The truth is, I don’t even want to think about how much it would cost to take a taxi back to Jersey City. Probably a lot.
So I start making calls. There’s a short list of people who would be willing to drive out to rescue me, and every single one of them isn’t picking up. This is when having a local boyfriend would really come in handy.
I notice John’s phone number in my history. He might do it. There’s some small chance, at least. But then again, I don’t want him to hate me more than he already does by asking a ginormous favor of him.
Eh, screw it, I’m calling.
“Kirby?” John sounds shocked to hear from me. I guess he didn’t think we were ever going to see each other again until the wedding.
“Hi, John,” I say in my most friendly, peppy voice. “Listen, I really need your help…”
“I’m listening…”
“So my car broke down,” I say. “And I can’t get a taxi because it’s Valentine’s Day, and I don’t have a way to get home.”
“So you assumed I was free to pick you up,” John concludes. He doesn’t sound pissed off about it—more just sort of sad.
“You weren’t my first choice,” I say, because I’m not quite sure what else to say.
“Well, gee, thanks,” he says. “What about the light rail or the path train?”
“I’m actually sort of far away.”
He sighs. “Okay, where are you?”
“Jackson.”
“Missouri?”
“No, Jackson, New Jersey,” I say. What the hell would I be doing in Missouri? Sheesh.
“That’s still really far,” he points out.
“I know,” I say. “I realize it’s a huge favor. And if you pick me up, I will owe you big time. Like, anything you want. Seriously.”
John is quiet for a minute and that’s when I notice how much background noise there is on the other line. Where is he? Maybe he’s on a date. Oh crap, am I bothering him during a date? It is Valentine’s Day, after all. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll come pick you up. On the way over, I’m going to think about how you’re going to pay me back for this.”
That sounds ominous, but I don’t even care anymore. I’m just relieved I’m not going to be sitting here for the next four hours, clutching my wedding dress.
_____
John arrives in less than an hour, which is really impressive, taking into account V-day traffic. He’s driving that gray Toyota I saw during our dinner together, and when I get inside, I see that his wheelchair is partially dismantled and in the back seat.
As I climb into the passenger seat, he looks at the dress I’ve been protecting with my life. It’s covered in plastic, which makes it hard to tell what it is. “What’s that?” he asks.
“My wedding dress,” I say. I can’t suppress a smile. “I just bought it.”
“Wow,” he murmurs, looking a little glassy eyed for a moment.
“Do you want to see it?” I ask.
His almond brown eyes meet mine. “Remember how I said you were going to pay me back for this?”
“Yes…”
“Well,” he says, “the first thing I want you to do for me is to not make me look at your wedding dress and pretend to be excited about it.”
My cheeks burn. “I just thought you might like to see it.”
“I’m a straight male,” he says. “So no. I wouldn’t. Sorry.”
Well, fine.
I had been curious about how John drives. He moves the steering wheel with his left hand, mostly hooking it into the spokes in the wheel. His right hand rests on a joystick-like device that seems to control how fast the car is moving. That’s about as much as I can figure out just from watching him.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I say to him. “Were you, um, doing anything important?”
“Nope.”
“It sounded like you were out somewhere.” I glance at him. “Like, on a date?”
John shoots daggers at me with his eyes. “No.”
Hmm. Maybe I’ll just drop this. Whatever John was doing, it’s none of my business.
As we drive back home, I figure out how John made it to Jackson in only an hour. He drives like a freaking maniac. He weaves in and out of lanes like the worst Jersey driver there is. At one point, I’m clutching my seat until my fingernails turn white.
“I’m not in any rush,” I tell him as he changes lanes abruptly.
“You have to be aggressive,” he says. “On Valentine’s Day, we could be sitting on the highway for three hours.”
“It’s not worth an accident.”
“I’ve never gotten in an accident,” he says. He hesitates. “Well, one. But it wasn’t my fault.”
John hits the brakes just before we rear-end a white SUV. There’s literally nowhere for him to fling his Toyota right now. The highway is a parking lot.
“Is that how you got hurt?” I ask him in a quiet voice. I’m sure he’ll be pissed at me for asking, but considering we’re stuck here for the duration, I may as well make things as awkward as possible.
John raises his eyebrows at me. “You mean Ted didn’t tell you?”
I shake my head.
John glances up at the rows of cars surrounding us. “Fine,” he says. “Looks like we have some time to kill. Basically, I was on this narrow road late at night, minding my own business. I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy in the opposite lane had a heart attack and passed out. I saw his car speeding toward me on the line between the two lanes, and there was just nowhere to go. I knew he was going to hit me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I thought for sure I was going to die.”
“Oh my God,” I murmur. John rolls his eyes at me.
“Anyway, when I woke up in the hospital, I was alive but I couldn’t move,” he says. “Not anything aside from, like, my eyeballs. I couldn’t move my head because I had a halo brace screwed into my skull. I couldn’t even talk because I had a trach. They told me I broke my neck and that I was paralyzed from the neck down. For three months, I was on a ventilator and all I could do was shrug my shoulders. They thought there was a decent chance I’d be on the vent forever and I’d be completely dependent for all my care.”
I look at the collar of John’s shirt and see a scar that must have been from where his trach was. I’d noticed it before, but hadn’t thought much of it.
“I got some movement back in my shoulders, elbows, and wrists, but nothing in my hands,” he says. “It may sound impossible to you, but I’ve trained myself to do… well, a lot. Almost everything. Way more than I would have thought possible.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “Anyway, that’s the story. Questions? Comments?”
I have a million questions, but I can’t think of the right way to phrase any of them. “That’s okay. And since you’ve been so honest with me, I think I owe you telling you my story.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “What story?”
“Of how I got the ridiculous name Kirby.” I poke him in the arm. “Don’t tell me you weren’t curious.”
“No, I was definitely curious,” John admits. “To be honest, when Ted told me he was dating a Kirby, I thought maybe he’d finally come to terms with his lust for dogs.”
I give him a dirty look, but he doesn’t seem to notice because his eyes are back on the road. “Anyway, Kirby is my mother’s maiden name. Her parents had three daughters and her father was always sad he never got to pass his name on to a son. So she stuck me with it.”
“Actually,” John says, “it suits you.”
I’m not sure what it means that he thinks such a dumb name suits me, but at least he’s not insulting me anymore, so I’ll take it.
I hear the radio get a little louder. I think John turned it up, which I’m guessing means that he’s done talking to me. At least he was subtle about it. I don’t mind listening to some Fallout Boy instead of an awkward conversation.
“So I figured it out,” John says, in the middle of that song about Uma Thurman.
“What you’re going to do to pay me back, that is.”
I look at him with interest. “What?”
“You’re going to go with me to a strip club.”
“You want me to take you to a strip club?”
I don’t know what to think about this. I guess John has needs like everyone else.
“No.” John shakes his head. “I want you to accompany me. I need to check out a place to take Ted for his bachelor party.”
“You’re taking Ted to a strip club for his bachelor party?” I ask, horrified.
“Why not?” John shrugs. “It isn’t my first choice, that’s for sure. But that’s what Ted and the other guys wanted. It’s traditional, I guess.”
That’s what Ted wanted?
“Anyway,” John says, “are you in, Kirby?”
I hesitate. There’s some part of me that feels like it would be really cool to go to a strip club. Then there’s another part of me that feels like the whole thing would be really disgusting. I don’t know if I want to watch a bunch of half-naked women throwing themselves at a bunch of creeps.
“Might I remind you,” John adds, “that I have now dedicated about three hours of my Saturday to rescuing you from Jackson, New Jersey, on the evening of Valentine’s Day. And even though I might not have a girlfriend, this isn’t exactly how I’d want to spend this day.”
“You’re right,” I agree. “Okay, I’m down with the strip club.”
That actually gets a smile out of John. “Awesome. This might actually be fun.”
You know what? It actually might.
Chapter 14: John
I hate telling people the story of how I got hurt.
It’s not an interesting story. An old guy had a heart attack while driving and slammed into me. I wasn’t doing something cool like skydiving and the parachute didn’t open. (Although to be fair, I’d probably be dead if that happened.) I wish I’d gotten hurt doing something awesome and idiotic.
Not that any of the other guys in rehab had great stories—most of them got hurt on their motorcycles or ATVs. But I wasn’t even driving a motorcycle—I was in a regular, boring automobile. I was even wearing my freaking seatbelt.
I got knocked out in the accident, and regained consciousness in the back of the ambulance going to the hospital. I had an oxygen mask on my face and a hard collar on my neck and there was so much to take in that it took me a couple of minutes to realize I couldn’t feel or move my body.
“He’s waking up,” I remember a voice saying above my head. A male face came into view. “Hey buddy, how are you doing?”
“Not good,” I managed to say from within the oxygen mask.
“Can you tell me your name?” he asked.
“John Yang,” I said.
The guy nodded, like he had known all along. He’d probably looked at my wallet. “You were in an accident, John. We’re taking you to the hospital.”
“I…” I swallowed a hard lump in my throat. “I can’t move… anything.”
He looked down at my body. “Really?”
I would have shaken my head, but the collar kept me from moving. “No.”
I could see him lifting my arm off the table. It was surreal because I couldn’t feel it. At all. It was like somebody else’s body. “Give me a squeeze with your fist, John.”
I could see the fingers that I knew were mine, but I couldn’t figure out how to move them. A feeling of absolute fear came over me. “I can’t.”
“Shit,” the guy muttered. He called out to someone else, “Looks like a cervical spinal cord injury.”
I had surgery that night. I thought I was having surgery to fix my body, but after the surgery, things were even worse. They screwed that goddamn halo brace into my skull, and on top of that, they couldn’t get me off the ventilator. With my body paralyzed, my head immobilized, and the tube in my throat, I couldn’t communicate at all with anyone except with eye blinks, although I was sedated enough then that I wasn’t as upset about it as I would have been otherwise. My memories from that time are patchy.
When they took the tube out of my throat, they replaced it with a trach and also a feeding tube in my belly. I couldn’t talk with the trach in either, unless they deflated a cuff that blocked off my airway. Believe me, nurses are not good at reading lips. If they deflated the cuff, I could whisper, at least.
Dr. Richmond was the neurosurgeon who fused my neck. He came in when my mother was there and tested the strength in my arms and legs. I had no strength in my legs at all. I could not move my hands. I had a tiny twitch of movement in my biceps. He had the nurse roll me over and confirmed that I couldn’t feel anything around rectal area, which wasn’t a surprise since I couldn’t tell at all when I’d shit myself except when the nurses pulled the blankets away and I smelled it. That was always mortifying, no matter how out of it I was.
“John,” Dr. Richmond said to me. “I’m going to be straight with you. You have what we call a complete spinal cord injury, meaning the nerves in your neck are completely severed. There could be some improvement in arm function, but that’s likely the best you can hope for. I would not expect you to regain any movement in your legs.”
“You mean he’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of his life?” my mother burst out. I could see she was on the verge of tears.
“Most likely, yes,” the doctor said. He looked down at me. “My hope is that you recover enough function in your arms that you’ll be able to do some basic things such as feeding yourself with assistance or writing with a hand splint. You’ll probably need help getting dressed and bathed though.”
“For how long?” I asked in my hoarse whisper.
Dr. Richmond was quiet. “John, I’m going to be honest. I think you will likely need help with these things for the rest of your life.”
“We’ll be there to help him,” my mother said quickly.
I wanted to throw up. I was twenty-five years old. The thought of needing help from my mother to bathe and dress myself for the rest of my life was beyond horrifying. I wished I had died in that accident.
“Also, there’s the matter of the trach,” he added. “I’m very optimistic that we can wean you off the ventilator, at least for short periods. You may just need to be on it at night by the time you go home.”
“So I won’t be able to have it out ever?” I asked.
Dr. Richmond gave me a grim look that said it all. “I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to get you entirely off ventilator support.”
I cried. I was trying my best not to, but I couldn’t help it. The trach put me over the edge. I hated having to rely on the fucking vent and having that stupid thing sticking out of my neck. I hated having to be suctioned at regular intervals. I wanted that trach out so badly.
And because I couldn’t move my arms, my mother had to wipe the tears off my face. I couldn’t even do that. “It’s okay, Johnny,” my mom kept saying. “We’re here for you. We’re going to take care of you. I promise.”
The next few months were rough, but I managed to prove Dr. Richmond wrong on many accounts. I got a lot more movement back in my arms than he ever predicted I would—I got my biceps, my wrist extensors, and even my triceps to work, although not full strength. I got my trach out three months after my injury. (And I also got the feeding tube yanked out, which was so fucking painful, I wanted to punch the doctor who did it, if that were humanly possible.)
At the time I went home with my parents, I wasn’t independent yet. I’m embarrassed to admit that for several months after I came home, my mother helped me get dressed and showered. We also had a Hoyer lift so that she could help me get in and out of my wheelchair from the bed. But I kept doing therapy, and by a year from my injury, I could do practically everything myself. I even learned to drive again.
Even though I hate that fucking surgeon who told me I’d have a trach forever and that I’d always be dependent on my parents, I have to say that it motivated me to work my ass off. And I’m grateful that I managed to r
ecover enough that I can be independent. Not every quad I met in rehab is that lucky.
But it’s precarious. In the last six years, my right shoulder has gotten progressively more fucked up. If it gets much worse, it will threaten the independence I worked so hard to achieve.
Chapter 15: Kirby
The plan is to take John’s car to the strip club (actually called an “adult entertainment club”). I offered to drive, mostly because I’m frightened of John’s reckless driving, but he insisted on taking his car, saying, “We get the good parking this way.”
John swings by the bakery at the end of my shift. I see him park his Toyota in front of the store, but before I can get outside, he’s already unloaded his wheelchair from the car. I watch him popping the wheels into place, then he pulls his legs out of the car. In a swift movement that’s much more practiced than when he was trying to get on and off my sofa, he shifts his body from the drivers’ seat to his wheelchair cushion. I watch as he pulls his legs onto the footplate and adjusts them.
“You didn’t have to get out of the car,” I say apologetically.
“Well, I wanted to see the bakery,” he says. He looks up at the pink lettering on the front. “Minnie’s Bakery. Who’s Minnie?”
“That’s my aunt.”
“So basically,” he says, “you got this job through nepotism.”
“Look, are we going to a strip club or what?”
John grins at me. “I want to see the bakery. Come on.”
Sighing, I hold the door open for him so that he can wheel through. There’s no doorknob, but the door weighs about a million pounds and I just can’t see him being able to open it. When he gets inside, he looks around at the displays of cookies, cakes, muffins, and scones.
“Kirby’s Kupcakes?” He starts to laugh. “Oh man, it was worth getting out of the car just for that.”
I slug him in the shoulder. Hard. John rubs his arm with the back of his hand and gets this mock wounded expression on his face. “Hey,” he says. “I thought you said you weren’t strong…”
It would be too much to hope for to usher John out of here with a free muffin before Minnie could come out. She emerges from the back room in a puff of flour. Sometimes it seems like Minnie sort of becomes one with her cakes.
The Best Man Page 7