“Hey, honey—just need to confirm something. Is the date I’m seeing on the calendar really real?”
He sighed heavily through the phone.
It was my own fault for trying to be cute when there was nothing cute about my absence. This little joke probably wouldn’t have worked even if I had delivered it while standing in our kitchen making dinner, but at least I would have been standing and at least I would have been making dinner. Some of my best and most heartfelt exchanges with Joey were by text, but on the phone it was a different story, and in person, even worse. He could barely look at me when he came to visit. His grades had slipped. Rich and Joey were arguing a lot. It was a perfect storm of absent mother, overwhelmed father, and teenage angst.
Texting was also the perfect way for me to be a busybody. From my bed, I tried to control the kids’ after-school schedules even though Rich sorted everything out each morning. Invariably, this caused confusion. It also made Rich crazy.
“But I want to help,” I explained to him.
“I know you want to help, but that’s not your job right now. Your job is to get better. I’ve got this.”
In other words, my family was getting on fine without me. I’d already noted how some of Rich’s pronouns had changed (he talked about Henry coming into his bed to sleep with him), and how other pronouns had been excised altogether (my car had become the car). I was at the mercy of my drunken feet. Until I could get them under control, I would not get the keys to my car or my household back.
“How is my Henry doing?” I asked Rich one day.
“He’s okay.”
“Does he miss me?”
“Of course he does. We all do.”
“Has he asked you any questions about me?”
“He came to my bedroom door the other night and asked when you were coming home.”
“Oh no.”
“Then he had a little cry.”
Henry and I are both Geminis, which is the only sign about which I have even a passing knowledge. We are apparently a joy to those around us. We are also loyal friends, and have emotions that can turn on a dime. I would hate to live with me, but I hated living without Henry. I had been worried about the effect of my surgery on him, but when he came for visits, he seemed excited. He would sit on my lap while Rich pushed us around outside, or he would hang out at the back of my wheelchair with his arms wrapped around my neck, or coax me out of my chair so he could it use it to do wheelies.
Early on in my stay, he said to me: “You have to admit, Mom. This is kind of fun.” But the novelty of my being away had finally worn off. With my recovery on an uptick and the limits of my freedom slowly expanding, it felt like the right time to set up a new after-school schedule—one that could be accomplished without stepping on anyone’s toes.
I called them my one-on-ones, and my first was with Joey. I suggested that I wheel down and meet him at Starbucks, just a few blocks away from Lyndhurst. I had forged a pretty decent relationship with my chair, one I couldn’t have foreseen even two weeks earlier when I sob-yelled to Dr. Zimcik that I was not leaving this hospital in a wheelchair! She had fixed me with one of her enigmatic close-mouthed smiles.
“Ruth,” she said, waiting until I looked at her before continuing. “Do you see anyone here teaching you wheelchair skills?”
“I’m just telling you right now. I am not leaving here in a goddamn wheelchair!”
“Of course you’re not.”
I had to look away. She had the power to distract me with her amazing accessories, and I didn’t want to be distracted. It was probably the worst-kept secret in my unit that Dr. Zimcik was my girl-crush. I didn’t need to be in therapy to know I was experiencing transference. Rumy was an angel, but with Dr. Zimcik, I felt an instant kinship. She swore like a teenage boy. She was honest but also sensitive. She lived in the same area I lived when my kids were the same ages as her little kids. Day after day, she was able to talk me down from whatever tree I had managed to get myself stuck in. She didn’t reciprocate my feelings; she just accepted them.
“And anyway,” said Dr. Zimcik, trying to ease me back to a calmer state, “you need your chair to get your apples from Neville.”
“Good point.”
Meeting with Joey meant leaving Lyndhurst unaccompanied for the first time. Getting to the gates just beyond the hospital’s circular drive was a breeze. Henry’s words had had an effect on me: It was fun, especially when the road sloped down and I could coast as if I were on my bike.
I got as far as the first stop sign before deciding the more prudent thing to do was to get off the road. I used extra arm strength to get myself over the lip of a driveway to ensure I made it up onto the sidewalk without rolling backward, but I pushed with too much gusto and narrowly avoided a face plant with a curbside sapling. Rolling on the sidewalk proved more treacherous than the road. There were obstacles everywhere: poorly placed garbage cans, break-your-mama’s-back cracks that made me veer off course, piles of leaves. Cars blew past me and I ducked. The joy of heading out on my own had been swallowed up by the wind that was now shaking my chair, trying to dislodge me. Joey called me on my cell. I could hear him but he couldn’t hear me.
“Where are you?” he was asking.
“I’m right here!” I yelled. “In the wind!”
“Mom? Mom? Are you there?”
I sent a frantic “Help me!” text and then saw him running toward me with his red knapsack slapping his back.
We made it to Starbucks safely, where we sat and talked like old pals. He didn’t look at his phone and he didn’t roll his eyes at me once. I bought him a Frappuccino and a lemon poppy seed loaf, feeling like a divorced parent who buys her children whatever they want out of guilt.
“What’s the most difficult part of high school so far?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”
I wanted to ask him if the most difficult part was me not being around.
“Is it hard?”
“Is what hard?”
“Science.”
He shrugged.
“Math?”
“Eh.”
“English?”
“Really, Mom?”
“You do have impeccable grammar.”
“Of course I do. I wrote a new joke.”
“Tell me!”
“It’s a medical one.”
“Go on.”
“Why did the guy get rid of his tapeworm?”
“Why?”
“It was getting under his skin.”
“Ha! Nice one, Joe!”
I picked at the crumbs of his lemon poppy seed loaf. “Are you sleeping okay?”
“That’s a weird question, Mom.”
At three thirty in the morning, my worst fears came out to play in a field of crashed cars and bloodied swimming pools, broken locks and mangled bikes—all worst-case events I couldn’t control. But it was daytime now, the weather was fine, my son was okay.
“That was a totally weird question. Honey, I have to get back for my next round of pharmaceuticals. Care to push me?”
Not being particularly mindful of my fragility—or maybe he was just having fun—Joey decided to gun it. I forgot about this one curb, the one that everyone got hung up on when they wheeled me to Starbucks. It was more step than bump. A good mountain bike could have taken it easily, but not a wheelchair. Joey ran straight at it. The wheels slammed into the curb. I clutched the arms of my chair but still flung forward. Pine needles from passing trees grazed my forehead before I flopped back down into my seat.
“Whoa!”
“Are you all right?” asked a guy walking past.
“I’m good I’m good,” I puffed.
“Sorry! Sorry, Mom!”
“Actually, would you mind helping us out?”
The stranger gently tilted me backward and got me up and over the curb. I felt like a nineteenth-century lady who needed a man’s arm to step over horse dung.
“Thank you so much!” Joey
said, white-faced with relief.
“That’s his good deed for the day. Now, don’t ever fly me over a curb again!”
Two days later, the boys’ nanny, Ellen, drove over with Henry for his one-on-one. It was my first time meeting her, although I spoke to her on the phone practically every day.
“The boys really like you,” I told her.
“Thank you. I really like them. They’re good boys.”
“You’re doing a great job. I don’t know what we’d do without you.” I wanted to say more but I couldn’t. Ellen put down her newspaper and bag of chips to come over and hug me. “You’re going to make me cry,” she whispered.
“Don’t do that because then I’ll start crying and I have a date with my son.”
“You ready, Mom?” Henry asked.
“Ready!”
Instead of Starbucks, we wheeled over to Tim Hortons at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital next door. The going was much smoother—no bumps, no cracks, no cars. I could have wheeled myself, but Henry insisted on pushing me. He whispered in my ear: “There’s a new song on the radio that I really like. Can I sing it to you while I push?”
“Of course!”
“I may not get all the words right.”
He sang quietly and I tipped my head back to hear—a new song by Adam Levine.
We got to Tim Hortons and parked at a table near the window. The foyer was flooded with sunlight and children. The kids, both able and disabled, didn’t look twice at me; they were used to people in wheelchairs. As with Joey, I let Henry have whatever he wanted.
“Did you want something, too, Mom?”
“I’d love a cup of tea but you’ll have to carry it, okay?”
“Sure.”
I watched him as he walked slowly with our snacks and drinks, his eyes never leaving the cup of hot tea. He didn’t have to glance down at his feet to see where they were. It was hard to imagine ever having that ease with my body again, but I did imagine it. In the absence of normal feeling in my entire bottom half, I made it my job to imagine what my life was going to look like when I finally left rehab; how I would cope with everything from lifting a hot pot off the stove to putting my pants on.
Henry sat down and I asked a lot of questions. I had nowhere else to be; it was just me and my boy.
He might have grown used to seeing adults in wheelchairs, adjusting the parameters of his comfort zone to accommodate them, but children in wheelchairs were a different story for both of us. We were conscious of keeping our eyelines tight to each other. We finished our snacks and wheeled back to Lyndhurst, the cold pushing us faster than I wanted to go.
“We’ll do this every week until I come home, okay, Hank?”
He nodded.
“Every Tuesday and Thursday. You and Joey can pick whichever day you want, plus our dinners and our weekends, of course.”
I was rushing, as if Henry was already on the train and the train was chugging out of the station.
Back in my room, I looked at myself in the mirror. My heart began a slow thud. I had a question and I needed to ask it out loud, the one question that no one dared ask me, the one question I was afraid to ask myself:
What if I really never walk again?
I waited for the answer while looking into my own unblinking eyes. I felt restless. My mind paced where my legs couldn’t. It bothered me that I didn’t know the song Henry had sung to me—I was used to being up to date with all the new songs on the radio. The chorus rang in my ears. If I had been home at that time of day, the music would have been cranked up while I made dinner: Jack Johnson, Joss Stone, Nikka Costa.
I opened the top drawer of my dresser and took my computer out of its black sleeve. I scrolled to my unused iTunes page looking for the song Henry had sung, pressing some buttons without much result. I was done with the sounds of the hospital acting as the soundtrack to my life; I called Joey.
“You need to teach me how to steal songs from YouTube.”
I downloaded every single song I could think of that my feet could reasonably keep time to. Then I blasted Michael Jackson out of my computer. All the old stuff: “ABC,” “I Want You Back,” “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” “Rock with You.” My feet were keeping the beat and my hands were up in the air. I was amazed at how coordinated I was—even my left foot didn’t lose time. Joy zapped through my body, forging new neuropathic highways. For entire songs I was able to ignore the strangled sensation behind my knees, the sandbag heaviness of my calves, the pebbly feeling in the soles of my feet, the burning sensation in my bum, the zizzy feeling in my thighs. For a while I forgot how frustrated I was. I didn’t close my curtains. I turned up the volume. In no time at all, a male figure appeared at my door. Even in profile, I knew who it was: Derek.
“Hey!” I called out to his reflection. He jerked his head up in surprise and then boldly looked inside my room.
“Is the music too loud?”
“Oh, no, no. Not at all. I like it.”
“I like it, too. This place needs a little funky-funk, don’t you think?”
“Oh, sure, sure.”
By purposely keeping my door open and playing music loud enough for the whole unit to hear, it looked as if I were sending an invitation when really, I just wanted to block out the other sounds of rehab. But he was still a dude and I was still a married woman and I wasn’t about to invite him in for a handful of jujubes and a nightcap of Metamucil.
“Anyhow, Derek, I’m kind of winding down now. I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”
“Oh, right, right.”
Like always, he took his cue quickly and wheeled away.
Later that night, Rumy came to my room, her face filled with mischief. She sang, “Guess who has a crush on you?”
“Derek,” I said.
She was disappointed—I had stolen her news. “How did you know?”
I lifted one shoulder. “He follows me around a little.”
“He said to me: Oh that Ruth, she’s so pretty.”
I had never looked worse in my life. I felt so beaten down and desexualized by the whole hospital experience, it was a wonder that anyone—my husband included, my husband especially—could look at me with anything like desire. The last thing I wanted Rumy to know was that this shaggy-haired hippie with the gray goatee and the biker vibe had single-handedly made me feel like the hottest girl in school.
10
Progress, Practice Makes Perfect
There were only two floors at Lyndhurst but I always pressed the wrong elevator button. My room was on the second floor—I thought it was the first. Physio was on the first floor—I thought it was the second. Like my toe test, I got it wrong every time. I could tell that my mother, a self-diagnosed “number dyslexic,” got a neat kick out of my up/down confusion. This should have been the perfect opportunity for her to get back at me for all the times I pointed out her lapses in memory, her screwups of times and dates, even her repetition of stories, but she never did. She was the first person to text me most days, often before six A.M. Little messages: Are you awake, darling? How are you? She knew how difficult mornings were for me. But I never answered her texts right away. I didn’t want her to know that I was awake, that I did need contact, that I felt horribly, inconsolably alone.
In the struggle to work out the ratio of who to dump more of my sadness onto, my mom or my husband, I had to ask myself, Who could handle it more? It was no contest. I offloaded my angst onto my mother every chance I got.
“Maybe we should come up with a schedule to come visit you?” my mom suggested.
“No.”
“I think your father and I should come every other day.”
“No! That’s ridiculous. I’m not making a schedule. I have a schedule. I don’t need another schedule.”
“Some of our friends would like to call you.”
“No!”
“But they’re worried about you.”
“That’s very nice, but no, they can’t call.�
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My mother became very quiet.
“They can text if they want.”
“Larry!” My mom yelled to my father, who must have been in the next room. “Ruthie says our friends can text her!”
“Tell her that’s a good idea!” I heard my father yell back.
“Oh, thank you, Ruthie!” my mom said. “That’s an excellent idea!”
I cringed at how little it took to make her and my father happy; and also how little it took to upend their day. I might have been quick to snap but I was slow to reveal true neediness. When I was feeling particularly awful, I wouldn’t answer my phone, not trusting myself not to break into tears when I heard their voices. Instead, I would send out a text: Feeling a little low today. Will call tomorrow.
In front of the elevators in my unit one day, trying to figure out whether I had to go up or down to get to the lobby, I decided to never again rib my mother over not getting the dates or times or years of things right. I would have happily traded my body confusion for her number confusion any day. I was just about to text her something funny when I came wheel to wheel with Kellan, the hospital spokesman for the Canadian Paraplegic Association. I had barely seen him since he had burst into my room several weeks earlier, CPA folder on his lap. I had calmed down considerably since that day. To show him there were no hard feelings, I said hello first. He nodded and then paid a lot of attention to the closed elevator doors. Once inside, he pressed “down.”
“Could you press two, please?” I asked.
“We’re on two,” he said.
“God, I’m dumb. I meant down, which you did. You pressed down. Thanks.”
The elevator doors opened, and Kellan rolled away. But as I met my friends Jeff and Kathy in the lobby, Kellan stayed on my mind, so much so that I was still thinking about him when the three of us went back to my room. I told my friends the story of Kellan and our fraught conversation from weeks earlier. And then I remembered what a show I had made of moving my legs around when he came to my room to “recruit” me to his association; how I had gathered my knees to me, wiggled my toes, crossed my feet back and forth without caring if they got tangled up in each other—which they did; how I had waved my knees, then clacked them together even though it hurt a little and I didn’t mean for them to actually touch. My thinking was that if Kellan could see how clearly un-paralyzed I was, then he would take his little Association bible with its forecasts of all the joys I could still count as a newly-minted wheelie and stick it someplace highly unpleasant.
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