The Half That Wasn't Missing

Maya's grandmother drew a clock with all twelve numbers squeezed onto the right side.

She did it carefully. She did it like someone who believed, truly believed, that she had drawn a perfect circle with the numbers evenly spaced. She set the pencil down and smiled at the occupational therapist, and Maya felt something crack open inside her chest.

"Beautiful," Abuela said. "What's next?"

The therapist, a young woman named Dana who was always slightly behind schedule and already glancing at her next patient's file, collected the paper. "Great work, Mrs. Reyes. We'll do more tomorrow." She was out the door before Abuela had finished nodding.

Soren was sitting in the corner chair, the one with the ripped vinyl armrest. He had his notebook open but he wasn't writing. He was staring at the clock drawing that Dana had left on the tray table.

"She can see," Maya said quietly, standing in the hallway just outside the door. "Her eyes are fine. They tested them."

"I know," Soren said. He had followed her out. "That's the part I keep getting stuck on."

"So why does she eat food from only the right side of her plate? Why did she only put makeup on the right side of her face this morning? My mom had to fix it and Abuela didn't understand why."

Soren opened his notebook to where he'd written the word Dana had used during the family meeting two days ago. Hemispatial neglect. Below it he'd written: NOT blindness. Eyes work. Brain doesn't build the left side.

"Dana said her parietal lobe," he said. "The right one. It got damaged by the stroke."

"But what does that mean? She's not blind on the left. She's just. She doesn't know the left is there."

They stood in the hallway with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes somewhere around the corner. Maya's face had the look Soren recognized, the one where she was chasing something she could almost feel but not yet name.

"Come on," she said.

She walked back into the room. Abuela was watching television, a cooking show, smiling at the screen.

"Abuela, can I sit on your left side?"

"Of course, mija. Sit anywhere you like."

Maya pulled a chair to Abuela's left. She sat down. She waited.

Abuela kept watching the cooking show.

"Abuela?"

No response. Not ignoring her. Not distracted. Maya could see her grandmother's eyes pointed at the television. She was right there, two feet away, and she had vanished from her grandmother's world.

Maya moved the chair to the right side. "Abuela."

"There you are, mija!" Abuela's face lit up. "Where were you?"

Maya looked at Soren. Soren looked at Maya.

"I was right next to you," Maya said softly.

"Don't be silly." Abuela laughed and turned back to the cooking show.

In the hallway again, Maya pressed her back against the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the floor. Soren sat next to her.

"It's not that she can't see me," Maya said. "It's that her brain stopped building the place where I was sitting. The left side of her space just. Doesn't exist for her."

Soren turned that over. "Like if someone erased every left page from a book. You wouldn't know pages were missing. You'd just read the right pages and think you had the whole story."

"She thinks she has the whole world," Maya said. "She drew that clock and she thought it was perfect. She really did. She wasn't being lazy or confused. Her brain built a complete clock. It just built it out of half a clock."

A nurse passed by pushing a cart, and they pulled their knees in to make room.

"Soren. What if we do that too."

He looked at her.

"Not the left side thing. But what if our brains are building our world out of less than what's actually there, and we think it's everything? What if there are whole parts of reality that our parietal lobes just. Skip. And we don't know it because we've never had anything different."

Soren picked up his pencil. Put it down again. "We'd have no way to know."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Abuela doesn't know the left is missing. She can't know it from inside her own experience. Someone on the outside has to show her."

"So who shows us?"

The fluorescent lights buzzed. Down the hall, someone laughed.

"Maybe nobody," Soren said. "Maybe we just have to figure out that it's possible. That what we experience isn't the same as what's there."

Maya pulled her knees up to her chin. "I want to help her. I don't want to just understand it. I want to do something."

"Dana said the brain can sometimes rewire. That's what the rehab is for."

"Dana is always rushing to her next patient."

"Yeah."

They sat with that for a minute. Then Maya stood up.

"Okay. So we learn everything about this. We figure out what actually helps, not just what fits into a thirty-minute session. We find out what exercises work, what research exists. And we do them with her. Every visit. We put things on her left side and we gently show her they're there. Not because we're smarter than Dana. Because we have more time than Dana."

"We'd have to be patient," Soren said. "Really patient. She's going to forget. She's going to not see the left side over and over. Every single time is going to be the first time for her."

"I know."

He stood up too. "We should start with the clock. Dana leaves the drawings. We could sit with Abuela and draw clocks together. If we draw them next to her, she can see the whole circle. Eventually her brain might start reaching for the left side on its own."

Maya was already walking back toward the room. She stopped at the door.

"Soren. She thinks she sees everything. She's sure of it. She would argue with you. She'd say the clock is fine, the plate is full, both sides of her face have makeup on. Her brain is that good at filling in what's not there."

"Or leaving out what is."

"What's the difference?"

He didn't answer. She didn't need him to.

Maya picked up a blank sheet of paper from Dana's stack and a pencil from the cup by the window. She carried them to the right side of Abuela's tray table, where Abuela could see them.

"Abuela, will you draw a clock with me?"

"For you, mija, anything."

Maya drew a full circle, slowly, and placed her pencil at the twelve.

Abuela reached for her own pencil and began on the right, at the six, and Maya gently, so gently, guided her grandmother's eyes to the left, where the other half of the world was waiting.