“I’ll see you later then,” Lou said. He closed up the back of his van before crawling behind the wheel.
Behind me, I heard Josie exhale. It was a slight sound, and the emotion in it might have been imagined, but it almost sounded like she was standing at the base of a mountain and staring up at it after being told she had an hour to summit it. It was the kind of exhale a person gave when they were tasked with an impossible challenge.
“Hey, Joze?” I tried glancing at her over my shoulder, but the chair made it difficult. “I’m sorry about all that. I really am—”
“Shit,” she said under her breath.
“Yeah, I know I’ve been acting like a piece of shit,” I said. “That’s an understatement, but—”
“Not shit you.” Her voice was hinging on hysterical. “Shit I just left my purse in the van that’s currently driving away.” She flew around the side of my wheelchair, raising her arm to try to flag it down.
“Joze, wait!” I knew her purse would be okay for a couple hours, and the upside to leaving it in the back of Lou’s van was that when she was reunited with it, her purse would be the most enlightened and insightful purse in existence, brimming over with positive affirmations and shit.
Josie didn’t hear me though. She was one-track minded. She was about to step out into the road when something came into view from the corner of my eye: a big truck with big tires and big sounds. How Josie was oblivious to its size and sound was beyond me, but I guessed whatever was in her purse seemed more important.
“Josie, stop!” I shouted as she took a step into the road, the truck barreling closer.
Still she heard nothing, neither my voice nor the thunderous growl of a diesel engine powering closer. The road leading up to the hospital was rounded and at an incline, so while I could see the truck coming, the driver couldn’t see us yet. Even if he could have seen us, he wouldn’t have, because the driver was flailing one arm, looking frantically at the buildings instead of the road. Beside him, a young woman was breathing heavily and seemed to be holding her stomach.
Shit.
The driver didn’t see Josie. Josie didn’t see the truck. A catastrophe was moments away, and other than my raised voice, I had no way to stop it.
“Josie!” I cried, my voice more of a plea than a warning.
Right as she was about to take another bound into the road, someone snagged Josie’s hand and whipped her back onto the sidewalk seconds before the truck came speeding by. Something I couldn’t understand slipped from her mouth when she finally noticed the truck and how close it had come to hitting her. I was in the middle of exhaling the most relieved sigh I could recall when I twisted my head back to thank whoever it was who’d swooped in to save Josie. Only when I found the space behind us empty did I look over to find a hand still firmly clutched around Josie’s. Like me, she was staring at that hand. Well, she was more like gaping at it.
“Oh my god, Garth,” she whispered, her voice shaky from either what had almost happened or what was currently happening. Her hand twisted, her fingers tangling through the ones secured around hers. “Your hand . . . it moved . . . it’s moving . . .” She smiled at our conjoined hands, returning the squeeze my hand had just given hers. “What just happened?”
I recognized my hand was in hers. To have gotten there, it had to have moved, which had to mean something good, but that wasn’t what I was most concerned with right then. “You just ran out in front of a truck whose driver looked like he was minutes away from becoming a father and wasn’t exactly paying attention to the road or pedestrians.”
The truck was long gone, hopefully finding the ER entrance before his wife or girlfriend delivered their baby in the cab, but I still lifted my middle finger toward where the truck had disappeared. Just thinking about it got me all riled up. When my other hand started flying about, Josie’s gaze drifted toward it, her eyes widening.
“I mean, shit, Joze, do you want to end up like me? Stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of your life? Do you want to spend the rest of your life dead?”
She bit her lip to subdue her grin, but it didn’t work.
“Please, Joze, work with me here. I can’t move. A little help preserving your life would be much appreciated.”
I could have gone on and on—I was so worked up about what had just happened and just could have happened—but when she crouched beside me, her lips pressing softly then not so softly into my knuckles, my mind shifted gears. What else had just happened started to settle in.
“I can feel your hand,” I said, sounding out of breath.
Josie smiled as she continued to slide her mouth along the ridges and valleys of my knuckles.
“I can feel your lips.” My eyes closed from the pure, unparalleled pleasure of her lips moving against my hand. Even at our most intimate, I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt something so intense. “I moved.”
That made her laugh. With her mouth still pressed to my hand, her laugh vibrated up my arm and seemed to work its way deep inside. “I’ll say you moved,” she said as her laugh rolled to an end.
“Someone had to,” I grumbled. Even though I was pissed like nothing else about what had almost happened, thanks to two people focusing on everything but the road, my anger couldn’t dampen the hope trickling into my veins. I’d moved. Without willing my arm to lift or telling my hand to grab hers, something had fired to life inside me, and a minute later, it didn’t seem in a hurry to extinguish itself.
“Just when I’m sure you couldn’t possibly get any more wonderful . . .” She lifted her mouth from my hand long enough to smile at me.
I brushed her cheek with my thumb. I’d never realized until right then how Josie’s skin was the smoothest thing I’d ever felt. “I go and lift my arm?” I peaked a brow at her.
Her smile stretched as she watched my other arm lift into the air. Then her eyes shifted back to mine. “You go and save me when I was supposed to be saving you.”
I WAS LATE for my appointment. I blamed it on Josie. If she hadn’t gone and stepped into traffic without looking, then I wouldn’t have had to save her. Then we wouldn’t have spent a good half hour in a state of shock and surprise, trying to figure out what had just happened.
When we did finally make it to Dr. Miracle Worker’s office, no one seemed to mind we were late. Probably because the patient they’d expected to see paralyzed from the neck down was only paralyzed from the waist down.
“Can you feel this?” Dr. Miracle Worker, whose actual name was Dr. Murphy¸ asked as he tapped above my knee with a tool that looked like it belonged in a torture room instead of an exam room.
I shook my head. “No.”
Josie was standing beside my wheelchair and hadn’t once let go of the hand that had grabbed her. Even when we’d had to fill out some paperwork, she hadn’t let it go. I thought that, like me, she was afraid the spell would wear off if she let go, so she kept hanging on.
“Can you feel any sensation at all?” Dr. Murphy tapped at the same spot with what looked like a bit more force.
“Nothing,” I answered.
Dr. Murphy nodded, squinting as if he were lost in some internal dialogue. “And up until just outside, you were unable to move or feel anything from your waist to your neck, correct?”
I nodded.
More internal dialogue. From my estimate, Dr. Murphy had said five times more to himself than he had to Josie and me.
“What do you think that means?” Josie asked, sliding closer to me. “Does it mean he’s getting better?”
Dr. Murphy put away the torture device and shoved backward on his stool. He rolled halfway across the room, toward the phone hanging on the wall. “The spine doesn’t ‘get better’ in the traditional way we think of some parts of our body healing. If a vertebra is broken, it doesn’t just ‘fix’ itself, or if there’s extensive nerve damage, those nerves won’t heal on their own. Generally, if a person is paralyzed from a back injury, they stay that way. There are very few instances of a p
atient starting out paralyzed then regaining motion.”
“Gee, don’t soften the truth, Doc. Make us bend over before you slam it up there.”
Josie threw me a mild look of disapproval, but her hand didn’t loosen around mine.
The doctor lifted a salt-and-pepper brow at me. “I didn’t take you for the kind of patient who preferred the truth in a softened version. Shall I tailor my approach? I’ve got plenty of methods of explaining this.”
I’d barely spoken a handful of words to him, and I already knew he was the best doctor I’d ever had. “Nah, you got me profiled correctly. I don’t like it sweet and slow. I much prefer it rough and hard.”
Any other girl would have been a blushing red mess, but instead of shifting and hiding behind a sheet of hair, Josie flashed me a wink and settled the edge of her backside on the arm of my wheelchair.
“Then I guess it’s time to take a look at those X-rays and see what the future has in store for you.” Lifting the phone off its hook, he pressed a button. “Jody, would you bring in Mr. Black’s X-rays please?” He paused for a moment, nodding before replying, “Yes, I understand. Thank you for taking a look at them for me.” After that, he hung up.
Before I had a moment to prepare myself for whatever was coming, in walked a woman I assumed was Jody, carrying a file containing my X-rays—more like a file containing my fate. Josie’s hand tightened around mine. Mine did the same, and just feeling that seemingly small measure of comfort, though there was nothing small about it, reminded me that no matter what those X-rays told us, I was holding Joze’s hand, something I’d never thought I’d be able to do it again. Whatever came next, I could take it in stride.
Jody opened the file and slid a few X-rays onto the dark screen, acknowledged us with a nod, and slipped out the door. I swallowed. She hadn’t smiled or offered a greeting; she’d graced me with the slightest of glances before ducking out that door. If those X-rays told the story of a man whose back would be just fine, I doubted she would have just hightailed it out of the room like she wanted to be at the far end of the building before Dr. Murphy took a look at them.
“Let’s see what’s going on here,” Dr. Murphy said to himself as he headed over to the X-rays.
From the time he stood to the time he flipped on the screen lights and illuminated the slides of my spinal column from varying angles, I didn’t think Josie or I took a single breath. By the time the good doctor lifted his hand to his chin, rubbing at it as if he were searching for what to say, I felt like I was close to passing out from lack of oxygen.
“This is . . .” Dr. Murphy shifted his weight, still rubbing at his chin. “Interesting.” He leaned in closer to the slides, narrowing his eyes.
I stretched my neck, cracking it. Josie practically flinched when she heard the small pop.
“That’s a diagnosis I’m not sure what to do with, Doc,” I said, making sure to strip the anxiety from my voice because Josie was swimming in so much of it that it was spilling out of her ears. “What does that mean in cowboy-with-a-GED terms? Will I keep the movement from my waist up? Will I regain the feeling from my waist down?”
Dr. Murphy stayed quiet, leaning forward before leaning back and repeating the cycle. When I studied the X-rays, all I saw were a bunch of grayish-white shapes surrounded by darkness, but he apparently saw something else entirely. I saw a word where he saw a thousand-page novel.
“Doc?”
“Well, now I see why the doctor in Casper was so confused when I spoke to him about you.” He tilted his head to one side then the other.
“You’ve been staring at those things for what feels like an hour, and I still don’t know what my X-rays mean, in layman’s terms, about what I can expect in the future.” Josie slid a bit closer when my voice rose. “Rough and hard, Doc, remember? I can take it.” I waited for him to tear his eyes away from the X-rays long enough to meet mine. When he did, I leaned forward in my wheelchair. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“You want my professional opinion?” he asked, shoving his hands into the pockets of his big white lab coat.
I shrugged. “That’s why we’re here.”
He took another look at the X-rays before sighing. “I don’t know.”
I stayed quiet, waiting for him to expand on that. Surely a doctor wouldn’t just say I don’t know without adding some clarifying comments, right? No doctor would look a man in the eye and tell him he wasn’t sure if everything south of his belt would ever move again and not give some additional commentary.
“With all due respect, we didn’t come here for ‘I don’t know,’ Dr. Murphy.” Josie’s voice sounded far more controlled than mine would have been. “Would you mind telling us what you do know?”
Mr. Murphy’s gaze left mine to land on Josie. The wrinkles lining his face flattened. “I can tell you that none of Garth’s vertebrae are fractured.”
Josie and I exhaled at the same time.
“But his spinal column has gone through a serious amount of trauma, and my guess is that extensive nerve damage and swelling are causing his paralysis.”
“So that means that eventually he’ll recover, right? He’ll walk again one day?”
I hadn’t realized how hope-deprived Josie was until I heard her voice right then. It was bursting with hope, but it only took one lined forehead from Dr. Murphy for her hope to peel away in layers. At the moment a doctor was about to tell me I’d never make a full recovery, I was infinitely more concerned about how the news would affect Josie than how it would affect me.
“If it’s only swelling, then yes, maybe Garth will walk again,” he said before clearing his throat. “But if nerve damage is also playing a part in his paralysis, that’s impossible to say. Sometimes nerves can repair themselves, and sometimes they cannot. It just depends on the level of damage.”
Josie was wringing my hand so hard it started to go numb. When I felt the sensation leaving my hand, I panicked and slipped it free of hers. Blood drained back into it, and the prickles started, but it took my heart a while longer to recover.
“If it is nerve damage, will he keep the motion from his waist up?” Josie sounded afraid of the question, but I knew she was more likely afraid of the answer.
Dr. Murphy turned off the light box, hooked his foot around his stool to bring it closer, and dropped onto it. “If you’re looking for odds and probabilities, I can give you those.” He clasped his hands and leaned forward. He looked both of us in the eye. “But until I can get Garth in an MRI and run some more tests, I won’t be able to give you hard facts.”
“MRI?” I said. “That’s one of those machines they slide you into that’s about the size of a mouse hole and tell you not to move for the whole hour you’re in there, right?”
A smile tugged at the corners of Dr. Murphy’s mouth. “That’s about it, right. Are you claustrophobic? Because I can order a couple of sedatives to be administered before you’re shoved into the mouse hole.”
I nudged Josie when I saw her thinking about smiling. I shook my head. “Claustrophobic? No. The day my blood pressure starts to rise from the thought of climbing into small spaces is the day I’m going to have someone send me out to pasture and put me out of my misery. But it does sound expensive.” When Dr. Murphy crossed his arms and nodded but didn’t offer the actual price tag, I asked, “How expensive?”
“You’re uninsured, correct?”
I made a face. “Lucky for me, I sure am.”
Dr. Murphy came close to wincing with me. “I’d estimate that out-of-pocket, it’ll run you upwards of four, maybe five thousand dollars. Tack on another thousand for the dye injection we’ll do first, and that’ll put you in the ballpark.”
My eyes came close to bursting out of their sockets. “Are you telling me that this MRI thing is going to cost me a grand total of five to six thousand dollars?”
I couldn’t comprehend it. An hour in a big machine would cost me more than I’d made riding bulls four years ago. All of the sweat and
blood and bruises I’d endured that year to make that kind of money, and I’d have to wave bye-bye to it after spending one hour in a glorified mouse hole? If Josie hadn’t been gaping at Dr. Murphy as well, I would have asked him to repeat himself to see if I’d heard wrong.
“That’s why it’s recommended that people carry some kind of health insurance. These kinds of tests don’t come with coin slots you can just drop a few quarters in and hop in and out a minute later.”
I rubbed my forehead, wondering how I could have just regained feeling from my waist up yet still feel my dreams slipping away. All I could envision was a huge stack of hospital bills eating all my winnings from the past year and, along with it, Josie’s and my plan to start our own ranch. “What would happen if I didn’t get the MRI?”
“The world would come to a screeching halt,” Dr. Murphy answered promptly. Before my head could whip in his direction, he rolled closer and continued, “The MRI will show us what’s going on with your spine. There’s damage there somewhere, and we can guess what it is until we’re blue in the face, but we won’t know for sure until we get the MRI results.”
Josie kept nodding her head while I wanted to shake mine. “Can it change anything if I do it? Or will it just change what we know?”
Dr. Murphy gave me a curious look, as if he didn’t understand where I was coming from. That was ironic since I didn’t know where he was coming from either.
“When we know what we’re dealing with, we can figure out how best to move forward,” he said. “I can’t diagnose you blindly, nor can I create a rehab plan for you until we know what we’re dealing with so we know how best to attack it.”
Josie was still nodding along with Dr. Murphy’s every word, making me wonder if I were insane for wanting to give some pause before dropping thousands of dollars or if they were. Like the ever-profound Clay Black used to tell me when I asked for a few dollars when we were out of milk, money didn’t grow on trees. Shit, if it did, Clay Black would have drunk nicer whiskey.
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