The First Stone (13 page)

“One more thing.”

He turned to see Colville standing in the open kitchen doorway.

“The other part of being accountable is paying for your mistakes. The money to fix that panel you just broke comes out of your own pocket.”

“Fuck you!” Reef said, but Colville had already gone back inside. Reef's face twisted and he ground his teeth, felt a sudden coppery taste in his mouth as he bit the inside of his cheek. He raised his hand to his lips, brought it away red, made fists that clenched and unclenched uselessly there in the back yard.

No one could have prepared Leeza for the agony she experienced that first day. Lying in bed focusing on the top left sprinkler and waiting for her next shot of morphine was one thing. Being forced to get out of that bed was another entirely. She'd been astonished when Val had told her she'd be going down to the fourth floor to meet “the team.”

“What team?” Leeza asked. The morphine in her system made her tongue thick and lethargic and she had to concentrate to form her words.

“The specialists assigned to assist in your recovery. Along with Carly and me, there's your doctor, an occupational therapist, a vocational counselor and a social worker.”

“Why so many?” Leeza couldn't have cared less if there'd been two hundred people assigned to her. She was just stalling, hoping Carly would return to explain that clearly a mistake had been made, that there was no way she could be expected to get out of that bed, let alone into a wheelchair. She suddenly realized why Val had asked her mother to leave. Now Carly was Leeza's only hope.

But when the nurse entered the room moments later, it was only to assist Val in getting her patient up.

“Each person on the team has a different function. You've only heard mine,” Val explained, slowly raising the head of Leeza's bed to its maximum incline. The gradual shift in Leeza's center of gravity put new weight on different areas of her body, the flesh around her pin-sites tugging at the fixators and producing brand-new degrees of pain.

“I can't—” Leeza gasped, “—do this!” Even with the morphine in her system, the spasms that accompanied this upright position were unbearable.

“Yes, you can, Leeza.”

It took Leeza a moment to realize it was Brett who had said this. She hadn't even been aware her roommate was still in the room. “No! I can't!” she hissed. Her body was trembling uncontrollably, and for a moment she was sure she'd split right down the middle and whatever wasn't pinned or stapled or riveted together would spill out onto the bed. “Make them stop!”

“Leeza,” said Brett, “everybody goes through this. I did, too. It's the worst part. But you have to do it.”

“No! I don't!” Leeza panted as she spoke, the words coming in short puffs through clenched teeth. “If they need to see me, make them come here!”

“Leeza, take a minute and breathe slowly.” Val'svoice was low and even, a soothing contrast to the ratcheting in Leeza's chest. “I want you to listen to me. Focus on the sound of my voice.”

Tears slid down Leeza's face. Ashamed, she tried to turn away, but this movement only produced new spasms, and she choked back sobs.

“Leeza, honey,” said Val, “you
can
do this. Just focus on my voice. I want you to picture a place in your head.”

Leeza sobbed again. “I
can't!”

Val gently took Leeza's hand and put herself directly in the girl's line of vision. “We're going to do something called imaging. It'll help. Picture a safe place. It can be real or one you imagine. It's a place you can go to in your head when the pain gets too great.”

Leeza gulped, ground her teeth, tried to focus.

“Think of somewhere you went when you were younger that made you feel good, made you feel happy. Or picture a place you've always dreamed of going, a place where everything is warm and soft and soothing.”

Leeza again tried to focus, tried to empty her head and think of places she had been or wanted to go. Nothing. Another wave of pain surged through her, this one a breaker complete with jagged whitecap, and she cried out.

“Keep trying,” Val said. “It'll come.” She continued to speak, her tone low and soothing as she urged Leeza to concentrate, to open her mind and allow the images to form.

Leeza let the waves of Val's words wash over her and, in doing this, she remembered a place from her early childhood, a place where she and Ellen had gone with their mother one summer on Nova Scotia's Northumberland Shore. It was the summer of their parents' divorce, and their mother had taken the girls away to give their father time to pack and move out. Diane had rented a cottage at Pictou Lodge, and, soon after they'd unpacked, she'd driven west along the coast looking for a place where the girls could swim. By accident, she'd stumbled on Skinner's Cove, a tiny fishing community that wrapped around a secluded harbor, a sea-grayed wharf separating half a dozen boats on one side from a deserted stretch of sand on the other.

Diane had parked the car and urged the girls out, and they'd trudged after her, listlessly carrying the blanket, water toys and picnic basket over the dune and down to the sea. The previous weeks had been difficult for the girls, the first time they'd come to understand that nothing was forever. They hadn't wanted this trip, had wanted only to stay home, to hold on to whatever fragile permanence they could still find there.

Diane had nearly had to drag them into the water, but once in, all three had delighted in its bath-like temperature. Accustomed to the icy waters of the beaches near Halifax, they later learned that the water of the shallower Northumberland Strait was easily warmedby the sun-heated sand over which it ebbed and flowed. They'd reveled in being able to walk out dozens of yards and still stand only waist-deep in the water. Diane had brought them back to that tiny cove every day of their stay—it was as though the warm waves had a healing effect on all three of them, caressing, rocking, lifting them out of themselves and teaching them how to smile again.

It was the water of Skinner's Cove that Leeza pictured now, imagined herself and Ellen floating in, suspended weightless above the warm sand. Gulls floated lazily above them, their cries distant and muted, much like the pain that ebbed from Leeza now.

“When you think you're ready,” Val said softly, “let me know.”

A minute passed, then another. Leeza knew she would never be ready, never wanted to leave the moment she'd made in her head, but finally she whispered, “Okay.”

Carly positioned a piece of plywood between Leeza's body and a wheelchair by the bed. Varnished to a high gloss, the wood was nearly frictionless as the nurse and physiotherapist eased her down the board and into the chair. The teenager gasped and clenched her teeth during the procedure, but she managed to keep from crying out, focusing instead on the warmth of the water and the sand in her mind. When she was at last sitting in the chair, she glanced up and smiled. It was a fleeting expression, but Val and Carly couldsee the triumph behind it. So could Brett, who cheered loudly from across the room. “You
go
, girl!” Brett put her fingers between her lips and blew, producing a shrill whistle that echoed down the hallway beyond their room. “You'll be racin' with us wheelers in no time!”

Carly raised her eyes heavenward. “Oh, Lord,” she sighed, “what have we done now?”

This time, Leeza's smile lasted longer, and she gave Brett a feeble thumbs-up.

“All set?” Val asked her.

“Never better,” she lied.

The rest of the day was no less arduous, and pain was the constant companion who shared Leeza's wheelchair.

The meeting with the specialists was more a chance for Leeza to meet them than an opportunity for any formal assessment of her condition. That would take place in the days ahead as they monitored her progress and responded to her needs, both physical and emotional. Their names were a blur of syllables, and the only one she remembered that morning was the physician assigned to her case. His last name was at least a dozen letters long—Dandenshefsky or Danderhelsky (and quite possibly something entirely different)—but he'd apparently taken pity on patients and staff and now told everyone to call him Dr. Dan.

He began by asking Leeza if she had any questions. There were so many that the words had tumbled over each other in her mind, the throb of each pin-site making coherent speech a challenge. But she managed to make her mouth form the one question that was her most immediate concern: “How … how long will I have the catheter?”

“Hopefully,” explained the doctor, “not more than a month. Six weeks at the most, depending on how your muscles spring back. Trust me, I don't want you to have it any longer than you do. There's always risk of infection with a catheter, and an infection would slow the healing process.”

And it would be quite a process. The team members clarified their roles in Leeza's treatment, giving her specific details so she would know what she could expect of each in the weeks ahead. At times, Leeza was sure they had her mixed up with someone else, someone who could actually
do
the things they described. Besides the several kinds of physiotherapies she would undergo daily, she would eventually cook some simple meals, do her own laundry and take part in a variety of activities designed to reacquaint patients with life in the outside world. They seemed oblivious to the fact that, at that very moment. Leeza wanted nothing more than two minutes without a buzzsaw ripping at every nerve.

Surprisingly, the team had some good news for her.

Initially, the group had been worried that Leeza might experience embolisms, obstructions of blood vessels caused by clots not uncommon after a bad fracture. Fortunately, though, she had experienced no shortness of breath associated with pain, which was the telltale sign of embolismic distress, and because of the length of time that had passed since the accident, Dr. Dan felt it unlikely that she would. In addition, her age was in her favor. He explained that, because teenagers had greater energy and more rapid healing processes, they recovered much faster than older patients. According to the physician, while someone her mother's age or older might take five or six months to heal, Leeza could—depending on her commitment to her rehabilitation—expect to reduce that time to three months. Of course, that would be followed by at least six weeks of outpatient therapy, but she would be home then and able to begin resuming normal activities.

When the meeting ended an hour and a half later, Leeza's body was no longer at the mercy of the buzzsaw. She
was
the buzzsaw, every muscle part of the mechanism that churned and roared in her head. With her one good hand, she brushed at tears that formed in the corners of her eyes, ashamed of her weakness yet unable to make the tears stop.

Val saw her tears, produced a tissue and murmured that it was probably time for Leeza to rest.

Leeza smiled gratefully, but the tears didn't stop until she was again lying in her bed, her second morphine shot of the day cradling her, lifting her, carrying her toward the sand and waves of Skinner's Cove.

“We've increased your dosage,” Carly explained when Leeza awoke shortly after noon.

Leeza's head felt fuzzy, and her tongue was, if possible, even thicker than it had been that morning, but the pain was not as insistent. She could still feel it waiting in the background, circling like some long-toothed creature ready to pounce, but each time the creature caught her in its mouth, its teeth slid harmlessly over her. She smiled. “Mmm,” she said.

“It takes the doctors a while to find each patient's baseline. Everyone's different. But you should be more comfortable now.”

“Mmm,” Leeza said again. She sensed the creature's annoyance. Taunted it.
Bite me
, she told it, then smiled at her unintentional pun.

“Lunch came while you were asleep,” said Carly. She pointed to the tray in front of her, and Leeza was suddenly aware of her hunger.

“But don't be gettin' used to those meals on wheels,” came Brett's voice from the other side of the room. “You only get a few more days of the invalid treatment, you know. By the end of next week you'll beeating with the rest of us in the lounge down the hall.” She smiled. “Everyone's looking forward to meeting you.”

“Mmm … mmeet me?” she asked.

“Yeah, it's quite a group we got here.” She began listing the other patients on the floor, but Leeza wasn't listening to the names, injuries and character sketches that Brett reeled off. For the first time, she was thinking about what it would be like to meet people now. In her present condition. She suddenly thought about all the times she'd told people in the past that she felt “like a wreck.” She'd been wrong. She'd really had no idea what a wreck felt like. Or looked like.

But she did now.

She ignored the food Carly uncovered, her appetite suddenly gone.

“So, I hear you had quite a day,” said Leeza's mother.

Quite a day
. Three words. Words Leeza had often used herself when she'd visited Ellen and, later, the kids at the Children's Hospital. The kind of meaningless comment you make when you really have no idea what someone has been through. Quite a day, indeed.