The First Stone

by Don Aker

  Besides their involvement with individual patients and organized activities, volunteers also assisted the staff directly. “They help set up barbecues, accompany patients from one part of the hospital to another, help them get their food and so on. The list is endless. At least you won’t have to worry about the time being long. The staff will keep you hopping.”

  When she had finished, she asked if Reef had any preferences regarding how he might help out. His preference, of course, was to put as much distance as he could between himself and every gimp in this place, but he thought for a moment. “I don’t see myself doin’ things with a group,” he said. “Maybe one on one with somebody. Or I could just help out the staff doin’ some of the things you told me.”

  “I’m sure Jim filled you in already on the different kinds of injuries this facility treats. Any particular floor you think you’d be more comfortable working on?”

  Reef had long forgotten which floor was which, but he knew what he didn’t want to do. “I don’t wanna work with stroke patients.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Reef paused, wasn’t sure how to continue. Then, “My grandfather had a stroke. It’s what killed him.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  He was sure, of course, that she didn’t see. Couldn’t see. He’d actually been grateful for the stroke. Had, in fact, once wished it had come sooner. It was the one thing that had finally stopped the drinking, the rages, the flood of empty threats he’d never stood up to, never challenged. Wished he could have but never did. If he’d believed in God, he’d have thought the stroke was an answer to an unspoken prayer. But he knew it wasn’t. Not when he saw what it did to his grandmother. He’d hated watching her look for any sign of improvement, any reason to hope. She’d held her husband’s hand for days in the hospital, rubbing it softly, all the while talking to him, telling him over and over that everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. Not then. Not ever. Even then, the cancer was growing inside her. It just hadn’t told anyone yet.

  “I don’t assign new volunteers to the eighth floor anyway,” Shelly continued. “Or the seventh, for that matter. Patients who’ve had strokes or lost limbs often require a level of patience and compassion that even professionals take a while to develop. Over time, though—”

  “That’s all right,” Reef said. “What about the mus …” He’d forgotten the term.

  “Musculoskeletal. That’s on the sixth floor. How about we put you there to start?”

  Reef would have preferred she put him on a bus backto North Hills, but that wasn’t going to happen. The judge had made sure of that. “Fine with me,” he lied.

  After giving him a quick overview of the sixth floor and introducing him to the medical personnel in the musculoskeletal unit, Shelly Simpson had left him with a nurse named Carly Reynolds, who put him to work almost immediately. “We can always use another body around here to help out,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “In fact, I’ve got a job for you right now. You’re on traffic control.”

  He waited for an explanation.

  “In the next few minutes, that elevator door is going to open and two wheelchairs are going to come out full tilt.” She seemed to notice the surprise in his eyes and laughed. “No, I’m not clairvoyant. It’s just that two of my patients usually come up from physio at the same time, and if someone isn’t here to stop them, this hallway turns into the Indianapolis 500.”

  As if on cue, the elevator binged and the doors opened, revealing two people—a young woman and a man about Carly’s age—in wheelchairs, each jockeying to be first off.

  “Hold it!” Carly ordered, sticking her hand out like a crossing guard.

  The two looked up and grinned sheepishly. “Busted.” the young woman said.

  “Reef,” said the nurse, “meet the bane of my existence.

  Brett Turner. And this is her partner in crime, Ron Sheffield. Guys, this is Reef Kennedy. Hall cop.” She punched out the last two words for emphasis. “Reef here is going to help me make sure everyone observes the speed limit.” She leaned toward Reef and murmured, “Whatever you do, don’t get your feet in front of them.”

  Turning to her partner, the young woman groaned. “Looks like the hall Nazi has reinforcements. We’re screwed.”

  Her partner laughed. So did the nurse.

  Reef moved forward, keeping an eye on his feet.

  It turned out that Brett was as much help as she was hindrance. She gave Reef a tour of some of the other floors, including the second and third, where, she said, the “real action” was.

  It was when he saw the physio gym that Reef began to wonder if he’d be able to handle this volunteering thing after all; the patients he saw there were a far cry from Brett Turner. An old man sat hunched over in his wheelchair pulling on a rope attached to a weight, and, despite the encouragement he was getting from the therapist working with him (and despite the fact that the weight couldn’t have been more than a couple of pounds), it was all he could do to pull the rope a few inches. To his right, a middle-aged woman was attempting to walk between two parallel bars but had managed little more than a halting, snail-pace shuffle.

  At the far end of the gym, a man in his late twenties or early thirties was trying to walk up a ramp whose incline was minimal, but even from the door Reef could hear him groaning with exertion. Across from him on the far wall was a basketball net, and Reef thought whoever’d hung it had one christly sick sense of humor. It was obvious that no one here would be using it.

  The third floor, which contained the general recreation area, was much less depressing. Many of the walls found on the other floors were absent here, allowing for a large, open area beyond the elevators that served as an entertainment center. The room contained three large sofas and several armchairs and recliners, separated here and there by tables covered with books and magazines. Off to the left were higher tables on which lay a chess set, cribbage board and assorted games. To the right was a large-screen projection TV with VCR and DVD player, and near the windows at the far end stood a regulation-size pool table. He thought briefly about Jink and Bigger and knew they’d have a ball on the third floor, momentarily pictured them hanging out there then shook his head to clear that image. Those two would level the place.

  He also thought about Scar. Brett reminded him of her, and not because of her hair—where Scar’s was the red of kids’ crayons, Brett’s was much lighter, more blond than red. No, their similarity lay more intheir manner: completely genuine. What you saw was what you got.

  During the tour, Brett introduced Reef to a number of patients, most of whose names he forgot the minute she said them, so focused was he on their various physical limitations. It was like a freak show, only free. Many were missing something—an arm or a leg: others had all the parts but these seemed to have a life of their own. Or no life at all. Most of the time he looked away, but not from any courtesy on his part. They creeped him out. And every one of them knew Brett.

  “She’s a wild one,” warned a bald man with a handlebar mustache who was slowly pushing a metal walker down the hallway. “Nearly knocked me down twice this week already.”

  “Yeah, well, next time signal when you’re turning,” Brett retorted impishly.

  Reef was surprised people weren’t pissed off at her. If he said the kind of things she did, he’d be sure to get a dirty look—or worse—but everyone she met seemed to enjoy her comments and many stopped to chat. Watching her carrying on with the other patients, he wondered what had brought her to the rehab. Shelly Simpson hadn’t told him he couldn’t ask.

  “So,” he said later as he rolled ‘her wheelchair toward the elevator for the ride back up to the sixth floor, “you fall down some stairs or something?”

  Brett turned to look at him and grinned. “You’re not real subtle, are you?”

  Reef reddened, unsure if he’d offended her. “Look, uh—”

  “Or something.” Brett said.

  “Huh?”

&nb
sp; “You asked if I fell down some stairs or something.”

  Reef was surprised. “Off a roof?” he asked.

  “Out of an airplane,” she said.

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “No, really. I did.”

  “You fell out of an airplane.” He waited for the punchline.

  “Well, actually, I jumped.”

  “Look,” Reef said, not bothering to mask his annoyance, “if you don’t wanna tell me—”

  “I was skydiving. My parachute didn’t open.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.” It was out of his mouth before he realized he’d said it. “I mean—”

  Brett laughed. “No, I’m not shitting you. Actually, it was my first time skydiving. Sam, that’s my guy, he warned me not to but I’d always wanted to try it, so I paid to take a course. On the last day everybody got one jump. Some luck, eh? My only jump and the chute doesn’t open.”

  Reef remembered something he’d seen in a movie. “Ain’t there another parachute?” he asked.

  “The reserve, yeah. It got tangled in my lines.”

  Reef shook his head slowly, stopped pushing the wheelchair and moved around in front of the girl. “Christ,” he breathed. “What was it like?”

  “The falling or the landing?”

  Jesus! “Well, uh, both.”

  “At first I thought, ‘This isn’t happening to me.’ You know, like those nightmares you have and you wake up drenched in sweat?”

  Reef nodded. He’d had lots of nightmares like that when he was younger. And a few since the hearing. Since seeing those pictures.

  “Then I panicked. Forgot everything I learned in the course.”

  “No shit.”

  “I almost did that, too. Which, when you think of it, might actually have made for a softer landing.”

  Reef grinned. The chick had balls. Big ones. “Then what?” he asked.

  “Then I got myself under control and started trying all the things we’d been taught. Which didn’t work.” She shrugged. “I found out later that what happened to me was just fluky. The main chute almost always works. And on the off chance it doesn’t, the reserve takes over with no problem. It was just a weird combination of events. But hey, I guess when you jump out of an airplane you should be ready for weird, right?”

  “Fuckin’ right!” he exclaimed, then remembered where he was.

  It was nearly noon when Reef returned Brett to the sixth floor. They found Carly, who thanked him for “keeping the Turner Terror occupied and making the hallways safe for the rest of us.” She gave him a lunch voucher and told him to grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria. “You know where that is?” she asked.

  “First floor, right?”

  Carly smiled. “You learn fast. You’re gonna work out just fine here, Reef.”

  Reef flushed. That was the third time that morning he’d turned red for some reason or other. Wouldn’t Scar have loved to see that, he thought, then realized that was the second time she had come to mind that day. For a moment he wondered where Scar was, what she was doing.

  “Well, Reef,” said Brett. “I was looking forward to seeing more of you, but there’s little chance of that now.”

  He looked at her. “Why not?”

  She nodded at the lunch voucher. “Carly’s sending you to the cafeteria. Clearly the woman is trying to kill you.”

  The nurse raised her clipboard threateningly and Brett wheeled around and sped down the hall. “Nice meetin’ you, Reef,” she called over her shoulder before disappearing into her room.

  “So, how was your first day?” Colville asked when Reef opened the door and slid into the truck.

  Reef didn’t answer right away. Finally, “Okay.”

  Colville pulled the truck out onto Winter Street, came to the lights on Spring Garden Road and turnedright, heading down toward the harbor. “What you expected?” he asked.

  “You want a play-by-play?” asked Reef. “You think maybe I should take a video camera next time and tape it for the sharin’ sessions?”

  Colville didn’t say anything for a bit. Satisfied, Reef watched the city slide by. Warm air rushed through the open windows, and mingled with the traffic fumes were the undeniable smells of midsummer. Reef thought about Bigger and Jink, wondered what they were doing on such a nice day. Not wheelin’ gimps around, that was for damned sure. Or reading to vegetables, which was how he’d spent the afternoon.

  “You have some visitors coming later,” Colville said.

  Reef turned. “Whaddya mean, visitors?”

  “Friends of yours. Jim, Scar and … Bigger?”

  “Jink.”

  “What?”

  Reef breathed a loud, derisive sigh. “Not Jim. Jink.”

  “Oh.”

  They drove in silence, and before long Colville’s truck pulled onto the span of the Murray MacKay Bridge. He could have taken the MacDonald Bridge, but once on the Dartmouth side of the Murray MacKay, it was only a couple minutes to the 118 and then a straight haul to Waverley. In a moment they were high above the water, and Reef could see dozens of sailboats dotting the Bedford Basin to the west and, beyond that, outbound vehicles lined up on Magazine Hill. People playing, working, living their lives.

  “Thought I wasn’t allowed to have visitors,” he said finally.

  Traffic on the span was heavy and a blue Grand Am cut in ahead of them, forcing Colville to brake hard to keep from rear-ending it. To Reef’s surprise, Colville showed no impatience, didn’t even honk his horn.

  “Not at the beginning,” Colville agreed. “And no unsupervised visits for the first six months. But I thought it might be good for you to see them. I talked to your social worker about it and he agreed.”

  Reef mulled that over, knew somehow that his continued refusal to join in the nightly whine-and-whimper was part of this. As if bringing his friends in would get him to open up, make him—how did Colville put it?—more likely to “disclose.” Such bullshit.

  “Anyway, Greg offered to bring them over this evening for a bit. I told him I thought you’d earned it.” When Reef snorted disdainfully, Colville continued, “Look, if you don’t want to see them, just say the word.”

  Reef turned away, looked east down the harbor past the shipyards, the MacDonald Bridge, MacNab’s and George’s Islands, the Atlantic Ocean beyond them all. Even now, he could see the bank of offshore fog moving in. “S’okay,” he said.

  The truth was, though, it didn’t feel okay, though he wouldn’t let Colville know that. For some reason, theidea of seeing his friends again suddenly made him uneasy. Maybe it was because he hadn’t returned Scar’s calls. Yeah. That was probably it.

  He drummed his fingers on the door frame, watched as the water beneath them fell away and became land.

  Chapter 15

  Leeza could hear Brett drumming her fingers on the arm of her wheelchair. Then again, louder this time.

  Her eyes closed, Leeza ignored her, concentrated on riding out a spasm without grinding her teeth. Val had told her that sometimes patients respond to pain by clenching their jaws together, which just creates more problems later on. Leeza hadn’t realized she’d been doing it until Val pointed it out. Now she had to break herself of the habit.

  Brett began to hum. Something between a nursery rhyme and the national anthem. Badly.

  “If you’re doing that to get on my nerves, it’s working,” Leeza said.

  “Sorry.” Brett rolled her chair over beside Leeza’s bed. “You asleep?”

  “Certainly not now,” Leeza said dryly. “Exactly what is it about the concept of resting that you don’t understand?”

  “Meeeowwww,” said Brett. “Aren’t we in a great mood.”

  Leeza sighed and opened her eyes. “We can’t all be as bubbly as you, now can we?”

  It was Brett’s turn to sigh. “Cripes, Leeza. After three weeks, you’d think you’d get tired of the ‘poor me’ routine.”

  Leeza closed her eyes again, but not to shut out her roommate, as Bre
tt probably thought. Squeezing her eyelids tight was the only way she could keep the tears from slipping out. Tears that had become more and more frequent in the last few days. Brett had been at the rehab several weeks before Leeza arrived, so she’d had more time to get used to it all. Waking up to the pain every day, enduring the agony of physio, coping with the loss of freedom to move around the way she once had, even putting up with the humiliation of the damn catheter—all these were bad enough. But for Leeza, these weren’t even the worst of it. It was seeing every day the wreckage that had once been her body.

  Of course, that part was difficult for anyone, but as Dr. Dan had pointed out to her earlier that week, it was even harder for young people. “Body image is many times more important to a teenager than to someone my age,” he’d told her during an examination. Leeza had been crying when he’d arrived, and he’d explained that everything she was feeling was perfectly normal. “Teenagers who’ve had debilitating injuries worry about how strangers will react to them. They worry about not being accepted by their peers, about not being attractive to the opposite sex.”

  He’d waited a moment, allowing his acknowledgement of her fears to register before continuing. “Andthis psychological trauma is compounded even more by the fact that young people don’t have the same life experiences they can draw on to put their injuries into perspective.” At this, Leeza had sobbed even louder. “I know you’ve had a rough time this past year, Leeza. The loss of your sister was a terrible thing, and I’m not trying to diminish that.” He’d given her a moment to realize this was true. Then, “Do you remember that first day when I said your youth was an advantage, that you would heal faster than an older person?” Not waiting for an answer, he’d continued, “Youth can be a double-edged sword. Yes, you’ll heal faster. But for young people, injuries like yours seem more traumatic and long-lasting than they would for an older person. The advantage of age is that older people have been through so much more in their lives. They realize that, although this is terrible, it’s not as devastating as this thing that happened ten years ago or that thing that happened twenty years ago.”