by Rhonda Crone

Created on: September 12, 2008   Last Updated: September 20, 2008

Tommy's Halo
Tommy was born a bit special. He just doesn't do mediocre. Whether it's going to school, working, drinking, whatever he may do, there's no happy medium. It's all or nothing. When he was twelve, and Mom was pregnant with me, he wrecked his motorcycle into a car. It was a close call, but he got out with only a broken bone or two. That was just the beginning of a string of close calls, and cranial damage, for Tommy.

The summer before he went to medical school, Tommy presented us with our first serious family tragedy, and his second brush with death. He had been staying at home after graduating college, and was partying with friends at our sister Susan's swimming pool (Susan always had a swimming pool, along with a great tan), a few blocks from our parents' house. I was about eleven. I remember waking in the middle of the night, to find Tommy sitting on the floor of my closet with the light on. Mom was hovered over him. "My neck hurts," he said. And she had him turn it, and bend it, and he couldn't. They thought it was probably just sprained, but she and my father, startled out of sleep in his Fruit of the Looms, took him to the emergency room, to be on the safe side. Good thing sometimes, that safe side.

"He's broken the third vertebrae. Had it been the next one down, he would be paralyzed." The doctor, a family friend, told my mother. They immediately performed surgery and placed this huge brace on his head. There appeared to be holes drilled into Tommy's head that supported the monstrous contraption that he would wear for months. But they weren't acutally holes, I later discovered; they were just metal posts so tightly clamped to his head that they looked that way. When I saw him next, he was face down on a hospital bed, which looked more like a massage table, with its hole at the top for his face fit into. I crawled underneath so that he could see me. I was devastated and confused. I had never dealt with anything but my hamsters passing away at age eleven. I thought Tommy was going to die. But he didn't.

He lived at home that summer, spending most of his time in a beige recliner, with the television remote or a copy of Playboy in his hand, which he claimed to read for the articles. I knew where he kept his dirty magazine stash, conspicuously under the sink in the bathroom that we shared. Beth, my best friend and I would sneak in and look at the naked women, and read their "bios." "I enjoy snow skiing and baking cookies," or, "I like to roller skate,

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>