Pia Padukone - The Faces Of Strangers

“Yes, yes,” Paavo said. “I’m just... I’ll see you back in there.” But Paavo’s foot caught on a cleaning mop that leaned against the wall, and he fell backward. The last thing he saw before his head hit a stall door was Pyotr’s face. Then everything had gone dark.

NORA

New York City

September 2002

This was what life after the accident felt like to Nora, as though a switch had been flipped and the spotlight on her life had been turned off. She constantly felt as though she were wandering around in the dark, groping for answers, reading faces, trying to make sense of what had happened in her brain. She’d certainly made sense of her feelings in the year since the accident, and she could communicate how frustrated and helpless she felt. Perhaps she would do well in the support group after all; these things always tried to get you to connect with your feelings. But would acknowledging the feelings help them go away?

After her brother left for the airport, Nora spent a long time lying on her back in her bedroom, clutching her black notebook and staring at her wall of quotes. It had been about a month after the accident that she had first starting writing directly on the wall in permanent marker. She’d done it out of pure rage at first, scribbling angsty snippets from whiny bands that all her friends listened to, and then graduating to more philosophical lines. Words of wisdom from Shakespeare and Sonic Youth each bore equal presence on the wall. It would be another six months before she would abandon the wall altogether and whitewash over it in another fit of frustration, but for now the wall was her own personal therapy.

Her mother had told her not to be late for the group, but she dawdled, opening her notebook and flipping through the pages. She hated overhearing her parents talk about her as though she wasn’t right there. They discussed her at length—out of concern, she had to admit—but it was still humiliating. She had already started living away from them in college. She’d already staked her independence. But after the diagnosis, she found she couldn’t return. She’d been intimidated by the prospects of all those faces: her suitemates, her professors, her thesis advisor. At the end of the summer, once her arm had fully healed and her skin had grafted itself back into her own cells, she called the registrar and told them she was taking the year off. It would be a setback, and it would certainly be embarrassing, Nora knew, but it wouldn’t be as tragic as returning to a campus filled with people who called out to her but whom she couldn’t greet back.

Her stay in the hospital had been over a year ago, but it still felt as if she had just returned. From time to time, her leg pulsed as a cruel reminder of the accident. As if she could forget. In the first few days of her stay at St. Paul’s General, doctors had all tried their luck at diagnosis. They asked her to recall the specifics of the accident.

“I was crossing the street at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Fourth Street and a car barreled into me. I remember flipping over onto the hood but not much else after that.”

They asked her to recall what she had been doing, where she had been going.

“I’m home from college on spring break. I have to go to Myrtle Beach with my friends. We’re leaving. They’re going to leave without me.” She had attempted to rise out of the bed, but her wrists and ankles had been tethered there beneath the blankets. They asked her to recall her name—“Nora,” she’d scoffed. They asked her to recall the names of the people standing in front of her. “Dr. Li, Dr. Charles, Dr. Kelly.” They asked her to name the couple sitting on either side of her bed, each holding one of her hands. She rolled her eyes. But when the request was repeated, she stared into each face with determination and focus for what felt like hours before she turned her head, slumped back into the pillows and said that the exercise was stupid. The woman had broken down then, biting her hand so as to contain her tears, and the man had come over from his side of the bed to comfort her. Nora had watched all this, as she had watched Doctors Li, Charles and Kelly exchange glances and purse their lips before they scribbled copious notes into their individual ledgers. One of them picked up the phone in her room to make a page, and in moments, a flurry of men and women in white coats descended upon the room.

After a number of days, questions and tests, the team of neurologists and orthopedists gathered the man, her father Arthur, and the woman, her mother Stella, into the hallway to deliver their diagnosis in hushed, hurried tones. Arthur had erupted in the hallway at the mention of the words. “That’s ridiculous. Nora knows why she’s here. She knows her name. She can remember what color her sheets are, what kind of cake she had on her fifteenth birthday. She knows who she is.” This time, it was Stella who calmed him, walking him into the stairwell, where his angry shouts echoed and bounced off the landings and banisters.

In the end they told Nora everything, from her broken femur to the damaged sliver of fusiform gyrus in her brain. How could such a tiny piece of spongelike matter make such a difference? The doctors had tried to soften the diagnosis by reinforcing the fact that Nora could still function regularly on a daily basis. She could eat, study, get a job, find a husband.

“Not really sure how that one is relevant,” Arthur had smirked in the hospital room while Stella held her daughter’s hand. “Everyone knows you would have no trouble in that field even with a bag over your head.” The neurologists weren’t entirely certain of the long-term effect this might have, but the terminology was enough to scare the Grands: brain damage. Nora had forced herself to smile at her father’s attempt at levity, but brain damage was brain damage. Whenever people mentioned it, there were always a few shocked moments thereafter, with audibly sharp intakes of breath and sympathetic sighs exhaling them.

By the time Nora was released into the care of her parents and a borrowed wheelchair, she had lost all track of time. Her father wheeled her from the elevator and into the foyer, where her eyes lit on familiar things. She took in the pile of colorful throw pillows in the corner, the twin towers of stacked magazines on either end of the coffee table, the plush couch that had long since broken its spine but was so comfortable that the Grands couldn’t bring themselves to part with it. Even the word familiar had become familiar to her. She cherished the word now, because when the doctors used it, it meant that she was doing well, that she could identify things. Familiar was always one step closer to being normal. From the threshold of the dark dining room, she could hear whispered rustlings and excited murmurs.

“She’s here,” a voice whispered. She turned to look back at her father, that not-quite-yet-familiar face, but one she was retraining herself to know in the antiseptic starkness of the hospital room. He smiled down at her and pushed her farther into the room, where a flashbulb went off, illuminating a few bobbing balloons and a group of people gathered around a large cake.

“Welcome home!” they chorused together, and broke into embarrassed giggles at their seemingly rehearsed symphony. Nora knew she should smile so she did, but there was a halting in the way her cranial muscles worked, taut and obdurate, as though coming out of hibernation. She engaged her brain, forcing her lips to purse together and show her teeth, but she didn’t mean it. She didn’t even feel it. Seven strangers smiled back at her. She turned back to look at her father. He licked his lips and smiled even harder, glancing at the woman who stood just off to the side, methodically massaging each digit of her fingers as though she were taking a tally. Nora could see the gold stars twinkling in the woman’s ears. She smiled harder at their presence, at their continuity. She was forever grateful for those gold stars that helped her identify her own mother.