"Remember," said Leath, standing outside the operations building at Kelly Air Force Base in November 2003, "on the boat, when . . ."
"Uh-oh," said Al Sr., "I'm not sure if I like where this is going."
Alan Babin reacts to Al Sr.'s touch as neighbor and friend Andrea Lovelidge looks on.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall)
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They were at the Air Force base in San Antonio waiting for Alan and Rosie's Texas homecoming with 19 other family members and friends. Christy entertained Leath's 3-year-old son, Chad, collecting chalky rocks piled near a tree. Al Sr. suffered through Leath's stories with a smile, the same look he would reflexively show Rosie and Alan when they'd team up to tease him.
Al Sr. and his son had a relationship that Leath and a lot of his other friends had elevated to a sort of father-son prototype. Some of the family photos that the Babins had posted near Alan's hospital bed reminded everyone of this: The two of them in a swimming pool, smiling as Al Sr. gets ready to flip his son into the air one more time as a teenager; the two of them at Alan's jump-school graduation. Al had enthusiastically encouraged Alan to join the Army, believing that the military would provide the same sense of purpose it had provided him, but now he didn't talk about those discussions much. Once Rosie asked him, genuinely curious, whether he ever thought about the advice he'd given Alan.
Every day, he told her.
On this day, several of the friends waiting with Al Sr. at the Air Force base were the same ones who had spurred a fundraising effort that helped Al and Christy afford to travel to and from Washington on his policeman's salary. The town held carwashes and golf tournaments, appealing to Round Rock's patriotic instinct to help a kid everyone was calling a local hero. The regional home builders' association went so far as to build an addition onto the Babins' house -- a customized, wheelchair-accessible downstairs bedroom and bathroom that Alan could use as he gained the strength to walk on his own. They furnished it with a flat-screen TV and a SurroundSound stereo system. Not only did they install hardwood flooring in that room, but they extended it throughout the rest of the ground floor. When Al Sr. called Rosie in Washington to tell her about that surprise, his voice was choked with tears.
After a couple of hours of waiting at the airfield, Al Sr. got a call from Rosie on his cell phone at about 12:30 p.m. Takeoff had been delayed because of bad weather, and then the plane had been diverted to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.
"She said he's doing good," Al Sr. told the others.
By 4:30, the plane still hadn't arrived, and everyone was antsy. Al Sr. shifted his weight from one foot to the other, talking with Leath, waiting behind a low stucco wall that separated them from the tarmac.
Just before 5 p.m., Carol Baker, a friend who helped coordinate the building of the home addition, fetched Al Sr., who was pacing near the operations building: "You better look at this one, Al." "That's it," he said, watching the slow-moving figure getting bigger as it moved closer. "A C-130. You can tell by the smoke trailing from behind."
After the landing, Air Force officials drove Al Sr. to the plane while the others waited behind the low wall. Five ambulances rolled across the tarmac at the same time to transport Alan and four other wounded soldiers to nearby Brooke Army Medical Center, where Alan would remain for several weeks. The tiny figure of Rosie walked to the side of one of the ambulances and thrust her thumb up for the distant onlookers.
When Alan's ambulance finally approached the wall, with Rosie in the front passenger seat, the driver stopped to allow the family and friends to take a look in the back. A heavily medicated Alan was lying asleep, tubes protruding from several parts of his body. For most of the family members, this was their first glimpse of him in a year and a half. As they clamored at the ambulance's open back door, Christy stood off to the side, alone. She rolled up one of the banners, and waited. Rosie's mother climbed into the back of the ambulance and collapsed in tears when she saw Alan. She rubbed his cheek, and his eyes opened briefly; she cried harder.
Four minutes later, the ambulance drove away. As Al Sr. headed toward the parking lot, he spotted one of the other ambulances carrying another returning soldier driving off of the tarmac. No one else noted its passing. Al Sr. waved at it and said aloud, "Welcome home."
ROSIE ARRIVED AT THE TEXAS NEUROREHAB CENTER IN AUSTIN AT 9:30 A.M., which was late for her. It was January 2004, and she'd come from a doctor's appointment she'd been putting off for months. During the checkup, the doctor implied that grief counseling might be a good idea. It was a routine suggestion, which he said was prompted by nothing in particular, but it blindsided her.
"I think we're coping pretty well," she said at the rehab center after the appointment.
The doctor had also advised her to start an exercise regimen, immediately.
"Oh, sure," she said later. "When am I going to fit that in? At 3 a.m.?" Her words dripped with uncharacteristic sarcasm. But Rosie's endurance was under assault: She spent her days tending to Alan at the rehab center, where he was undergoing intense physical and speech therapy. At the same time, she was making a conscious effort not to forget Christy, who was now 17 and carrying an achiever's schedule at high school -- up at 6 a.m. for cross-country, the duties of a class president, softball and the National Honor Society.
Both Rosie and Al Sr. tried to keep an eye on Christy, worried that if anyone needed help coping, it probably would be her. She might have been an extrovert at school, but she had a tendency to keep her emotions to herself. While Rosie and Al Sr. kept a constant conversation aloft when visiting Alan, Christy was more prone to silences. They changed his wound dressings and catheter bags, but Christy seemed hesitant, as if afraid that she might damage him with a touch.
But the visits with her brother, and essentially being separated from her mother for months, also seemed to be spurring Christy to greater maturity. There was the silent confidence she'd shown by flying across the country by herself to see her brother at Walter Reed. Or the full carton of milk that could be found in the refrigerator, even though neither Rosie nor Al Sr. had had a chance to go to the store to replace the empty one from the day before. Or when a local television crew asked to interview the family and Christy served as the family spokeswoman:
"The response of the community has been amazing . . .," she began, smiling into the camera.
Blessed, grateful, lucky -- Rosie was constantly repeating those words when talking of her children and almost everything else. She had started distributing near-daily e-mail updates to people back home while at Walter Reed, a mailing list that grew to include hundreds of recipients as Alan's recovery became something of a community obsession. The updates usually ended with sunny valedictions such as "In the Grip of Grace" or "With a Grateful Heart."
Reading the updates, it was easy to mistake Alan's struggle as a steady march of progress. Actually, his overall responsiveness ebbed and flowed, and it was often worse after he had returned to Texas than it had been at Walter Reed. An erratic relationship with his feed tube -- sometimes he'd digest well, sometimes not -- prevented him from bulking; despite a 3,000-calorie daily diet pumped into him, his weight dropped to 117 pounds on his 5-foot-9-inch frame. He struggled with continuing infections and fevers, and he constantly battled the phlegm that plugged his tracheotomy hole. He periodically trembled and convulsed, but doctors weren't sure if they were seizures resulting from brain malfunction or from breathing blockages.
Alan's private room in the rehab center was at the end of a long hallway, easily spotted by visitors, thanks to the American flag posters and 82nd Airborne banners that Rosie hung. A single cross was nailed to an otherwise unadorned section of wall. The nurses and doctors periodically checked on him, but most often Alan was alone with his mother.
She examined every inch of his body every day, looking for redness that could foretell bedsores. She checked his eyes for mucus, cleaned his ears, checked the drain on his tracheotomy tube. She massaged his arms and legs to try to keep circulation steady. She sprayed clean every surface around him to battle bacteria. And every day she made a conscious effort to counteract the strain that her doctor, during that morning's checkup, had suggested was only normal for someone in her position.
She wasn't the only one under pressure. Al Sr. had recently adjusted his work schedule, trading the standard five-day workweek in favor of four 10-hour shifts Monday through Thursday, so he could sit with Alan more often and allow Rosie breaks. Christy was becoming more independent, by necessity. And then there was Alan.
Rosie didn't forget what Christy had asked at Walter Reed: Who's to say who's lucky and who's not? Rosie grew to believe that progress was not only possible but was destined. Everything seemed to be part of a vast plan. She remembered how as a 19-year-old in the Army she had escorted generals, learning the rules of protocol and rank structure that she believed helped her navigate the military bureaucracy on Alan's behalf. She remembered how Alan used to run through the kitchen and nibble on food throughout the day, forgoing big meals for lots of little ones; then she'd think about what the doctors told him life might be like after his eventual reconstructive surgery: He couldn't eat large meals, they told her, but would have to eat small portions regularly through the day. Everything was a blessing to her, and almost anything could be cause for celebration.
"Your nails need to be cut again," she said, taking one of his thin hands in hers on a day in late January at the rehab center. "I just cut them on Thursday. That's a good sign -- they're growing a lot faster now." While Rosie tended to her son, speech pathologist Joy Strother entered the room to begin Alan's therapy session. Her goal was to coax words from his throat, but first she had to start with more basic steps -- moving his lips with control and re-learning how to swallow. She swabbed the inside of Alan's mouth with lemon-flavored cotton, trying to prompt a swallow.
"Stay with me, Alan," Strother said, watching him tire as she swabbed and waited for any reaction. "C'mon. I'm going to need you to really concentrate. Here we go. Start moving your tongue. Bring it up and swallow. I'm watching for that Adam's apple to go up and down. Don't poop out on me now." Therapists, doctors and nurses who visited Alan daily -- even some of them at Walter Reed months before -- had become convinced that the reactions Rosie long had seen weren't figments of her imagination. Alan wasn't strong enough to nod his head easily or give other physical signals, so Strother and some of the others at the rehab center began using cards with "Yes" printed on the left and "No" printed on the right. They'd ask him questions, hold the card in front of his face and watch his eyes to see which word they would gravitate toward.
"I right away found that Alan's answers were very reliable," Strother said.
But now Alan's eyes were closing, exhausted from the effort of trying to swallow. Strother pleaded with him to keep trying, but he seemed to be fading. She asked if he wanted to try one more swab. She held the card in front of him, and his glance moved jerkily toward "No."
Alan also worked with physical and occupational therapists who tried to wake up his dormant muscles. Rosie wheeled him to an exercise room filled with multicolored balls, plastic horseshoes, badminton rackets. Two therapists supported him as he sat up on the edge of a large padded mattress, careful not to snag the one tube protruding from the short sleeve of his polo shirt, or the two jutting from near the waistband of his gray sweatpants, or the plastic hose that connected a portable oxygen tank to the tracheotomy hole in his throat. They scooted his catheter bag under the mattress and began trying to encourage him to move his arm, legs, neck and fingers.
"You up for this?" Rosie asked. "Give me a thumbs up!" His thumb lay motionless in his lap.
"I'm gonna take that as a no. But will you try anyway?" Rosie and the therapists asked him to look at different objects in the room, to test his responsiveness and to train his eyes to follow his thoughts.
"Where's Mom?" Rosie asked. "Look at my eyes, Alan." His gaze shifted jerkily toward her, then strayed. "Find your center, Alan," she said. "Find your center." Physical therapist Christienne Landry-Parten held a hairbrush in front of him, trying to get him to reach for it. He couldn't. But when she placed it in his palm, his thumb bent slightly around it.
"You're so awesome, Alan!" Rosie said, wiping a tendril of saliva hanging from his underlip. "My sweet man!"
"Can you try to brush your hair with it?" Landry-Parten asked.
