How to Walk Away Read online

  We practiced an extra transfer, just for good measure.

  I kept expecting to see Chip. All day, every time the door swung open, I expected it to be him—carrying flowers, at least, and full of apologies and encouraging words. But he never did show up. Maybe he was still at his parents’ house, sleeping it all off. For his sake, I hoped so.

  All of this bustling busy-ness seemed oddly cheerful on the surface. Every professional I interacted with had a pleasant, just-another-day-at-the-office demeanor, and yet I strongly suspected they were faking. I know for sure that I was. I kept things calm, I stayed pleasant, I took my medicine—but the truth is, I had woken up in a dystopic world, one so different that even all the colors were in a minor key, more like a sour, washed-out old photograph than anything real.

  It looked that way, and it felt that way, too.

  I couldn’t imagine the future, and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—even think about the past. And by “the past,” I mean ten days earlier. My past hadn’t even had time to fade: It had been severed from me—the whole history of who I’d been, what I did, anything I’d ever dared to hope for—gone.

  That kind of thing puts quite a spin on your perception.

  By that evening, I was so tired, I had hopes I might actually sleep through the night. Exhaustion is a friend to the grieving. I was the kind of tired where sleep just reaches out and tugs you into its gentle sea without you ever making a choice. Just as I was giving in and closing my eyes, the door opened again.

  And it was my sister, Kitty. With a suitcase.

  Seven

  KITTY HESITATED AT the door. “Hey, Mags,” she said.

  When I didn’t respond, she held her hand up in a little wave.

  “I know you said you didn’t want me to come,” she said. “But I came anyway. Obviously.”

  I just stared.

  She didn’t step in. She waited for permission that I wasn’t prepared to give.

  Three years. Three years of unanswered emails and phone messages. Three years of nothing, and now here she was.

  She looked utterly different from the sister I’d last seen. She had short, spiky hair now, bleached a bright yellow, instead of the shoulder-length brown I’d always known. She had little hoop earrings going up the sides of both ears. She had no makeup except for bright red lipstick. She had a ring in her nose like a cow.

  But of course, I knew her at once. Even after all this time.

  “Nice nose ring,” I said.

  “So—can I come in?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was up for it.

  “Just a quick minute,” she promised.

  “I’m super tired.”

  “I just want to say hi.” There was a nervous energy to the way she stood, as if she were standing on the edge of some tall building’s flat roof rather than just in my doorway.

  I felt that same energy—a little bit of that same stomach-dropping feeling. Plus, so many different things all at once—surprised, uncertain, annoyed. She could have called, right? She could have let me know she was coming, at least. Did I really need some weird stealth attack from her right now? She’d had three years to get in touch, and she’d waited until I literally couldn’t escape. It felt like too much. My instinct was to send her away.

  But I couldn’t.

  Part of me wanted her to stay. A bigger part than I’d realized.

  “Fine,” I said, and I kept my eyes on her face as she walked closer.

  She set down her bag as she stepped to the side of my bed.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Dad said you were in town.”

  She nodded.

  “Have you seen him?” I asked.

  She nodded again.

  “Have you seen Mom?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you going to? Before you go back?”

  She gave a half-smile. “I’m gathering up my resolve.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I really didn’t even know where to start. It was exactly as bizarre to see her as it was not bizarre at all. Of course she was here. She was my big sister. And yet it was like seeing an afterimage come back to life.

  “You look better,” she said.

  “That’s not what Mom says.”

  “She’s kind of a bitch sometimes, though.”

  She wasn’t wrong. “True enough,” I said.

  “And a liar,” Kitty added.

  I frowned. “Not sure about that.”

  Kit went for a subject change: “How are you?”

  “I’m not sure there are words in the world that can answer that question.”

  She shrugged, like, Fair enough, and tried a new angle. “How do you feel?”

  “Physically? Or emotionally?”

  “Either. Both.”

  But I didn’t want to share any of that with her. Talking about things that tender required a closeness she had forfeited a long time ago. “What’s with the suitcase?” I asked.

  “I was thinking I might come stay here in the evenings. With you. You know: when Mom’s not around.”

  I eyed the recliner chair. It was supposed to flatten into a bed, but I couldn’t imagine how.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, you shouldn’t stay here.”

  “Don’t you want company?”

  “Not yours.”

  She frowned a little. “Are you mad at me?”

  I looked away. “It’s just weird to see you. My life is weird enough right now.”

  “I want to help.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not helping. You’re making things worse.”

  She didn’t answer. It was clear that hadn’t occurred to her.

  “Want to know who I’ve been staying with?” she asked then, brightly, even chattily, and before I could say no, she went on, “Fat Benjamin. From high school. Do you remember him?”

  This was a classic Kitty trick: pretending things were fine until everybody forgot they weren’t. She was trying to lure me in.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Remember how he used to give me rides home in that Jetta with the broken back windows with Hefty bags duct-taped over them?”

  “Did you just call this guy ‘Fat Benjamin’?”

  “Everybody calls him that.”

  “Seems kind of mean.”

  “He doesn’t mind. He’s the cute kind of fat. Anyway, he had a huge thing for me, but I never gave him the time of day because he was so doughy and had that mullet-y haircut? Well, he’s not exactly fat anymore—more ‘chubby.’ He’s cute now! He got cuter! Or maybe my standards went down. Anyway, I’m staying at his place, on the sofa bed, but I can tell he still likes me, and I’m sure I’ll wind up sleeping with him before long if I don’t get out of there.”

  I didn’t meet her gaze. Was this her argument for why she should be here? So she didn’t accidentally screw a guy called Fat Benjamin?

  She shrugged. “I wish I could stay here instead.”

  “Don’t ask me again.”

  “I’m not asking! I just said, I wish.”

  “We can’t all get our wishes.”

  “I just think it would be a bad idea to sleep with him.”

  “Then don’t.”

  She shrugged. “I’m terrible at saying no.”

  I met her eyes. “Well,” I said. “I’m not.”

  She was not going to suddenly reappear in my life after three years and make me talk about boys, of all things. She could not just show up like this and expect to pick up in the same naïve place we’d left off.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I’m pretty tired, so…”

  “That’s fine,” Kit said, rejecting the hint. “I brought some magazines.”

  I shook my head. “You need to go.”

  She stepped a little closer. “I’d really like to stay.”

  But I just shook my head. And then I turned my face away until she gave up and left.

  Eight
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br />   THE NEXT MORNING, I learned something new about my hospital room: It had great acoustics.

  This was after all the morning rituals: sponge bath, tooth-brushing into a bedpan, medicines, catheter change, bowel evacuation, breakfast of oatmeal and Jell-O, and OT with Priya for three breathless rounds of getting in and out of the chair and two failed toe-wiggling attempts.

  My door was right next to the nurse’s station. For the first time, I noticed I could hear voices talking about medicine and medical orders. I could hear someone typing on a keyboard. Someone was making a run to Starbucks. An orderly tried to flirt with one of the nurses, but she shut him right down.

  Then I heard Nina’s voice, a little louder than the others. “I need to talk to you about this schedule.”

  A man with a slightly nasal voice replied, “Okay, shoot.”

  “You gave Ian to this patient.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve made several notes in the chart that she should have someone else.”

  “I saw those notes.”

  “And you just ignored them?”

  “Look, Ian’s wide open right now.”

  “Yeah. There’s a reason for that.”

  “Are you saying Ian is incompetent to work with this patient?”

  “I’m saying he’s not a good match for her. And I think you know it. I’m wondering if you might be kind of hoping it’ll blow up in everybody’s face.”

  “What are you saying, Nina?”

  “Exactly what you think I’m saying, Myles.”

  Sheesh. This guy Myles was a wiener.

  “You think I’m trying to bring Ian down? You think I’m sacrificing this patient’s well-being so we can all watch him self-destruct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t have to. The man’s a time bomb. He’s going to self-destruct all on his own.”

  Nina wasn’t having it. “Not with my patient, he isn’t. She’s right on the edge. She’d just gotten engaged. She just lost everything. You need to pair her with somebody kind and encouraging—April, or even Rob.”

  “I’m not redoing the entire schedule for one patient.”

  Nina’s voice tightened. “She needs someone else.”

  “Everyone else is full.”

  “So switch somebody out.”

  But Myles—some kind of supervisor, maybe—apparently didn’t like being told what to do. In the silence that followed, I could hear him bristle. “It’s not your call. It’s my call. And if you make trouble for me, I promise I’ll make trouble for you. The schedule stays as it is.”

  He must have walked off then, because after a few seconds of silence, several nurses, including Nina, started talking trash about him, using words like “jealous” and “control freak” and “little Napoleon.” I might even have found it funny, if I could find anything funny anymore. If it weren’t so clear that the patient she’d been talking about—the one who had just lost everything that mattered—was me.

  That’s when I heard a Scottish voice out at the station. “I tried to switch, if it’s any consolation. I talked to Myles yesterday.”

  “You didn’t try hard enough.”

  “He never gives me anything I want.”

  “You never used to let him push you around like that.”

  “He never used to be the boss.”

  Nina’s voice was all business. “You’d better be nice to her, Ian.”

  Ian’s voice was, too. “Nice doesn’t make you strong.”

  Two seconds later, the door to my room pushed open.

  “Time for PT, Maggie Jacobsen,” Ian said, not meeting my eye. He wheeled my chair close to the bed.

  “It’s Margaret,” I said. When he didn’t respond, I said, “I go by Margaret.”

  “You don’t look like a Margaret,” he said. He was dead serious.

  “That’s not really your call, though, is it?”

  “Okay, Maggie. Whatever you say.”

  He grabbed the transfer board and lowered the bed, as well as the chair arm, and then he arranged the board as a little bridge between the two.

  Then he turned and walked toward the door.

  Wait—what? Where was he going? Had I made him mad with the Maggie thing? Was he really a time bomb? Was he about to self-destruct right now? “Aren’t you going to help me?”

  He paused but didn’t turn. “Nope. Press the call button when you’re ready.”

  Then I was alone—just me, a board, and a chair. Oh, and a catheter bag strapped to my thigh.

  It was a problem to solve, I’ll give it that.

  I found the control for the bed and maneuvered it into a sitting position. Then I edged my butt closer to the transfer board. My yoga pants had a bit of a bell-bottom, and one cuff got caught in the bedrail, but I worked it out. Perched at the edge, about to shift myself onto the board where there’d be nothing below me but stone-hard hospital floor, I felt frightened for the first time since the crash. In fact, I felt something for the first time since the crash. I paused, out of breath, and wondered why my first feeling couldn’t have been laughter. Or joy.

  I edged a little closer, putting all my weight on my palms. The muscles in my trunk were atrophied, yes, but still functioning, which helped—but the dead weight of my legs threw me off balance. I wobbled a little, then hunched down until I was steady again. The chair was maybe twelve inches away, but it might as well have been a football field. I eyed the distance, ooched another inch, lost my balance, hunched down. Then again, and again. After a bit, I noticed that the fabric of my pants had two wet blotches on the thighs, and that’s when I realized that I thought I’d just been concentrating—but instead, I’d been crying. Possibly for some time.

  I decided to take a break, halfway across the board.

  That’s when Ian walked back in. “God, are you not finished yet? I had a cup of coffee and read the paper.”

  If he’d been someone else, it might have been okay. If we’d been friends, if I’d known he was on my side, if we’d built up a rapport—he might have been teasing me in a fun way. As it was, he was just a mean stranger.

  I looked up, and when he saw my face—no doubt puffy and slick with tears—I saw the hardness on his falter, just for a second, before he came gruffly over and steadied my shoulders.

  “I’ve got you,” he said. “Keep after it.”

  With Ian there, it went much faster—and before I knew it, I was trailing along after him as I rolled myself down the hall toward the therapy gym. I tried to think of another time I’d been with another person and felt so alone at the same time. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at me. You’d think he was out for a stroll all by himself.

  He paused at a door to hold it open, which I thought was a nice gesture until he started speaking. “No,” he said, as I rolled past him. “Your technique’s all wrong.”

  He sounded irritated, like we’d been over this a thousand times.

  “Well,” I said, “I didn’t know there was a technique, and this is my first time to ever do this, so—”

  “Nobody’s shown you how to use the chair?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s OT 101.”

  “I guess we’re still doing prerequisites.” Another sad little attempt at a joke.

  He didn’t smile. Instead, he bent forward to look into my eyes and then squeezed my biceps. Then, in a voice that sounded like he was about to impart vital, deeply insightful information, he said, “Arms are not legs.”

  I gave him a look, like, Really?

  “What I mean is,” he went on, unamused, “they can’t handle the same amount of work as legs. You have to be careful not to strain them with overuse.”

  “I don’t see that I have much choice about that.”

  “Not in the big picture, no,” he conceded. “But in the details. Hence: chair technique.” He put his hand over mine—it was warmer than mine was, I noticed—and placed it on the rim of the wheel. “Instead of ten little pushes,” he said, “you
want to do one strong push and then coast.”

  He stretched my hand down low along the back of the wheel and pressed it into a grip around the push rim. Then he brought it up and forward to push off, and I went zooming down the hallway fast enough to scare me, so I grabbed the rim to stop, and got a little friction burn.

  Ian jogged up behind me. “You’re going to need some gloves” was all he said.

  Next we covered turning, rotating in place, and popping wheelies—though we didn’t actually practice those. “Are wheelies really necessary?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, though he didn’t explain why.

  “Why?” I decided to demand.

  “Because you need to know how to control your wheels.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you need to know how to manage all kinds of terrain.”

  “Like for when I go off-roading in the Grand Canyon?”

  He looked up. “More like for when you encounter steps. Or potholes. Or a curb.” He turned away. “If you want to go anywhere, you need to know how to manage.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” I said.

  “You will,” he said as he walked away, all tall and athletic and sturdy. There was something almost mean about how in shape he was, and the way his scrubs draped from his waistband over what any woman with a heartbeat would have to admit was an utterly perfect guy-butt. He was such a supreme physical specimen. I didn’t compare myself to him, exactly, but just being near that kind of robustness made me feel extra weak and shriveled. I looked away.

  Anyway, that little Wheelchair 101 moment made us a few minutes late arriving at the therapy gym, and so we signed in a little late, too, which seemed to irritate Ian. “Now we’re late,” he said, noting time on the clock, as if it were my fault.

  As if it mattered.

  I looked around while he gathered some equipment. If I’d been able to appreciate anything, I would have appreciated the gym. It had all kinds of machines and colors and games. It had a pop-a-shot basketball machine, and a ring toss, and two pinball machines—Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy. It had weights like a gym, and mirrors everywhere, as well as a set of walking bars, a standing frame, and a full-body harness. It had a fine-motor board with locks and latches and screws to work with, and a beanbag-toss game. It had a flight of practice stairs, a minitramp, and a row of recumbent bikes. It even had an entire car, painted a perky aqua, down at one end—I guessed for people to practice getting in and out. Also, up top: quite the speaker system, playing a relentless mix of lite-rock Eagles and Van Morrison tunes.