Characters from My Lost Summer, the Book

My family members are characters in My_Lost_Summer, a story of my recovery from a coma when I was thirteen. This picture was taken one year before my horseback riding accident.

I’m the blonde to the left. My brother Chris is behind me. He is eighteen here. Though Mom remembers how much time he spent at the hospital with me, he cannot remember anything about that time—or he wasn’t willing to talk about it when I asked, perhaps. When he makes an appearance in the story, it’s due to someone else’s memory, most often mine. Therefore, he is a relatively minor character in the story though in reality he was a major one.

To Chris’s left is our brother Mike. He’s ten years older than I, which makes him twenty-two in this picture. He had moved to Maine just weeks prior to my accident and came back to see me twice during my ninety-day hospital stay. I don’t remember either of the visits. His character is a little more developed than Chris’s because Mike remembered so many significant happenings when I interviewed him. Mom and he both remember the event that most characterizes the relationship Mike and I had then, a relationship typical between the oldest and youngest of a three-child family.

Chapter 8 of My_Lost_Summer ends with Mike flying in from Maine, and the next morning he and Mom leave for the hospital to see me.

In the morning on the drive to Kettering [Hospital], Mike at the wheel, Elaine tried to equip her son with a visual picture of what his sister was now: “Now, Michael, she’s either really active or really still. I think the doctor is bringing her out of it to see how she is, and then once she gets violent, I think their drugging her to keep her under so she doesn’t hurt herself or anyone else. She’s already kicked a nurse. She usually has restraints on her arms and legs for when she gets so restless.” They passed the Miamisburg public pool with its smooth surface glistening in the morning sun.
“And she has tubes running everywhere and IV lines and monitors and all that. Okay?” Elaine searched her son for some kind of slight shock or reaction, but she’d told him the same thing over the phone every day since Libbi was admitted. He’d heard it all already.

Mike barely nodded his head up and down, keeping his eyes on the road, “Okay.”

“Her doctor assures me that she’s right on course. They say that most people who come out of a coma are active and thrashing around like she is. They say it just takes time.”

Then, in Chapter 9, he sees me for the first time:

Elaine’s warnings were insufficient to prepare Libbi’s older brother for the scene. Seeing all the lines from the machines and dripping bags that led to his sister’s body, which was lifeless for the moment, and the restraints on her arms and legs, it was all somehow a surprise despite the forewarning. Mike collapsed in a wave of emotion—like he had taken a physical blow—and he lay on the floor sobbing with abandon

Interviewing family for this book more than twenty years after the event was quite revealing to me. I had no idea Mike reacted like that, and he and I shared a cry when he told me.

In the picture next to Mike is my cousin Holly, sixteen, giving Mike the bunny ears. She didn’t make it into the book because she couldn’t remember anything from that time and I had no memories with her in them, and including extra characters, especially if they do nothing significant, simply confuses the reader. So I chose to leave her out. She understands.

In front of Holly is my cousin Noelle, who’s thirteen in the photo. I have only great memories of whenever Noelle would visit, which I remember being several times a week.

Yay! Noelle’s here! I think as I see my cousin walk through the doorway with a big, yellow smiley-face, Mylar balloon.
…
“Hi, Libbi! How are you today?!” She doesn’t expect a response. “How was your therapy this morning? Good?” She ties the balloon onto the railing.

“You know what; I bet you can’t see that, can you? Why don’t I tie it down here so you don’t have to look straight up to see it.”

She talks to my Mom: “How’d she do in therapy this morning, Aunt Lanie?”

Mom tells her I’m coming right along and then gathers her purse and a couple flower arrangements and leans over the bed and says to me as she pushes my hair back off my face, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, okay?” and she kisses me on the forehead and leaves.

Noelle is just a flurry of activity. I love love love when she comes with Grandma. …

Noelle secures the balloon to the table across from my bed, still talking: “We won our softball tournament last weekend. We played some teams from Carlisle. Tracy pitched the game we played against them. She did real good, but I got two singles off her, and we did win three to one. Lance’s team finishes up this week.

“There. How’s that?” She pulls the string to make the balloon bounce.

She flits over to the window and looks at the plants and flowers that are piling up there. She reads the cards: “These flowers are from your Aunt Frieda and Uncle Steve in North Carolina.” She turns to look at me. “That’s your dad’s brother, right?” She turns back. “And this arrangement is from…I can’t get the card out of the envel—oh, here it is. J.T. Riley and Ruppert Ruppert. Huh. What about that.” She replaces the card in the envelope and turns to me. “They’re the sponsor of our softball team.”

Noelle walks to the bedside console for bed-2, where Mom has set the lidded glass container with condensation forming on the inside walls and ivy and moss growing. “Isn’t this terrarium nice!?” Noelle exclaims as she bends to look through the glass sides. She reads the card tied to the lid with the striated pink ribbon, “It’s from everybody at Cheney’s. Where your dad works? They sponsored Stephanie and Trisha’s team. Do you remember my friends Stephanie and Trisha?”
…
Noelle makes her way to the bulletin board across from the end of my bed, above the table where she tied the Mylar balloon. She rearranges the pictures on the border. The ones of Flash and Sparky and my brother. “Is Mike going to come home again to see you?”

Again? When was he here? I wonder.

Even though I have memories of her later visits, Noelle only remembers seeing me when I was glassy-eyed and non-responsive.

Between Noelle and me in the picture is Lance, my cousin who’s a year younger than I. He doesn’t remember anything from my time in the hospital, and I don’t have any memories that include him. His one spoken line in My_Lost_Summer is “Hello?” when he answers the phone at our grandparents’ house when Mom calls to report the news that I am critically injured.

The picture of my horse, which is the front cover of my book, has field/woods in the background. It’s the same background as in the picture above. The field Flash was in when I took that photo is off the left side of the picture.

As I come across photos of family who are characters in my story, I’ll post them.