Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

visitor’s chair to my right like a nervous hen on a nest of precious eggs. Even though I don’t have a medical excuse now, I’m still trying to pretend she’s not here. But she’s sitting smack in the middle of my field of vision, so she’s unavoidable. And every time I look at her, she’s got this anxious expression carved onto her face that makes me want to scream. I suppose it’s the sort of worried expression that would naturally form on anyone forced to sit next to me or the motorcycle accident guy next door with the mangled face and no legs or the young woman down the hall who had a postpartum stroke and can’t say her new baby’s name. It’s the kind of concerned, mixed-with-a-spoonful-of-horror-and-adollop-of-dread look that anyone might have if forced to sit next to any patient in the neuro unit. It can’t be that she’s actually worried about me. She hasn’t worried about me in thirty years. So, although it bugs me, I get her expression. What I don’t get is who’s forcing her to sit here.
    Martha comes in and places a stainless steel basin on my tray.
    “Helen, will you go sit on Sarah’s other side?” she asks.
    My mother pops up and disappears. Maybe I judged Martha too quickly.
    “Okay, Sarah, lie back, here we go. Ready?” she asks.
    But before I can give my consent to whatever it is we’re about to do, she places her strong hand on the side of my face and turns my head. And there’s my mother again. Damn this woman.
    “Here’s a washcloth. Go up and down her arm with it, rub her hand, all her fingers.”
    “Should I wash her other arm, too?”
    “No, we’re not giving her a bath. We’re trying to remind her brain that she has a left arm through the texture of the cloth, the temperature of the water, and her looking at her arm while this is happening. Her head is going to want to drift back over here. Just turn it back to the left like I did. Good?”
    My mother nods.
    “Good,” Martha says and leaves us in a hurry.
    My mother wrings the cloth out over the basin and starts wiping my arm. I feel it. The cloth is coarse and the water is lukewarm. I see my forearm, my wrist, my hand as she touches each body part. And yet, although I feel it happening to me, it’s almost as if I’m watching my mother wash someone else’s arm. It’s as if the cloth against my skin is telling my brain,
Feel that? That’s your left shoulder. Feel that? That’s your left elbow.
But another part of my brain, haughty and determined to get in the last word, keeps retorting,
Ignore this foolishness! You don’t have a left anything! There is no left!
    “How does this feel?” asks my mother after several minutes.
    “It’s a bit cold.”
    “Sorry, okay, hold on, don’t move.”
    She springs up and scurries into the bathroom. I stare at the prison and daydream. I wonder if she’d be fetching warm water for me if I were over there. Without warning, her hand is on my face, and she turns my head. She starts rubbing my arm again. The water’s too hot.
    “You know,” I say. “Bob really needs to get to work on time. He shouldn’t be driving you in here in the morning.”
    “I drove myself.”
    Baldwin sits in the eye of a colossal mass transit tornado, a difficult destination to reach for even the bravest and most seasoned Boston drivers. Add rush hour. And my mother.
    “You did?”
    “I typed the address into that map computer, and I did exactly what the lady told me to do.”
    “You drove Bob’s car?”
    “It has all the car seats.”
    I feel like I missed a meeting.
    “You drove the kids to school?”
    “So Bob could get to work on time. We’ve switched cars.”
    “Oh.”
    “I’m here to help you.”
    I’m still catching up to the fact that she drove my kids to school and day care and then into Boston by herself from Welmont during rush hour, and now I have to wrap my brain around this doozy. I try to remember the last time she helped me with anything. I think she poured me a glass