Scorpio Love

by S. Tamanaha

  “Okay, that’s four,” he said when he finished his final lap.

  “You need to do six today,” she said. “If you keep doing only four, your muscles and your brain are going to think that four is enough.”

  “Can’t we do six starting tomorrow?” he asked.

  “No, I can tell just by watching you that you can do six today. Come on, it’s just one more full lap. And concentrate please.”

  He sighed and proceeded back across the pool, trying his best to keep his feet in the proper position when he brought his legs down. He reached the other side of the pool and turned around.

  “Okay, come back,” she said. “Just one more time.”

  “She’s so bossy,” he said to Jackson who just smiled. “When did you get to be so bossy?” he called out to her.

  “I am not bossy.” She sounded almost offended by the term. But then, as if to contradict herself, she said, “Now, come on, walk back to me. And concentrate.”

  He did. He willed his legs to move and his feet to maintain a straight gait.

  “That was great,” Jackson said when they completed the lap. “I only had to straighten his left foot out once.”

  “Satisfied?” Johnny asked her. “Now that I’m here, what do I get?”

  She smiled. She moved the television monitor out of the way and leaned forward to put her arms around his neck. “You get to get out of the pool and do your other exercises and get ready for your acupuncture session. But before all that, you get this.” She kissed him tenderly.

  Johnny smiled. “You keep offering me that kind of reward and I’ll be chasing you around this pool in no time,” he said.

  “That’s the plan.” She smiled and kissed him again. Then she realized that Jackson was still standing there. “Sorry, Jackson. We don’t mean to embarrass you or anything.”

  Jackson smiled. “Don’t apologize. I hope when I get married, my wife and I love each other half as much.”

  Johnny and Susan looked at each other and they both smiled. “We wish that for you too,” she said.

  Within another five weeks, Johnny began experiencing feeling in his right calf but then they hit a wall. Progress on his right leg seemed to stall and his left calf wasn’t responding to the therapy at all. The doctors who had been periodically monitoring Johnny’s general health and checking on the condition of his spine with MRIs and CT scans suggested that it might be unrealistic to expect any further significant progress. It had been a little more than ten months since the accident and, based on their experience, substantial recovery after six to nine months was highly unlikely. They felt that Johnny should be grateful for the amount of recovery that had already occurred. Their assessment infuriated her, not just because she didn’t want to hear it and didn’t believe it, but because she didn’t want anyone planting that thought into Johnny’s head.

  The only good news was the message that they received from Frank Pierce shortly after the doctors’ prognosis. He informed them that the lawsuit had been settled. The State of California had agreed to a settlement of twenty-five million dollars. The insurance companies representing the trucking company and the bar that had been knowingly serving alcohol to truckers had agreed to pay fifty-five million dollars and five million dollars, respectively. Even after paying Frank Pierce his thirty percent fee, Susan and Johnny would receive more than enough money to get Johnny everything that he possibly needed to help him recover. Susan was tremendously relieved. She had been handling all of their financial affairs and although she never burdened Johnny with the details because she did not want him distracted from his therapy, she was getting concerned about their financial situation. To Johnny, however, the settlement only seemed to confirm what the doctors had told them—that very little improvement in his condition should be expected.

  “I got an email from Roy today,” Johnny said one afternoon when Jackson was gone on his personal time off. “He said that he’s still receiving a lot of mail about me, asking how I’m doing and all. He said there’s a show interested in having me on to talk about what happened and how I’ve progressed.”

  He never expected her immediate anger. “Johnny, is he crazy? Are you? Why would you let him even talk to you about doing an appearance now when you’re still not done with the therapy? One bad move and it could undo everything that we’ve done so far. Damn him! I’m calling him right now and I’m telling him to leave you alone.” She stood up from her chair and grabbed the phone.

  “Don’t get mad at him,” Johnny said then. “I contacted him.”

  She looked at him and there was disbelief in her eyes. “Why? Why would you even consider such a thing? You used to always complain about that life and most of the people in it. And now you’re willing to risk ruining all of the progress so far just to put on a show for them? Just to have some audience made up of people you don’t even know and who don’t really know you give you a little applause?” She stopped and her tone became like ice. He recalled that tone in her voice.

  “Fine,” she said. “If that’s what you really want then go ahead. Do it. But if you intended to quit on me halfway, if you intended to settle for less than all you can do, then we shouldn’t have started this to begin with. Here—call him so that you can get your applause and make him happy that he can start making commissions off of you again.” She slammed the phone onto the table and then turned on her heels and walked outside, leaving him alone.

  The last time that he had seen her this angry was when he had hurt her with his jealousy and the only reason that he wasn’t arguing with her or defending himself was that he knew deep inside that she was right. She had been working tirelessly with him for months just to get him to this point. For him to risk everything just because he was afraid of being forgotten by a public who only cared about his looks and people who wanted tabloid fodder was stupid. It really wasn’t the life that he craved. He just longed to be back in the game; to be doing something other than therapy.

  He couldn’t see her. She had gone to a part of the patio that wasn’t visible from where he sat. He wheeled his chair to the doorway and saw her sitting on the floor in the farthest corner of the patio, knees bent, arms wrapped around her legs and her head buried in her arms, crying silently but so hard that her entire body shook. Angel, as always, was beside her. He hated seeing her cry and hated himself for causing it. He wheeled his chair outside and towards her until the patio set obstructed his path.

  “Susan ... ”

  She raised her head and wiped away her tears quickly as though she didn’t want him to see them. “Leave me alone right now, Johnny,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Go and make your phone call and just ... leave me alone ... please.”

  Her words hurt him. And now he was afraid that he really was going to lose her. He knew that she was tired. She had to be. In addition to being with him while he exercised, she had been cooking all of the meals for him and Jackson, doing all of the shopping and house cleaning, handling the finances, and caring for her Angel. She had also been taking care of all of the details of the lawsuit and keeping in touch with everyone who emailed her asking about his progress.

  “I’m not making that call,” he said. “You’re right. It was stupid of me to even consider it.”

  She had turned her face away from him but he could tell that she was still crying and he knew that he had to stop it. “If I could, I’d go over there and hold you and make you hold me,” he said, “like the time we had that fight about that woman who came to the house. But I can’t do that now. This time, all I can do is to say that I’m sorry and ask you to come to me.”

  She didn’t move. He engaged the brakes on his wheelchair and reached down and moved his right leg off of the support. If she wouldn’t come to him, he had to try to go to her. He couldn’t lose her. Suddenly, she was on her feet and beside him.

  “Don’t,” she said, stopping him from continuing. “Don’t. I’m here.” She knelt beside his chair and replaced the support for his right l
eg while she wiped away her tears.

  He reached out and took her hand and squeezed it tightly. “I love you,” he said softly, emotionally. “I’m sorry. Don’t be angry at me.”

  She put both of her hands around his hand then and kissed it. “I love you Johnny,” she said, her voice trembling, “and I don’t care if you want to go back to that life. I’ll be right beside you if you do. But when you do step out in front of a camera again, I want you to do it on your own, standing tall and walking.”

  “Baby, there hasn’t been any improvement in over two months. You know what the doctors said and the defendants wouldn’t have settled if their experts didn’t think the same thing.”

  “I don’t care what those doctors said or what the Defendants’ experts think. I’ll give up after we’ve exhausted every possible option or when God himself shows up and tells me to—not before. If nothing works, then okay, we’ll go on from there—together. I meant it when I said that I would love you just as much if you could never get out of that chair, Johnny. I just don’t want you to quit before it’s time to quit or settle for less than you want because of what they say and then wonder later on if you made the right decision. You need to believe in us right now, not them, please. You need to believe in what I’m feeling inside—that we’ve hit a plateau, that’s all. You’ll start improving again soon. I know it.”

  He smiled slightly. Her faith was unshakable. “All right. I’m not going to quit or settle. After everything that I’ve seen about how you feel things and sense things, that should be good enough for me. Come here.”

  She stood and he pulled her to him and kissed her lovingly. Then he wiped away her tears gently. “I hate it when you cry,” he said, “unless it’s tears of love.”

  “Only you can do that to me, Johnny.” she said. “Only you can make me feel like that inside.”

  “I want you to know that I wasn’t thinking of doing it for the applause or anything like that,” he said. “I just get so frustrated sometimes because I used to always be working on one project or another. I used to always be busy. I just felt like I needed to be doing something in addition to all this therapy.”

  She understood. “Then why don’t you work on your story, Johnny?”

  “What story?”

  “Your story. This story. That’s something that you can do and that will be of interest to a publisher.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yes, I do. You just can’t write the ending yet because we’re still working on that.”

  Now he had a project that stimulated his mind and kept him occupied between his therapy sessions. It also seemed to make him attack the therapy sessions with renewed vigor. When his left side still showed no improvement after another week of therapy, she came up with an idea. She told him and Jackson about it at dinner one evening.

  “I’ve been doing some research about the brain. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier, but when you were in that accident, it was your right side that got injured so maybe that’s why it’s not as strong right now. Maybe it got lazy and used to having the left side do most of the work. So I was thinking that we’re going to have to force the right side of your brain to work harder and get stronger.”

  “How are you going to force one side of my brain to work more than the other side?” Johnny asked.

  “Well, you’re already working on your book. That’s supposed to be a right-brain activity. But I was thinking that you need to do more things with the left side of your body—type, write, eat, brush your teeth, and wear this over your right eye.” She handed him an eye patch. “Not all the time but an hour a day maybe. The left eye will have to work harder to see and process images through the right brain. And we need to get you to do more right brain activities like music and art. Doing all of these things might force the right side of your brain to start working like it’s supposed to. There are a lot of people who claim that brain training works so can you try it?”

  He slipped the patch on. “So, what do you think?”

  She smiled. “Actually, you look kind of sexy,” she said. “Like a hot pirate.”

  “You mean all I had to do to make you think that I was sexy was to put on an eye patch?”

  “Johnny, you could wear horn-rimmed glasses and look like a total nerd and I’d still think that you were the sexiest man on this planet.”

  He smiled and pulled her to him to kiss her lovingly. “That’s why I know that I’m the luckiest guy on this planet,” he said.

  Johnny began putting her plan into action the following day. He used his left hand to eat, brush his teeth, and shave. He even tried to type using only his left hand, but it went so slowly that he had to occasionally cheat. He also wore the eye patch at least an hour a day. She took him into the rehearsal room and made him play left-hand piano, learning new and more difficult bass lines for boogie-woogie and rock music, while she played the right-hand riffs. Amazingly, within only ten days, his right calf began improving again and his left calf began to respond to the therapy. It was very slight at first, but Johnny was ecstatic.

  Johnny reverted back to normal use of his right hand for some tasks, such as typing, but continued right-brain stimulation by practicing the left-hand bass lines on the piano and then started learning the new right-hand rifts. Learning new music was supposed to be a right-brain activity and he had missed playing the piano. Jackson and Susan even danced to the new music and the sight of the football-player sized nurse swing dancing with her made Johnny laugh.

  She made him learn new songs to sing as well and had Jackson participate. Jackson, as it turned out, loved karaoke and had a good voice, higher than Johnny’s, and a great knowledge of oldies. When he performed the Blues Brothers’ version of “Everybody Needs Somebody” complete with talking and dance steps, Susan and Johnny laughed so hard that they cried; it was such an unexpected performance from the usually quiet man.

  “That was terrific!” Susan exclaimed, clapping her hands. “Do another one!”

  Jackson smiled. “Okay, I’ll do a song that John should learn so that he can sing it to you.” He put on the disk and began singing “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” by the Casinos. Susan and Johnny were both familiar with the song but as he sang it, it was as though they were listening to the words for the first time. She was seated on a stool beside his wheelchair and she slipped her arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder. He turned and lifted her face and kissed her gently.

  “Even a million years wouldn’t be enough for me,” he said softly.

  “Me either,” she said. She caressed his face lovingly. “You are my soul.”

  Susan also brought out some of her art supplies and insisted that both Johnny and Jackson paint. They painted the backyard with the pool. They painted bowls of fruit. They painted Angel. They even painted each other. Both Jackson and Johnny laughed when they saw the results.

  “Why are you laughing?” she asked when she saw the paintings. “These are great!”

  “Are you kidding?” Johnny laughed. “It looks like I painted it with my left hand.”

  “And mine looks like one of those weird abstracts,” Jackson said, grinning. “You know, where the nose is where the mouth is supposed to be.”

  “But look at the eyes,” she said, admiring their work. “You both captured the kindness in each other’s eyes.”

  She was right—they had. As strange as the rest of the work might have appeared, they had been able to paint what they saw in each other’s eyes. Johnny and Jackson smiled at each other and then Johnny pulled her to him and kissed her.

  “Only you would be able to see that in these paintings,” he said.

  “The eyes are the windows to the soul, Johnny,” she said softly. “You should know that.”

  He looked deeply into her eyes then, into her soul, and saw all the love that she had for him and held her tightly.

  She kissed him. “I’m g
oing to hang these paintings up in the front room to dry,” she said happily. “Then I’m having them framed. I love them. Come on Angel.”

  Johnny smiled as he watched her and her baby head towards the front room.

  “She’s not serious, is she?” Jackson asked. “About framing those paintings?”

  Johnny grinned. “I’m afraid so. But don’t worry. We didn’t sign them and no one will recognize us.”

  Jackson smiled. “You know, when I was doing PT work in Florida, I saw a lot of couples split up after the injury happened. Sometimes right away. Sometimes a while afterwards. Even the ones who stayed together, I could see the strain on the relationship. But you two—all I see is love. It’s great.”

  “I tried to end it,” Johnny confessed. “When it first happened and the doctors told us that I’d never fully recover, I tried to force her to leave because I thought it would be better for her, but she just wouldn’t do it and I’m glad that she didn’t. I can’t tell you how glad. I’d be empty inside without her.” It was unusual for Johnny to express such feelings to anyone else besides her but he felt comfortable talking to Jackson. The months they had spent working together had made these two men friends.

  “I think she feels exactly the same way,” Jackson said. “I think that woman would walk through fire for you if she had to. And even though she’s doing all this with the therapy and everything, somehow I don’t think that it would matter to her at all if you couldn’t get out of that chair.”

  Johnny was moved. “You can see that?”

  “Every time she looks at you,” Jackson said. “You’re a lucky guy.”

  “I know it,” Johnny said. “I don’t know what I ever did to deserve it, but I know it.” He looked at Jackson then and could sense the sadness in the man.

  “I never wanted to pry, but I’ve always been curious. Is that why you’re here in Hawaii working as an RN instead of in Florida doing PT work? Because of a woman? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”