How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  “Push back a little. Otherwise, it’s not therapy. It’s just hugging.”

  “Hugging could be a type of therapy.”

  “Not the type your father’s going to pay me for.”

  “He might if I asked him to.”

  “You can do this. Take a breath.”

  So I did. Then I pushed myself back until there was half a foot between us, and worked my legs into position as if they were foreign objects. He kept his hands at my rib cage, and I braced mine on his shoulders. Then there we were, waist deep in the water, standing. Right then, I felt it for the first time—almost like an electrical pulse: a tiny flicker of joy.

  He saw it. He saw me feel it. There was nowhere to look but straight into his face, and he read me in less than a second.

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  He smiled back. A real smile. The first one of his I’d ever seen. And I felt another electrical pulse.

  “You’re standing,” he said.

  “You’re smiling,” I said.

  “I’m not,” he said. But that just made him smile more. He threw his head back and said, “Focus! Focus!” To himself, as far as I could tell.

  For a flash, as I noticed all those muscles and tendons crisscrossing under the stubble on his throat, I forgot all about myself, and why we were here, and the impossible thing we were trying to do. For a second, he was just a guy in a pool in wet cargo shorts—and I was just a girl, being held.

  But just for a second.

  Then he brought his face down and got serious. “Okay,” he said. “When I take a step backward, you take a step forward.”

  But it had been too long. I shook my head. “I can’t remember how.”

  “Don’t overthink it. Your body remembers. You know how to bring the knee up. Then let the water help the foot follow.”

  When he took a step back, I brought my knee forward. Then my foot followed behind, carried by the current. Then I set it down.

  “I did it!” I whispered.

  “Good. Do the other one.”

  So I did.

  It was slow, but it felt so good to work that old, familiar pattern. One foot, then the other, side to side, in that ancient human motion. It was bliss, and heartbreak—both. It was just enough of what I wanted to remind me of what I wanted—who I’d been, what I’d lost. That must have been the aspect that made me cry, because by the time we made it to the far side, my face was cold with tears.

  But I was smiling. Crying and smiling both. As sad and happy as I’d been in a while. Not numb, that was certain.

  “We made it all the way!” I said. Then, because nothing else seemed like it could possibly be more interesting, I said it again. “We made it all the way!”

  “Aye. We did.”

  “I want to high-five you, but I don’t want to let go.”

  “Don’t high-five. We’re going back across.”

  I felt like I could go all night, but he said that was just the excitement. He promised I was working much harder than I realized.

  “The thing is,” I said, as we moved back across. “I don’t think my muscles are bringing my foot forward. I think it might just be drifting in the current behind the knee.”

  “That’s okay. The theory is, the more your body does it, the more it will remember what to do. Going through those motions helps spark memories in your body. That’s the hope, at least.”

  “Thank you for not letting me fall.”

  “We’re not out yet.”

  “Thank you for being so nice to me today.”

  But Ian didn’t have a reply to that, and once again, he got quiet.

  Nineteen

  ONE NIGHT, A hospital volunteer showed up just after Kitty arrived with Moroccan lamb tagine. She was perky and big-eyed, and she carried a little clipboard. She was recruiting volunteers for a crafts fair that week in the children’s wing, and I was just drawing breath to shoo her out when Kitty said, “What kind of crafts?”

  “Oh, everything,” the volunteer said. “Rock painting, finger knitting, friendship bracelets, balloon rockets, beeswax sculpting, sand candles. Also: anything with googly eyes.”

  Kitty looked at me. “They are having a lot more fun in the children’s wing than we are.”

  “Would you like to sign up?” the volunteer asked.

  “Yes,” Kitty said loudly, just as I said, “No.”

  The volunteer looked at Kitty. “Great.”

  “Can we sign up for knitting?” Kitty asked. “My sister is knitting a slug.”

  “Ooo, bring it!” the volunteer said. “The kids will love it.”

  Kitty wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Maybe we can steal some googly eyes.”

  After the volunteer left, I said, “I’m not going.”

  “Yes you are. You just signed up.”

  “You just signed up.”

  “What else do you have to do?”

  “Stop trying to cheer me up. You know it makes me feel worse.”

  “You feel worse, anyway.”

  “Yeah. But you make me feel guilty about it.”

  “Look, I just saw a very inspiring quote on Instagram that said, ‘Our struggles lead us to our strengths.’”

  “Say the word ‘Instagram’ one more time and I will burn this building down.”

  “Fine, but every single article in the entire world says you need to learn to appreciate what you have and not dwell on what you don’t.”

  “Are you kidding me right now?”

  She hesitated. “Okay, that sounded a little flip.”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “It’s been four weeks!! Four weeks since I lost everything I cared about. Can I get five minutes to adjust?”

  “Yes! Of course! And in the meantime, let’s go teach a bunch of hospitalized children how to knit a slug.”

  “Dammit, stop trying to fix me!”

  Ian showed up in the doorway then, but that didn’t slow us down. Kitty flung her arm in his direction. “Ian gets to try to fix you!”

  I glanced over at him. “It’s his job to fix me.”

  “So?”

  “So! A job is different.”

  “That’s better?”

  He was right there, listening, but I was hell-bent on making my point. “Yes! Because in less than three weeks, I will never see him again. He won’t think about me, he won’t worry about me, and he sure as hell won’t spend the rest of my life telling me to cheer up. He will feel a wash of relief as I roll out the door to go live my tragic life, and then he’ll be done.”

  I was about to go on, but Ian stepped in closer. “That’s not true.”

  Kitty and I both turned toward him. “What’s not true?” I asked.

  “I will think about you after you’re gone. I expect I’ll think about you often.”

  Was there more? Nope. A man of few words.

  But just enough, as we stared at him, to stop the fight in its tracks.

  “Want some Moroccan tagine?” Kitty asked after a bit, peeling the lid off a container and holding it out.

  Ian said no.

  “Maggie’s knitting a slug,” Kit said then. “Want to see?”

  She got him to smile. I loved when he did that. “I’d love to see,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said to Kit, “don’t—”

  “Shh.” Kit held her finger out. “For a scarf, it’s terrible. For a knitted slug, it’s divine. Just go with ‘slug’ and be proud.” She thrust it at Ian.

  He held it for a second, looked back and forth between us, and then said, “That’s a fine knitted slug.”

  Kit turned to me. “Does everything sound sexy in Scottish?” Then, back to Ian, “If you were a kid at the craft fair, wouldn’t you love to see that?”

  He looked up. “The craft fair?”

  “Yeah, they’re holding one for the kids, but Cranky McCrankypants doesn’t want to volunteer.”

  I gave Kitty a look.

  But I did have to give her credit. He seemed to like it when she teas
ed me. His eyes crinkled up at the edges in an expression that was almost warm. And then, like just a normal, friendly, healthcare professional, he shook his head all wryly and said, “Now you make me think of my mother.”

  Kit and I both frowned. “Your mother?”

  “She always said, ‘When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for someone else.’”

  * * *

  WE WENT TO the fair. What choice did we have? Neither of us had the guts to disobey Ian’s mother.

  The fair turned out to be the most fun I’d had since my incarceration.

  There, surrounded by kids of every variety, I felt more relaxed than I had been in all these weeks. In the rehab gym, the focus was on how we could fix what was broken about me. In my room, I was, well, in a hospital room. But in this rec room in the children’s wing, it was just bright colors and helium balloons and yarn animals and sing-alongs and face painting. Noisy? Yes. Chaotic? Totally. As I sat at my finger-knitting station with Kit, teaching kids what to do when they came up, and chatting with Kit in between, I felt noticeably peaceful.

  “These are your people,” Kitty said.

  “They do seem to get me,” I said.

  “You’re craftier than I realized,” Kit said next, eyeing the long yarn snake I’d been making.

  “I’m craftier than I realized,” I said with a shrug.

  It was here, among all this chaos and peace, that Kit decided to give me two pieces of information.

  One: She’d booked her flight back to New York. She was leaving on the morning of the same day I was getting discharged.

  “You’re not going to come home with me?”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “No.”

  “Not even for a couple of hours? To help me get settled?”

  “No. This was the cheapest flight, and I took it.”

  “I can’t believe you’re leaving me.”

  “It’s not for two weeks.”

  ‘Two and a half,” I corrected.

  “That’s, like, ten years in hospital time.”

  “Now I have to dread it.”

  “I did everything I came here for,” she said then. “I cleared things up with you. I confronted Mom. I went on an erotic journey with Fat Benjamin.”

  “Did you come here for that last one?”

  She squinted. “I guess Fat Benjamin was a surprise.”

  “And did you clear things up with Mom?” I asked.

  “As much as I ever do,” she said.

  “’Cause it seems like we haven’t talked about”—I didn’t know how to describe it—“your information since the day it all came out.”

  Kit shrugged. “Yeah, well. We’ve all been kind of busy.”

  True, we’d been busy. But this was also a classic Jacobsen-family technique for responding to big, earth-shattering news: pretending it didn’t exist.

  There was probably a more delicate way to ask the question, but I said, “Don’t you want to know who your real dad is?”

  Kit got quiet at the sound of the words out loud.

  “Our dad is my real dad.”

  Had I hurt her feelings? “Of course he is,” I corrected. “I just I meant your biological dad.”

  She thought about it. “I’ve thought about it. I am curious. But as long as Dad doesn’t know, it feels disloyal to take it any further.”

  “And Dad will never know.”

  We agreed.

  Two: Kit’s other piece of news was she had decided to throw a party on her last night here. In the rehab gym.

  “They’ll never let you do that,” I said.

  “It’s closed at night. No one has to know.”

  It was a “Valentine’s Day party,” even though it would happen on the first of April.

  “Details,” Kit said, making a pshaw motion. “Love can happen anytime.”

  “Do you know that’s April Fools’?”

  “Only you would notice that.”

  “You realize what happened to me the last time it was Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Of course she knew. We all knew. But I said it anyway. “I was in a plane crash.”

  “Duh. I’m aware of that. I’m giving you a do-over.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  But she had a fire in her eyes. “I’ll do everything. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll talk to the nurses, hang the decorations. I’ve got a vision! Little heart-shaped chocolates everywhere, punch that we’ll call ‘love potion,’ and Fat Benjamin’s got a chocolate fountain that he stole from a catering gig. Streamers, and karaoke with nothing but love songs, and I’ve got that old disco ball in my high school bedroom. I love stuff like this! Let me do something for you. Yes?”

  Maybe it was because the kids’ craft fair was so unexpectedly charming, but I let out a long sigh, and as soon as my shoulders sank, she knew she’d won.

  She held up her arms in victory.

  “Who would you even invite?” I said. Then I pointed a warning at her: “Nobody from Facebook. No normal people, okay?”

  “Just injured people. Just the folks on your floor. And the nurses. And anybody else good. Plus Fat Benjamin, of course.”

  “Why do you have to do this?” I asked. “Let’s just eat tacos and watch TV.”

  “I need to go out with a bang,” she said. “And guess what? So do you.”

  That’s when it hit me. “You’ve already started planning this, haven’t you?”

  She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “It was supposed to be a surprise, but you know I can’t keep a secret.”

  “You sneaky weasel!”

  “I dare you to be mad,” she said, “when you’re drinking straight out of the chocolate fountain.”

  Twenty

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Kitty showed up with some astonishing information: I’d been granted a furlough.

  She held out a box of spanakopita with a triumphant flourish and said, “Great news!”

  I was knitting a new slug. “What?”

  “We have an amazing birthday present for you.”

  I had to think about it. Sure enough, my birthday was coming up on Sunday. “I forgot about my birthday,” I said.

  “You are not going to believe how great your present is.”

  “My face is back to normal?”

  Kit frowned and then squinted at me. “Not quite,” she said. “But close.”

  “What, then?”

  Kit stretched up taller. “We are about to blow your mind.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Mom and me.”

  “Since when are you and Mom a ‘we’?”

  Kitty’s expression darkened. “It’s a fragile, don’t-ask-don’t-tell truce.”

  I frowned. How was that possible?

  “Never underestimate Linda’s ability to compartmentalize,” Kit said. “Or mine, either.”

  “So you’re not talking about anything?”

  “Nothing but you.”

  “Okay.”

  “She hates everything about how I look, though.”

  “Of course she does.”

  “Especially the tattoos.”

  I gave Kit a look. Of course she does.

  “It was her idea, actually. This whole thing.”

  “What whole thing?”

  Kit pretended to blow a trumpet. “Announcing the greatest birthday news ever!” she announced. “We are giving you a night out.”

  “A night out?”

  Kit dropped her voice back to normal. “Mom thought you might like to have spaghetti and cake at home.”

  Our traditional birthday dinner. Spaghetti and cake. The thought of it made me sad. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “I know.” Kitty looked pleased with herself. “I told her that! And Dad backed me up.”

  “I don’t have to go to Mom’s?”

  “No. Better.”

  “Where?”

  Kit did a little shimmy. “The lake.”

&nb
sp; “The lake? Our lake?”

  She clapped.

  But it was no good. “I can’t go to the lake,” I said. It was my grandparents’ old fishing cabin. Rustic, to say the least. Hardly wheelchair accessible.

  “You can! It’s all set up!”

  “They’ll never let me out of here for that.”

  “Mom got them to okay it. It’s all official. I was waiting to tell you until it was certain. We’ll spend Saturday night at the lake. Which means you will wake up on your birthday not in the hospital.”

  “But…” I wasn’t sure what to think. Kit wanted me to be excited, but it just seemed like such a terrible, awful, exhausting idea.

  “We figured it all out. Mom’s been down there all week, cleaning so it shines. Fresh sheets, dust-free: the works. Plus a ton of groceries to stock the kitchen.”

  “Is Mom coming, too?”

  “No! That’s just it! I said, ‘Mom, Margaret is a young person! She wants to spend her birthday with young people!’ And Dad backed me up.”

  “So who am I spending it with?”

  “Me!”

  This sounded worse and worse. “Kit, you can’t take care of me. You can barely take care of yourself.”

  “Rude. And untrue. And I can take care of you, because I talked your boyfriend into coming with us—and he’s going to do all the hard stuff.”

  My boyfriend? “Who—Chip?” I hadn’t seen or heard from him—absolutely nothing—since the night we’d ended it. It was like he never existed.

  Kit shook her head. “No. Your Scottish boyfriend.”

  I put my hand over my mouth. “You didn’t.”

  “I did!”

  “You asked him?”

  She nodded.

  “And he said yes?”

  “I might’ve implied I could accidentally kill you.”

  I leaned back against the pillow. “No.”

  “Anyway, that’s your real present. Now you can have forbidden sex with your secret love.” Then she frowned and leaned in to whisper, “Your vagina still works, right?”

  I put my hand over my eyes. “No secret love. No forbidden sex. Come on, Kit!”

  “You think I’m an amateur? You think I can’t read that sexual tension? Sexual tension is my primary language!”

  “Kit, look at me. Look at my life.”

  “So?”

  “This is not junior high. I’m a month into a total shit-storm of utter devastation.”