Page Utilities
Lainie Cohen, ECW Press (page 4 of 5) Page 4 of 5
At 4:45 a.m. Monday, Joel, Alyssa and I are finally allowed into the surgical intensive care unit to see Daniel. As we walk down the hall, Joel pulls ahead, his stride like that of a speed walker approaching the end of a race, determined and fatigued. Alyssa and I clasp hands. We pass white-curtained windows before we approach his bed. I can see the steady rise and fall of his chest under the crisp sheet. My heart races. My son is alive!
His eyes are closed and his face looks so still. Cheeks and chin, darkened with shadow, are almost hidden behind the pale blue tube that snakes from his mouth to the ventilator on the wall, controlling his breathing. His head is wrapped in white gauze bandages covered by a blue cap; the indigo corona pierced by a thin wire poking out above his left eyebrow. My gaze follows the wire to a machine that flashes with bright shiny lines and buzzes in a language I don’t understand.
Joel and I are stricken dumb as we stand by our son’s side. But, Alyssa reaches out and touches him gently on his right arm that rests at his side.
“Daniel, we’re here now. You’re fine. Everything is going to be fine.”
My voice croaks as my throat tries to squeeze out words: “Daniel, we love you.”
All Joel can manage is, “Daniel.”
Our legs are rubbery when we turn to leave. We walk as if our feet were bound together, Joel in the middle, his arms weighted on our shoulders. Somehow we make our way back to the car. Alyssa drives home.
Chapter Two
It’s early January and snowing outside. It’s been over five years now since Daniel’s injury and I sit, staring out the patio doors of my kitchen to the backyard that stretches as long as an empty football field. Everything is blanketed in white. Heavy powder covers the picnic table like thick icing applied by an absent-minded baker. Drifts of wind-swept snow fill in the open slats of the wooden deck and pile high against the frosted glass door. An icy wind howls from the north. I turn on the radio.
“It’s 9:00 a.m. Here’s a brief weather update before the news,” the announcer says. “We’re expecting more snow in Toronto today. Motorists are advised to leave their cars at home and take public transportation.”
I turn off the radio. I hadn’t planned to go anywhere today so I didn’t mind when Joel took my car, the one with a four-wheel drive, to work.
It’s a good day to start writing my book, I tell myself. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, to write Daniel’s story for him. I’d like to try to recapture events so he’ll have an understanding of that period of time for which he has no memory.
When I leave the kitchen, the puppy starts to whine. She scratches on the wooden gate secured across the doorway. I hadn’t realized she would be so needy. Every time I take a step, she follows me and tries to nestle on my toes. She whimpers until I’m back in sight. I set up my laptop computer on the kitchen table and plug it in. The puppy cuddles contentedly on my feet. As a young girl, I always preferred to do my homework in the warmth of the kitchen rather than in my own room. Perhaps this new venue will spur my writing along. The task seems daunting.
Life has turned out to be different than anything I might have imagined on that late August day and I’m not sure where to begin. Our lives seemed so settled then. I was working full-time as a psychoeducational consultant for the York Region school board and Joel was a senior partner at Richter, a chartered accountancy firm. Just the month before, we had celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with a tour of the Normandy coast and the Loire Valley in France. It was such a golden time in our lives and we laughingly recalled the importance of fate, how we were fixed up on a blind date when we were both undergraduate students in Montreal, our hometown. We talked a lot on that holiday, reminiscing about the plans we’d made for our lives and the successes and surprises we experienced.
In 1970, we moved to Toronto for Joel to get his MBA. To support us, I took a job teaching grades two and three in a private school. Joel never completed that degree. Instead he took a summer job with Richter that turned into his life’s work. I continued teaching while raising our family. After five years of marriage, we had the first of our three children, spaced about three years apart. When our youngest child entered grade one, I started graduate studies in psychology and special education, later becoming a consultant, specializing in the assessment of children.
I think back to that last innocent summer. Our daughter Alyssa was working in Joel’s office doing an internship in accounting. Aged twenty, she had completed the first two years of a four-year degree program in social sciences at the University of Western Ontario and had just been accepted into the prestigious honours business administration program there. She planned to become an accountant like her dad. In high school, she had shown an entrepreneurial bent—organizing swim lessons at the cottage, tutoring students in math and French, and compiling practice tests in other subjects that she sold to students anxious to improve their grades. And she was such a social being. She seemed to live with one ear attached to a phone receiver, constantly talking to her boyfriend or one of her many girlfriends.
Daniel was different, so much quieter, at least at home. He, too, was a social creature, but he guarded his relationships and seldom spoke to us about his friends. Nor did he show the same interest in academic achievement as his sister. Where she strived for perfection, he followed the school of “it’s good enough”, content with C’s and B’s, although he was certainly capable of higher grades. If he hadn’t dropped calculus, he would have completed his high school studies in June, at age seventeen and a half. As it was, he was planning to return for one more semester, but he had no specific career direction. He talked of going to university in British Columbia the following year, so he could be close to the ski hills. He joked about becoming a ski bum. We knew he hoped to get a job at Whistler, B.C. when he finished his semester in January. His energy was always focussed on sports activities. That’s where he shone, and he managed to make it look effortless.
From Crooked Smile by Lainie Cohen, published by ECW Press, LLC. Copyright © 2003 by Lainie Cohen. All rights reserved. www.ecwpress.com. For more information about author Lainie Cohen, go to www.crookedsmile.org.
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