“It was an accident,” I insisted.
He looked up—right at me. “I broke your back. You understand that, right? They told you? You didn’t want to go up in that plane with me. It was the last thing on earth you wanted to do, but I fucking forced you. You trusted me. And now—because of me—you will never, ever—”
Maybe for the first time ever with Chip, I didn’t see his next words coming: “—walk again.”
For a second, I thought I’d maybe heard him wrong.
Then, just like that, I knew I hadn’t.
It was like the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. My lungs seemed to flatten. I tried to take a breath, but I couldn’t make it work. All I could manage was tiny little flutters.
Chip sobered, reading my face, and peered in closer. “They haven’t told you yet?”
I felt dizzy, I still couldn’t catch my breath, and then I got that salty tingle you get in your mouth right before you throw up.
Chip took a step back. “Oh, my God! They didn’t tell you you’re paralyzed!”
Didn’t see “paralyzed” coming, either.
Next? I threw up. All over the floor, and the bedrail, and my hospital gown, though my mother’s nine-patch quilt from home was miraculously spared.
Right then, as if on cue, the door pushed open and my father walked in, carrying a box of French pastries over his head like a waiter’s tray and announcing, “We’ve got—” But he stopped short when he saw us, and then finished under his breath, “Croissants.”
Chip rounded on him. “Nobody’s told her?”
My dad shifted into action, leaning back out into the hallway—“Can we get some help in here?”—then tossing the pastry box on the side chair and leaning over the bed to check on me. I stayed draped over the railing in case I puked again. Plus, now I was afraid to move my back. Had leaning over hurt it? Had the heaving made things worse? Could I have accidentally just made myself more paralyzed?
My father grabbed a towel and reached around to wipe my face off.
Chip’s outrage seemed to exempt him from caretaking duties. He stayed safely across the room. “She’s paralyzed—and nobody told her?” Chip demanded of my dad again, slurring a little.
“Sounds like you just did,” my father said, tucking my hair back behind my ear.
“She has a right to know, doesn’t she?”
“Of course,” my dad said, his voice tightening, turning to face him. “But not like this. We were waiting for the right moment.”
“Like when?” Chip demanded. “Over Thanksgiving turkey? On Christmas morning?”
“You self-righteous little clown—”
My dad was a big, bearlike guy—a former marine—and Chip was more in the “wiry” category. Everyone knew my dad could crush Chip if he wanted to—and I suddenly understood that maybe that was exactly what Chip wanted.
“Dad!” I called. “He’s drunk. He’s been out all night drinking. Just take him home.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine to me, sweetheart.”
“Just get him out of here, Daddy.” I hadn’t called him “Daddy” in years. “Please.”
My dad let out a long sigh, and as he did, Nina bustled in with a fresh gown and new sheets. An orderly followed her with a mop cart and spray bleach for the floor.
I let Nina fuss over me, and get me changed, and reposition me in the bed. I watched the orderly mop, wondering if he’d notice the far splat in the corner. The room seemed to fill with a wispy, numbing fog. It was like the real world was too much, and so my brain was going to blur it out. There were noises, there was talking—I heard my dad and Chip muttering and hissing at each other—and the door opened and closed and opened and closed, but the moment seemed to break into puzzle pieces scattered across a table.
For a long time after Nina got me settled, I tried to hold very still, afraid to move and make things worse. When I finally lifted my head to look around, the only person still left—still stuck—in the room was me.
*
THAT FOG LASTED for a good while.
Never walk again. What did that even mean? How did they know? How could they be certain? Who were they to make predictions about the rest of my life? Wasn’t the human body full of mysteries and miracles? Could they just announce something like that about me and then leave me to live with it?
Of course they could. I’d broken my back, apparently. That was what happened to people who broke their backs. They spent the rest of their lives in wheelchairs. I’d watched a documentary about it last year—a team of invincible teenage boys who’d crashed their cars or their motorcycles or dived into shallow water only to spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs. But now they’d formed a championship wheelchair basketball team. Which might have been inspiring to think about, except that I’d always sucked at basketball.
Paralyzed. Trying to work that idea into my brain was like trying to suck a bowling ball up through a drinking straw.
Impossible.
Not possible.
And yet Chip accepted it. My dad hadn’t argued with him. It was apparently already an established fact about my life—one everybody knew but me. On some level, of course, I wasn’t surprised. I’d been contending with my dead, pendulous legs for more than a week now. But things heal. Things always heal. I’d never had any injury—and I’d had plenty—that didn’t mend itself eventually. Paralyzed. I couldn’t fathom it. How would I drive a car? How would I cook dinner? How would I take a shower? Go to the bathroom? Buy groceries? Go out with friends? Have a job? Be the boss of whatever I was supposed to be the boss of? My brain was short-circuiting. I could feel it throwing sparks and smoking.
I tried for calming breaths, but I accidentally hyperventilated instead.
That’s when the physical therapist arrived—while I was basically doing self-Lamaze.
He wore pale blue scrubs and sneakers, and he had short, clean-cut hair that spiked up some in the front. He walked in and said, “I’m Ian Moffat. Your physical therapist.”
Except it didn’t sound like words to me. Just a bunch of syllables.
He swiped his badge in the computer and looked at my chart a second, before he said, “So. You’re Margaret.”
But again. Just syllables.
When I didn’t answer, he waved a little and said, “Hello?”
That I understood.
“It’s time for your physical therapy,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“What what?”
“I can’t understand you,” I said, shaking my head a little, as if to shake water out of my ears.
“Nobody can understand me. I’m Scottish.”
Wow. That explained it. Yes, he certainly was. I thought my brain had shut down—but it wasn’t me, it was him. He was super Scottish. So Scottish he sounded like he was talking through a mouth full of pretzels.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Ready to go?”
I wasn’t. I wasn’t ready to go. I shook my head.
“Not ready to go?” He held that last o with his lips, and I was forced to notice his lower teeth were a little crooked, but in a good way.
I shook my head.
“Why not?” he asked, with no t on the end.
My drunk fiancé just told me I’ll never walk again. “It’s been a tough morning.”
“Lots of mornings are tough. We still have to do this.”
“No.”
“No what?” Later, I would decide that it wasn’t just the consonants that were exaggerated—it was the vowels, too.
“No,” I explained, “I can’t do this right now.”