Nurse in Recovery

by Dianne Drake

  Mitch smiled, winking at Frank. “So I take it you don’t want my help again, Anna?”

  “You helped her with a shower?” Frank asked. “And should I be asking your intentions toward my daughter?”

  “I helped her, in a manner of speaking, and if you think she actually let me into the bathroom…” Mitch shook his head, shuddering. “All I can say is, you know Anna better than I do.”

  “Pity, young man. Damn pity. Might have done you both some good.”

  Those comments sent Mitch to the hall outside the bathroom door, more to escape Frank’s innuendo than in case Anna needed him. But five minutes into Anna’s shower, five minutes into realizing he wasn’t needed, Mitch finally wandered back into the kitchen and sat down at the table with Frank. “She’s going to start working her butt off tomorrow,” he commented, picking up the bottle of beer Frank had gotten for him.

  “You sure about that, son?” Frank asked. “She’s gotten my hopes up a few times already, then didn’t do a damn thing.”

  Mitch shook his head. “She’s just now figuring out it’s her battle to fight. She can have all the support in the world standing on the sidelines, but in the end it’s still up to her. Something I’ve seen time and time again is someone who will work harder to please his therapist or doctor than he will for himself. That’s a lot of progress that doesn’t necessarily translate into real progress later on when I’m not there. Anna needs to do this for herself, not for me. It’s the only way she’ll get better.”

  “And you think she will? Get better?”

  “One hundred percent? No, probably not. But better?” He took a swig of beer then thought for a moment before he answered. “She’ll improve if she allows it, but I can’t tell you how much. No way to predict it. I can tell you this, though. The human body is resilient. It can do amazing things.”

  “Like Anna,” Frank said.

  “Like Anna,” Mitch repeated, “if Anna wants to.”

  “So this big jump you’re predicting, the one that will actually have her working…you sure about that? You sure she’ll actually do what you expect her to?”

  “I’ve got a trick up my sleeve.” Mitch laughed. “Or two.”

  Frank smiled. “Well, I hope you’re right. And in case I didn’t get around to saying it before, thank you for saving my little girl. I’ll be owing you for that one the rest of my life.”

  Mitch shrugged, noticeably uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation.

  “I knew you were following us, by the way. Saw you hanging back there, figured you had something in mind for Anna. Guess I should have been paying less attention to you and more attention to the road.”

  “He was drunk,” Mitch jumped in. “Wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “Well, I’m mighty glad you were right there.”

  “The hell of it is, I intended doing what that guy in the car did—show her, one more time, how vulnerable she is. Prove she couldn’t save herself. But she did, Frank. She fought like a wildcat to get out of the street.”

  “And that’s when it happened?” Frank asked.

  “What?”

  The older man smiled as he stood up and headed back into the living room. “That’s not for me to tell you, son. Like you said about my Anna…you’ll figure it out if you allow it.”

  Almost three in the morning and Mitch was still wide awake, thinking about Frank’s hint. He’d figured it out all right. It was the first time in his experience that the patient’s parent had ever had transference—where the patient became so dependent on the doctor that emotions inappropriate to the situation were transferred. First time he’d ever recognized it, anyway. And he absolutely recognized that Frank had high hopes for more than a professional relationship between Anna and himself. Me and Anna…Anna and me…

  He’d known Anna had been trying to escape him yesterday morning. He’d expected her to do it—she was so predictable that way—and he’d been taking perverse pleasure following her, waiting for the right moment to grab her away from Frank and run, just like he’d admitted to Frank. But, dear Lord, he’d never been so scared in all his life, seeing her there in the street, fighting to get to the curb. Fighting to survive.

  If ever there was a moment that defined a person, that was Anna’s moment. It told him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what she wanted and what she would do to get it. More than that, it told him what he needed to do to help her—the hard part, the reason he’d left rehab medicine. Some people never wanted it badly enough to wage the war, and as hard as he fought for them it wasn’t enough. The lion’s share of the battle was theirs to win, not his. If he couldn’t make them understand that, too often they simply quit. That was his fault, his shortcoming, his inadequacy as a doctor, and what the world didn’t need was one more inadequate doctor. Making burl bowls was a lot simpler.

  Anna and me…me and Anna…“Yep, burl bowls are a whole lot simpler.”

  Thank God he’d been in the right place at the right time.

  Suddenly a strange feeling hit him. A fumble from his blind side, one that scared him because he hadn’t seen it coming. And it had everything to do with being in the right place at the right time for Anna…being there for Anna all the time.

  That made him sweat, and since he wasn’t sleeping anyway he opted for a cold shower.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANOTHER day, and apparently this was the one on which Mitch intended to get serious about Anna’s training, because she’d been watching him walk back and forth through the house for the past half hour, carrying all sorts of weight equipment, setting it up in the room Lanli had already designated for her therapy with mats, ropes, and other exercise odds and ends. He was real optimistic, Anna thought, since that other stuff had been sitting there taunting her for weeks, as yet unused. And now there were the weights Mitch was arranging to suit himself. Not exactly the way she’d intended to use her dining room. Once upon a time she’d entertained the notion of cozy dinners with good friends in there. That had been when she’d had a dining-room table instead of a portable therapy table. She still did have a dining-room table technically, but it was sitting in the garage, along with pretty much all the other furniture that had once made this place cozy. Now her house was sparse, barrier-free, impersonal. Just like her life. But, hey, she had a…Well, she didn’t know the name for it, but it was some kind of bench with pulleys.

  Anna wheeled herself into the doorway of her new training room in time to see Mitch pull off his sweat-stained knit polo shirt and toss it onto the back of a chair. Standing there in his low-riding jeans, the crisp, golden brown hair covering his chest a stark contrast to his deep umber tan, he was the best thing she’d seen in years. The flood of plain old hormonal appreciation was rising in her and she wondered if it showed. She hoped not, because to Mitch she was merely another patient to train, no matter what he was calling it. And she didn’t want to get caught up in a transference—namely infatuation. Time to dig down deep and find a scrap of professionalism, she decided. Drag it out and tie herself up in it, since that infatuation transference was nudging at her in a big way.

  Besides, there was still that other situation in her life that needed resolving. The Kyle situation. And realistically why would someone like Mitch be attracted to her anyway? Especially when the man who loved her wasn’t?

  “Ready to start?” Mitch asked, tugging a sleeveless mesh shirt over his head. It didn’t hide much and, if anything, it accented the muscles of his arms. Anna knew they would be rock hard beneath her fingertips if she touched them, and her mind stopped short of a good mental feel.

  “Is that how my arms will look when we’re through with this?” she asked, the corners of her mouth tugging upwards.

  “I sure hope not.” He chuckled, taking in the appreciative looks coming from her. “Unless it’s your intention to beat me at arm wrestling.”

  In a sleeveless shell top, Anna looked at her own arms. Skinny right now. And pretty limp. The only way she’d ever beat Mitch a
t arm wrestling would be to hire a stand-in. She took one more look at her arms, tried to flex muscles that simply wouldn’t pop up and define themselves, then braced herself for the next phase of her life. “So let’s get started.”

  “You gotta get rid of the rock.”

  “Huh?”

  “The ring. Take it off. It’ll wear blisters on your hand.”

  Anna stared down at it. Once it came off it would never go back on, and she knew that. It was the last vestige of hope for all the things she’d planned for her former life, the only remaining piece of her past she was still clinging to. Laying her fingers on it, she tried to recall the evening Kyle had given it to her, but the memory didn’t rush right back to her like it should have. She had to dig for it, and somewhere in that digging she twisted the ring to the end of her finger. She shut her eyes and gave the irrevocable tug, then finally the ring was just an ostentatious chunk of jewelry in the palm of her right hand. Nothing more, nothing less. And she wasn’t surprised by her lack of emotion over removing it. In fact, she was almost relieved by the lack of sentiment and feeling. A small step, but in many ways a very big one.

  “Here,” she said, holding the ring out to Mitch. “Would you put it in the drawer next to my bed? There’s a ring box in there.”

  “Are you sure? The magazine stand in the other room—I could just set it there so you could get it—”

  “I’m sure,” Anna interrupted. Two little words, but they were forceful and decisive. And in her future life, also irreversible. A melancholy smile brushed across her lips. “Absolutely sure. And when you get back, I’m finally ready to work.”

  Clearing his throat, Mitch nodded, then left. Once he’d returned a minute later, Anna’s engagement ring wasn’t mentioned again.

  “OK,” he said, tossing Anna a pair of black leather half-gloves. “From now on, you wear them when you exercise and when you wheel or else you’ll get blisters. And if you get blisters you’re out of commission, so put them on and wear them.” His voice was a little rough. Not unfriendly. Just rough.

  Anna tugged on the gloves, wiggling into the fingers that barely came to her first knuckle, leaving two-thirds of her fingers exposed. Then she fastened the straps at her wrists. The palms were reinforced, she noticed as she studied the gloves on her hands. Kind of an awesome biker look, she thought, not that she was the biker type. But they didn’t look bad. “Leather’s not quite my style,” she commented, flexing her fingers.

  “I’ve always liked a lady in leather myself,” Mitch commented.

  “Most men do, don’t they? But I would have chosen something in pink or powder blue. They’d go better with my pasty complexion.”

  “Which is soon to be fixed,” Mitch stated, pulling on some gloves similar to Anna’s. “Old habit,” he explained. “When I used to work with patients I couldn’t afford the blisters either.”

  “You still do work with patients, Mitch. Actually, with patient, although nobody’s accused me of being patient for months.”

  “You need discipline,” he returned, smiling. “And I love to discipline.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just bet you do.” Anna grabbed her wheels and rolled her chair over to the rack of hand weights Mitch had set up. “So, what should I do to get started before I incur some of that discipline?”

  “We’ll start with light weights. One and a half pounders, and work your way up from there.” Grabbing two small weights, he thrust them at Anna. “Let’s see what you can do with these. Start with some lifts straight out in front. One at a time, slowly. You need to warm up.”

  “I can handle something heavier than these,” she challenged.

  “Yep, but it’s not about what you can handle. It’s about what it’ll take to retrain your muscles the right way, and by the time you’ve worked out with these for several minutes, I promise you’ll be feeling like you’ve been lifting twenty pounders for several hours.” He pulled a heavier set from the rack and demonstrated the technique he expected her to use. “Elbows to your ribs, forearms up then extend slowly. Once you’re there, bring it back to the upright, then do the other arm. And repeat until I tell you to quit.”

  “Or until I can’t do any more,” Anna added.

  “Until I tell you to quit,” Mitch corrected her.

  Anna watched Mitch go through several reps then did the same. Stretch it out, then bring it back. Other arm repeat. Occasionally, Mitch reached over to guide her arm to a better position when she got sloppy, especially when, after three minutes, she could barely lift the combined three pounds. “Gotta rest,” she gasped, totally winded, letting her arms, and the weights, drop to the sides of her chair. “I can’t believe how hard this is.”

  Mitch laughed. “And it’s only going to get harder. Trust me.”

  She did, and by the middle of her second three-minute set, sweat was drizzling down Anna’s face, dripping off her chin, and wet stains were soaking the fabric under her arms. A slight stain was also beginning to dampen the fabric over the valley between her breasts, giving her the look of a marathon runner after twenty-six grueling miles, not a drooping weightlifter after a couple of mediocre minutes. Midway into the first good, hard sweat since she couldn’t remember when, Frank appeared with a towel full of ice cubes for her, then several minutes later, as the stains in her armpits was spreading out over more fabric than was dry, he came back with a glass of cold water. By the time Anna was completely soaked, front and back, her dad was at her side once more with a damp cloth, a dry towel and a clean shirt. Finally, when her salty sweat was stinging her eyes, he produced a sweatband for her head—it still had its tags. “I’m fine, Dad,” she kept telling him each time, but each time he would merely pat her hand, smile kindly, then disappear into the folds of the floor-length country tan and blue checkered drapes so he could keep watch.

  So much expectation, she thought. He was the delighted daddy in the audience as his little girl came forward to recite a one-sentence poem in the kindergarten play. It didn’t matter what she was saying, how she was saying it, or even if she remembered all her words: Daddy was glowing with pride in the front row, taking pictures. Right now her daddy was glowing with pride in the curtains, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to see the flash of a camera.

  “I’m really out of shape,” she admitted to Mitch, toweling off. “Guess I didn’t realize how much until now. Kind of sneaks up on you.”

  Mitch took her weights and replaced them in the rack. “You’ve had six months of downtime. Anyone would be out of shape, sitting around doing nothing for half a year. Especially someone who was physically active before.”

  “I never used to work out,” she admitted. “Never exercised.”

  “But you were on your feet ten, twelve hours a day, five or six days a week. And that’s exercise, believe me. You don’t realize how much until you’re not doing it anymore. And you’re right. It sneaks up on you. I got caught in that trap now I’m not…” He paused, smiling almost wistfully. “Now I’m not working the way I used to. Put on ten pounds in the first couple of months before I realized I was going to have to fight to keep myself in shape.” He patted his six-pack belly, grinning. “Doesn’t come easy for some of us.”

  Maybe it didn’t come easy, Anna thought, but on Mitch it definitely came good. “Mind if I take a quick shower?” she asked. “Then I’ll fix us some lunch. That is, unless you have to go somewhere.” A simple lunch, and actually it would be her first time fixing anything in the kitchen since…

  “I’m free all day,” he said, grabbing a towel Frank was holding out from his station in the curtains. “And I thought later we’d get some weight on your ankles and start with some leg lifts. Try and build up those quadriceps.”

  Yeah, right. That was a hopeless cause, Anna knew. Lanli had been trying the leg lifts for weeks. Big waste of time because her legs didn’t want to lift. Sure, they had a bit of movement—weak, restricted movement, a little to the left, a little to the right, an inch up then, plop, right back down
like deadweight. Nothing that would get her up and walking. But she wasn’t going to tell Mitch. He’d accuse her of being afraid to try, or quitting before she gave it a chance, or just plain chickening out. So she’d let him find out on his own that her arms were one thing and her legs completely another.

  Anna’s shower went better than it had the first time Mitch had stood guard outside her bathroom door. What had that been? Just a few days ago. It seemed like forever already, like he’d been in her life as long as she could remember. Or maybe like her life had actually started over the day he’d entered it.

  Wait! Was that a brush of hope creeping in? No hope. She knew better than that. No expectations meant no disillusionment. In her life, that was the safest place to live.

  When Anna returned to the living room, Mitch was clicking off the cell phone, and the strained expression on his face told her she was off the hook for fixing his lunch. Oddly, a little wave of disappointment slid over her, meaning there’d been some of that expectation she didn’t want. Bad mistake. She wouldn’t go there again.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’s my mother. She’s been arrested. I’ve got to go bail her out…again.

  “Want to come with me?” Mitch asked, heading to the front door. “We can get her then grab a sandwich at the pub over by the campus.”

  “Nah, I’m fine. Not really hungry.”

  “Go with him,” Frank said, stepping out of the curtains. “Does she need a lawyer?” he asked Mitch.

  “She hasn’t in the past. Normally they release her on her own recognizance, then she antes up a few hundred dollars in fines when she’s summoned to court. But if she does, I’ll give you a call.”