The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(32)

*

“Hello, love of my life,” Davy said to my mom. She was on the couch, had just woken up from a nap. After ten months in the hospital and rehabilitation facilities, she was released to his care. He rented a small apartment for a few months, had soft blankets and shower stools and raised toilet seats and all the accompanying products that are supposed to make recovery easier. She was alert, alive. Still paralyzed on the right side of her body. Still without language.

Her head wound was fresh again, as it usually was, because of the number of times they tried to stop the bleeding, to implant drains and tubes and magnets and replace the bone flap and take it back off and replace it again, off, on, off. There were a lot of infections. Constant infections.

She was home with Davy for a few weeks, then back to the hospital. Then back home for two months, then the hospital. She started having seizures. She had soaring temperatures. She fell. Hit her head. She would go back into the hospital, and the doctors would help how they could and Davy would be there every day and my brother and I would visit when we could, and then she would come back out and into his care, and he would do the best he could to care for her, an amazing job. But something would happen, another infection, weakness, wound trouble, whatever, and off they’d go to the hospital again.

“Italy,” he whispered to her. “Just keep thinking about Italy.”

*

After we close, I find I’ve been marked. By the snake, again, though differently this time. I held her today, still afraid, but she hadn’t drawn blood, and I’d tried to commune with her, sending her a sense of peace. I peel the sweat-sticky corset from my torso; my ribs finally expand with a full breath and ache with the relief, like the pain of a hand finally warming up after hours in the cold. Papery snake scales are stuck all over my skin. They cling everywhere, binding to me from the heat of the day, my fingernails filling with the rough flakes of snake as I run my fingers over the indentations from the corset’s ribs.

I lie down in my bunk, legs and feet aching, ribs hot, and close my eyes. Try to breathe. But quickly, I feel a heavy weight grow around my neck, a cold smooth body pressing into my throat and moving down my sternum. I know that there is no snake on my body, that I am lying safely in bed, exhausted, dirty, alone, but still I feel it, not only her weight and chill but also the expansion and contraction of her muscles as they move, her face pushing hard against the side of my face as she slithers up and over my head. People who’ve lost limbs sometimes feel phantom pains—could the same happen here? Maybe this will be the way life is from here on out, the weighty presence of that giant boa constrictor around my throat whether she’s there or not.

Still, the presence of the snake isn’t what keeps me awake. I am afraid of a recurring dream. It was always set somewhere different—a car I was driving, a room I was walking into—somewhere innocuous. When I’d enter, just out of my sight, from the back seat or behind a corner in the room, I’d hear my mother’s voice. She’d say something very quiet, almost imperceptible, and I’d look around until I found her. She’d be right there with all the other dream people doing banal things, suggesting a right turn ahead or wondering if the sandwich bread was whole wheat. I filled with joy. There was her voice, that familiar song I hadn’t heard in so long, and even as a dreamer, I knew these words were a gift. That her voice was, somehow, a miracle. And every time, that sweet happiness I felt would slowly start to fade as I looked around at all the other dream people, who acted as though it was normal for her, for any person, to speak. That was the moment I’d realize that her voice wasn’t real. That her words were ghosts of words she had spoken years before. Realizing that made time start happening faster, so I’d ask her to speak again, turning from the road my car was hurtling down, craning my body all the way around since our car could not crash in this dream, so I could get right up against the words she couldn’t possibly have said—What? Can you say it again?—but she never did, of course, my recognition of its impossibility killed the fantasy. But I’m inventing this dream! I wanted to shout, Please speak again, and sometimes she would take her palm and bring it softly, softly up to my cheek, her eyes meeting mine with their mirror of green, and I knew there was a lesson I was supposed to understand about acceptance. I refused it. Please speak again, I pleaded with her, Tell me what to do, please? I didn’t hear you? Please, again and again and again.





LET’S US HAVE FUN

Two months after the stroke

December 2010

Story goes: Sidonia the Hungarian Baroness began sprouting a beard just after giving birth to a little person. He weighed one and a half pounds. The baby’s father was Baron Anton de Barscy, a burly four-hundred-pound man who lost his fortune and was forced to flee Hungary just as their new child arrived. Taking their new life in stride, the family decided to begin touring as performers. 1885. They traveled with the circus together for many years, seeing the world, amazing audiences with their family story that was almost too good to be true.

Davy told us the incredible story of the de Barscys before we went to sleep, or around a fire at our camping spot, five miles into the redwoods from where we lived. The son, Davy would say, Baron Nicu de Barscy, was my first friend.

The de Barscys came to the United States in 1903 and continued performing together until the baron died in 1912, after which Sidonia the Hungarian Baroness married the Long-Haired Cherokee Buck Man, another performer on the circuit. The reorganized family continued playing circuses and sideshows until Sidonia’s declining health in 1923 caused the Long-Haired Cherokee Buck Man to leave her for a performing dwarf named Doletta Boykin. Sidonia died in 1925, and, after performing another decade, Nicu retired to a small town called Drummond, Oklahoma, that they’d passed through on their way elsewhere. Davy’s grandparents lived next door.