Part 7
The MRI showed an injury. Haugen hadn’t brought the pictures because she didn’t need them. She uncapped a marker and drew it for them on the whiteboard, over the ghost of someone else’s heart: a small oval deep in the right side of the brain, smaller than a pencil eraser.
“This area helps control movement on the left side of his body,” she said. “It’s injured. It isn’t the widespread pattern we worry about most. He’ll need physical therapy and an early intervention team, and we’ll watch his development closely. Some children with an injury like this do remarkably well. Some have weakness on that side that stays with them. I can’t tell you yet what he’ll be doing at five.”
Jenna asked one question. “Can he feel me?”
“Yes,” Haugen said. “Everywhere.”
Caleb asked when the therapist could start. When Haugen told him Monday, he wrote it on the back of his hand with her marker, because there was nothing else in the room to write on.
Wes came home on the sixteenth day, in a car seat Caleb had installed three times in the hospital garage before Pauline came down and pronounced it fine.
Ray had brought Banjo over an hour early, along with a bag of the eggs he’d refused and a chewed glove, and the dog met them on the front step with his whole back end going. He didn’t jump. He followed the car seat into the house with his nose an inch from the blanket.
Caleb carried it down the front hall and stopped. The car seat base still leaned against the wall by the coat hooks, where it had been on the morning everything happened. He set the seat down on the floor beside it, on the same square of hardwood he hadn’t been able to make himself walk past, and stood there with his hand on the handle.
Jenna came up beside him and put her hand flat between his shoulder blades. She didn’t say anything. She left it there while he got his breath back.
Banjo put his nose against the edge of the blanket and stood there breathing. Then he lay down beside the car seat, and from then on the front hall was where he slept.
Bev Odegaard retired at the end of April and sent Jenna a photo of her written warning on the refrigerator, pinned under a magnet shaped like a walleye. Gary kept the write-up in Caleb’s file, and that spring Caleb took his turn on the storm roster like anybody else and not one call more.
In June the windows stood open and the lake air came through the screens smelling of cold water and cut grass. Jenna had Wes on a quilt on the living room floor, working through the stretches the therapist had shown them, his left arm drawn gently out to the side and held while she counted in a whisper. The left hand still curled more than the right. It still opened when she stroked the back of it, a little slower, a little more reluctantly. The therapist used the word asymmetry like it was a weather report, and that helped.
Banjo lay along the edge of the quilt with his chin near Wes’s left foot. Whenever the foot kicked, his good ear moved.
The yellow hat no longer fit. It sat on the bookshelf next to the footprint card. Jenna had found wool at a shop in Superior as close to the color as she could get, and that evening she wanted to start a bigger one. She’d use the last of her mother’s yarn for the first rows, she said, and the new wool after that.
“I need hands,” she said.
Caleb held his up. She slipped the loose skein over them and showed him how to spread his thumbs to keep it taut.
“Mom used to make me do this,” she said, winding. “I hated it.”
“Why?”
“You can’t go anywhere.” The ball grew in her palm. “You just have to sit there and hold still until it’s done.”
Caleb sat on the couch with his arms out and his wrists starting to ache, and the yarn came off his hands in slow loops, around and around. On the floor Wes kicked both feet, one quicker than the other, and Banjo’s ear followed the slower one. After a while the dog got up, turned once, and lay down across Caleb’s sock feet, the whole long weight of him. Through the open window a truck went by on the wet road, and Caleb didn’t turn his head to see whose it was.
He kept his hands up until the last loop slid off his thumbs and into hers.