Abner Louima Jr. fidgeted on a plastic-covered couch in Brooklyn as his grandmother reached to keep him from grabbing my cell phone. As I remember, he moved a lot quicker than his father. The 1-year-old certainly laughed louder than his father.

On a recent day, as I visited with Abner Louima's friends and family in East Flatbush, the father was still in a hospital bed. That afternoon, the child's mother, Micheline, was visiting her husband, Abner, America's most famous victim of police brutality since Rodney King.

Abner now will come home to their neighborhood to live in a new apartment, his lawyers said yesterday. His homecoming is less than two months after an allegedly savage attack in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct stationhouse that was worse than the King case. The crime has staggered the Police Department, but a harsher life awaits Louima, who has a colostomy bag.

"Little Abner miss his father," said Marie Louima, the grandmother. "We all miss the old one."

As the kid played with the cell phone, an odd circle seemed complete. Months ago, I used the same phone in a Coney Island Hospital room to alert the city to a tale from the police dungeon. "Hello," the 1-year-old said into the phone. "Hello, Dad-Dee."

They didn't speak then. But they hope to be together today. The child was delightful and as his grandmother swooped the child up to go and change his diaper, the kid squealed. I was reminded of the way the father had looked in the bed the first day, when the nurses had to change his own soiled clothing.

One nurse saved Louima, and his story. Her name is Sonya Miller and she is the unknown hero in this case.

On that first night he arrived in the emergency room, after Louima refused to even tell the medics how he had been injured, he told the story to the nurse. Miller listened as Abner Louima whispered the horrific details through a broken mouth. She then told another nurse, Magalie Laurent, and suggested she call the Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau. The cops lost the call, and Miller told me she only wants to talk to the feds now.

Louima comes home to the staggering cost of home health care. His lawyers say it will cost about $50,000 to turn an apartment near his mother's house into an infirmary. Louima doesn't have the money. Although he deserves millions from a city that didn't want to believe police brutality is a serious problem, the former security guard is a long way off from that payday.

The lawyers will set up a benefit for him in the next week or so, and I expect New Yorkers, rich and poor, will shower him with gifts to cover his health care.

"My first love is my son," his mother said. "I want to get him better. Even if we have nothing, I will be there for him."

They live on the top floor of a five-story walkup near a public school in Brooklyn. The sign over the door reads: "Christ is Able." Abner lived here with his parents until he got married to Micheline, now 24. He has a daughter Sandra, 6, who rejoined him from Haiti last month.

The girls in the apartment had been watching soap operas "Another World" and "One Life To Live" while I visited. The toddler quit my phone for a harmonica after a few minutes.

"My brother will survive this," Abner's sister Yversoe, 28, said. "All of this."

She spoke beneath a picture of her sister Fanie, and her brother, Jonahs. They were both in splendid blue gowns, graduates of Samuel Tilden High. The Louimas were a New York success story until Justin Volpe, the cop alleged to have stuck a stick up Abner's rectum, came into their lives.

I told them about a photograph that columnist Michael Daly had shown me. It was taken at the notorious police rally/riot outside City Hall -- five years before Louima and the 70th Precinct stationhouse bathroom. In the black-and-white photo, a cop is seen holding a bathroom plunger while others scream about the bathroom attendant, David Dinkins.

"Yes, well, some cops that way" Abner's mother said. "Some are haters." The shame of the bathroom plunger attack that scars Abner Louima might cripple most families. But I sense love will get the Louimas through this. The sign above Marie's couch reads: "God is the chief of my house."

One uncle is a Brooklyn pastor, and another is a Haitian artist whose religious drawings fill his family's apartment. There is a plastic cover on the couch and a collection of porcelain ducks and parrots on a table.

Abner Louima returns to a religious, but breakable, world. He will come home, too, with a colostomy bag. Here's hoping that Abner Louima will be free of the bag by the time his son is potty-trained.