pain gradually working its way up her calf and then past her knee until there was a concentrated knot of tension and an almost unbearable ache at the top of her hamstring where it joined her lower gluteal muscles. (How blissfully ignorant she’d been of the infrastructure of upper thigh to ass before the accident! Only wondering if there was a cure for the tiny cellulite bumps that peeked out from her very short shorts.) Most days the pain would creep into her hip; many days her neck would start to ache by late afternoon and she’d end up in bed before dinner.
Her doorbell rang, loud and insistent, angry. Vinnie. Matilda opened the door to find him standing there with a pizza box balanced on his left arm and a full-length mirror tucked under his bionic arm. She eyed the long mirror warily when he came through the door.
“I don’t want that thing in here,” she said.
“Maybe you don’t want it, but you need it. Your foot is bad, right?” He could tell just by looking at her how much pain she was in. She would still laugh and smile, but her eyes would be unfocused. He understood.
“It’s not too bad,” Matilda lied. On good days, Matilda’s nonexistent foot would tingle or just feel like it was there, its ghostly presence driving her crazy. But on bad days it hurt to distraction. Today, it felt like needles were piercing her nonexistent foot. For weeks, she’d had a persistent itch on one of her missing toes. She found herself in the ludicrous position of fantasizing about amputating a foot that didn’t exist.
“Sit down,” Vinnie said, placing the pizza on her kitchen table. “Take a slice while it’s hot. You can eat while we do this.”
She reluctantly sat on one of her kitchen chairs. Took a slice and blew a little before she bit into it. “How did you manage to get it here while it’s still hot?” she asked him.
“Trade secret,” he said.
“What’s in the sauce that makes this so good anyway?”
“Nice try. We can talk my miracle sauce later. Let’s do some work.”
Vinnie had been talking about mirror therapy for weeks, and Matilda thought it sounded ridiculous, like voodoo. Still, he was in front of her and he’d carted a mirror all the way to her house, so she reluctantly did what he said. She straightened her knees and let Vinnie position the mirror between them so that when she looked down, she saw her intact foot on one side and its mirrored image on the other. “Oh,” she said.
“Move your left foot,” Vinnie said. She did and the optical illusion was of two perfect feet, moving in concert. “Scratch your toe,” he said, “the one that’s been itching.”
“How?”
He pointed. “Scratch the itchy spot on your left foot, but keep looking in the mirror.”
She leaned over and gently scratched. “Oh my God,” she said. “It helps.” She scratched harder. “I can’t believe it helps. I don’t understand.”
“Nobody understands, really. The simple way to think about it is that you’re helping rewire the old signals in your brain. You’re teaching your brain a new story.”
She moved her foot to the left and to the right, flexed and pointed and flexed again. She wiggled her toes. She rotated her ankle and the foot in the mirror, her missing foot, seemed like it was back and was working. She scratched again, it helped again. “It already feels better,” she said. “Not great but different.”
“Good. Four or five times a week for fifteen minutes. And use the mirror whenever the foot hurts or itches. Got it?”
Matilda nodded and smiled. “It sounded so stupid,” she said. “I didn’t want to go buy a mirror just to do something that sounded so dumb. Thank you, Papi,” she said. She spoke softly and put a light hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing the mirror.”
“It’s temporary,” Vinnie said, standing abruptly. The charge that shot through his arm, his chest, and other places he didn’t want to dwell on when Matilda touched him was dismaying.
“I’ll buy my own. You can have this back—”
“No, no,” he said. “I don’t mean the mirror is temporary; it’s yours. I bought it for you. I mean you still need to deal with the underlying problem.” He sounded angrier than he intended. Matilda was frowning. He took a breath. Stop. Rewind. He started again, keeping his voice even. “The mirror is just a temporary fix is what I meant.”