Nor, when he finally woke in a hospital he didn’t recognize in an entirely different country, would he remember the accident at all. He remembered that he had been returning to the lodge after spending a few days in Gaborone, but only learned later from the nurse that an oncoming supply truck in the opposite lane had suddenly crossed into the path of his pickup. Tru hadn’t been wearing his seat belt, and in the collision, he’d rocketed through the windshield, cracking his skull and landing forty feet away, which caused eighteen more bones to break, including both femurs, all the bones in his right arm, three vertebrae, and five ribs. He was loaded into a vegetable cart by strangers and rushed to a temporary NGO clinic that was offering vaccinations at a nearby village. It had neither the equipment, medicine, or supplies that Tru needed, nor was a doctor even present. The floor was dirt, and the room was filled with children who had learned to ignore the flies that swarmed over their faces and limbs. The nurse was from Sweden, young and overwhelmed, and had no idea what to do when Tru was rolled into the waiting room. But people expected her to do something—anything—so she moved toward the cart and checked for a pulse. There was nothing. She checked the carotid artery. Still nothing. She put her ear to Tru’s mouth and checked for breathing. She heard and felt nothing, then raced toward her bag for a stethoscope. She placed it on his chest and listened carefully for the faintest murmur without hearing anything before finally giving up. Tru was dead.
The owner of the vegetable cart asked that the body be placed elsewhere, so he could go back and retrieve his vegetables before they were all stolen. There was an argument about whether he should wait for the police, but the owner shouted the loudest and his opinion carried the day. He and the father of one of the children lifted Tru’s body from the cart. The bones clicked and made grinding noises as Tru was placed on the floor in the corner, and the nurse draped a blanket over his body. People made room for the corpse, but otherwise ignored it. The owner of the vegetable cart vanished back onto the street and the nurse continued to administer injections.
Sometime later, Tru coughed.
He was brought to the hospital in Gaborone in the bed of someone’s truck. From the village, it took more than an hour to get there. When he was admitted, there was little the emergency doctor thought he could do. It was a wonder Tru remained alive. His stretcher was left in a crowded hallway while the hospital staff waited for him to die. Maybe minutes, they thought, no more than half an hour. By then, the sun was going down.
Tru didn’t die. He survived overnight, but soon an infection set in. The hospital was short on antibiotics and didn’t want to waste them. Tru’s fever rose and his brain began to swell. Two days passed, then three, and still he lingered somewhere between life and death. By then, Andrew had been contacted through his listing as next of kin on his ID, and had flown from England to be with his father. Alerted by Andrew, Kim also flew in from Johannesburg, where she was living at the time. An emergency medical flight was arranged, and Tru was flown to a trauma hospital in South Africa. He somehow survived that flight, too, and was given massive infusions of antibiotics while the doctors drained the fluid from his brain. He remained unconscious for eight days. On day nine, his fever broke, and he woke to see Andrew by his bedside.
He stayed in the hospital for seven more weeks while one by one his bones were reset, casted, and healed. Afterward, unable to walk, fighting double vision, and constantly plagued by vertigo, he was moved to a rehabilitation facility.
He was there for nearly three years.
At the cottage, the firelight flickered in Hope’s eyes like candles, and Tru thought again that she was as beautiful as she’d been so long ago. Maybe more so. In the soft lines near her eyes, he saw wisdom and a hard-won serenity. Her face was full of grace.
He knew the years hadn’t been easy for her. Though she hadn’t spoken much about her marriage to Josh, he guessed she was avoiding the subject to spare not only Tru’s feelings but her own.
Meanwhile, she stared at him as though she was seeing him for the first time.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That’s…one of the most terrible things I’ve ever heard. How did you survive?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you really dead?”
“That’s what I was told. I called the nurse at the vaccination clinic about a year after the accident, and she swore that I had no vitals at all. She said that when I coughed, half of the patients in the room screamed. It made me laugh at the time.”
“You’re trying to be funny, but there’s nothing funny about any of that.”
“No,” he agreed. “There wasn’t.” He touched his temple, where his hair had turned white. “I had a traumatic brain injury. Some pieces of my skull were driven into my brain, and for a long time, the wiring was all messed up. After I finally woke, I would talk to Andrew or the doctors, thinking that I was saying one thing, but actually I was saying something entirely different. I’d think I was saying, ‘Good morning,’ and what the doctors would hear was ‘Plums cry on boats.’ It was incredibly frustrating, and because my right arm was so smashed up, I couldn’t write, either. Eventually, some of the wiring started to get straightened out. It was slow going, but even when I could speak and made sense, there were ridiculous gaps in my memory. I’d forget words, usually the simple things. I’d have to say ‘that thing you use to eat, the pokey silver thing you hold in your hand,’ instead of ‘fork.’ While that was occurring, the doctors also weren’t sure whether my paralysis was temporary or permanent. There was a lot of lingering swelling in my spine because of the broken vertebrae, and even after they put in rods, it took a long time for the swelling to go down.”
“Oh, Tru…I wish I would have known,” she said, her voice beginning to crack.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he pointed out.
“Still,” she said, drawing her knees up under the blanket. “That’s when I was trying to find you. I never thought to check the hospitals.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“I wish I could have been there for you.”
“I wasn’t alone,” he said. “Andrew would come to visit whenever he had the chance. Kim visited from time to time as well. And Romy somehow learned what had happened. It took him five days on a bus to reach the rehabilitation center, but he stayed for a week. All their visits were hard for me, though. Especially during the first year. I was in a lot of pain, I couldn’t really communicate, and I knew they were as frightened as I was. I knew they had the same questions I did: Would I ever walk again? Would I be able to speak normally? Would I ever be able to live on my own? It was hard enough already, without feeling their worries, too.”
“How long was it until you started getting better?”
“The double vision improved within a month, but everything was still miserably out of focus for maybe six months after that. I was able to sit up in bed after three or four months. Movement in my toes came next, but some of the bones in my legs hadn’t been set properly, so they had to re-break and reset them. Then there were the brain surgeries, and the spinal surgery, and…it was an experience I’d rather not repeat.”
“When did you realize that you’d be able to walk again?”
“Moving my toes was a good start, but it seemed to take forever to be able to move my feet. And walking was out of the question, at least in the beginning. I had to learn how to stand again, but the muscles in my legs had atrophied and my nerves still weren’t firing correctly. I’d experience intense, shooting pains all the way down the sciatic nerve. Sometimes I’d take a supported step—with bars on either side of me—but then I suddenly wouldn’t be able to move my rear leg at all. Like the connection between my brain and my legs had suddenly been severed. Sometime around the year mark, I was finally able to cross the room with support. It was only ten feet or so and my left foot dragged a bit…but I actually wept. It was the first time I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I knew that if I kept working at it, I might one day be able to leave the clinic.”
“That must have been nightmarish for you.”
“Actually, I have trouble remembering all of it. It feels so distant now…those days and weeks and months and years sort of run together.”
She studied him. “I would never have known any of this unless you told me. You seem…the same as you were back then. I noticed the limp, but it’s so slight…”
“I have to stay active, which means I keep to a rather stringent exercise routine. I walk a lot. That helps with the pain.”
“Is there a lot of pain anymore?”
“Some, but the exercise makes a big difference.”