque in ze box—he would joke. A few weeks later, my dad and Loretta took me for an eye exam—my first since I got out of the hospital. It was then that I learned the extent of my blindness.

“20/800 in both of her eyes.” The doctor said as I could hear my father starting to wince. “That’s four times worse than legally blind.”

“Is there anything you can do for her, doctor?” He asked.

“Yeah, and not make me look like a nerd in the process?” I added.

“Well, we’ll never be able to fully correct her, but we can probably get her under 20/200,” He assured him then added turning toward me, “And besides, we have lots of new frames so I promise you will not look like a nerd.”

I got both a clear and a tinted pair with matching rose colored Cartier frames. Loretta said how pretty I looked while my dad just mumbled about the cost. Anyway, my vision was better, but I still couldn’t always make out what I saw. I spent the last part of the summer outside at the pool and when I wasn’t swimming, I was up in my room thinking about the world I left behind and how soon I would have to face it again when I went back to school that year.

That day finally came about a week before my sixteenth birthday. It should have been my junior year, but instead I was technically still a freshman. By then my hair had begun growing back, but I still decided to go with a wig. Loretta put it on for me that morning carefully brushing its highlighted bangs.

“My now, don’t we look pretty?” she said.

“Whatever,” I shrugged.

Most of my classes were special ed with the exception of Theater Arts with my favorite teacher Mr. Moore. My first day in class, the first one to greet me was a young man named Michael who once tried asking me out until I told him that I was too good for him. Michael was five years older than me and also legally blind. He was finally graduating that year at the age of twenty-one.

“Just do everything that they tell you,” he said, “And they’ll pass you right through. All of the work here is really easy.”

Except I didn’t do everything that they told me, and even though the work was easy, within a few days, I was totally bored.

“So, who can tell me what two and two equals?” the teacher would ask. “Pamela, can you tell me what two and two equals?”

“Four, of course,” I said while rolling my eyes. “How stupid do you think that I am?”

“Now, Pamela. Nobody here thinks that you’re stupid,” she said in that same old annoying voice I grew to despise.

Then the next day she asked us to recite the alphabet. “This is such bullshit!” I said as I looked over at Michael who was kicking the letters around in his head while humming that stupid alphabet song. Next thing I knew I got sent to the office. Things didn’t go much better in Drama class either. The only people who would still talk to me where Michael and Trey.

“Hey, Tatania, nice having you back!” Trey said as he gave me a hug.

“Pam is my friend.” Michael added. “She’s in all of my classes this year, her and Christina!”

It may have well been the kiss of death. Most of the other students shined me, the ones who didn’t openly mock me. “It looks like Tatania is now part of the retard class!” They would say and they’d all start laughing. One day after class, I stood on the stage and started to cry. Then I threatened to jump off head-first until Mr. Moore ran over to stop me.

“I think this is high enough to break my neck.” I said as a stream of hot tears poured down my cheeks.

“Pam, just ignore them,” Mr. Moore pleaded. “None of them mean any harm. They just don’t know how else to respond.”

A few days later I heard a familiar voice ring out through the intercom. I could tell as soon as I heard it that it was Trey. “Attention Troy High School, I just want to take a few minutes to say, I am still friends with Pamela Vasquez. And no matter what anyone thinks, I will always be her friend. Two years ago, most of you losers would do anything to be her best friend. Now you losers want nothing to do with her. How pathetic! It wasn’t Pam’s fault what happened to her!” Then suddenly the voice cut out then a few seconds later the principal came on and apologized.

I thanked him when I saw him a few days later after he served his suspension.

“You are the only friend I have left,” I told him.

“Come on, Pam, that isn’t true,” he tried to convince me. “You still have lots of friends around here, they are just afraid to show it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“People fear what they do not know,” he said. “It’s easier for them to avoid you rather than to confront their own fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“Fear of their own mortality,” he said. “See you tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Hey, thanks Trey!”

The next day I ran into Mike and Paul who sat next to Michael, Christina and I in the cafeteria. Michael had developed a thing for Christina so that took some of the pressure off me.

“I’m so sorry to hear about what happened,” Mike said as he put his bag down on the table.

“Don’t pity me!” I warned him. “I don’t need anyone’s pity!”

“It’s not pity,” Paul interrupted. “We just wanted you to know how good it is to see you again.”

“And to remind me that you were right!” I stopped him.

“Right about what?” he asked.

“Right about there being a “god,” because he certainly proved it to me!”

“So, you think that God is some cruel tyrant who gets his kicks out of maiming people just to prove his existence?” Mike interrupted.

“Sure looks that way.”

“Then why don’t you meet us tomorrow in study hall and see for yourself what God is like?” Mike asked me. “I lead a devotion there every day and you’re welcome to join us.”

“I’ll think about it,” I told him.

I don’t know why, but I started going to Mike’s bible study each day after school, it was much different from all those assholes in Drama. For one, I was fully accepted despite my disabilities. Sometimes they would even offer to pray for me, and I reluctantly let them, despite my own suspicions about them. Not to mention, all of them seemed to genuinely care about me, not because I was on Drill Team or had the leading role in a play, but because as they put it, I was “such a blessing” to them. When I was little, my father had warned me about all those “religious people.” He would remind me what phonies they were and that most of them couldn’t be trusted “as far as you’d throw them.” I remember that I used to believe him, but all I knew was that except for Trey, Michael, and Mr. Moore, they were the only ones who at least seemed to give a shit.

One day after school, Mike invited me to his mother’s house for dinner.

“Mom, this is Pam. Pam, this is my mother, Ruth,” he said as we walked through the door and into the kitchen.

“Nice to meet you, Pam,” she said extending not just a hand but a hug. “Mike has told me so many things about you. You are a living miracle, honey.”

As it turned out, Ruth was a living miracle too. Her first husband was an alcoholic who abused both her and her children. When he died, she became a foster mom; Mike and her daughter Betty were always the older brother and sister to the changing sea of names and faces and stories. I would visit Ruth each day after school and since she lived only a few blocks away, either her or Mike would walk me back home. Then one day, she invited me to church with her and her family.

“So where are you going all dressed up?” My father said as my aunt Loretta walked me down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“To church, daddy,” I answered.

“Why do you bother wasting your time?” was all that he said. “I’m sure you can find something better to do than hang around with a bunch of holy rollers thumping their bibles.”

“Pammy, don’t listen to him,” Loretta told me. “You look beautiful, my dear, doesn’t she, Ron?”

My father said nothing, just sat in his chair and picked up the paper. When Ruth came to get me, he had Loretta answer the door.

“See you both later. Love you!” I said as I left.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “Don’t be too long.”

Ruth told me the name of her church, Yorba Linda Friends Community, and when we got there, I was expecting it to be like that old Catholic church my grandmother took me to when I was little. Instead, there were drums and guitars and everyone clapping along to the music. And all of the people were really friendly. It was like no one noticed that I was unable to see and that my left hand didn’t work. And the sermon, something about the “one lost little sheep” and how God would always go out of His way to bring it back home. I had to admit there were times that I cried, as if that one lost sheep was me and that God was trying to bring me back home.

I went to church with Ruth and her family every Sunday, then afterward, we’d go out to breakfast. No matter where we went, we would always pray before eating.

“Pam why don’t you say the blessing?” Ruth asked as the server set the food on our table.

Then I bowed my head and thanked God for the first time in my life for everything that He’s given to me—friends who loved me, a whole new family, and even a second chance at life. I thanked Him for the doctors who made me better and for the paramedics who found my body lying in the street and did all that they could to save my life. But mostly, I thanked Him for my friend Ruth who had become like a second mother to me.

The next week, after the minister spoke, I felt something lifting me out of my seat as the band played “Come as You Are.” I turned and looked at Ruth, then nodded my head when she asked me if I was ready. The next thing I knew I was standing down by the stage looking up at an old wooden cross and praying to receive Jesus into my heart. It was like the heavens opened before me and love poured down all around as the autumn light strained in through the windows and shined on my face. For a moment, I was no longer aware of my own disabilities and for the first time in my life, I truly felt whole. As I walked back to my seat, I could feel the embrace of what felt like a thousand arms all around me, everyone welcoming me into the family of God.