How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  I sat back. I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, but it wasn’t that. Not in that way, at least. Not like it was true. “You’re not?”

  His voice was flat. “I am fond of you. You have been a pleasant patient to work with. Your situation is tough, and I’ve been impressed with your drive and your strength. But I do not have romantic feelings for you.”

  I took a few breaths in slow motion. Did I believe him? “And so that very passionate, Olympic-level kiss at the lake?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’m just a good kisser.”

  “How about that other kiss—when you publicly, in front of a whole room of onlookers, ended your own career?”

  He looked up very carefully, straight into my eyes. “I must have let myself get too lonely.”

  “So,” I said, putting it together, “it wasn’t passion—it was desperation?”

  He almost looked a little bored. “That’s one way to put it.”

  “So,” I tried again, hoping to make him deny it, “what you’re saying is, you knew I’d developed a slightly overwhelming crush on you, but you didn’t dissuade me because you were lonesome and horny?”

  “That’s another way to put it.”

  “Okay,” I said, and then I felt a wash of shame.

  Of course he wasn’t in love with me. Why would he be? What had I been thinking? He could do and be and choose anything he wanted. He had the whole world ahead of him. All I had was a tiny little half-life. What was exciting or attractive or lovable about that? I’d forgotten what I’d become. If Chip, who had known me at my best, didn’t even want me, how could I hope for anyone else? I was no longer lovable. Note to self.

  “Okay,” I said again. My chest started to ache as it all hit me.

  There was no point in being honest anymore. There was no way to save face at this point, either. I just had to get him out of here. Fast, before the universe collapsed.

  We were done. I turned away. “Hey—have a great trip back to Scotland.”

  But he lingered.

  “I have something for you,” he said, holding up a small box wrapped in kraft paper. “Your birthday present, actually. I brought it to the lake—but … I’d still like you to have it.”

  I turned away. “No, thanks.”

  He hesitated. “I could just leave it here for you.”

  “Don’t leave it here. I don’t want it.”

  He stood there.

  “Time to go, dude,” I said then. “Get out.”

  “I thought we might exchange contact information.”

  Why the hell would we do that? “Oh,” I said, falsely pleasant. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

  “I was hoping we could stay friends.”

  Fuck you. “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “How will I know how you’re doing?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, still not turning back. “You said yourself I’m a lot stronger than I think.”

  “Maybe I could just—”

  “Get the hell out,” I said. “Please.” We were so done here.

  He got quiet. I heard him walk toward the door then. When he reached it, he turned. “I’m sorry, Margaret. I will always remember you.”

  “That’s so funny,” I said, glancing in his direction, but not actually meeting his eyes. “Because I’ve already forgotten you.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, lying awake in my new, greige bedroom, I noticed something on the table by the door. My birthday present from Ian. He’d left it, anyway.

  It made me angry to see it. Hadn’t I told him not to do that? Didn’t I get any say in anything?

  I resolved to throw it away in the kitchen trash.

  I should probably have gotten up and gotten dressed. But I didn’t. I found myself thinking about Kit’s comforting thought. Kit’s expert said to give it a year. Would I be back to normal in a year? It seemed utterly impossible.

  But then I had a comforting thought of my own.

  I’ll give it a year, I thought, and if I don’t feel any better, I’ll kill myself.

  It perked me up quite a bit.

  All I had to do for one year was make it through the day. I’d ask my mother to get me a big wall calendar, and then, at the end of every day I successfully suffered through, I’d mark a big X. Things would get better, Kit’s mathematician had promised. Great. I hoped so.

  But if he was wrong, I had a plan B.

  One bit of good news: It was not as hard to move back home as I’d feared.

  Though my dad did not come home.

  The “little time” he was taking turned into a lot of time.

  My parents talked on the phone some, going through the details, my dad trying to get a handle on the story. Sometimes my mother cried and begged, which was disturbing because my mother never cried. Or begged.

  But he didn’t come home.

  In fact, within the month, he called to tell her he was going to take a trip for a “personal project.” He was going to donate his woodworking and construction skills to a help restore a historic whaling ship in a museum in Connecticut. He’d rented a little house up there, and he wasn’t sure when he’d be back. If.

  “Your father is moving to Mystic, Connecticut,” my mother told me, before bursting into tears. “He’s going to volunteer as a woodworker.”

  I had never seen my mother fall to pieces in the way she did in the weeks after my father left town. Her jobs died on the vine. She just didn’t show up. She wandered the house crying, or staring into space. She’d forget to eat. Or she’d make a meal and then sit staring at it until it was cold. I’d find her sitting in my father’s favorite chair, staring at the rug or rubbing at the chocolate stain he’d smeared on the arm.

  “I snapped at him about this once,” she said quietly, when she noticed me watching her. “I waited to reupholster that chair for years, and we hadn’t had it back a week before he melted chocolate on the arm.”

  She didn’t seem so mad about it now.

  As bad as this time was, it was good, too. It let me see her differently. It let me see her story in a much wider context. It let me feel, for the first time ever, almost protective toward her. She had always been so strong, so in control, until now. I’d only ever seen her as invulnerable—but now she was the opposite.

  There was another bonus to this time, too: Worrying about her gave me something to worry about other than myself.

  I took to emailing my dad every few days, just “checking in” casually, trying to ascertain when, if ever, he planned to come back. I also called Kit with updates on the home front and—because she went out to visit him a couple of times in Mystic—gathered intel on his state of mind.

  They never officially separated. My dad was just “taking time.” Kitty promised us he wasn’t dating anyone. And, she said, he didn’t seem particularly out of sorts, either. Just eating way too much canned soup.

  My time with my mom turned out to be a surprise. Something shifted in her after my dad left. At lunch, back in in the hospital, she had barraged me with advice and opinions and half-baked inspirational stories. She’d pushed me the way she’d always pushed me. She’d been relentless, and critical, and judgmental.

  But now that the window had closed, and she’d accepted that, she’d become much calmer. If there was nothing I could do, then she didn’t have to make me do it. She could relax and give us all a break. Of course, it turns out that the window never truly closes. I found a bunch of articles saying there’s always potential for neurological plasticity, long after that initial healing period.

  But my mom didn’t know that. And I sure as hell wasn’t telling her.

  Adjusting the curve for how crushingly depressed we both were, life with my mother was surprisingly pleasant.

  Once she’d recovered enough to get back to work, she reduced her workload by half. She made sure to be home for lunch, when she made us sandwiches and smoothies. In theory, I was responsible for dinner—but lots of ni
ghts we wound up getting takeout from the Italian place down the road. After dinner, almost every night, we worked puzzles and sipped wine, and half-listened to the news.

  We were both miserable, and grateful for the company.

  Of course, everything I might have expected to be hard was, in fact, hard.

  It was hard to be back in that house as a broken version of myself. It was hard to compare the past to the present at every turn. It was hard to see my old clothes, shoes, keepsakes, photo albums, Rollerblades—not to mention a shelf of diaries filled with all my old assumptions about how my life would turn out. It was hard to glimpse ghostly memories at every turn of what it was like to run and skip and hopscotch and bicycle and shoot hoops. I even missed utterly ordinary things, like walking out the front door, or leaning on the kitchen counter, or standing in the shower. It was hard not to regret everything I’d lost. The abilities I’d taken for granted. The time I’d wasted.

  I am not going to lie. Everything that happened in the hospital before I moved home? That was the easy part.

  My situation didn’t truly feel real until I was out of the hospital.

  Without Kit, and Priya, and Nina—and, okay, fine, even Ian—it was like I didn’t have anyone to keep me from sinking.

  So I sank.

  I went through a long, deep period of grief that involved bitterness, anger, mourning, judgment, rage, self-pity, fear, longing, and loneliness—usually more than one in combination, and often all together—as well as nightmares, insomnia, fits of temper, anxiety attacks, and dish throwing. In fact, after accidentally dropping (and smashing) one of my mom’s favorite saucers, I got so enraged that I hauled a whole stack out into the backyard and smashed about ten more on the driveway.

  Then I cried in the backyard until my mom came home and found me.

  She should have yelled at me. But guess what she did instead?

  She marched back into the kitchen and brought out her own stack of dishes to smash.

  That weekend, she made a trip to Goodwill and brought back crates of unwanted dishes that we could smash at will. We didn’t even clean them up afterward. Just left the shattered colors all over the driveway like a great mosaic homage to crazy-town.

  “It’s pretty, actually,” my mom said one day.

  In a way, it was.

  Years before, I’d seen a video taken by a security camera that went viral on the Internet of some kids playing on a beach where they weren’t supposed to be. The tide came roaring in, and the three of them got pulled into the waves. The beach was long and flat. Watching it, you just rooted for them to stand up, get balanced, and run back up to higher shore. But the tide was so strong, they couldn’t get their footing. They just washed out to sea and then back in, over and over. They started to stand and then tumbled backward, lifted their heads for a good breath and got pummeled by a giant wave, tried to outrun the waves and were overtaken. You thought, “Those kids are going to drown five feet from dry land.” In fact, even though you knew they weren’t going to drown—because the title of the video was “Miracle of Survival”—you felt certain they were going to drown anyway.

  That was me, during those early months after leaving the hospital. I was all three of those kids at the same time. A miracle of survival—but drowning anyway, all the same.

  My old friends wanted to see me, for example, but I didn’t want to see them. They wanted to “get together” and “grab a bite” or “have coffee.”

  Why would I want to do that? I dreaded the pity on their faces and the assumptions they’d make. I dreaded how sorry they’d feel for me. I dreaded every single reaction of every single girlfriend when she heard how Chip had ruined my life and disappeared. I wasn’t going to feed their schadenfreude.

  My mother read an article saying it was important for “people like me” to stay connected. She even tried to convince me to let her organize a girls’ day at a spa. “It’ll be fun,” she tried to declare. “We’ll get our hair done. Mani-pedis. You can roll home feeling great.”

  “I never feel great, Mom,” I said. “That’s not a feeling in my collection.”

  “I just read an article that said human connections help prevent Alzheimer’s.”

  “Alzheimer’s,” I said, “is the least of my worries right now.”

  I tried not to feel bleak, but I felt bleak anyway. I tried to leave the house, but I always stopped at the door. I tried to count my blessings, but even just trying made me mad. Things went on like this for months—and months. No change in sight. I don’t mean to gloss over it, but there just isn’t much to report. Wake up. Feel angry. Avoid human contact. Smash dishes. Repeat.

  And then, in late summer, Kit came home for a weekend.

  Twenty-five

  YES, KIT’S BOYFRIEND, the Moustache, had let the Beauty Parlor fall apart. Yes, things were far worse than she’d expected when she got back. Turns out, he had no interest in the boring, day-to-day activities of running a shop, like sweeping or taking out the trash or writing down appointments. Kit returned to angry customers, disgruntled employees, and a cockroach infestation.

  We hadn’t talked on the phone every day, as she’d promised—though she had found time to talk every day with my mom.

  It was fine. My mom needed her more.

  “If you’d just follow me on Instagram,” Kit said, “we wouldn’t have to talk on the phone.”

  “It’s really not the same thing.”

  Kitty had the most contact with our dad of anyone, so she and my mom suddenly had a lot to talk about. They also had years of resentments, misunderstandings, disappointments, and blame to work through. But I had to hand it to them. They didn’t just smile big and make nice. They went for it. They argued, they disagreed, they compared notes—on their lives and everybody else’s.

  When we did talk, though, Kit was very interested in my health, my progress, my daily routine. She asked tons of questions—sometimes so many we never talked about her at all. Specific questions, too, about how I felt and how I was taking care of myself. She started emailing me articles on spinal health, recovery, home rehab, functional electrical stimulation, and neurogenesis. Specific, highly technical articles, too—far different from the pop psychology we’d started with.

  “Where are you finding these?” I asked her. “I thought you were repainting the shop.”

  “I broke up with the Moustache,” she confessed.

  “Because he drove your business into the ground?”

  “Because I think I’m in love with Fat Benjamin.”

  “We’re all in love with Fat Benjamin. He’s adorable.”

  “Anyway, I have insomnia.”

  “Do not worry about me in the middle of the night!” I said. “Go back to sleep!”

  “Nobody chooses who they worry about in the night,” she said. “Just read the articles and shut up.”

  So I did. Or tried to. Actually, I just printed out most of them and put them in a stack. They were very dry. My guess was Kit herself only read the titles.

  All to say, she’d hoped to visit in early summer, but she didn’t make it until August. Which was fine. I wouldn’t have been much fun before that anyway.

  I wasn’t much fun in August, either.

  But being with Kit seemed to help.

  She made me get dressed and put on lipstick and go out to hip new restaurants with her. She made me listen to disco and sing with her—and she filmed everything. One afternoon, she drove me to the ocean.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said, snapping my photo as we watched the waves. “You’re living like an old person.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  She leaned over and sniffed me. “You’re a little mothballish, even.”

  I swatted at her. “I am not.”

  “You do remember you’re twenty-eight—not seventy-eight?”

  “I think I’m doing okay,” I said. I was alive, wasn’t I? Maybe I wasn’t doing yoga at sunrise, but I did get out of bed every morning. Usually.<
br />
  “Why haven’t you learned how to drive?”

  “Where would I drive to?”

  “Why haven’t you investigated braces for your legs?”

  “I’m fine with the chair. It’s fine.”

  “I think you need to try harder.”

  She probably meant well, but I was tired of people meaning well. “I think you need to mind your own business.”

  But Kit didn’t care. “You are my business,” she said with a shrug. “You always have been.”

  She took a million pictures of me for her followers: me eating spaghetti, me getting my toenails painted rainbow colors, me sunbathing in heart-shaped sunglasses. She gave my pixie cut a freshen-up and Instagrammed that. She made me put on her retro 1950s lipstick and Instagrammed that. She even took a picture of the scars on my shoulder and Instagrammed that.

  “Kit! Nobody wants to see my gross shoulder!”

  “Everybody wants to see it. You’re an Instagram star, lady. Just accept it.”

  But Kit just had to push me. On her last night, at dinner, in front of my mom, of all people, Kit said, “How’s your summer camp coming along?”

  It felt like an awfully private question to bring up in a place as public as the dinner table. I glanced at my mother.

  “Summer camp!” my mom said. “You want to go to summer camp?”

  Kit said, “She wants to build a summer camp.”

  My mom sat straight up. Build something? Yes, please!

  She lobbed fifty questions at me at once, but I shut them all down.

  “I haven’t even thought about it in months,” I said. Which was true.

  But that night, as I was falling asleep, I found myself thinking about it again. Under the onslaught of real life in the real world, I’d almost forgotten the idea entirely. It was so like Kit to remind me.

  Overnight, my head flooded with ideas, and the next morning, before I’d even had coffee, I wheeled into the kitchen in my pajamas to find some paper, and I made a list off the top of my head:

  chair bowling

  bonfires

  gardening

  singing

  hand cycling

  wheelchair kung fu

  bungee jumping