How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  The old me would have felt tempted to boogie around a little bit, but the new me sat still as a sack of flour.

  Ian wrote my name on a big whiteboard that had a slot for every patient on it, with “goals” written out, and smiley faces, and lots of little encouraging sayings. I watched the other trainers while I waited—without exception, an insistently cheerful, optimistic bunch. They laughed loudly, and high-fived, and called their patients things like “champ.” They coaxed. They encouraged. They cheered. They sang along to the music.

  One guy with a man-bun, who I would come to know as Rob, was working with an eighty-year-old lady on a walker—and while he wasn’t exactly flirting with her, he was certainly paying her enough attention that she positively bloomed. A female trainer, April, was shooting Nerf hoops with her patient, a forty-something guy in a wheelchair, and high-fiving each swoosh. It was like a big fitness-and-recovery party. All around me, people were moving, and talking, and challenging themselves—and while the patients were more somber, the PTs were nothing short of jovial.

  Except for my PT.

  I looked over at Ian with his gray frown and his stiff jaw. He was so serious, so sour, so much the opposite of jovial that he practically had a little cartoon scribble of grumpiness above his head.

  No wonder he has an open schedule, I thought.

  “Late again, Ian,” I heard then. The nasal voice. The same one I’d heard talking to Nina. I looked over to get my first eyeful of Myles, walking toward us. He turned out to have wavy, tight-cropped red hair—clashing boldly with the red sweatshirt he’d zipped over his scrubs—and tight, hard little brown eyes. He looked exactly like his voice.

  Ian didn’t respond.

  “Hate to have to mark you in the book,” Myles went on, almost glaring at Ian. “But rules are rules.”

  Ian held menacingly still, eyes averted.

  “Just gotta watch that clock and stay timely.”

  Then, I didn’t mean to stand up for Ian, but I did. “He was helping me with wheelchair technique in the hallway,” I said. It just popped out.

  Myles shifted his eyes to me. “That’s not PT. That’s OT.”

  “But he was correcting my technique.”

  “Not his job,” Myles said. “Right, champ? Not your job.”

  Ian just worked his jaw.

  Myles went on, “Wouldn’t want people thinking you don’t know what your job is.”

  I started to argue again, but Ian gave me a look.

  Myles was baiting him. “Wouldn’t want people thinking you have no right to be here.”

  Ian: Silence. Then more silence.

  “Good talk,” Myles said after another minute, clapping Ian on the shoulder.

  Then he turned to me and said, “If you need any more advice, I suggest you come to me. I’m just right there in my corner office.”

  I saw Ian squeeze his hand into a fist and then stretch it out.

  Then Myles pointed at Ian and said, in a pseudo-inspirational tone, “Go work some miracles.”

  Did that guy want to get punched? I even wanted to punch him. “Sorry,” I said, once we’d made it to the far side of the gym. “I was trying to help you.”

  “Don’t help me,” Ian said, shaking his head. “Don’t do that again.”

  Then he walked off.

  He stopped across the room at a mat table and looked exasperated to find that I hadn’t followed him. He made a “get over here” motion, and I wheeled in his direction.

  When I reached him, he handed me a transfer board and said, “You know what to do.”

  I hadn’t let my armrest down on my own before, and it took me a minute to find the latch—during which time Ian kept his eyes focused out the window, breathing impatiently every so often.

  “You could help me, if you’re in such a rush.”

  “I’m not here to do it for you. You’re here to do it for yourself.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do it for me. I just said you could help.”

  “At this point, that’s the same thing.”

  I could imagine one of the other trainers saying that in a playful tone, but Ian was about as playful as roadkill. He was silent, and tense, and now—since seeing that guy Myles—radiating hostility. I could sense it wasn’t meant for me, but I was still collateral damage. The rancor fumed from his body—you could see it in his face and his gait and the way he held himself as stiff as an action figure—and I was just unfortunate enough to be stuck with him.

  Just as I had that thought, Rob, the trainer with the man-bun, let out a whoop of a cheer over something amazing and inspiring his patient had just done. Then everybody in the room stopped to applaud.

  Except Ian.

  “Let’s move,” he said, urging me toward the mat.

  I moved, and I got the armrest down, and I eventually dragged myself across the board onto the mat, but Ian’s cranky, impatient, irritated nonhelp did not make things easier. Or faster.

  By the time I made it, I was panting.

  Before I’d caught my breath, Ian leaned over me and laid me back on the mat, careful of my burns, to start a whole series of exercises to take stock of my starting place—what I could and couldn’t do right now. He did this without explaining first, and for a second I thought he was picking me up. I leaned forward just as he did and managed to smush my face into the corner between his neck and his collarbones. Just for a second, before I pulled back, I registered his scratchy, unshaven neck, firm with muscles, and the salty, linen-y smell of him.

  It could have been a funny, slightly embarrassing moment, one we could laugh about—but Ian decided to make it humiliating instead. When I looked up, he seemed super annoyed. “Down,” he said, pointing at the mat, as if he’d already explained this to me a hundred times.

  I felt a sting of embarrassment. “Right,” I said.

  With that, we took stock of me: Could I sit up on my own? (Barely. With a lot of grunting.) Could I roll over? (Yes. Clumsily, but yes.) Could I lie on my back and lift my knees? (Yes, actually. But my thighs were weak and trembled like earthquakes.) Could I sit on the edge and straighten my leg out? (No. Not even close.) Could I lie on my stomach and lift my feet behind me? (About halfway.) Could I point, wiggle, or flex my toes? (No, no, and no.) By the end, we had the general idea. Everything above the knees seemed to work—though not always well. Below the knees was a different story.

  The whole process seemed to go on for hours, and it left me breathless and shaky. I had known that my legs were not exactly working, but breaking it down into specifics—and by “specifics,” I mean breaking the function of my legs and feet down by each specific muscle—made it more real. In a way, I didn’t really want to know what I could or couldn’t do. Observing this new, broken version of my body only seemed to give it a validity it didn’t deserve.

  But if Ian was aware of my unhappiness, he didn’t seem to care much. He drove us on and on, testing everything: ankles, toes, thighs, hip flexors. He did pressure tests all up and down my legs, poking me with a little pin, and I saw him write down the word “spotty” in his chart over and over.

  He was keeping a list of all the muscles that didn’t work. It was far longer than I’d expected, but, to be fair, just the list of muscles in the legs was far longer than I’d expected. Ian’s “not working” list included several leg muscles that had Latin names starting with “biceps,” which seemed needlessly confusing, since “biceps” made them sound like arm muscles, and my arms were fine. Ian totally ignored me and made his list anyway, which, in the end, looked like this:

  biceps femoris

  biceps semitendinosus

  biceps semimembranosus

  tibialis—anterior and posterior

  peroneus longus

  gastrocnemius

  soleus

  flexor digitorum longus

  I wondered if I should ask what some of those muscles were, but as the list grew longer, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  It was physically exhau
sting, and it was emotionally grueling, but I really think the worst part of the whole experience was, of all things, the not talking.

  I’m a talker from a long line of talkers. My mom might be talking to you about the curtains and who should be sent to Guantánamo for choosing them, but she’s talking to you. My dad might be placating my mom, but he’s doing it with words. I don’t think I have ever once, in my entire life, spent that much time one-on-one with another human being and spoken as few words as I did with Ian. Over the entire afternoon, you probably couldn’t make one full sentence out of the words we exchanged.

  It bothered me. Viscerally.

  But I was too tired, demoralized, shell-shocked, discouraged, and numb to do anything about it. It was Ian’s job to work the conversation, dammit. All the other trainers—and I had plenty of time to take stock—were doing the vast majority of the conversational grunt work, giving their patients the gift of conversational pleasure without the usual work, and leaving the patients free to concentrate on their tasks.

  With Ian, I got the opposite of conversational pleasure. I got the cringe of uncomfortable silence. Plus the comparative disappointment of knowing I had the worst trainer in the room.

  Silent, surly, and relentless. We didn’t finish our session until all the other perky people were long gone and my entire body felt like Jell-O. I thought for sure Ian would help me back into the chair at the end, but he just slapped the board down and turned his gaze back to the window.

  I gave a long sigh as I looked at it.

  I didn’t ask for help, because I knew I wouldn’t get it.

  I had to readjust my catheter tube, which had come untaped, and then I started scooting my butt sideways across the board.

  But I was more exhausted than I realized, because just before I reached the chair, as I shifted my weight onto my lead arm, my elbow gave way and I went pitching forward.

  I should have hit the floor, but almost as soon as I realized I was falling, Ian caught me. I would have bet you a hundred dollars that his entire focus had been out the gym window, but he must have been using his peripheral vision, because I was caught by his steady arms and settled in my chair before I even fully got what was happening.

  “Thank you,” I said, before I remembered that he was kind of the reason I’d fallen in the first place.

  Before he stood back up, he checked my expression, meeting my eyes for the first time. “I’ve tired you out,” he said.

  “In more ways than one.” I noticed his eyes were blue. Dark blue—almost navy.

  “You worked hard today.”

  As mad as I was, it felt weirdly nice to have that acknowledged. And you, I thought, stared out the window.

  He studied my face another second, and then he stood up and said, “Time to get you back to your room.” I’d seen the other PTs pushing their clients’ chairs—especially the elderly and the tired—at the ends of their workouts, and I just assumed that Ian would do the same.

  Wrong. Of course.

  He and his perfect butt just strolled off toward the exit, and I had no choice but to scramble after him in my chair.

  At the door, Ian stopped at the patient whiteboard. Under my name was an empty box. Other patients’ boxes had stars and smileys and hearts in them, but Ian marked mine with a solemn black X.

  Which was about how I felt.

  Nine

  BACK AT THE room, a nurse I’d never seen before scolded us. “Ian, she was supposed to be back forty-five minutes ago.”

  I was? I narrowed my eyes at Ian, but he pretended to ignore me.

  “She didn’t want to quit,” he said. “She’s a machine.”

  “I need her now.”

  “She’s all yours.”

  Just then, the new cell phone my mother had brought me rang. I’d never heard its ringtone—so loud and screechy—and it startled all of us. Ian picked it up off the side table and handed it to me.

  “Hello?” I said.

  A guy’s voice. “Margaret Jacobsen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Neil Putnam from HR at Simtex.”

  My new job! Oh, God—I had forgotten all about it. Should I explain what happened? Did they already know? That interview felt like a hundred years ago in somebody else’s life.

  “I remember,” I said, after a pause. Neil Putnam was the guy who’d told me that I unofficially had the job. “How are you?”

  “Doing just great.” His voice was overly bright, but I didn’t notice at first. “Hey,” he went on, like he’d just thought of something. “I’ve been asked to call and let you know that the guys upstairs have made an official decision about the position.”

  I held my breath. It was an impossible problem. I was twenty-eight and just out of business school, and I’d landed a dream job that nobody with my lack of experience had any right to, and it really was the offer of a lifetime, and at this moment, given that I couldn’t even pee without help, it seemed unlikely I could make the most of it. What would I do if they wanted me to start next week?

  I’d never in my life faced a challenge and given up. The non-quitter part of me could not imagine doing anything other than wrestling myself into an Ann Taylor suit and hauling my ass out to their corporate campus the minute they said go. But a much more vocal part of me—the part, shall we say, with the catheter sticking out—could not imagine ever even leaving this hospital room, much less dedicating my thoughts to “strategic and higher operational level engagement with the logistics environment.”

  My only hope was to delay. Maybe I could wrangle a start date later in the summer. How long was it going to take me to get myself back to normal? Two months, maybe? Four?

  But as I opened my mouth to suggest it, Neil Putnam said, “They’re going with another candidate.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Someone with more experience.”

  “But you said I had it!”

  “Unofficially. But then a better candidate came along.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “They’ll send an official letter, but we wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  “I see,” I said at last. “Of course.” Had they somehow heard about the crash? Did they know what I was up against?

  “We wish you the best of luck, and hope you are up and around again soon.”

  Guess they did.

  I pressed END and let out a long sigh comprised entirely of the word “Fuuuuuuuuuck.”

  When I looked up, Ian and the new nurse were watching me.

  “I just got fired,” I explained. “Though not really. It wasn’t official yet. But right before the crash, they told me it was mine. The most amazing dream job ever. And I was going to rock it out.”

  “They can’t do that!” the nurse said, all sympathy, like we’d been pals for years.

  “Sure they can,” Ian said. “That’s how the world works.” No sympathy there. Dry as chalk.

  “Bad luck,” the nurse said, and took my hand to squeeze it. It wasn’t until she touched me that I realized how cold my own hands were. “I’m sorry about your bad news.”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay,” I said, and in a way, it was. A relief, at least. An impossible challenge that I didn’t have to rise to.

  I had enough impossible challenges these days.

  But in a much larger way, it wasn’t okay. I wanted that job, yes—but I also needed it. I had bought a fancy condo on the strength of my bright future. I had student loan payments and car payments and credit card payments. Plus, I had no idea what the medical bills were going to be like for this situation.

  A panic about the future swirled inside my body like a dust storm. Another piece of my old life had just crumbled away.

  Here’s the weird thing, though, about all the emotions swirling through me right then: I felt them intensely—and, at the exact same time, I could barely feel them at all. I have no idea how that works, but I swear it’s true. I felt full-out panicked and quietly numb simultaneously. I wondered if I’d ever feel
things normally again—and then immediately hoped it would be a long, long time before I did.

  Never would’ve been fine.

  Ian was already back to business. “So,” he said, rocking back a little, “let’s recap. We basically made a map of your entire body today—and in the coming weeks, we’ll strengthen what’s working and try to wake up what’s not.” He spoke with his eyes on his clipboard, as if the topic in general, and me in particular, bored him to tears. “There’s a great deal of mystery with spinal cord injuries, and we can’t always predict who will see improvement and who won’t. Your deficits are all at the patella level and below, and that’s the area we’ll focus on. Do you have any questions?”

  As he waited for my answer, he looked out the window.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow, then,” he said, turning away. “And next time,” he called over his shoulder, “you have to try.”

  The nurse and I watched him go. I could have been irritated with him, I suppose, but I was too tired to be mad. In fact, I felt all remaining energy whoosh out of my body like a sigh as he left. The day was over. All I had left to do was get myself back into bed. Then I could close my eyes and sink into oblivion.

  But just before I turned to look for the transfer board, another figure appeared in doorway.

  Kitty.

  Again.

  “I thought I told you no,” I said.

  “That was a long time ago,” Kitty said.

  “That was yesterday.”

  “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”

  “Nope.”

  “Fat Benjamin confessed to me after I got home last night that he still had a ponytail holder of mine from high school. And then he tried to put his tongue in my ear.”

  I faced her dead-on. “I have many problems right now,” I said then. “But Fat Benjamin’s tongue in your ear is definitely not one of them.”

  Kitty looked affronted. “I’m not asking you to solve my problems.”