How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  “Yes, you are. Like you always do.” But not anymore. I didn’t say it, but she’d lost the right to ask that of me.

  “Not this time,” Kitty insisted. “I’m here to help you.”

  “I already told you that you can’t.”

  She blinked.

  So I said it again. “All your being here can possibly do is make things worse.”

  “What if I bring you cupcakes?”

  “No.”

  “What if I bring trashy novels and spring rolls from that Thai place you love?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t just send me away,” she said. “Let’s talk about it. Let’s rap it out.”

  She was being cute, but I had no patience for cute. “I’m serious,” I said. “Get out. Go home. Go back to New York, even. You are something I just can’t handle right now.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Both.”

  * * *

  KIT LEFT, BUT she came back again the next night, just as I was finishing dinner. With cookies.

  I sent her away.

  She came after dinner the night after that with macarons, and I sent her away again.

  And then, on the night after that, when she didn’t show up after dinner, I noticed I was disappointed. I was waiting to see her. More than that: The idea of seeing her didn’t seem weird and destabilizing anymore. In fact, it felt like something to look forward to. I was anticipating the sight of her with her crazy hair and tattoos, wearing a tutu or something equally nutty. Not to mention the cake pops she’d bring, or brownies, or doughnuts, or whatever.

  I found myself worrying that she might have given up on me, and regretting being so cold.

  When she finally did turn up at last, she was carrying one perfect, exquisite chocolate cupcake from my favorite bakery of all time, twenty minutes across town.

  “Are you bribing me?” I asked, as she held it out.

  “I am demonstrating,” she said, “that I am not just here to escape trading sexual favors with Fat Benjamin in exchange for lodging. I am here to do whatever I can to make your day just a little bit better. Starting with cupcakes.”

  I looked at the cupcake. I took it.

  “I also apologize for ignoring you for three straight years.”

  “Fine,” I said, taking a bite and pressing the smooth icing against the roof of my mouth. Then, after swallowing: “You can stay.”

  “Really?”

  I took another bite and savored it, then spoke louder for more authority. “But if you wind up making things worse for me, you’re out.”

  “I won’t,” Kit said.

  “For example,” I said, throwing down the challenge. “It’s time for bed now.”

  Kit glanced at the clock on my wall. “It’s not even nine o’clock.”

  The cupcake was suddenly gone. We were done here.

  “Yeah,” I said, like, Duh, like it was past the whole world’s bedtime. “Get your bed ready and let’s hit the sack.”

  I watched her unfold the recliner and make it up with a sheet from the cabinet. She’d brought a pillow and blanket of her own—both plaid, which added a camp-out vibe. As I watched her work, her movements and her silhouette so familiar, my eyes kept trying to close on their own. I remember thinking I was so tired I’d never wake up. I remember wondering if she was going to sleep with that crazy nose ring in.

  * * *

  I WOKE A couple of hours later to Kitty at my bedside, whispering, “Hey. Hey! Wake up!”

  I opened my eyes in the pale darkness. Kitty was leaning over me in a sleep shirt with R2D2 on it. I was out of breath.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “You were having a nightmare.”

  She wasn’t wrong. “I was drowning,” I said. “I was trapped in the plane—underwater.”

  “I figured it was something bad.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed and took a second to catch my breath.

  My hair—what remained of it—was damp with sweat, and I was shaking. Kitty got a nubby white washcloth from the bathroom and pressed it to my forehead. Then, without a word, she crawled into my bed beside me—careful not to touch my neck. She was slender enough to fit. She curled on her side and stroked my hair. “Your hair’s a mess,” she whispered.

  “The fire burned it off,” I said.

  “Well, that’s kind of lucky,” she said, “because guess what I’ve been doing since the last time you saw me?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Cutting hair.”

  I frowned. “You’re a barber?”

  “A hairstylist. I’m famous. I have forty-six thousand followers on Instagram.”

  “You’re famous?”

  She nodded. “I also do tattoos. I have a place called the Beauty Parlor in Brooklyn. And we do piercings.”

  “You do the tattoos yourself?”

  “Yep. Tattoos and haircuts. I’m amphibious. Guess what else? I’m sleeping with the manager. Or maybe he’s sleeping with me … Either way, it’s one-stop shopping.”

  The manager’s name was Ethan, but he had a handlebar moustache that he waxed at the tips, so everybody just called him the Moustache. Even Kitty.

  She told me all about him in soothing tones while I waited for my body to settle down and stop shaking—his motorcycle, and his cooking skills, and his favorite books.

  At last, after letting her talk and talk, I asked, “Do you always use the article? Like, do you say, ‘Hey, the Moustache! Come here!’ Or, ‘What’s for dinner, the Moustache?’”

  She thought about it. “Actually, to his face, we call him ’Stache, like it’s a name. But when we’re talking about him, we call him the Moustache, like it’s his title.”

  “What does he call you?”

  “I can’t repeat it,” she said. “It’s X rated.”

  The last time I’d seen her, she’d been temping as a receptionist. She’d been wearing pumps and an ill-fitting gray suit that she’d refused to have altered. “You’ve really changed a lot,” I said.

  “For the better.”

  “Maybe. Except for that nose ring.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “You look like Elsie the cow.”

  “But sexy.”

  My sister, the nose-ringed hairstylist. “Can you fix my hair?” I asked.

  “Of course. I’ll give you an adorable little pixie. It’ll be cuter than what you had before.”

  It wouldn’t, of course. But I was too tired to argue.

  “Remember that time,” Kitty said, “I cut that girl’s hair at summer camp and made her cry?”

  “That was actually a really cute little bob.”

  “I took like ten inches off, though.”

  I remembered. “She called her parents to come and take her home.”

  “I should send her a gift certificate. Now, I can make anybody look good.” She nudged me. “Even you.”

  I knew she meant it as a joke. But I closed my eyes.

  “I was kidding,” she said, when I got quiet.

  I said, “Mom can’t even look at me.”

  “That’s not about you. That’s about her.”

  “My face is burned.”

  Kitty made a pshaw sound. “It’s a sunburn. It looks exactly like a sunburn. Except for the blisters. Not a big deal. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  It was strange to listen to our conversation. It was like I was eavesdropping on it somehow. In one way, we sounded very much like we always did—the back-and-forth, the teasing. We’d only ever had one way of talking to each other, and it was playful and jokey. That way of talking didn’t fit the situation now, but it was all we knew how to do. So we did it. But it was in a minor key, just a muffled, gray version of itself.

  Of course, that’s how everything I said or did or thought felt now. Flat, and colorless, and altered.

  “Kitty?” I asked, after a bit.

  “What?”

  “Stay here tonight, okay? I don’t want to be alone.�
��

  “I am staying here.”

  “No, I mean right here. In the bed.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to have any more nightmares,” I said.

  “I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  “Thanks.”

  We let ourselves get quiet and start to settle, but then I had to say one last thing. “You can’t be drinking here, by the way. I’m making that rule.”

  “Drinking?” she asked.

  “’Cause you get crazy when you drink, and I just can’t take any more drama—”

  “I haven’t had a drink in three years,” Kit said. “Dad sent me to rehab.”

  This should have been thrilling news, but my heart was too numb to feel it. “That’s great,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, he thought he should keep that under his hat.”

  “That’s why you went away?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “And you stayed away because—what?—you were too fragile?”

  “That’s part of it, too. I’ll give you the whole story sometime. But not tonight. Then you really will have nightmares.”

  Fair enough. “So … you quit drinking entirely?”

  “Entirely. It was brutal, but I did it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. We all have our struggles. I’m better for it, actually.”

  “Does Mom know?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You should tell her.”

  “Nah.”

  “It might help the two of you make up.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, right there,” Kit said. “I’m not sure if I want to make up.”

  She was offering up some answers to questions I’d carried around a long time, but somehow they were raising more questions than they were settling. What had happened that night she pushed our mom into the pool? What had they fought about? Who was mad at who, exactly? What on earth could have made Kit—who always longed so much for attention—shut us out for so long? I wanted to know, but I also didn’t. It had to be something big, and I wasn’t sure at this point I could even handle something small.

  Wondering about Kit did offer a small distraction, and in the face of the wasteland my own life had become, there was something about a distraction that felt like relief.

  Until Kit turned it all back to me.

  “Can I tell you something comforting about your situation?” she asked, after a minute.

  “No.”

  It hadn’t been a real question, of course. It was just an intro. “Really? You don’t want to be comforted?”

  “Nope.”

  She wasn’t buying it. “Everybody wants to be comforted.”

  How to explain to her that there was absolutely nothing she could say that would comfort me? Even the attempt would make things worse. There was no upside. There was no silver lining. There was no comfort.

  But there was no way she could understand that. “Don’t comfort me. Don’t say a word. Just go to sleep before I kick you out again.”

  “Okay,” Kit said.

  So that’s how we stayed, two in the bed, all night long: Kit patiently comforting me while I rejected the very notion of the concept.

  As long as she was just breathing in and out beside me in that snoozy, wavy, sleepy-Kitty rhythm of hers—it was fine. I didn’t believe in comfort anymore, and I knew for a fact that I would never, ever feel better. But having her with me like that? Not being alone? Well, it didn’t make me feel worse. That counted for something.

  Ten

  KITTY WAS GONE in the morning when I woke up, and she’d folded the chair-bed back so neatly that it was almost like she was never there. For a second, I wondered if she’d left for good—until I noticed her stuff in a neat pile in the corner. Maybe she’d left early to make herself scarce to avoid running into my mom.

  And so I launched into another day, all on my own—everything pretty much exactly the same until the very end, when Ian walked me back from another awkward, silent, antisocial session of physical therapy, and we found a nurse I’d never seen before waiting for me in my room.

  She met my eyes with a bright smile. “How do you feel about good news?”

  I glanced at Ian, who gave me a tiny shrug.

  I hesitated. “I’m … for it?”

  The nurse’s smile got bigger. “Because I have good news for you.”

  I waited. “Okay.” I wasn’t sure I could muster the excitement she was clearly expecting. “I guess you’d better tell me, then.”

  Then she pointed right at my crotch. “We’re about to take out that catheter.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO guarantee the catheter wasn’t going back in. The spinal surgeon had noted “sacral sparing” down in the nether regions, and he was optimistic that I had both enough sensation down there to feel when I needed to pee, and enough muscle control to make it happen—but there was no guarantee.

  Only trying would tell.

  The nurse put an absorbent pad on the bed before helping me get up into it, and then she slid the tube out with no ceremony at all. Then she helped me into an open-back gown for the night, “for easy access.”

  “When you feel the feeling and need to pee,” she said, “move fast. Press the call button. Don’t try to transfer on your own.”

  “Okay.”

  “And don’t wait until you’re about to burst!”

  “I won’t.”

  She’d be back soon to check on me. The question now was, would I feel that feeling? And if I did feel it, and manage to get to the bathroom without wetting myself first, would my urethra know what to do when I got there?

  Safe to say, I had never adequately appreciated the sheer, elegant genius of the urinary system. Now it became a significant character in the story of my life. It was common for patients with injuries like mine to spend the rest of their lives catheterized, facing all the humiliations and discomfort that implied—not to mention chronic infections from the tubes. I found myself rooting for my bladder to impress us all.

  After the nurse left, I lay in the silence of my room, eavesdropping on the conversations outside, waiting alertly to feel that delightful old sensation of needing to pee—what did it even feel like? I could barely remember—and rooting for my brave little-urethra-that-could to face this challenge and triumph.

  Until I fell asleep.

  I slept until Kitty arrived with Chinese takeout.

  She poked me, saying, “Hey, are you sleeping?”

  I put my hand over my eyes. “Don’t wake me when I’m sleeping, Kit!”

  “I brought dinner,” she said, as if takeout justified anything, and she started unloading containers.

  As I came awake, I noticed something. “Oh, my God. I need to pee! I can feel it!”

  Kit looked at me like I was a little nuts. “Hooray?”

  I pointed at the transfer board. “We have to get me to the bathroom.”

  Long story short: I did it. We did it—my urethra and I—without a hitch.

  Except for the moment when I looked up to find Kit trying to take a picture of me on the toilet.

  “Kit! What the hell? Don’t take a picture of me peeing!”

  “For Instagram!” she said, like that made it better. “It’s photojournalism!”

  Had she always been this crazy? We were barely back on speaking terms. “Shut it down.”

  “I’m kidding,” Kit said. “But my followers are all rooting for you.”

  “That’s rule number two,” I went on. “No photos—ever.”

  “Not even selfies?”

  “My hospital room, my rules: No comfort. No photos. And no goddamned selfies.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine. Now help me back into the chair.”

  We worked me back into the bed, and once I was all tucked in, Kit laid out the Chinese food like a feast—fried dumplings and egg rolls and sesame chicken. All my favorites from childhood.

  I kne
w what she was up to. “This isn’t comfort food, is it?”

  Kit narrowed her eyes. “This is just what I happen to like. You can’t blame me if you find it comforting.”

  “I’ll blame you if I want to,” I said, but I gave her a little smile. Which felt shaky, like those muscles had atrophied, too.

  Kit speared a chicken hunk with her chopstick. “Aren’t you kind of glad I’m here?”

  I was, actually. Far more than I would admit. “When you’re not taking pictures of me on the frigging toilet.”

  * * *

  I COULDN’T EAT much, but Kit could. She finished off all the egg rolls and every steamed dumpling, slurping dipping sauce and licking her fingers. Then, after she’d cleaned up, she said, “Now: the haircut!”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I’m too tired.”

  “You just had a nap!”

  “Yeah. My pre-bedtime nap.”

  “No!” Kit protested. “I planned us a whole girls’ night.” She started pulling items out of her purse and stacking them up on the tray table: a box of chocolates, a nail-painting kit with emoji decals, a bag of popcorn, Boggle, and a couple of naughty-looking romance novels. Plus a set of long computer cords.

  “You’ve got quite the party planned.”

  She nodded. “Total debauchery.”

  “Glad you woke me now.”

  She nodded, missing the sarcasm. “I can hook my computer up to the TV. I’ve got Grease cued up.”

  I smiled for a second despite myself. We loved Grease as kids. We’d put on the soundtrack and dance around the house, climbing the furniture and singing the duets.

  She always made me be Danny, though.

  Kit stood up and pointed her finger in the air, striking a Travolta-on-the-bleachers pose.

  Nothing from me.

  “Come on. I’ll let you be Sandy.”

  Too little, too late. “I don’t want to be Sandy.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I don’t feel like singing.”

  “You always feel like singing.”

  “Not anymore.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “When was the last time you sang?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I read an article that if you have a talent and you don’t find a way to use it, your life can collapse in on itself like a black hole.”

  I gave her a look. “Too late.”