How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “Only because it’s true.” She was pushing, and all I could do was push back.

  “No, it’s not.”

  I felt my hackles lift just a little bit. If I said my life was a black hole, then it was an effing black hole. “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

  I could read her face so clearly. She thought I was being stubborn.

  The longer she stared, the more I felt my body tightening in defensiveness. Really? She was going to stand there with her working legs and resent my less-than-sunny attitude?

  “Looks like we’ve got kind of a role reversal going here,” Kit said at last.

  I waited, and lifted my eyebrow a bit, like, Oh, really?

  “This may be,” she went on, in a conversational tone, like we were just chatting about the weather, “the first time ever that I am the one trying to make things better—and you are the one trying to make things worse.”

  And just like that, I was mad. “I don’t have to try to make things worse,” I said, my throat tight and strangely sandpapery. “Things are already worse.”

  “Things can always get worse,” Kit declared.

  My reply was like a reflex—a shouting reflex. “Not for me!”

  I’m always amazed at how fast siblings can warp-speed into a state of rage. It’s like they keep everything they were ever angry about growing up shoved into an overstuffed emotional closet, and at moments like these, it takes about two seconds to swing open the door and start an avalanche.

  “You have to try!” Kit insisted, in a tone like she’d said it a hundred times.

  “I am trying!”

  “You’re not!”

  This was the trouble with sisters. This was the trouble with family. I had barely cracked open the door to my life, and she’d just barged in and made herself at home—taking photos of me and judging my coping skills. We hadn’t even officially made up yet, and she was ordering me around.

  Just as I had that thought, she went on. “You,” she said, pointing right at me, “need to sing.”

  With that, the anger lit inside me like a flame—so physical, I felt myself light up. “I don’t want to sing!” I shouted.

  It was like all the anger I’d been unwilling to feel—at Chip, at my mother, at the folks in this hospital who kept making me do impossible things—had been quietly gathering like some flammable gas. And Kit had just lit a match.

  I slammed both my fists down against the bed. “I’m not going to sing!” My voice both too loud in that moment and not loud enough. “You can’t make me sing! Do you really think it’s that easy? You can’t just come in here with Boggle and show tunes and make everything all right! Stop trying to fix things! Give me a fucking break.”

  Kit blinked. Then blinked some more. I wondered if she might cry, or run out of the room—but she just nodded.

  In the long silence that followed, I deflated.

  “Okay,” Kit said after a while, in a quiet voice. “Okay, that’s fair.”

  I sighed, long and slow.

  “You don’t have to sing,” Kit went on, shrugging, and looking at me with new eyes.

  I matched my voice to hers. “Damn right I don’t.”

  “I hear you,” she said. “I’ll back off.” But then she peeked up from under her eyelashes. “Can I at least do the haircut, though?”

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, hair was all over the floor. I’d transferred into the chair so that I wouldn’t have to sleep in a bed of “hair fuzz,” and we’d made a carpet of hair sprinkles all around the wheels.

  Kitty fussed and fussed, and it took far longer than it should have, as all her genetic perfectionist tendencies kicked in. At last, she declared victory and handed me a hand mirror. I started to lift it, but then I hesitated.

  “Take a look,” she urged.

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “You don’t want to see?”

  I did want to see the haircut—but I didn’t know how to do that without also seeing my face.

  “You know what?” I said then, shaking my head. “I’m good. I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “Are you afraid you look terrible? Because you don’t.”

  Yes. I was afraid I looked terrible. Of course. When your own mother can’t even look at you, you have to be a monster. But it was more than that. Once I knew what I looked like now, I would always know. There are things you can’t unsee.

  It would be like the time my aunt walked me up to my grandmother’s open casket to “say good-bye” and I looked down to see an embalmed, flattened, just-plain-wrong version of the face I’d known and loved so long. For a long time after that, the only face I saw when I thought of my grandmother was that wrong one. It had erased the face I wanted to hold on to.

  I didn’t want to look in that mirror to find that I was gone.

  Kit seemed to read my thoughts. “You look just like you. A little sunburned, and with a few scabby blister things on the jaw…” She touched her jaw. “And with the cutest haircut you’ve ever had—you’re welcome. But still the same you.”

  I tilted the mirror a little.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she urged.

  But I was. My hands felt cold. Don’t think, I told myself. It was time to face the future, whatever it looked like. I held my breath, and lifted the mirror, and tilted it, one centimeter at a time, until my whole face gazed back at me.

  My same face. A little roughed up, but familiar as an old friend.

  “See?” Kit said. “You’re still the beauty.”

  A ragged sigh escaped my chest. “I don’t need to be the beauty. I just want to be recognizable.”

  “You are,” Kit said. “Just way more stylish.”

  I’d never had bangs, but this cut flopped down over my forehead in the front and was short and spiky in back. Pixie-ish. I’d never had anything but long hair—out of fear, really, that I’d cut it all off and then hate it and have to wait forever to get back to my old self. Also, my mother thought short hair on girls was ugly.

  But this haircut wasn’t ugly.

  Kit was grinning wide now. “How cute are you?” she demanded. “This is the haircut you’ve been waiting for all your life!”

  “I don’t hate it,” I said.

  “You love it. Come on.”

  Next, I angled the mirror ever so slowly toward my neck. Seeing my face better than expected made me hopeful that the rest might be, too.

  But the skin grafts were worse.

  The side of my neck, from my jaw to my collarbone, was utterly unrecognizable. It was purple and gooseflesh-y and mottled like pepperoni. It was Frankenstein-esque. My face, if I didn’t scratch, would heal. But the grafts, even healed, as Chip had so tactfully pointed out, would look like Silly Putty forever. I would forever be a person that other people tried not to stare at in the grocery store. I would forever be someone who made other people uncomfortable.

  Now a new feeling cut through my haze: resentment.

  I knew what it was like to hate parts of my own body—what woman doesn’t? You “hate” that little bump of fat behind your knee, or that pointy little pinkie toe that doesn’t match the others, or that one crooked tooth. Anything about you that insists on being flawed despite all your attempts to get yourself perfectly uncriticizable is fair game for hostility.

  But this was different. Those grafts didn’t even look human.

  It was like some alien creature had laid itself down over my neck. Old dissatisfactions with my old self dissolved in the face of what it felt like to look at my shoulder. I’d “hated” my flabby parts before, and I’d thought things were “gross,” but I didn’t even know the meaning of those words until now. The sight of the grafts—puckered and gooey and shiny with Silvadene ointment—was so viscerally shocking, I felt a squeeze at the base of my throat like I might throw up.

  I had to look away.

  This was the feeling I’d been afraid of—but it was so
much worse than I’d feared. It was like a part of the old me, sweet and vulnerable and shockingly innocent, had died. It’s one thing to think about in a theoretical way—we know we won’t last forever—but it’s quite another thing to see it happen. Part of me had been destroyed. I squeezed my eyes closed and felt a wash of regret. Why hadn’t I ever even appreciated that curve of my neck before, or the smoothness of its skin, or the pattern of its pale freckles? What had I been thinking that night, wearing a strapless dress? Why hadn’t I been more careful? How could I have been the keeper of such a precious thing—my body!—and taken it so stupidly for granted?

  “That could have been your face,” Kit said then, peeking at my shoulder through squinted eyes. “You’re lucky.”

  Lucky again.

  “That’s what people keep telling me,” I said.

  * * *

  WE DID NOT wind up watching Grease that night. The haircut and all that came after was more than enough for me. I did let Kitty set up my computer so I could check email—but then I shut it right back down again when I saw that Chip had posted a photo of me while I was still in the ICU, looking absolutely ghastly, to Facebook, of all places, asking for prayers.

  “After a tragic accident,” he wrote, “the love of my life is fighting for survival in the ICU.”

  “A tragic accident?” Kit demanded, when I showed it to her. “He’s a tragic accident.”

  He’d posted the photo on his wall and tagged me. He’d also linked to a news clip and an article in the paper.

  People were understandably alarmed. With every comment, Facebook sent me an email notification, so my inbox was flooded. People were “praying” and sending emoticons of hearts and kisses and angels. They made comments about how great I was and cheered me on. But the volume—there must have been a hundred—felt overwhelming to me.

  I fixated on the photo itself, amazed that Chip had overshared so wildly by posting it. I didn’t even want to see pictures of people’s pedicures in my feed—much less bruised shots of tubes and vacuums and abject suffering. What had he been thinking? What was he trying to prove? In what universe would I want a picture of myself looking like a meatloaf posted for the world to see? I had barely summoned the courage to look in the mirror myself—and apparently, I was the last one to know. An ex-boyfriend had even left me a GIF of puppies and kittens licking each other.

  This must have been how Neil Putnam at Simtex knew about my situation. The whole damn city seemed to know.

  “I’m never going back to Facebook,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Kit agreed. “Facebook’s for grandmas. Just follow me on Instagram.”

  * * *

  LATER, AFTER WE’D fallen quiet for a while, and Kit was already starting to make slow, snoozy sleeping breaths, I had to wake her up.

  “Kit!” I whispered. Then, with no response, a little louder: “Kit!”

  She startled and sat up.

  “Great news!” I said, still whispering.

  “What?”

  “I have to poop.”

  She leaned a little forward. “That’s great news?”

  “Help me out of bed.”

  “Didn’t you just go right before bed?”

  I snapped my fingers at her, like, Let’s go. “That was pee.”

  She got up and shuffled over.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” I said, as we worked me across the board into the chair.

  Kit only had one eye open. “What does this mean?”

  “It means I can pee and poo on my own.”

  “Does it mean you’re getting better?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m not getting worse.”

  “Can I Instagram this?” she asked, as we positioned me onto the toilet.

  “Say the word ‘Instagram’ one more time, and you’re on the first flight back to Brooklyn.”

  “Noted,” she said.

  She waited outside the door for me a long while, Googling random trivia on her phone to pass the time. “Did you know that Ben Franklin invented the catheter in 1752 when his brother John suffered from bladder stones?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “Did you know you can use urine to make gunpowder?”

  “That might come in handy.”

  “Did you know that seventy-three percent of people with spinal cord injuries never void normally again?”

  “Don’t tell me that! That’s depressing.”

  “Not for you.”

  “Where are you finding all this?”

  “PeeTrivia.com.”

  I took my time. Kit hinted several times that she was ready to go back to bed, but I was not rushing this miracle for anything.

  Eleven

  AT LUNCH THE next day, we did not linger more than sixty seconds on the triumph of my newly returned toileting skills before my mother declared the topic “unappetizing” and got back to worrying about my relationship with Chip.

  “Has he been to visit you?” she wanted to know.

  My BLT suddenly lost its flavor. “Can we not talk about this?”

  “I did some reading on the computer—” she said next.

  I glanced at my dad. “Here we go,” he said.

  She continued, “—and I think maybe he’s afraid of you.”

  “Afraid of me?”

  “Of what you represent. Of how you’ve come to symbolize his weakness and foolishness.”

  “Have I?”

  “Well, what other explanation can there be?”

  “I can’t psychoanalyze Chip right now.” I had my hands full just making it through the day.

  “Well, someone has to!”

  “Looks like you’re doing a pretty good job.”

  My mom set her sandwich down—a gesture that meant we were getting down to business. She started to speak, but then she caught herself, turned to my dad. “You know what, sweetheart? This sandwich is not very good.”

  My dad looked at the sandwich.

  “I hate to ask, but would you mind going back and getting me a Caesar salad instead?”

  My dad had just taken his first bite of his own sandwich. He looked back and forth between it and my mother for a second. “You want me to drive back to the sandwich shop?”

  My mother nodded, then gestured at me with her head. “We could use a little just-us-girls time anyway.”

  My dad looked at me. Then he nodded and stood up with his sandwich in one hand and his keys in the other and left the room.

  My mom leaned closer to me once the door closed, and kept her voice low. “I read an article last night called ‘Sexual Functioning After a Spinal Cord Injury.’”

  “Mom! Don’t read that!”

  “Because if Chip’s enthusiasm is like his father’s—or any man, really—that’s going to be important to him.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Please don’t talk to me about Jim Dunbar’s ‘enthusiasm.’”

  “I’ve been best friends with Evelyn for years, sweetheart. I know everything.”

  I was shaking my head. “Nope. Please. No.”

  “The great news is,” she pushed on, “even though men in your situation often lose sexual abilities, women typically don’t. Which means even if you don’t walk again—which, of course, you will—you’ll still be good to go in that arena.”

  Was it worse to talk about Chip’s father’s sexual functioning with my mom—or to talk about mine? Words cannot express how much I did not want to discuss “that arena.” But she had momentum now.

  She went on. “You can have babies and everything—typically. In fact, the only trouble most women in your situation have is finding somebody who’s willing to—”

  She stopped herself.

  “Somebody who’s willing to what?”

  But she turned her attention back to her sandwich, wrapping it up like she might save it for later.

  “Willing to what?”

  She started again, more carefully. “Women’s level of sexual activity does typically g
o down, but it’s not that the injury prevents it. It’s that nobody…”

  She paused, like she couldn’t say it.

  “It’s that nobody wants to fuck them anymore?”

  She closed her eyes. “You know I hate that language.”

  If I could have walked out, I would have.

  Instead, with no other option, I banged my head back against the pillow. “Is that the inspiring message you came with today?”

  She did have enough self-awareness to be a tiny bit cowed. She folded her napkin and smoothed it on her leg. “I just read the article, and it seemed like information you should have.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do with that? Root even harder for a miracle? Defy the laws of human physiology?”

  “I’m trying to help,” she insisted.

  “By freaking me the hell out?”

  “The point is,” my mother said, “we have to be proactive. We have to face this thing head-on. All the healing and recovery you’re going to do takes place in the first six to eight weeks after the accident—and you’re already two weeks in.”

  “Are you saying I’m a slacker?”

  “I’m saying you need to get your head in the game.”

  There was always a kind of backward logic to my mom’s crazy. I got it now. She hadn’t accidentally revealed to me that I was facing a possible lifetime of being unfuckable. She was doing it on purpose. She was attempting to motivate me. To get me focused. To rouse some unsinkable part of my soul that would stand up in outrage and simply refuse to give in.

  The worst part was, it was working.

  This was how she’d motivated me my whole life: fear of the worst-case scenario. She was trying to scare me into action. She was trying to generate a Rocky moment, trying to cue the music and shift me into a training montage.

  Did I think that I could beat my spinal cord into submission? Of course not. Could sheer willpower overcome anything? Of course not. Was there a hazy line between determination and denial? Absolutely.

  But what choice did I have? Sure, she was playing dirty. Sure, she was acting like a terrorist. But her heart was in the right place—and she wasn’t wrong. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. I didn’t want to give up everything I’d hoped for. I didn’t want to lose Chip.