Push Girl: A Novel

by Chelsie Hill

  The elevator dinged and the door slid open. Mom wheeled me out, smiling at the nurses and doctors on the floor. “Physical therapy?” she asked the nurse behind the reception desk, and the nurse pointed to her left.

  “Here we are,” Mom said, turning me into a spacious room set up with various tables, machines, balls, and pads scattered around. Doctors and nurses worked with a few people spread around the open space, but mine was the only wheelchair in the room.

  Mom signed me in, and I watched the nurses bend people’s legs back and forth and saw people pull on giant, colorful rubber bands between their arms. I felt like I had wandered into some sort of top secret movie stunt room or something, the way everyone seemed so focused on twisting their bodies into odd positions. I had no idea what was happening, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone rappel down a wall or launch into a back handspring out of nowhere.

  “Sorry, I’m late! Did you wait for me?”

  I turned my head and found what I had been hoping to see—another wheelchair. This one was occupied by a dark-haired girl who was a bit younger than me, but who looked a lot more comfortable in it than I did in mine. She looked like she belonged there, like her wheelchair was a comfy throne she lounged in by choice, and she smiled at the nurse behind the check-in desk.

  “Oh, hi,” she said when she saw me waiting by the door. “I’ve never met you before. I’m Ana.” She smiled this huge, genuine smile, and she waved at me.

  I stared back. I didn’t smile, I didn’t wave, I had no idea how to respond to this girl who was in a wheelchair and seemed to be happy about it. Did not compute.

  Luckily, I had Mom with me to keep me from spiraling into total bitch mode. “This is Kara,” Mom said on my behalf. “This is her first time in physical therapy.”

  “Oh, well, you’re in for a treat, Kara.” Ana had this voice that was so light and airy, it almost sounded like she was laughing when she talked. “They’re pretty nice here. But they can hurt sometimes. They tell me it’s for my own good, but I don’t know if I believe them yet.”

  She signed herself in and rolled her wheelchair right up next to mine.

  “I’m assuming that since it’s your first time in PT that the chair is a new development for you?”

  I nodded. I still didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ve had mine about a month now,” she said. “Still getting used to it. But it’s okay so far. It’s sorta nice to always have somewhere to sit, you know?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. Ana had a ridiculously positive attitude, and the fact that she kept cracking jokes about being stuck in a wheelchair while I’d spent about two hours the previous night crying about it was grating on my nerves.

  “You haven’t been out of the hospital yet, have you?” she asked, undeterred by my stink eye.

  I shook my head. Was it that obvious?

  “I was out for a week, but I got an infection and had to come back. Just you wait, though. You’re going to get so much sympathetic head tilt out there, you won’t even know what hit you.”

  “What’s that?” I was still wary of her perkiness, but I couldn’t help but be drawn into this conversation.

  “Oh, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when you get it. I get it a lot, especially when people find out what happened to me.”

  I opened my mouth to ask, but she kept right on talking.

  “I fell off a balcony,” she said. “The wood on the railing at my apartment was totally rotted through. I was leaning against it, talking to my friend on the ground after school and—bam!—it just snapped in half and I fell off. Three stories up. Half of the railing fell on top of me and cracked my spine.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly that it shocked me. Wasn’t she upset about what had happened to her? That was ridiculously unfair, that she’d never be able to walk again after some stupid accident that wasn’t her fault at all. How could she be so calm about this?

  “I think I saw this on the news.” Mom clicked her tongue. “Such a shame. You’re so young.”

  Ana nodded. “Yup. Sucks, huh? I’m only twelve and I’ve already had like a zillion surgeries.”

  Ana and my mom continued talking while we waited for the nurses to get our physical therapy started. I knew I should have joined in the conversation and talked to this very sweet girl who was in a situation so similar to mine. But I just couldn’t. It wasn’t Ana so much as her attitude. She was so accepting of her situation. She didn’t act like a girl whose life was over. She acted almost happy.

  We may both have been in wheelchairs, but our hearts could not have been in more different places.

  CAN YOU AT LEAST LET ME KNOW IF YOU ARE GETTING MY TEXTS?

  I MISS YOU.

  CHAPTER 8

  My discharge from the hospital was exactly how I’d seen it on TV and in the movies—the nurses always made those TV patients leave in wheelchairs whether they liked it or not. I always wondered if that was a real rule or one of those made-for-TV plot devices, like everyone in a group of friends dating each other because the writers didn’t want to add more characters. I guess it didn’t matter if it was true in real life, really, because I was leaving in a wheelchair whether I liked it or not.

  I thought about that as Laura, my day nurse, wheeled me through the front doors to meet my dad, who was pulling his car into temporary parking to take me home. I let myself daydream that there was some sort of supernatural force field on the door that would magically heal my spine when Laura pushed me through it, that that’s the reason the hospital made people go in a wheelchair through the doors, because the real healing didn’t take place upstairs. And then I could walk, or skip or grand jeté, to the car, and I’d be as good as new.

  Obviously that didn’t happen. But it was a nice little daydream.

  Dad stepped out of the car and walked toward me, trying to mask the nerves I could see all over his face with a smile. “You ready to go home, sweetie?”

  I nodded, but I also chewed on the tip of my thumb. Yes, I was ready to go home. Ready to sleep in my own bed and cuddle with Logan. Ready not to have machines beeping at me all night. But at the same time, I didn’t know if I was ready to face real life with everything so completely different. I didn’t know how to live this life that was in front of me. I tried to muster the excitement I should have had about leaving the hospital and going home, but it was difficult when I wasn’t walking.

  “Okay,” he said, trotting over to the passenger side and opening the door. “How are we going to do this?”

  “It’ll be just like getting on and off the couch,” I said. “I think I can do it.” Once I’d been introduced to my chair and the doctors and nurses taught me how to get around in it, they also showed me little tricks that would help me get around in the world. They started off by showing me how to get from the floor back to the chair in case I fell or something. But that was the worst because the nurse kept using her legs to demonstrate it to me. Real helpful. From there we went on to learn crazy things like how to navigate my wheelchair backwards down a flight of stairs in case I was on a high floor of a building and the elevator wasn’t working. Or how to get from the chair to a couch or a bed by using the strength in my arms as leverage. As a dancer, I’d always been proud of the strength in my legs. I guess it was time to start appreciating other parts of my body.

  “Careful, Kara,” Dad said. His face had been lined with worry since I woke up two weeks ago, but now the worry was active, crawling all over him like ants on a picnic blanket. He reached forward as if to catch me, like I was in the process of falling to the asphalt, when I hadn’t even made a move off my chair yet.

  Ignoring him, I rolled myself up to the open door. I took a deep breath and, just as I’d practiced over and over on the couch in the PT room, leaned over to the seat, put down both my hands, transferred my weight onto my arms, then swung my body out of my chair and into the car. It was far from perfect—I landed lopsided on the seat, with half of me sort of falling
out the open door and the seat belt digging into my upper back. But I did it. I successfully moved myself from chair to car.

  Dad clapped and cheered like I’d just hopped up and ran a relay, and the cynical part of me wanted to tell him to shut up. I was just getting myself in the car. It’s not like I was walking. But another, quieter part of me was proud. Proud of this little thing that I could do all on my own, without a doctor or a nurse or a team of specialists helping me out. So I let myself smile as I adjusted comfortably into the seat, lifting my legs with my hands and arranging them in the space under the seat. “Done and done,” I said.

  Once Dad folded up my chair and stashed it in the trunk, he climbed into the driver’s seat, leaned across the center console, and kissed my cheek.

  “I’m proud of you, Kara,” he said. And I smiled, because I was pretty proud of me, too.

  He pulled out of the hospital parking lot and turned the car in the direction of home.

  “Where’s Mom?” After the first couple of days in the hospital, Mom and Dad started saying they wanted someone to be with me as much as possible, and that was easier when they divided and conquered. But I couldn’t forget the fight they’d had the night of the accident, and I knew these separate visits were less about having someone with me at all times and more about trying to avoid spending time with one another. Neither of them had brought up divorce in front of me again, but they weren’t exactly lovey-dovey, either.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Well, we’ve made some changes around the house. You know, for you. Your mother is putting some finishing touches on everything so it’s all ready.”

  Anxiety pumped through my veins. I’d had so much change lately, I wasn’t sure how much more I could handle. “What kind of changes?”

  He grinned. “You’ll see when you get home.”

  He was right. As soon as we pulled in the driveway, I noticed a ramp right there in our front yard, covering the three brick steps that led up to our front door.

  “Wheelchair accessible, just for you!” Dad said.

  I snorted when I saw the makeshift plywood ramp. “What’s the HOA going to say about this eyesore? Doesn’t do much for the curb appeal.”

  My dad sat on the board of our neighborhood’s homeowners’ association, and he was one of those guys who was obsessed with our house and yard. Last year, he’d launched a full-scale attack against Mr. Anderson across the street when he installed one of those custom fish-shaped mailboxes; Dad claimed it was an eyesore that was driving down our property value. I wondered if the Andersons would see this hideous homemade ramp as a chance to retaliate.

  Dad let out a humorless laugh. “Oh, don’t worry. I got it all cleared by the board.”

  Of course he did. I never should have doubted that he had all his bases covered when it came to the association.

  I was out of the car and into my chair much more smoothly this time, and I turned down Dad’s offer to push me up the ramp in favor of wheeling myself up without his assistance. The plywood ramp sagged under the weight of my chair, and Dad’s arms were outstretched, ready to catch me if the whole thing buckled. “I got it, Dad,” I said, pushing myself up the steep ramp.

  It was a struggle, but I made it. “I don’t know if that should go over the stairs,” I said at the top, panting and out of breath. “I feel like I’m pushing myself up at a ninety-degree angle.”

  “Noted,” Dad said. “One more thing I didn’t really think about. I can add that to the very lengthy list. We’ll get one built for you, how about that? Maybe inside the garage. That should be easier.” He swung the door open for me, and I pushed myself in. “We’re home!” Dad called as he followed me into the house.

  At the sound of Dad’s voice, Logan came bounding into the entryway.

  “Little Lo!” I said. “I missed you so much, doggie!”

  Logan stopped to sniff my chair. Once he decided it met his approval, he leaped up onto my lap, tail wagging, and licked my face like it was a giant pork chop.

  Dad lifted Logan from my lap and held on to him while he called again for my mom.

  “I’m in Kara’s room,” Mom called back. But her voice wasn’t coming from my room upstairs; it was coming from my dad’s office down the hall.

  “Okay, so don’t freak out,” Dad said. “But we obviously couldn’t install an elevator in the house. So we figured the most sensible thing to do was move your bedroom down here.”

  “You moved my room?” My mind traveled to my secret stash of sexy bras and underwear that were totally inappropriate for parents’ eyes, and the journal shoved between my bed and the wall, which was even more inappropriate. My parents had gone through my bedroom? They had touched everything? Nothing good could come of that.

  Without thinking, I pushed myself down the hall toward my dad’s office. But once I was out of the entryway, I was on the shaggy carpet of the hallway, and as soon as my wheels touched that carpet, pushing myself became much, much harder. “Argh,” I said. “This carpet.” I used all the force in my arms to push myself forward, and it worked, but it was slow going compared to the ease of the slick floor of the hospital and the tile of our entryway.

  “Thick carpet,” Dad said. “That’s going on the list, too. Sorry, kiddo.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Just give me—”

  “No problem,” Dad said. He came up behind me, dropped Logan into my lap, and pushed my chair into the room.

  I hadn’t been asking for help; I’d been asking him to give me a minute to do it on my own. But he was super quick to assume I needed his assistance. I was about to snap at him, tell him to leave me alone and let me do it, but we were in the office before I even had a chance.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That carpet is rough. Maybe we’ll get some of those plastic things they put under desk chairs. You know those plastic things?”

  He kept rambling on about the plastic things, but I was too distracted by the sight of my mom standing in the middle of my dad’s office, which was now my bedroom set up exactly as it had been upstairs. The office was smaller, and it was more rectangular instead of square, but aside from that, it was identical. Mom had even painted the walls the same bright pink and hung my dance posters in their same spots on the wall.

  My first reaction was a deep irritation that surged underneath my skin. She rifled through all my stuff without permission. She opened every drawer, touched every box, looked in every secret nook to get this room re-created exactly as it had been upstairs. Before getting in an accident that jacked up my spine and left me paralyzed, I would have said that this was my worst nightmare.

  But one look at Mom’s face told me to keep that irritation to myself. She didn’t look like herself at all. My tiny mom looked even smaller, curled into herself somehow. Shrunken. And even though her hair was styled and her face was made up, she still looked unkempt somehow. Worn down. Aged.

  So I bit my tongue and kept my irritation inside, under my skin. “Wow,” I said. That pretty much covered it.

  I rolled my chair over to Mom so I could hug her, but as I got close, she backed up a couple of paces. Turning toward my desk, her back to me, she said, “I tried to get everything exactly as it was. And don’t worry, I didn’t snoop or anything.” She opened the top to my computer, blinked absently at the screen, and shut it again. She was probably lying about the snooping, but just hearing her say it calmed my nerves.

  “I love it, Mom. Thank you.” Again, I pushed myself closer to her, and again, she moved away. This time toward the closet, where she opened the door and showed me where everything was, even though she’d taken care to put everything in the exact spot I’d chosen for it upstairs, only on a lower bar.

  I looked over at Dad to see if he noticed Mom scooting away from me, putting distance between us like my injury was contagious, but he had wandered out of the bedroom. He probably ran off to order a custom crane to lift me around the house.

  Mom explained where everything was in my room and told me things I needed t
o know to go back to school the next day, but she didn’t actually look at me, and every time I moved myself toward her, she shifted away.

  Eventually I gave up trying to break through to my mom. I sat still as she talked to me about my new bedroom, and I scratched Logan between his ears while he stretched himself out in my lap and licked my arm. It looked like my dog was the only one in this family who could manage to look at me.

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep. Logan was cuddled up next to me, right in the crook of my arm, and I stared up at the ceiling in the dark, trying not to think too hard about how school was going to go the next day. Did people know I was coming back tomorrow? How would they act toward me?

  And what about Curt? He hadn’t replied to a single one of my calls or texts. Every time I thought about how he’d completely abandoned me when I needed him the most, I got so angry, I felt like my skin was going to light on fire. But I had so much to be angry about that I found myself having to move on and focus my anger elsewhere. I knew I’d see him at school, though. I thought briefly about texting to let him know I was coming back, or texting one of our mutual friends to try to dig for information, but I decided against it. None of those friends had visited or called, and he was obviously avoiding me. If he didn’t know I was coming, I had the element of surprise working in my favor. I could finally get him alone and find out what’s been going on.

  I wanted a distraction from all these thoughts in my head. I was about to pick up my phone and watch some more videos of people doing awesome things in wheelchairs when the door to my bedroom squeaked open.

  “Dad?”

  “Oh, sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “It’s fine. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.” He shuffled over to my bed in the dark and lowered himself down on the edge of my bed. The disturbance woke Logan, who walked himself down to the edge of the bed, curled back up, and was snoring again within seconds.

  “Why not?”

  I could see him shrug in the dark. “Just thinking about you going to school tomorrow. You ready for this?”