She looked down at her watch. “I’ve only got a few more minutes.”
He asked if he could touch her face.
Yes.
He asked if he could touch her hair.
Yes.
He asked if he could kiss her.
Yes.
And then they were standing, hugging, kissing, and her back was up against the lockers. She smelled lemony and medicinal at once. He was hard, pulling at her skirt. Her nurse’s hat shifted to the back of her head and she reached up to make it right. She looked at her watch again. “Wait in the lobby until my shift ends,” she said. “Come back up here at nine o’clock. I’ll be waiting for you.”
• • •
There was an empty bed and Penny was holding his hand, leading him toward it. There was a comatose patient in the room, a boy with a shaved head and a perfect circle of black sutures forming a band around his skull. His name was Jack, Penny told him. He was two months shy of his eighteenth birthday. Jack had been riding a motorcycle without a helmet on his way to San Diego to see a girl. His brain had burst right through his skull.
“You can be on the 405 freeway one minute and here the next,” she said solemnly.
And then she was pulling the curtain closed.
And then she was stepping out of her white shoes and white uniform, unpinning her nurse’s hat and setting it on the nightstand.
And Martin was stepping toward her.
And then Martin was having good-bye sex with Penny in 6A, just four doors down from where Hannah Teller had spent most of her time in the hospital.
While he moved he could hear Jack’s breathing machine, the horrible suck and push of air. He was thinking about the boy, about catapulting into the air, popping from your bike like a piece of hot corn. He was thinking about Penny too, and how their good-bye sex was also their hello.
Hello
, he thought.
Hello, hello, hello.
• • •
“Is your sister really dead?” she said afterward.
“No,” he said.
“You can’t do what we just did and not tell the person true things,” she said.
Martin turned his head, looked at the wall, and said nothing.
“You can’t get naked with a person and not tell them the truth,” she said.
“People do it all the time,” he said softly.
“Yes, but not us, Martin—not people who feel like us.” She leaned back on the pillow. “What if I told you I already know?” she said.
“I’m going to New York.”
“Say it out loud, Martin.”
But he didn’t say it, and she put her arms around him, and he started crying, and Penny was kissing his face, his lips, and then she was climbing on top of him, demanding only that. “OK, be quiet then, don’t talk,” she told him. “You don’t have to say a word.”
HANNAH’S CASTS
were continuous—one after the other, year after year after year. Second grade into third into fourth into fifth, through the summer and through the fall—and here Hannah was in eighth grade and still wearing one. This was supposedly the last one, and it was the biggest one yet, a toe-to-groin, plaster from her toes’ second knuckles up to her pelvic bone.
She had signatures and drawings on the cast from her best friends, Rebecca and Megan, even from Rudy Evans, a boy who stuttered and whom she’d been arguing with about evolution since the sixth grade. Rudy had written across her knee in bold, black letters
God Made the World,
to which Hannah added an equally bold red question mark. Her favorite signature, from Pablo Parker, the guy she’d had a crush on since grade school, was accompanied by one of his abstract drawings. She’d spent time in her bedroom with her eyes fixed on Pablo’s lovely cursive and his sketch of an unrecognizable something. She’d run her finger along the rough surface, trying to figure it out.
I’m into abstract art,
was what he’d said when he’d leaned down in the quad to sign and draw.
The casts dried and settled and aged.
The skin inside the tunnel flaked and itched.
And while one was being removed, there were rolls of plaster smoking in the sink behind a doctor’s head.
Hannah had learned which casts offered partial mobility and which were the most confining. She knew which ones the kids at school were most likely to sign, knew how they’d line up excited with their colored pens and markers, and which ones they’d most certainly stay away from, like that one from long ago, the one she and her mother had to twist at night—that thing that was both cast and brace.
Hannah adapted. She didn’t hobble about slowly. There were days she raced home from school on those crutches with especially exciting news: the highest grade on a science project, a speaking part in the school play, or an invitation to the movies from the popular girls. She’d whiz past the neighborhood girls then, whose two legs worked, however leisurely, in unison—she must have been a blur of aluminum crutches and plaster and long dark hair. She liked to believe her speed was impressive.
Most casts came up to just below her knee—and one of them, a walking cast, was her favorite. In it, she was almost normal. With its rubber heel plastered to the bottom, she was able to lean her crutches against the wall and walk without them. She could ride a bike and carry her own schoolbooks.
Hannah had spent the years since the accident mostly in a cast and on crutches, but sometimes she was forced to wear a big metal brace attached to the most hideous orthopedic shoe. The shoe was heavy and awkward, a bright, shockingly white leather, and, of course, she had to wear its ugly twin on her perfectly functional right foot. Hannah did her best to hide the silver clamps that came down the side of her leg with too-long pants or bell-bottom jeans, which only improved the likelihood of tripping, stumbling to the floor, and exposing everything: the horrible vice-like contraption forming huge metal parentheses around her skinny ankle and calf, the clunky unfashionable oxford.
At least when she was wearing a cast, she could wear whatever one shoe she wanted to wear. She could also pretend to new kids and strangers that her leg was merely broken—something that happened to a lot of kids and implied you were a risk-taker, a rebel, propelling yourself out of a swing in midflight or climbing some fence you had no business climbing.
If a kid at school broke a limb, he or she seemed to feel an instant affinity with Hannah. Their newfound immobility made them curious, nudged them toward her, as if she had every answer. It signaled a time to make new, similarly immobile friends, however temporarily. In fifth grade, a girl in a short cast that barely covered her ankle sat down next to Hannah at lunch for the very first time.
“Mine comes off in six weeks,” Kelly chirped. She opened her bright pink lunch pail and took out a sandwich.
“You’re lucky,” Hannah’s pal Rebecca said.
But Kelly didn’t seem interested in Rebecca or Megan either. “Want my apple?” Kelly said, eyes fixed directly on Hannah.
And for six weeks, Kelly offered Hannah her fruit. A banana. A bag of Bing cherries. And, once, two of the tiniest, sweetest tangerines Hannah had ever tasted. Kelly made Hannah’s group of three into a group of four, but when that ankle cast came off, Kelly carried her tray of Tater Tots and a corn dog right past the three girls, ate her own fruit, and didn’t look back.
A couple years ago, Ian Evans, the religious boy who stuttered, showed up to school with his arm in a sling, complaining about his b-b-bike’s shitty brakes. Ian changed desks, settling in next to Hannah in science class, and asked her to be on his d-d-dissection team. They worked for several days on a frog, and because of Ian’s broken arm, Hannah did the dirty work. She sliced the frog’s belly and pinned his slippery skin, marveling at the spleen, the liver, the tiny set of gray kidneys.
During Nutrition Break, Rebecca and Megan would head for the swings while Hannah and Ian sat on a bench in the quad, eating cookies and drinking juice. They talked about everything: movies, how much Ian loved ch-church, how kids didn’t judge him there. They talked about their parents’ divorces, what it felt like to wear a cast and what it felt like to have one put on, how warm plaster was when it was first applied. It was easy for her to pretend he didn’t stutter, to try to minimize his discomfort. She’d watch his lips when the words came easily, but when they started to bubble and struggle out of his mouth, she’d look away, patiently, nodding
I’m listening, I’m listening
.
What effort,
she thought.
It’s like me getting from here to there.
It’s like walking.
It was hard, admitting how much she wanted it, and when Hannah thought of
walking,
it wasn’t a verb, but a noun, something she could hold in her hand like a book or clock. And when she imagined herself doing so, she wasn’t limping. In her dreams, her gait was perfect, balanced, and lovely to behold.
She’d been through a series of doctors, each one enthusiastically welcoming her and her mother into his office, full of new ideas, only to shake his head in frustration a few months later and admit he didn’t know what to do with her. It was nerve and muscle damage that even the best of them didn’t seem to recognize, so she was shuffled from one bespectacled man with plaques on his wall—with a cupboard full of rolls of plaster, with a whirring saw in his hand—to another. Always her mother by her side, whispering,
Hannah, it’s a new day. You’re the one, Doctor. I can feel it.
I’ll do my best, Mrs. Teller,
he’d say.
Call me Nina,
she’d say, smiling, coy, and it seemed to Hannah from where she sat on the examination table, vulnerable and often pissed off at the pure repetition of these visits, that it was important to her mother that the doctor find her attractive. He could be old and jowly, bald and doughy, he could have had more hair sprouting from his nose and ears than from his head, as was often the case, and still her mother would light up when she saw that white jacket and swinging stethoscope. She’d lean in, nodding—eyes big, lashes long and black with mascara—and listen intently to every word he said.
Hannah’s father had left her mother for someone younger, blonder, and more athletic, and even now, years later and remarried, her mom continued to need so much male confirmation. What magnified Hannah’s annoyance was how easy it was to contrast her mother’s beauty—her smooth skin and good bone structure, her figure, those firm and shapely legs—to the mess in front of them: Hannah’s damaged leg, how skinny it was without muscle, atrophied and pale, how the toes she could barely move had curled into claws.
After each round of casts or braces or surgeries or a combination of the three, a doctor would prop her up and ask her to walk across the room. And she’d fail, the beginning of her own somersault, left foot giving way.
I’m out of ideas,
this one said, and sent her to that one, his colleague or a doctor whose reputation preceded him or someone he’d met at a party who’d won prestigious awards and specialized in children’s orthopedics.
Initially a cast was bright white, as clean with possibility as a sheet of paper, and the doctor’s face was full of challenge and determination, an excitement that was contagious. Her mother’s face held hope, her eyes lit up, and she’d squeeze Hannah’s shoulder, offering a silent thanks to the God they no longer had time for.
At the end, though, the cast was gray and dirty, the cotton fraying where it opened at her toes. After it was removed, it was a thing cracked in half, sitting beside Hannah on the examination table, open like a split hardboiled egg. Each doctor reacted with the same resignation and visible disappointment when faced so bluntly with what he could not fix: a girl clinging to the wall, a girl who needed so much coaxing, a girl falling to the floor, a girl finally refusing to even try.
Hannah’s last surgeon, Dr. Russo, had been optimistic and had gone so far as to make promises. “I’m not saying you won’t limp—you will, mostly when you’re tired, though. But you’ll walk. I’ve had patients with even more nerve damage walk right out of here,” he’d said. It was all so simple, putting one foot in front of the other, and making it across the street. It was like breathing or sleeping, something most people didn’t think about.
It was all she wanted.
Girls her age wanted other things.
Those first years, they wanted to skip and play hopscotch and swim at the community pool. They wanted bikes with banana seats, with colorful fringe hanging from the handlebars. The girls wanted recess, tetherball and tag, wanted boys to chase and tease and pinch, and even in skirts, they’d climb the monkey bars. They’d swing from fat silver hoops, transported, showing off their cotton panties.
Now her peers’ steps carried them through malls, to football games and skating rinks. They sauntered in groups, so many lean legs working together, to parties and dances, to Carnation Park East, where the boys had become guys with faint mustaches and cracking voices, guys who waited with cigarettes and joints, with brown bags of fruity wine, purple enough to stain the girls’ teeth.
Last week, her crush Pablo Parker broke his leg during football practice and the whole school was abuzz. A complex fracture, they said. He might not play for a year or more. Maybe he’d never play again. Today, wearing his own toe-to-groin, Pablo joined Hannah on the bleachers, where she was doing her math homework and waiting for Megan to finish up sixth-period PE. She looked up from her notebook and watched Pablo dramatically maneuvering, getting situated, and finally sitting down with a cranky huff. His cast was on his right leg and hers was on her left, so their two free thighs were just inches apart. She tried not to think about it. He gestured with his chin, saying, “This fucking thing will be gone in three months. Better be off by Christmas break. I’ll die, man. I can’t surf. I can’t take a fucking shower.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“My mom says I have to take a bath. Guys don’t take baths,” he said.
“A bath isn’t so bad. I take baths,” she told him, immediately embarrassed. “I mean, I have to. You know.”