I could imagine one of the other trainers saying that in a playful tone, but Ian was about as playful as roadkill. He was silent, and tense, and now—since seeing that guy Myles—radiating hostility. I could sense it wasn’t meant for me, but I was still collateral damage. The rancor fumed from his body—you could see it in his face and his gait and the way he held himself as stiff as an action figure—and I was just unfortunate enough to be stuck with him.
Just as I had that thought, Rob, the trainer with the man-bun, let out a whoop of a cheer over something amazing and inspiring his patient had just done. Then everybody in the room stopped to applaud.
Except Ian.
“Let’s move,” he said, urging me toward the mat.
I moved, and I got the armrest down, and I eventually dragged myself across the board onto the mat, but Ian’s cranky, impatient, irritated nonhelp did not make things easier. Or faster.
By the time I made it, I was panting.
Before I’d caught my breath, Ian leaned over me and laid me back on the mat, careful of my burns, to start a whole series of exercises to take stock of my starting place—what I could and couldn’t do right now. He did this without explaining first, and for a second I thought he was picking me up. I leaned forward just as he did and managed to smush my face into the corner between his neck and his collarbones. Just for a second, before I pulled back, I registered his scratchy, unshaven neck, firm with muscles, and the salty, linen-y smell of him.
It could have been a funny, slightly embarrassing moment, one we could laugh about—but Ian decided to make it humiliating instead. When I looked up, he seemed super annoyed. “Down,” he said, pointing at the mat, as if he’d already explained this to me a hundred times.
I felt a sting of embarrassment. “Right,” I said.
With that, we took stock of me: Could I sit up on my own? (Barely. With a lot of grunting.) Could I roll over? (Yes. Clumsily, but yes.) Could I lie on my back and lift my knees? (Yes, actually. But my thighs were weak and trembled like earthquakes.) Could I sit on the edge and straighten my leg out? (No. Not even close.) Could I lie on my stomach and lift my feet behind me? (About halfway.) Could I point, wiggle, or flex my toes? (No, no, and no.) By the end, we had the general idea. Everything above the knees seemed to work—though not always well. Below the knees was a different story.
The whole process seemed to go on for hours, and it left me breathless and shaky. I had known that my legs were not exactly working, but breaking it down into specifics—and by “specifics,” I mean breaking the function of my legs and feet down by each specific muscle—made it more real. In a way, I didn’t really want to know what I could or couldn’t do. Observing this new, broken version of my body only seemed to give it a validity it didn’t deserve.
But if Ian was aware of my unhappiness, he didn’t seem to care much. He drove us on and on, testing everything: ankles, toes, thighs, hip flexors. He did pressure tests all up and down my legs, poking me with a little pin, and I saw him write down the word “spotty” in his chart over and over.
He was keeping a list of all the muscles that didn’t work. It was far longer than I’d expected, but, to be fair, just the list of muscles in the legs was far longer than I’d expected. Ian’s “not working” list included several leg muscles that had Latin names starting with “biceps,” which seemed needlessly confusing, since “biceps” made them sound like arm muscles, and my arms were fine. Ian totally ignored me and made his list anyway, which, in the end, looked like this:
biceps femoris
biceps semitendinosus
biceps semimembranosus
tibialis—anterior and posterior
peroneus longus
gastrocnemius
soleus
flexor digitorum longus
I wondered if I should ask what some of those muscles were, but as the list grew longer, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
It was physically exhausting, and it was emotionally grueling, but I really think the worst part of the whole experience was, of all things, the not talking.
I’m a talker from a long line of talkers. My mom might be talking to you about the curtains and who should be sent to Guantánamo for choosing them, but she’s talking to you. My dad might be placating my mom, but he’s doing it with words. I don’t think I have ever once, in my entire life, spent that much time one-on-one with another human being and spoken as few words as I did with Ian. Over the entire afternoon, you probably couldn’t make one full sentence out of the words we exchanged.
It bothered me. Viscerally.
But I was too tired, demoralized, shell-shocked, discouraged, and numb to do anything about it. It was Ian’s job to work the conversation, dammit. All the other trainers—and I had plenty of time to take stock—were doing the vast majority of the conversational grunt work, giving their patients the gift of conversational pleasure without the usual work, and leaving the patients free to concentrate on their tasks.
With Ian, I got the opposite of conversational pleasure. I got the cringe of uncomfortable silence. Plus the comparative disappointment of knowing I had the worst trainer in the room.
Silent, surly, and relentless. We didn’t finish our session until all the other perky people were long gone and my entire body felt like Jell-O. I thought for sure Ian would help me back into the chair at the end, but he just slapped the board down and turned his gaze back to the window.
I gave a long sigh as I looked at it.
I didn’t ask for help, because I knew I wouldn’t get it.
I had to readjust my catheter tube, which had come untaped, and then I started scooting my butt sideways across the board.
But I was more exhausted than I realized, because just before I reached the chair, as I shifted my weight onto my lead arm, my elbow gave way and I went pitching forward.
I should have hit the floor, but almost as soon as I realized I was falling, Ian caught me. I would have bet you a hundred dollars that his entire focus had been out the gym window, but he must have been using his peripheral vision, because I was caught by his steady arms and settled in my chair before I even fully got what was happening.
“Thank you,” I said, before I remembered that he was kind of the reason I’d fallen in the first place.
Before he stood back up, he checked my expression, meeting my eyes for the first time. “I’ve tired you out,” he said.
“In more ways than one.” I noticed his eyes were blue. Dark blue—almost navy.
“You worked hard today.”
As mad as I was, it felt weirdly nice to have that acknowledged. And you, I thought, stared out the window.
He studied my face another second, and then he stood up and said, “Time to get you back to your room.” I’d seen the other PTs pushing their clients’ chairs—especially the elderly and the tired—at the ends of their workouts, and I just assumed that Ian would do the same.
Wrong. Of course.
He and his perfect butt just strolled off toward the exit, and I had no choice but to scramble after him in my chair.
At the door, Ian stopped at the patient whiteboard. Under my name was an empty box. Other patients’ boxes had stars and smileys and hearts in them, but Ian marked mine with a solemn black X.
Which was about how I felt.
Nine
BACK AT THE room, a nurse I’d never seen before scolded us. “Ian, she was supposed to be back forty-five minutes ago.”
I was? I narrowed my eyes at Ian, but he pretended to ignore me.
“She didn’t want to quit,” he said. “She’s a machine.”
“I need her now.”
“She’s all yours.”
Just then, the new cell phone my mother had brought me rang. I’d never heard its ringtone—so loud and screechy—and it startled all of us. Ian picked it up off the side table and handed it to me.
“Hello?” I said.
A guy’s voice. “Margaret Jacobsen?”
“Yes?”
“Neil Putnam from HR at Simtex.”
My new job! Oh, God—I had forgotten all about it. Should I explain what happened? Did they already know? That interview felt like a hundred years ago in somebody else’s life.