The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [148]
Lydia’s aphasia began on that morning she had her seizure (for that was what it was, the doctors informed us). Even after her surgery, Lydia continued having seizures, and her aphasia only got worse, a decline that proceeded unchecked even after she started undergoing speech therapy. When it was first found the tumor was in such an advanced state of growth that the doctors suggested operating as soon as possible. Seven days after her first seizure, I was left alone at home while Tal drove Lydia to the hospital to get her head shaved, her skull sawed open, and a blob of disease cut out of her brain tissue. I forgot to mention that Tal came back into our lives at the beginning of Lydia’s illness (or the beginning of the time after Lydia learned she had an illness). Lydia must have called her up and asked for her help, being estranged as she was and geographically removed from her family. Tal still lived in Chicago. The night before Lydia’s surgery, Tal brought us a dinner she’d cooked, a dish composed of a sticky yellow coagulum steaming beneath a sheet of aluminum foil in a rectangular pan that she carried up the walkway to our door, having threaded herself with some difficulty through the thick mob of nasty morons encamped in front of our building. Lydia was elated to see her. She had spent much of the last six days sleeping, or else being awake at odd times of the night. That blob in her head had the effect of throwing her circadian rhythms into disarray, like shouting out random numbers at someone who’s trying to do some complicated math in her head, or interrupting a string quartet that’s busy playing a waltz by brattling on a pot with a spoon. So Lydia had just dragged herself messy-haired and puffy-eyed from one of her many long naps when Tal appeared at our door in the late afternoon. The right half of Lydia’s face had been drooping ever since that seizure, gone flabby and slack as if someone had snipped the strings that held that side of her face together.
I was surprised to see Tal physically changed somewhat, though I shouldn’t have been, because the last time I’d lain eyes on her was more than two and a half years before. Gone were her dreadlocks. Before, her hair had looked like something that ought to be dangling from the throat of a bison, but now her hair was a floppy, messy mop of buoyant and bitumen-black coils. Tal and Lydia hugged like long-separated sisters in the foyer after the casserole had been set down. Then she fearlessly embraced me, too. I was all grown up, much more mature and conversant than the wild thing that had once munched off most of the middle finger on her right hand. Now that I had speech, I apologized profusely for my past transgression, and she thankfully accepted my apology with warmth but enough gravitas to indicate that her forgiveness was sincere, which put me at relative social ease in her company, though every time I allowed my gaze to trickle from her face to her hand, and I saw the finger that abruptly truncated in a stub of scarred skin where once a prehensile digit of flesh and nerves and blood had been, I felt a pang of shame and remorse as tangibly felt in my innards as a pang of hunger. Tal fed and comforted us that night, rescuing us at least temporarily from the disorder, sorrow, and publicity of our current lives. She observed what a state we were in with no one around to help us, and wept with us tears of sympathy.
The next day Tal took Lydia to the hospital for her brain surgery. I pushed back the curtains to watch Tal and Lydia walk out of our apartment building and into the crowd of religious protesters. Reverend Jeb, diligently