The next day, in spite of a sleepless night, I dressed early and wheeled to the window. I picked up a book so I could pretend to be reading when she arrived. I put the book down and picked it up a half dozen times. Lindsey did not come when she usually did. I peered out of the window and even searched for signs of life at her house. Maybe they went to the store. Maybe she had to do chores. Bitterness started to creep back in. My happy feelings from yesterday started to leak. My mom had to like me; Lindsey did not. The true test was Lindsey, not my mom. I turned away from the window after a half hour. I was broken hearted. I wanted to go downstairs and talk to my mom so she could comfort me or at least help me get my perspective back.
A dozen more times I went to the window. Each time I grew disgusted with my transparent need for someone to think I was worth being around and turned away only to return. Finally, I realized that I had my answer and turned away. I wanted to scatter the new puzzle pieces all over the room with one angry sweep of my hand. I hated puzzles! I hated waiting for a doorbell or a knock or a voice to say, “Hi Jimmy.” Why did this happen to me? I knew I should not have gotten used to her coming over! I knew it! I ground my teeth. The room was stuffy, hot, and too small. I could not stand my room suddenly. I decided to go downstairs. All the good feelings that flowed from forgiveness left me. The hurt returned like a lump of lead in my chest.
I sensed that I was not alone and looked up. She was in the doorway. My heart gave up all of its anger as if someone had poked it with a pin. I stared at her. She looked at me. Finally, she broke the silence. “Your mom said it would be okay if I came up.” She said the exact same thing to me when she braved the unknown and came to my room the first day. When I could not respond she said, “Can I come in?”
My surprise eased and I waved her into the room. Instead of coming in all the way, she leaned around the door and switched the intercom to ON and turned the volume up. I could tell she was waiting for me to speak. A suspiciously devilish look made the green in her eyes show up. I stared at her in disbelief. I was sure my mom put her up to that move! She had expertly trapped me. I took a deep breath and gave her what she was expecting. I said as quietly as I could because I knew my mom was listening downstairs, “I’m sorry for what I said yesterday.” I probably blushed because my face felt warm.
Lindsey giggled under her breath, holding her hand over her mouth so my mom could not hear it over the intercom. She struggled for a moment and then said a lot louder, “What about all the other nasty things you said to me?”
My eyes went wide. I wanted to strangle her, but I managed to croak out, “Yeah, those things too.”
“I accept.” She switched the intercom OFF and grinned at me triumphantly.
“You little fox!” I said. I tried to come toward her to grab her or do something to pay her back but she was faster than I was and dashed around the card table giggling. The table wiggled dangerously on its four spindly legs as she bumped it with her hip on the way around.
She kept the card table between us. “So are you going to be nicer to me now?”
“Hell no!” I kept my voice low in case my mom had come creeping up the steps when the intercom went dead. I was counting on her not coming up the steps. If I had a sister, this is exactly how she would have acted. She would have taken advantage of the moment to pay me back. I could feel the steam boiling.
“Good. I like you just like that.” She sat down and grinned at me.
The heat dropped. The steam evaporated. “You what?”
“I like you all crazy mean like that,” she clarified. She was watching me like a hawk lest I suddenly dash in her direction with my crip-mobile. One never knew what a crazy mean person would do.
“Crazy mean…” I stopped thinking about retribution. She really did have guts, humor, and smarts. I leaned back to show that I had given up my desire to exact revenge. I studied her face and then her body—as much as I could see above the card table. I finally asked the question that had been bugging me. “Just how old are you?”
“How old do you think?”
“Oh, five, maybe six years old at the most,” I grinned maliciously at her.
She gave me a disgusted look mixed with humor. She knew I was joking and that I probably did not have a clue as to her real age. “Twelve.” Then she smiled sweetly and said, “At least I will be next week!”
“That’s not much older than ten!” I said trying to salvage my ego.
“It’s quite a bit older,” she said disagreeing with me. “Truce?” She held her hand up, palm toward me.
“Not a…” I looked at her and the doorway suspiciously, “…friggin’ chance.”
“Friggin’s okay to say,” she giggled. Then she leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “But not the other stuff you say like fucking or shit.” Then her face broke into a bright red flame and she giggled guiltily. I got the feeling that she was trying hard to impress me. She wanted me to like her. That thought hit me like a clap of thunder. I was so busy wanting people to like me and not pity me that the realization she wanted me to like her almost left me speechless.
I had to catch my jaw before it fell off my face. “Is it okay if I use the occasional damn?” I tried to recover before she realized she was outsmarting me.
“As long as your mom doesn’t hear you,” she replied with a satisfied grin.
I had to admit to myself: She had just won the second round. I never had a little sister but damn if she would not have been a good one. You get mad at little sisters but love, and hate them all in the same ten minutes. “Truce,” I capitulated.
After Lindsey left, I sat gazing out the window as the sky went dark. The lights in her house glowed with life. I could not see her room but she told me she had the upstairs bedroom and loved it because she could see the same things from her window that I saw from mine. The grass seemed greener, like it does after a shower. The air smelled fresher and my room did not seem as small and cramped as it had earlier. Why? What changed? How could my room get larger, my bed more comfortable, my chair less of a burden and the grass greener just like that?
A few weeks went by and we put together every puzzle I had. She was good at it and I enjoyed the competition. I decided to teach her the game of chess. She learned quickly and soon I was fighting for my life because I was too impetuous where she was more deliberate and careful. When she finally beat me after thirty games, I got a little… no, a lot worried. I started reading Bobby Fischer and other Chess Master’s books. I stayed ahead of her but then she got on the internet at home and figured out how to counter some of the moves I was putting on her and she came back the next day and beat me three out of five.
We switched to backgammon—which she had to teach me—and it evened out because I beat her four out of five times. There was more luck involved with that game. Sometimes we got so absorbed in the games that we lost track of time. Mom would come upstairs and tell Lindsey it was time to go home.
One day at lunch mom told me that I was much more fun to be around now that I had worked things out with Lindsey. I told her that Lindsey was fun to be around and since I was not exactly football material anymore, I was having fun exercising my mind. She grinned. “Lindsey says you are so competitive she has to go home at night and study.”
“Yeah,” I said, “She told me she studied chess on the computer just to beat me.”
My mom looked at me thoughtfully but just offered me another cookie.
“Mom,” I asked, “Why do you think she keeps coming?”
My mom shrugged but I suspected she knew something I did not because she was a girl.
Lindsey turned twelve in August and I turned sixteen. I think we were surprised at how close our birthdays were. We were exactly one week apart. Her birthday was August 12 and mine was the nineteenth. We did not get each other anything, but I made a sign on her birthday and hung it in my room. She gave me a card with a funny message. I kept that card.
Chapter 3
All thoughts of
dropping out of school vanished during the summer. When the year started, Lindsey entered seventh grade and I was a sophomore.
In our small, rather rural suburb, all the grades were in the same building, so it seemed natural that Lindsey would ride to school with us. Mom had to take me because the school was not equipped with a bus that could handle a wheelchair.
Lindsey made new friends in school but she always walked beside me when our paths crossed. It became normal for us to eat lunch together. At first, I thought she ate lunch with me because she was a new girl in school and had not made any other friends yet. That was not the case; she quickly became popular. Girls who were attracted to her wit and humor and life began to sit at the table with us. I was behind a year now, so my friends, mostly jocks, clapped me on the back, apologized for not coming over more often and then sat with each other and ignored me or poked fun at me for sitting with seventh grade girls.
There were times when being surrounded by seventh and eighth grade girls was awkward, but that did not last long at all. Boys were starting to notice the girls and soon I was giving advice simply because girls seemed to like me. I had no idea what to tell the boys because I did not know myself. I had no prospects of dating or marriage so I pretty much told them whatever I felt like telling them. Many of the boys asked me about Lindsey because she was new and had a cool accent. Some of the snobby girls turned their backs on Lindsey, but she won their grudging respect within weeks by helping them with homework or complimenting them or befriending them when they seemed sad. In no time at all, I was in the middle of a throng of kids who accepted me as one of them because of Lindsey.
Lindsey was not interested in boys. When the other girls seemed to be falling all over boys, she was friendly but never hinted that she liked one of them extra special. After the boys got used to the idea, things settled down between the sexes. Until they did, I felt like a referee—which was not always a good feeling because it was like being a eunuch in the middle of a harem. Everyone trusted me with secrets, hopes, and fears but no one asked me about mine. I obviously did not have any since I was crippled.
Schoolwork was hard for me. I hated school when I had legs and my skipped year did not make it any easier. I was actually worse off than if I had stayed in school. After a couple of weeks of bringing home terrible grades and falling into a real depression, Lindsey began to take an interest in my studies. She encouraged me, helped me study, learned the subject matter if I did not want to and taught it to me with extraordinary patience. Many a night she would go home at 8:00 p.m., her usual departure, without having done any of her homework. Then she would do her homework before she went to bed. When I was tempted to give up, Lindsey would cheer me on. Finally, she taught me how she studied when she understood my problem: I had no disciplined way of learning.
Lindsey also made me promise that I would not guess about things. If I did not know, I would look it up. She said she learned that from reading biographies of very successful people’s lives. Right then we made a pact together that we would stop and write down the topic for later discussion if we did not honestly know enough to argue about it. We talked on almost every topic imaginable. I was amazed at her breadth of interest in things. She was a knowledge hound. At the end of the year, I looked at the list and was amazed at how much ground we had covered. The only topics we did not talk much about were sex, politics and religion. She told me once that of those three, the only one that had facts related to it was sex. The other two required faith while sex required love. Moreover, love was a fact but hard to describe, she explained.
When I caught on to her system, my grades began to soar. Her study method was simple and so effective that I wondered if I should teach some of my former friends who were struggling. All she did was outline the material and then write questions about each idea. We swapped papers with the questions and answers written on them, and quizzed each other. Soon we could ask and answer the questions without looking at our papers—even when some of them ran eight pages back and front! By the second semester of my sophomore year, I began to enjoy the challenge of learning. Lindsey and I would go beyond the lectures, books and handouts. Once we had the questions and answers written out we would research the topic on the internet, going into libraries all across the nation for more detail.
I learned seventh grade material and Lindsey got a head start on tenth grade studies. It was fun.
When I did not have to take finals because my grades were straight A’s I teased Lindsey because seventh graders had to take their finals no matter what. Lindsey scored the highest of anyone in her grade. I was not surprised.
Chapter 4
Summer was a blessed relief. I thought for sure I was straining my brain cells and figured they could use a rest.
Lindsey went with her family on vacation to Boston. The second day after they were gone, my dad stood awkwardly in the doorway of my room.
“Hey, dad,” I said, looking up from a Louis L’Amour book.
“Uh, I thought we’d go for a ride this morning.”
The way he said it made me nervous. “Sure, dad,” I said. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
When I wheeled into the garage to join my dad in the car, both he and mom were standing beside a new car. “You got a new car?” I was surprised.
Mom and dad looked at each other and then grinned. “No. This one is yours.”
I sat there in shock as dad handed me a set of keys. “I’ve carved out a bunch of time this summer to teach you to drive. We decided not to take a family vacation. You don’t mind do you?”
“Heck no!” I wheeled to the driver’s door and looked in. The Ford was equipped with hand controls. My dad just beamed.
The car was a great thing for me. Just as the wheelchair marked my independence from being completely dependent on others, the car marked my independence from mom and dad chauffeuring me everywhere.
Dad and I spent three whole weeks together while he taught me to drive that car. Since we had fifty acres, there was plenty of room to make mistakes. When he thought I was ready at the end of July, he enrolled me in a Driver’s Ed course. The course did not start until September. I wanted to get my license by the time school started but the course lasted three months so the earliest possible date was November. Since dad said he was going to allow me to drive to school when I got my license, I studied hard.
Dad bought the car for me while Lindsey was on vacation with her parents for three weeks in Boston. When she came back, her Boston accent was more pronounced than I’d heard in a long time. I teased her for a few days and then I could not hear the accent anymore. Something else changed about her that it took her going away for me to notice. It worried me. She was…well, prettier.
I watched her walk across the yard the day she came home from vacation. She did not even go into her house first. She just opened the car door, said something to her parents and rushed across the yard until she saw me looking out the window. She waved happily and a few minutes later, she was in my room talking excitedly about the vacation.
Her hair had grown longer and she had impatiently tied it into a ponytail at the back of her head. Her eyes positively sparkled with happiness and it struck me for the first time how much more interesting a girl she was. She had grown at least an inch. Something poked out from her chest and for the first time since I’d known her, I realized she had actual breasts and that she was not wearing a bra. She realized I’d lost focus on her words and stopped talking.
“What’s the matter?” She asked.
“Nothing…” I hedged. “It’s just that your Boston accent is really back!” I said Bawstahn.
She grinned and began talking about the things she had seen and done. “I never really went to the Hancock tower or the Boston Common, or anything when we lived there! It’s neat. I want you to go sometime.”
She leaned over and brushed my cheek with a kiss. “I’ve gotta go. I promised mom I wouldn’t stay very long. She wants me to help her unpack.”
> I put a hand to my cheek as I watched her walk across the yard. I noticed for the first time that her hips actually swayed when she walked. I had a passing thought that maybe she was walking like that because I was watching. In a way, it made me mad because physical intimacy with girls would be something denied to me for the rest of my life. I turned and wheeled away.
The next day I remembered and told her about my car. She squealed with delight and made me take her down to the garage and show her. She wanted to go for a ride but my dad said I was not ready for passengers yet and that I had to get my license and drive for a while before he would let me take her. That was disappointing but gave me something to anticipate.
That summer Lindsey made me go outside. She wanted to learn archery so my mom talked my dad into setting up targets and a backdrop in the woods behind our house. I found that I could shoot with some accuracy and before long, that was a competition too. Lindsey wasn’t strong enough to use the bigger bow so we kept the distance under fifty feet.
Lindsey pretty much spent all her free time in my room hanging out when we were not practicing archery or bird watching. For some reason she really enjoyed doing the things that people in wheelchairs could do.
On Lindsey’s thirteenth birthday that summer, I made mom take me to the mall. I wanted to get her something that acknowledged how grown up I thought she was—especially after saying she was ten when we first met! I found a stone chess set and gave it to her. She loved it. She insisted that we keep it in my room so we could play on it, so that is what we did.
I celebrated my seventeenth birthday and mom invited the Andersons over. It was a nice party. Probably the best part of it was that we played board games as teams and Lindsey and I easily beat our parents.
The Orchid Page 3