How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  He was still standing at the door, staring down at his hand on the knob. He looked up. “I brought a present to give you tomorrow,” he said then. “But maybe you don’t want it now.”

  I turned my eyes to the window. “Just throw it away,” I said.

  I heard the door click closed behind him, and then he was gone.

  I stayed awake for a good while after that—waiting to hear Kit creep back to her bedroom, because I needed to pee and I’d be damned before I asked Ian to take me. Maybe I’d be better off without him. He certainly seemed to think so. But in all that time of thinking, I could not for one second imagine how.

  Twenty-two

  THE NEXT DAY—my actual birthday—did not shake down the way I expected.

  I expected to wake up and work my way through an awkward breakfast with Kit and Benjamin all lovey-dovey while Ian stared out the window with a face of stone.

  But that’s not what happened, exactly.

  When I opened my eyes and tried to move my toes, as I did every morning—one of them did something utterly shocking.

  It moved.

  It wiggled.

  The big toe on my right foot, to be exact.

  Part of me thought I might still be asleep.

  I tried again, and it moved again.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!”

  In seconds, all three of my lake housemates came bursting through the door in a hilarious potpourri of pajamas that made it clear I was definitely the first one up. Kit was in a hot-pink negligée, a sight I’d never seen before, and Fat Benjamin had a remarkable, gravity-defying bed-beard situation going on. Ian, I did my best not to notice, slept in blue cotton pajama bottoms. Only. Also, his hair was even more unruly than Benjamin’s beard—but to be honest, it just made him cuter.

  None of that mattered, anyway. “Am I dreaming?” I demanded.

  “The sun’s not even up,” Kit said, in her best big-sister voice.

  “I need to know if I’m dreaming right now. Am I?”

  Fat Benjamin ventured, “Of course, if you were dreaming, then we wouldn’t really be able to give you a straight answer.”

  Ian stepped closer. “What’s going on?”

  “Look,” I said, pointing at my toe.

  Everybody looked.

  I pushed it down, then pulled it back.

  “No! You! Did! Not!” Kit shrieked, turning around to hug me.

  “What?” Benjamin said. “I missed it.”

  “Do it again,” Ian said.

  I did it again.

  “Does it happen every time you try?” Ian asked.

  “So far,” I said.

  “Can you do the other one?”

  I tried. Nothing. I shook my head.

  Ian did a little mini-evaluation right then, even though he didn’t have any of the right equipment. Or a shirt. We didn’t learn much, except to confirm that—one—the toe was, in fact, wiggling on command, and—two—I was not dreaming.

  “What does it mean?” I asked Ian.

  “It means there’s more information getting through than there used to be.”

  It wasn’t an unreasonable answer, but it wasn’t what I’d wanted him to say.

  Or Kit, either, apparently. “It means she’ll walk again!” She started jumping up and down. “Right?”

  We all looked at my toe again.

  I wiggled it, showing off.

  But Ian wasn’t jumping. He stared at the toe somberly. “Not necessarily,” he said, like a buzzkill.

  “But it’s not a bad sign,” I said.

  “It’s a hell of a birthday present,” he said. “I’ll give it that.”

  * * *

  DESPITE THE TOE-RELATED excitement, I managed to have several childish and ungenerous thoughts about Ian on the drive home. What a downer he was, for example. How he refused to let himself—or anyone else—be happy. How he squandered opportunities for joy. Maybe I should work with a different trainer. Somebody who knew how to motivate and inspire. Maybe Ian’s intolerance for hope was holding me back.

  Kit was absolutely spazzy with excitement about the whole outing.

  “I never knew your toe was such a genius,” she said on the drive. “It’s, like, the Neil Armstrong of toes. Or maybe Abraham Lincoln.”

  As far as she knew, the weekend had been better than perfect. She had many topics she wanted to cover, but number one, for sure, just as soon as we finished our discussion of which famous person from history best represented my big toe, was “What the hell was going on between you and Braveheart when we walked in on you last night?”

  I wanted to tell her. Badly. I wanted to give her the slow-mo replay of every single significant moment and spend the rest of the car ride and even the next several days analyzing the data into submission. I could see many vastly different, totally contradictory interpretations of Ian’s behavior (and choices, and tone of voice, and facial expressions), and I had no clue which one was right.

  But I couldn’t tell her.

  Kit had no real sense of privacy. I tried to chalk it up to exuberance—if she had the goods, she just had to share—but she was a little gossipy, too. She also gabbed on the cell phone all the time with no sense of who might be nearby listening. And do not get me started on her issues with Instagram.

  I did not doubt that Myles would try to take away Ian’s license if he ever got wind of what had happened. I’d seen him menacing Ian in the gym every day for weeks. I’d watch him trying to provoke Ian, needling him, pushing his buttons, hoping to goad him into doing something stupid, and I’d think, “That’s a lot of anger.”

  I felt a little sorry for Myles, and the way something in his life compelled him to seek vengeance instead of just moving on. But I felt sorrier for Ian. Myles really was a revenge-driven prick.

  Mostly, that was a problem for Ian, but it was a problem for me today, because it meant I couldn’t do the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world to do right then: tell Kitty everything.

  She was waiting. “Were you hooking up, or what?”

  “Sadly,” I said, “no.”

  “No? What were you doing on the floor?”

  “He tripped,” I said with a shrug, like, No big deal.

  Kit squinted her eyes like she did not believe me at all.

  I had to ramp it up. “You know those little rag rugs Mom has everywhere? He tripped on one at the threshold. And, seriously, then he managed to heroically catch me on the way down.”

  Kit studied me out of the side of her eye. “Bullshit.”

  “I swear,” I declared then, “on my wiggly big toe.”

  That did it. “Okay,” she said. “So what was going on between you? Because the romantic tension was so thick you could wear it like a sweater.”

  I told myself it wasn’t lying, exactly. It was just mushing up the truth. “At the bonfire, I confessed some feelings to him.”

  “Yum,” Kit said. “I love confessed feelings.”

  “I told him I had a huge, all-consuming, heart-wrenching crush and that he was basically the only thing I looked forward to all day.”

  “Besides gourmet takeout with your sister.”

  “Of course.”

  “And what did he say?”

  Now I was grateful to him. Because this shit was too good to make up. “He said: No, I didn’t.”

  “No, you didn’t what?”

  “No, I didn’t have a crush on him.”

  Kit looked straight at me. “What the hell?”

  “Eyes on the road, please.”

  “Explain!”

  “He said I only thought I had a crush on him, and that this kind of thing happens all the time, and my life has been pulverized and so I’m grasping at any straws of happiness I can, but once I get through this, I’ll realize that it was all in my head and I never had any real feelings for him at all. Not really.”

  “He did not say that.”

  “He did. Then he cited a whole bunch of studies from his training and basica
lly told me that I was a teenage girl with Boy Band syndrome—thinking that some kindhearted prince was going to come in and take all my sorrows away.”

  I was a better liar than I thought. Though that kind of was what he’d said.

  “Is he right?” Kit asked.

  “No!” I said. “Nobody can take these problems away. Unless this toe thing turns out to be a surprise miracle.”

  “He didn’t return your feelings at all? Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “He basically told me that I have all his best wishes as a healthcare professional, but to shut the fuck up and go to bed. Then he tried to make me do just that, tripped on a rag rug, and got crushed under my dead weight. Insult to injury.”

  “He’s lying,” Kit said. “I see the way he looks at you.”

  I couldn’t help it. “How does he look at me?”

  “Like you’re a waterfall in a desert.”

  Did he? The idea of it made my stomach flip. But I had to keep obfuscating. “Guess what else? He knew how I felt before I even told him because I’ve been mooning at him for weeks, and he didn’t discourage me because he thought it might help my recovery.”

  “Narcissist!” Kit shouted.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But the thing is, he wasn’t wrong. You know you always work harder for teachers you have crushes on.”

  Kit nodded, and just from knowing her face almost as many years as I’d known my own, I knew I was in the clear. She’d bought it.

  “I guess now,” she said, “you’ll just have to work hard for yourself.”

  “I guess I will,” I said.

  And that was true—whether I was lying or not.

  * * *

  THE BIG-TOE MIRACLE turned me into quite the celebrity. Doctors who had lost interest were suddenly popping by several times a day. Other patients on the floor wanted to get the story firsthand. Kit even drew me a homemade card that read, “Toe-tally excited about your big breakthrough!!”

  It was such a busy flurry that the shenanigans with Ian seemed distant very quickly. I had bigger fish to fry, I let myself think. I’d get walking again, and then I’d grow my hair out, and then I’d pop by the hospital one day, pretending to look for—what? A lost earring? A book I’d lent out?—and he’d behold me in the hallway, tall and fierce and perfect and invincible. He’d say a sad hello because he’d know he’d missed his chance, and I’d give him a little wow-we-really-could-have-been-something smile, and then I’d flip my hair, walk away, and let him choke on the dust of his own regret.

  I will never, ever divulge how many times I partook of that particular fantasy. But I will confess that for some reason, in it, I was wearing the exact same shiny hot pants and high-heeled Dr. Scholl’s that Olivia Newton-John is wearing in the grand finale of Grease. And I had her fantastic butt, too.

  All to say, when I saw Ian again in the therapy gym for the first time since our trip to the lake, the sight of him took me by surprise. He was back in his usual blue scrubs, with his hair in its usual slightly spiky configuration, but what caught me off guard was his new demeanor. He wasn’t the hostile, sullen Ian I’d first met, but he sure as hell wasn’t the warm, goofy Ian I’d allowed myself to swoon over.

  This new Ian was just not there. I couldn’t quite find the word for it, but he was just gone. His posture was blank. His shoulders were blank. His eyes were blank. He was like a pod person.

  He still did everything he was supposed to. He still walked me through all my paces. He showed up on time. He even went the extra mile to bring in experts to consult and make sure we were doing everything possible. But he never smiled. He never relaxed.

  And not once after we came back from the lake did he call me Maggie again.

  * * *

  BY THURSDAY, WITH exactly a week to go until my insurance ran out and I had to go back to live with my parents, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  We’d all been on Toe Watch for days now, waiting for some new development—that hadn’t come. If anything, that one superstar big toe had become less reliable. Was my improvement stalled because Ian was being weird? Either way, it couldn’t be helping. Time was running out. I didn’t want a robot for a PT.

  That night, when Ian came to tutor, I told him I wanted someone new.

  I’d hoped for some kind of reaction—a flash of disappointment across his face, some human curiosity about why, even irritation would have sufficed. But nothing.

  “Okay,” Ian said, with all the emotion of a glass of milk. “If you think that’s best.”

  “I should probably change trainers in the gym, as well,” I added.

  No reaction there, either. “I understand,” Ian said. “If you wouldn’t mind letting me arrange the switch, it might give Myles one less reason to fire me.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “I’ll find you someone good.” His poker face broke my heart.

  “Great.”

  Ian headed toward the door, but I called his name. He turned back.

  This might be the last time I’d see him. I couldn’t stand the idea that he’d always remember me as a pathetic, lovesick, delusional girl. I didn’t want to be the only one who cared. If he could be a robot, so could I. “Thanks for your restraint at the lake, by the way. I cannot imagine what I was thinking.”

  Ian gave a sad smile. “What restraint at what lake?”

  And we left it at that.

  * * *

  LATER THAT NIGHT, with a week minus one day until Kit’s first-of-April Valentine’s Day party, I asked her to call it off.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’ve rented a karaoke machine.”

  I held my hands out, like, So? “Unrent it!”

  She mirrored the gesture. “Nonrefundable deposit!”

  We were eating enormous taco salads in bowls made of taco shells.

  Kit went on, “Plus, I’ve got a batch of kids popping in early to cut construction paper hearts, I’ve got a guy named Rodrigo bringing his garage mariachi band to play for free, I’ve bought the decorations and over a hundred heart-shaped cookies, I’ve invited everybody on the floor and all the nurses, and I frigging love Valentine’s Day. And so should you.”

  “It’s not Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  “That’s a bad attitude, right there.”

  “Damn right it is.”

  “You don’t have to like it,” Kit said. “You just have to come.”

  “I’m not coming.”

  She stopped chewing. “You have to!”

  I shook my head. “I have one week left. There’s no time for parties. I am not screwing around.”

  “But it will be my last night—and yours!”

  “That’s why you should cancel the party and spend it with me.”

  * * *

  SHE DIDN’T CANCEL the party. I spent the following days meeting my new PT, working with my new PT, and doing tutoring in the evenings with my new PT—and Kit spent them cutting heart decorations out of construction paper.

  The new PT was Rob-with-the-Man-Bun—the one I’d wished for early on. Without a doubt, he was the perkiest and flirtiest of everybody. He had huge energy and a laugh like a trumpet blast. I’d heard it a million times in the background in the gym, and I’d always assumed he was laughing like that because something was wildly funny. I had often wondered how he and his patients had managed to generate so much comedy from activities like riding the stationary bike, and I confess I’d mentally criticized Ian for being so serious.

  But now, in this final week, working with Man-Bun-Rob, I came to realize something: That laugh was fake.

  He was overlaughing. He was pretending things were a thousand times funnier than they were. I’d crack the tiniest little nonjoke, and he’d throw his head back and absolutely bellow. That was worse—far worse—than not laughing at all.

  Within hours of first starting to work with Rob, I grew to hate that laugh so much, it drove me to silence. I didn’t want to do anything to provoke it. But even that didn’t wo
rk. When he couldn’t get anything out of me, he’d turn to other patients and other trainers—and pretend to laugh at their unfunny jokes.

  Out of the frying pan into the fire.

  But at least I wasn’t tragically, unrequitedly in love with him. At least he had never given me a life-altering kiss and then said, “You know what? Never mind.”

  At least I knew I didn’t like him.

  Simple.

  I could just concentrate on my recovery. Or lack thereof.

  Every time I went to PT now, I worried Ian would be in the gym. Usually, he was, working with someone else—which, no matter if it was an elderly bald man or a postmenopausal lady, made me jealous. I’d steal glances at him over and over, but he never looked at me or even seemed to notice I was there.

  I guess that’s what happens when you push people away.

  Though, to be fair, he pushed me first.

  The person in the gym who did notice me was Myles.

  He checked on me much more often now that Ian was across the room.

  “Doing all right?” he’d say, materializing from behind a post.

  “Fine, thanks,” I’d say, not making eye contact.

  Sometimes he prodded me about Ian. “Didn’t work out with you two, huh?”

  Was he tricking me when he did that? Was he trying to goad me into getting Ian in trouble?

  “It worked out great,” I said, thinking fast.

  “So well,” Myles pressed, “that you requested another PT?”

  “It was Ian’s idea,” I said. Lying.

  Myles tilted his head like I was the biggest liar ever. “Really?”

  Here’s where my obsessive study of medical journals brought its big payoff. “Yes,” I said. “Because Rob has more experience with functional electrical stimulation, and Ian thinks I’d be a good candidate.”

  Suddenly, Myles wasn’t so cocky. “You couldn’t have wanted to stay with him, though. He was so unfriendly to you. Borderline hostile—”

  I started to say, “I wouldn’t call him hostile—”

  But Myles went on, “When he wasn’t standing outside your room listening to you sing.”