How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  “All the more reason to have a little fun.”

  “I hate fun. I don’t even believe in fun anymore.”

  “You do when you’re with Ian.”

  “We are not doing this.”

  “It’s all arranged. He’s taking a personal day and everything.”

  “So me, you, and my physical therapist are going to the lake for my birthday?”

  Kit nodded. “And Fat Benjamin, too. For a little forbidden sex of my own.”

  “What about the Moustache?”

  “We’re nonexclusive.”

  I’d grown up spending long weekends and summers at this little fishing cottage, scampering around the yard, swimming for endless hours, only breaking for lunch and dinner, and exploring the lake in the rowboat. I’d spent my childhood there, never even imagining—of course—that I’d end up like this. The idea of facing any normal thing now, with my life so changed—even the grocery store or a movie theater—seemed heartbreaking. But a place so happy? A place so densely layered with memories of my other life? A place where the future had always been something to look forward to?

  It broke my heart to even consider it.

  And yet. It was all arranged. I did want to get out of here. I did love that lake. The cottage was only a hundred feet or so back from the shore, and when you woke, the first thing you saw was morning sunlight glittering on the water. I did want to see that. I longed to be someplace beautiful.

  Kit went on, “We’re going to eat camp food and make s’mores.”

  My stomach felt like it was filled with pebbles. I wanted to go exactly as much as I wanted not to go.

  But I didn’t know how to refuse. It was happening. Plus, Kit wasn’t wrong: I did believe in fun when Ian was around.

  * * *

  IAN AND I had become quite the ninja rehab team since he’d become my tutor. I stayed motivated and focused, and Ian finally caught on to the notion that people do better when you encourage them. We worked every day in the gym, and then we worked again after dinner.

  In fact, he was the only person I’d told about my morning toe-wiggling attempts, which had become quite a ritual for me. I never started a day without giving my toes a little pep talk and then trying to rev them up.

  “What do you say to them?” he asked, when I told him about it.

  “To my toes?”

  He nodded. “In the pep talks.”

  In the name of healthcare, I told the truth. “I say, ‘Come on, little guys. You’re a lot stronger than you think you are.’”

  “What do they say back?”

  I gave him a look. “They say, ‘Right back atcha, lady.’”

  Some nights, I was tired, and he just hung out in the room with Kit and me, working my lower legs in a low-key way, with texture therapy, or stretching, or massage, and talking in a far more relaxed way than I ever saw in the gym. In the gym, with Myles never far off, Ian was always all business. He scowled less now, maybe, but he still scowled a lot.

  But after-hours Ian was different.

  First of all, he was jazzed about our activities. In the rehab gym, he had a going-through-the-motions vibe, but on his own, he was full of energy and surprises. When I wasn’t too tired, we went to the pool, where he had a whole array of inflatables to cheer the place up—surfboards and noodles and blow-up unicorns. Other times, he’d show up with an acupuncturist friend, and do acupuncture right there in my room while Kitty ate sesame chicken and looked on. Now and again, he brought a reflexologist who also dabbled in aromatherapy. Once, he had a chiropractor friend in tow—which was a little alarming because I did not want her even touching, must less adjusting, my back—but she just used a handheld ultrasound machine to stimulate my calves and feet.

  Was it helping? Who knows? It wasn’t hurting.

  The rehab gym was all work, but tutoring became play.

  Some nights, we played Pop-A-Shot outside the rehab gym until bedtime. The first time we ever tried it, after I explained in detail how much I sucked at basketball, I beat Ian’s score by thirteen points. He wasn’t thrilled about that. After that, I beat him every time we played. I’d sit in front of the basket as Ian handed me basketballs, and I’d make swish after swish after swish until the timer went off. Then Ian would take a turn. Sometimes he made baskets, sometimes he didn’t. I’m sure he was fine at it. But, to everyone’s surprise, I was remarkable. I never missed. And this drove Ian crazy—especially since I had never even seen a Pop-A-Shot game before now.

  I liked driving him crazy.

  The first night he’d showed up for tutoring, he’d stood the entire time, like an at-ease officer, and waited for Kit and me to eat. Now, he’d long since given in, and he and Kit sat in visitor chairs on either side of me, the bed lowered to table height, dinner spread out all over it, wedging containers between my ankles or up against my knees.

  Maybe it was the food, or the easy rapport between me and Kit, or just being far enough from Myles—but sometimes Ian seemed like a different guy entirely. An easygoing, smiley, likable guy. The more we saw that guy, the more we wanted to see him. It became a game.

  Kit and I ganged up on Ian a lot, trying to make him smile, or blush, or laugh out loud—ideally all three. Embarrassing him worked like a charm. We cursed. We talked about shocking “lady” things. We made him teach us Scottish insults. Turns out, there were plenty, and they were delightful. Both words—“clipe,” “dobber,” “scrote,” “roaster,” “numpty,” “jakey,” “walloper”—and phrases: “Shut ye geggie,” “erse like a bag o’ washin’,” and “yer bum’s oot the windae.” Not to mention “baw,” meaning “testicle,” which apparently goes with just about anything: “bawbag,” “bawface,” “bawjaws.” Plus, just words for regular things were awesome: “oxter” for armpit, “cludgie” for toilet, “blootered” for drunk, and “puggled” for out of breath.

  Ian gave us the shocking news that the Scottish accent was not as universally adored in the U.K. as in the U.S.

  “They’re just jealous,” Kit said.

  “Should we not make fun of your accent, then?” I asked. It was one thing to make fun of an accent that was unassailably cool—and quite another to kick an accent that was down.

  “You can make fun of Scottish,” he said, “if I can make fun of Texan.”

  Kit and I looked at each other. “Can you make fun of Texan?”

  Ian pointed at me. “You say ‘tumped’ for ‘fell over.’ You know that’s not a word, right?”

  “It is a word,” I said.

  Ian shook his head. “Only in Texas.”

  We loved to try to copy his accent, but we were bad at it. We also gave him American words to try, especially Native American place names that Kit Googled on her phone, like the Caloosahatchee River, Lake Tangipahoa, and Quittapahilla Creek. It cracked her up to hear him try, and it mesmerized me. I’d watch his lips forming those sounds, pulling back, and pouting out, and making that classic Scottish o. Sometimes I forgot to laugh. Sometimes I got hypnotized by it.

  He turned out to be remarkably game. We got started to bring him out of his stoic shell, but it always got us going, too. We laughed so hard at dinner sometimes that we couldn’t even finish our food. It was the kind of goofy, uncontrollable laughing you almost never do in grown-up life: Things weren’t just funny, they were hysterical—even things that were objectively not even funny: the noise of a scooting chair, a veggie dumpling that got dropped on the floor, a nurse coming into the room to investigate the noise.

  It’s strange that I could have laughed so hard under those circumstances, during that very dark moment in my life. But I’ve decided sorrow can make things funnier. Endure enough hardship, and you start really needing a good laugh. I remember my dad and his brother, on the day of their own mother’s funeral back when I was a kid, in the car, driving to the cemetery, making fun of all their relatives and cracking each other up. They were in the front seat, and Kit and I and our mom were in the back, and I watched those two grown men, now
motherless, having just lost forever a woman they both truly loved, not just chuckle a bit but howl with laughter.

  I was maybe ten at the time. “What are you doing?” I demanded of my dad. “How can you be laughing?”

  “Sweetheart,” my dad said, “if we don’t laugh, we’re gonna cry.”

  That’s what this laughing was like. It took us over. It made our faces hurt. And it happened not despite all the sadness, but because of it.

  Kit was bolder than I was. She begged him to wear a kilt to work one day.

  “Wear a kilt to this building,” she said, “and I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.”

  “She doesn’t have ten thousand dollars,” I whispered to Ian.

  Ian smiled. “And I don’t have a kilt, so we’re even.”

  Mostly, it was Kit and me egging Ian on, but one night, eating sushi, he picked up a teaspoon-sized wad of wasabi with his chopsticks, held it up so we could see it, and then said, “Do you dare me to eat this?”

  I looked at him like he was crazy. “The whole thing?” One tenth of that wasabi ball would be enough to send steam out his ears.

  Ian nodded.

  “No,” Kit said. “I won’t dare you. Not even I am that crazy.”

  “I’ll dare you,” I said—and before I could take it back, Ian had popped the whole thing in his mouth, swallowed, and thrown his arms up in victory.

  Kitty and I both gaped at him.

  “Not so bad,” Ian said, but the words were barely out before tears started running down his cheeks, and his face turned red, and he started panting and hissing like a feral cat.

  He grabbed his water and drank the whole bottle in one go. Then he grabbed my water and drank it all. Then Kit’s, too.

  “Whooo!” he said, pacing around the room. “Fuck—that stings.”

  “Curse in Scottish!” we called out.

  But he was jogging in place now. “Not my best idea.”

  “Say ‘bawjaws’!” Kit suggested.

  “Call yourself a ‘numpty jobber’!” I jumped in.

  “Dobber,” he corrected, while bent over at the waist, panting. Then he banged his head against the foot of the bed. Then he realized he was drooling, and took the wad of Kleenex I was waving at him.

  In all, it took half an hour for him to recover, and that’s when he threw us a bone and gave us a little Scottish. “I am a dobber,” he said. “What was I thinking?”

  “You were thinking,” I said, not even bothering to hide the affection in my voice, “that you’d entertain us.”

  It was like we had all made an unspoken pact to choose to have fun.

  “That’s backed up by science,” Kitty, Queen of Googling, said, when I noticed how much just the idea of dinner with her and Ian was impacting the rest of my sad days. “Anticipating a reward lights up the same region of the brain as actually getting a reward,” she said. “That’s what a dum-dum the brain is. It doesn’t even know the difference.”

  There was nothing, truly nothing, fun about any other part of my day. But I anticipated the hell out of dinner.

  Twenty-one

  THE MORNING OF my furlough was a usual morning—bathing, cleaning, failed attempts to wiggle my toes—and my parents came for their usual lunch. But then, instead of heading off to the rehab gym, I transferred to the chair, and my parents wheeled me down with a little overnight bag to where Kit was waiting in my father’s sedan.

  I felt surprisingly anxious about leaving the hospital.

  I would have said I’d be thrilled, elated, ecstatic to leave. Instead, I just felt shaky. I didn’t trust Kit to drive my dad’s big car. I didn’t trust all the idiot drivers texting their way through intersections. I didn’t trust the big, bad, chaotic world outside my controlled little hospital biosphere.

  Even in the car, I couldn’t relax. If I’d been a cat with claws, they would have been impaled in the dashboard. Every turn, every red light, every touch of the brakes made me wince with anxiety.

  “You have got to chill,” Kit said.

  I nodded. “Yes. Good advice. Chill.”

  But I had no idea how to do that. How do you make yourself chill?

  By the time we made it to the cabin, the tension in my neck was migrating to my head. I felt woozy and headachy, and Kit declared I had to take a nap.

  Of course, the house was not wheelchair accessible. Why would it be? We got me into the chair and across the gravel drive, but then we had to pause for a while to puzzle out how to get me into the house.

  “I knew this was a bad idea,” I said.

  “Hush,” Kit said. “If nothing else, your Scotsman can carry you in when he gets here.” She tromped off to examine the back porch to see if it might make a better point of entry, calling back, “Would that be so awful?”

  “Just go,” I said, closing my eyes.

  Being back here was exactly as bad as I’d feared. Everything was the same as it had been since my grandparents had bought the place in the sixties. The screen porch door still squeaked and slapped. The gopher hole by the back steps hadn’t moved. The pear trees my grandmother had planted still rustled in the breeze.

  The only thing different was me.

  It created such a visceral wash of grief through my body, I had to lean over and put my head between my knees. “We never should have come here,” I heard myself whisper.

  I was going to throw up. I felt that salty feeling under my tongue you get just before it happens.

  But then I heard tires on the gravel of the driveway.

  I looked up to see a brown vintage Bronco. With Ian in it. And then the door was slamming. And he was walking across the grass toward me with a duffel bag on his shoulder. In jeans, of all things, instead of scrubs. And brown leather shoes instead of sneakers. And a plaid flannel shirt.

  I forgot to throw up.

  “This place suits you,” Ian said, as he got close.

  “Really? Because I was just about to throw up.”

  “Carsick?”

  “Heartsick, I think.”

  “Does it make you sad to come here again?”

  I nodded.

  “But happy, too, I hope?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. But I’m glad to see you.”

  “Why are you out here alone?”

  “Kitty’s trying to figure out how to get me in.”

  Ian nodded. “I can help with that,” and as he said it, he dropped his duffel without a thought, kneeled down, pivoted, and backed up to me all at once. “Let’s go,” he said, jerking his head for me to climb on.

  So I did. He hooked his arms under my knees, and I gripped with my thighs, and held on to his shoulders. Just for a second, I got another intoxicating whiff of him, and then we were off, rounding the side of the house, looking for Kit.

  Ian stopped for a second when he caught sight of the lake—blue and bright and bigger than I remembered. The lawn sloped down to it, and from where we stood, we had a perfect, clear view.

  “This is your lake?” Ian asked.

  “This is our lake,” I said, and when I spoke, my cheek brushed his neck.

  “Will you take me out on it?” Ian asked.

  “Of course.”

  Just then, Kit rounded the corner. “We’re just going to have to wait for—” Then she saw us, and looked Ian over, in his flannel shirt and jeans. “The Brawny paper-towel guy.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T WANT to go back after that. It’s not that Ian showing up made everything okay—it didn’t. It made everything a little better, though. My heart was still humming a mournful tune, but it was like Ian arriving had introduced a little countermelody. It hadn’t stopped the sad song, but it had altered it.

  I needed to pee—we all did, after the drive—so after Kit opened the doors, Ian carried me to the bathroom and set me on the toilet with all my clothes still on.

  “Do you need help?” he asked.

  Even if I had needed it, no way in hell was I asking. “I’ve got it,” I said.
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br />   The wheelchair turned out to be fifty percent useless at the lake. The ground was too grassy and gravelly for it to roll well, and the doorways inside the house were too narrow. Upside: Ian carried me a lot.

  It was almost my birthday, after all.

  It was a crisp, sunny day, and my next order of business was to sit in an Adirondack chair in the sun near the water while Kit and Ian unpacked. I couldn’t expose my grafts to sunlight, so Kitty brought me out a pink dotted umbrella. I positioned it carefully to cover my burns but leave the rest of me—toes, legs, right arm—gloriously exposed. How long had it been since I’d felt the sun on my skin? I closed my eyes and drank in the feeling. The breeze was cool, but I felt warm.

  Despite everything that had happened, and everything still to bear, this moment right here was pretty nice.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but my headache had gone by the time I heard footsteps crunching down the gravel path toward me.

  It was Ian. “Kit wants me to bring out the boats,” he said, not breaking stride.

  I nodded, and went back to sunning, but I didn’t close my eyes again.

  Ian unlocked the boathouse and dragged boat after boat to the shore: a rowboat, two kayaks, two wakeboards, a clunky old paddle boat for fishing, and a canoe that my grandpa had painted with Cherokee designs. Back and forth he went. Mesmerizing.

  After a bit, Kitty joined me, and before she’d even sat down, she said, “Now that’s a gorgeous hunk of man, right there.”

  “He’s not a man, he’s a physical therapist.”

  Kit did not shift her gaze. “Pretty sure he’s both.”

  “Where’s your man?” I asked.

  “Which one?” she said, looking sly.

  “The chubby-but-cute one,” I answered.

  She looked a little offended on principle. A little protective even. “He’s on his way.”

  We watched Ian line up the last boat and then turn toward us. I guess boat dragging must be hard work, because he took off his flannel shirt as he walked, wadding it up to wipe the back of his neck, and leaving only his white undershirt.

  Kit let out a low whistle.

  “Kit!” I said. “Don’t objectify him!”