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TwitThisThe Perfect Gift
Several days later, an aide was straightening the bed sheets of one of those patients when the woman sat up and exclaimed, "Don't do that!" It was December 21 and Happi had come back to the world.The White Bull family converged on New Mexico. "You could instantly tell there was a difference," Boyer, now 29, said. "Her face was lit up." Happi lifted her arms for a hug. When the nurses asked if she knew her visitor, she nodded and said, "Cindy."
Perhaps the most poignant reunion of all, however, was an introduction. Mark, Jr., finally got to talk to the mother he'd never known. It was the first time he'd heard her voice.
Doctors suspect the amantadine is responsible for Happi's awakening. But when used to treat brain injuries, it's usually given soon after trauma occurs, not years later. And any return to consciousness after such a long time is extremely rare, experts say.
For the White Bull children, what brought their mother back is less important than her miraculous return.
Beacon of Faith
Margot Brown McWilliams, Woman's Day
One year, as 16-year-old Robyn Stevens pondered what to get her father for Christmas, she couldn't help thinking there seemed to be so few gift options for dads: ties, socks, a new belt. Then she remembered something her grandmother had said about the usefulness of flashlights: "You just never know when you might need one."
It seemed to Robyn that she had her answer. The one she bought wasn't fancy -- it was just an ordinary three-cell, garden-variety model. She thought her father would really like it, especially because it was waterproof and he spent a lot of time on the water, as part of a tugboat crew in Hancock, Maine.
When Arthur Stevens opened his present on Christmas morning, he grinned at his daughter and asked, "How did you know that this was just what I needed?"
On a raw January evening, Stevens was 25 miles out to sea, aboard the tugboat <i>Harkness</i>. He and his friend Duane Cleaves were helping Captain Rudy Musetti bring the craft home after towing barges off the coast of southern Maine.
Around 6 p.m., the temperature began to drop drastically. With winds at 40 m.p.h., the windchill factor was minus 45 degrees. A few minutes after six, the stern began taking on water. Musetti suspected that the boat had sprung a leak. Further checking revealed that the bilge pump had frozen. By then, the tug was pitching violently in 12-foot waves, and the decks were sheer ice.
To make matters worse, the crew also had sea smoke to contend with -- an impenetrable layer of fog caused by temperature differences between the ocean and air.
Captain Musetti radioed a message to the Coast Guard station at Southwest Harbor: "Mayday, mayday! We're going down."
As it happened, the <i>Harkness</i> was sinking just off Matinicus Island, where the few families who lived there during winter were settling down for dinner. Vance Bunker, an island resident, heard the radio conversations between the <i>Harkness</i> crew and the Coast Guard, and knew that the three men aboard didn't stand a chance in these conditions -- the tugboat was too far out for the Coast Guard to reach them in time.
He and two other lobstermen, Rick Kohls and Paul Murray, set out in the Jan-Ellen, Bunker's 36-foot lobster boat. They weren't sure of the tug's exact location, and because of the sea smoke and the icy windshield, all they could do was forge ahead into the darkness.
Around 7 p.m., the <i>Jan-Ellen</i> crew heard what would be the last radio transmission from the <i>Harkness</i>: "We're going into the water," Captain Musetti reported.
The certainty that the three men had just drowned made Rick Kohls sick to his stomach. But then he saw a strange sight. Piercing the sea smoke was a thin beam of light. Kohls shouted to Bunker and Murray, "Look -- follow that light!"
Bunker couldn't see through his windshield, but he followed Kohls's directions until they came upon something that dumbfounded them all: There, half-dead in the icy water, were three men with arms hooked together. Their clothes were frozen to a ladder that had come loose from the wreckage of the Harkness.
Shaking violently, Arthur Stevens had long since lost the ability to grasp anything. But the freezing cold had done the men an odd turn: Frozen to the back of Duane Cleaves's glove was a small, garden-variety, waterproof flashlight. And the beam of that light was pointing straight up to the sky -- a beacon for those who'd had enough faith and courage to follow it.
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