Lasting Damage
Garrett Bliss

“That’s where Kathryn Hill dropped you on your head when you were a baby,” my mother would say.

Over a low stone wall, across a gently sloping field, weathered shingle houses with white trim stand against the blue-green of the Sakonnet River. Passing the cottage in the distance I did not remember, where we had spent a summer years before, triggered in my mother a reflexive impulse to share this story.

The details were clearly important to her. The babysitter was named. Always. The verb was never “slipped” or “fell.” The indictment conveyed by the word “dropped” was intentional. I would reach up with my little hand and feel the top of my head, slightly nauseous at the idea of a “soft spot.”

I was nine months old when it happened. My eyes did not respond to light. My pediatrician in Providence was called. I was taken to the emergency room in Fall River. After tests and X-rays, I was given the all-clear to go home. No lasting damage.

Responding to the same stimuli, I kept up the tradition on day trips to Little Compton with my girlfriend turned fiancée turned wife turned mother of my children. This was all about my now-dead mother’s tendency to tell a limited repertoire of stories over and over.

When I reached that stage in life when one has friends who are actual doctors, I asked if what happened had been serious. I had come to terms with my mother’s need to embellish the mundane.

Eyes wide, head nodding: “Yeah, coulda been pretty serious.”

My joke that this explained why I could not do long division now had a welcome edge to it.

A few years ago, I was giving a lunchtime talk on predatory lending to an audience of about two or three dozen. When I finished and people were leaving to go home, a woman in her early sixties – about a decade or so older than me – approached. She had the recognizable air of someone too shy to speak up during the Q&A.

“You’re okay,” she said. She breathed deeply and smiled up at me.

I nodded. Said nothing.

“I just had to see that you were okay. I’m Kathryn Hill.”

Standing before her that day, I was the answer to a question she had lived with for forty-five years.

The next time I drive by that cottage silhouetted against the water, I won’t say anything.