Posters cover the walls. DVDs line the shelves. Females stroll past his door.

A typical 22-year-old guy's room?

Hardly. Christopher Williams' dorm is a nursing home.

A 2006 near-fatal car crash caused severe brain injury and a fractured body that's confined to a wheelchair.

Still, his eyes are bright.

"Can I hug you?" he asks a reporter in slurred speech.

Scars cross his scalp like railroad tracks. His forehead is dented. These tell the story of an aspiring rap musician's falling asleep behind the wheel on Interstate 25 in Pueblo. The 2004 Palmer High School grad was headed from his Denver community college to play in a concert in New Mexico.

Parents expect their kids to grow up and leave home. Christopher's mom, Margaret, wants him back. She's trying, with community help, to make her home handicap accessible. (She can be reached at mwilliams311@msn.com.)

"I'm hoping by the end of this year," she says. "I've moved him eight times."

For months after the crash, he was comatose or in a vegetative state. "He'll never talk," his mom was told, after being told he wouldn't live.

He was infantile when profiled in The Gazette a year ago. He can now recite phone numbers, feed himself, read, write and work the TV remote.

He can't move his manual wheelchair without help and looks forward to getting a power model. "So I can push a button," he says, "and go right and left. Forward and back."

Such a chair might give him too much mobility at his current place, the nursing center on Mount St. Francis campus.

"They take good care of him," says Margaret, who visits daily for hours. "There's nobody there close to his age. We tried to make it like his room at college."

He flirts with the "coeds" on his floor. "There's this 97-year-old who comes to see him and reads to him," Margaret says. "He tells her, ‘You're my oldest girlfriend.' He always compliments her. He's a Casanova."

Bringing him home will require constant care, likely for life. Margaret, a single mom for Christopher and his brother, Josh, 24, since the boys were toddlers, thinks in terms of what she can add to his life. "I can cook him stuff he likes. And work with him and help him get as far as he can go."

She's been a seasonal H&R Block tax adviser for 10 years. Repeat clients seek her out, which allows her to focus on other people's problems. "He's always on my mind."

Rather than dwell on what she has lost, "I'm glad I still have him," she says. "He won't be who he was."

Neither will she.

To clients, she's the same nice tax lady they trust to settle up with Uncle Sam. On the inside, she grapples with worrying about Christopher.

"You're never the same. I want to fix it, but I can't. So I cry, I laugh and I go on."