Chapter Twenty-Six Kami
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kami
Despite my parents’ resistance, after almost a year and a half, I gathered my courage and returned to the rehabilitation facility to visit Thiago. His mother was there, and she hugged me when I arrived, hope glimmering in her bright, tearful eyes.
It wasn’t easy to return after so much time. It meant stirring up the pain, the tragedy, the loss, remembering dark days when I’d sat next to him, saying nothing, just crying because he wasn’t there with me. But the hardest part was walking into his room and seeing the state he was in.
The person lying in that bed didn’t look in the least like Thiago. He was sunken and thin—frighteningly so. His face looked like someone else’s, and his muscles were gone.
I wanted to take off running when I saw all those machines keeping him alive. I even wondered for a moment whether Taylor had been right, whether unplugging him would be the best thing for him.
What would Thiago think if he could see himself like this?
What would he have asked us, begged us to do, had he known he would be spending years lying in a bed?
I was scared—scared that I might be wrong—scared that what I thought was best for him was just my selfishness speaking.
For a few days, I sat there next to him, not sure what to say. I told him a little about my life, about Harvard, about why I’d decided to go there instead of Yale. It was weird at first, because I felt like I was talking to myself, but it got easier. Soon it turned into a kind of therapy.
The first sign that it was working came fast. Just two days after I started going to the facility, something small, almost imperceptible, occurred. But I saw it: One of his fingers twitched against the mattress.
The second sign, on the seventh day, was when his eyelids trembled.
I told the doctors about both, but none of them seemed surprised or especially hopeful. They told me they had seen brain activity, that they knew he was even dreaming, and his movements could have to do with that. At any rate, it was nothing out of the ordinary, they said.
But I knew otherwise.
It didn’t matter what they said. I was hopeful now, excited. When I told my parents I wasn’t going back to college that spring, all hell broke loose. My parents even spoke to Katia, but this time, she backed me up.
This was more important than everything else, and I wouldn’t leave.
I wouldn’t stop going to visit until I proved that Katia and I were right and Thiago opened his eyes.
He would open them for me, for his mother, for his brother—his will to live was still burning inside him, I knew that.
And a life spent in a hospital, being tended to by doctors and nurses, would never be enough for him. He was hungry to live.
Two weeks later, there was too much evidence to ignore—he was changing, and the doctors had to start paying attention.
The physician overseeing him explained to us that there were drugs used to try to bring patients out of a coma—they had tried them with him before but hadn’t had any luck.
Maybe this time would be different. But he told us not to get our hopes up.
Reawakening after that long was very, very rare, let alone a full recovery.
It was a slow process, but he responded well. He had spasms and tachycardia, but slowly and steadily, they brought him back to us.
His mother and I were elated. It was working: Thiago could hear me. He wanted to come back. He wanted to come back to me.
I knew it. He had to.
I told him everything. I told him Taylor and I had gone out again for a few months.
I told him that our relationship had started off well but had become more and more complicated.
I told him I’d been selfish, that I’d gone to Harvard and gotten back with Taylor because it had been my way to hold on to him, Thiago.
It wasn’t easy to confess, but I’m convinced that those talks were key in Thiago’s recovery, and he finally awoke.
That’s right. Thiago woke up.
Two years. Exactly two years passed before Thiago Di Bianco decided to open his eyes.
It was a day like any other, but it was a day I’d remember for my entire life.
It was a rainy, cold day. Christmas was around the corner.
The third Christmas since the shooting had happened.
I was twenty years old now. Time had flown by, but at the same time, it had been frozen, frozen for Thiago, for his mother, for Taylor, for me.
Time freezes when the person you love is locked in a struggle between life and death.
I was with him when he opened his eyes, and I’m telling it this way because nothing ended up how I thought.
Was he happy to see me?
Of course he was, although when it happened, he didn’t know where he was, or who he was, and he remembered nothing about the shooting. It took him a few days to orient himself, to remember why he’d been in a coma for two years.
It wasn’t easy filling in the blanks for him, or watching his reaction when the doctors told him about his brain injury and everything that had happened to his body after being unconscious for so long.
That was when the hard times came, when we started to understand that what had happened to Thiago could have many aftereffects. Too many.
He got frustrated when he struggled to speak, unable to communicate using even the most basic words.
It was difficult to see someone as strong as Thiago going through something like that, and he didn’t want me to witness it.
He hardly spoke to me. He said he couldn’t find the words, but the nurses told me he was getting better all the time. He would tense up when I visited him. I realized he was uncomfortable whenever I was around. But why? Why would he feel that way?
“Go back to Harvard,” he told me during one of his physical therapy sessions. He was so weak that he could hardly stand and take a few steps.
“But I want to be here. I want to help you—”
“I don’t!” he shouted, and everyone in the physical therapy room turned and looked at us. “It’s killing me, letting you see me like this— I can’t. I can’t have you close right now. I need you to go.”
He was shaking, so the doctors rushed in to assist him. Finally, his mother told me to go.
“Give him time, Kami,” she told me in the hospital cafeteria.
“He doesn’t feel like himself; his body and his brain are betraying him, and he doesn’t want you to see him in this state.
I know my son, and the same way I knew you would bring him back, I know that right now, you being here is only going to slow down his recovery. ”
It was hard to accept, and I resisted it at first, but it was true that whenever he saw me, he got worse. As soon as I walked into the room, he’d turn angry and tell me to leave.
I cried all night, and then in the morning, I tried to force a smile.
What was happening? Was I going to lose him all over again? After all the time I waited for him to come back to me?
I didn’t know, so I decided to return to Harvard.
The day before I went back to school, I visited him in his room.
“I’ll wait for you,” I told him. He looked better, a little more like himself even though he was still so thin. They’d given him a shave and styled his hair like before, but he was far from that athletic guy he’d been. His vitality was missing.
He was staring out the window, looking irritated. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get why it was so hard to look at me.
“I was with my sister,” he confessed finally, and it was the first time in days he’d said something to me that wasn’t a complaint or dismissal.
I froze. “What… What do you mean by your sister?”
“I mean the only sister I have, the one I lost. I was with her, I could see her, I could hug her, I could run around with her and play hide-and-seek. We talked, and that pain tucked so deep inside of me—I felt it disappear.”
I stood there waiting for him to continue, not knowing what to say, because we both knew his sister was dead. If he had been with her, did that mean Thiago had been dead, too?
“You brought me back, and I’m thankful, but sometimes… sometimes I wonder if that was what was supposed to happen. Is this really the place for me after everything that happened?”
“Your place is wherever I am, isn’t it?” I asked, trying with all my strength not to burst into tears.
His green eyes looked straight into mine.
“I don’t even know if I’ll fully recover. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk like before, or run, or play basketball. I don’t know if my body will ever be the same. And you deserve better.”
“I deserve to be with you,” I said.
“No! You deserve to be with someone who won’t be a burden to you. You deserve someone healthy, strong, mentally capable, someone who can give you everything you deserve. And me—”
“You’re going to get better.”
“I need you to go, Kamila,” he said, and when he called me by my full name, I always knew he was serious. “Don’t make me repeat it. I won’t let you throw your life away because of me.”
I was furious. Didn’t he realize how much I had suffered? Was he aware of the mental and emotional effort I had made coming to see him every day, drawing strength from places I didn’t know I had to will a miracle to occur? And this was how he thanked me?
I stood. “I think I deserve a lot more than this,” I responded, holding back my tears. “Do you have any idea how much—”
“I didn’t ask you to,” he cut me off again.
“I’m grateful for your efforts, for your hope and commitment.
I know you were determined to wake me up, but I can’t just pick up where we left off.
I can’t look you in the face knowing I don’t deserve you.
So please, just go, start your life over, because I have a long road ahead of me, and I have to walk that road alone. ”
Alone?
I left feeling rejected and wounded—my whole body was heavy with pain.
I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t let me be there for him.
But I gave him his space.
I went back to college and left behind the depressive Kami, the weak Kami, the Kami who stayed in her room reading stories of people who had awakened from comas and learning about the aftereffects of brain trauma.
I became myself again, left the pain behind, hard as it was—and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done—but I couldn’t go on sacrificing my life for others.
I had done my job; I had fought for him, for us. If he didn’t want to see it that way, and this was how he thanked me, then maybe, maybe I had been wrong.