Chapter 10 #2
“Anyway, I kind of wanted to, ah…” She bites her lip. “Feel free to tell me to fuck off, but the thing is, you said you have a brain injury.”
I feel heat rising into my cheeks. “You want to know if I’m brain damaged?”
“Oh my god, no. I mean…I know how TBIs work. Just…” She lets out a small breath.
“I’m getting my degree in occupational therapy, and I want to work with people who’ve dealt with neurological issues from injuries.
You said you had something like that, and you have the cane, so I figure you’ve been through it. ”
I almost laugh. Been through it is one way to put it. It doesn’t come close to summing it all up, but it’s fair enough. I’m not used to genuine people like her though, so I’m not quite sure what to do with her statement.
“What do you want to know?”
She takes a long sip from her mug, then licks her lips and says, “How did it happen?”
I recoil. I don’t mean to. I was the one who invited the question, but it always affects me whenever people ask me outright.
Only, there’s a difference between the way she sounds when she asks and when other people want to know out of sheer morbid curiosity.
“Hey, if you don’t want to talk about it—” she starts.
“I fell off a cliff,” I blurt out, and she falls back in her chair with wide eyes. “Sorry,” I add quickly. I never mean to be so abrupt, but the answer always tends to come out that way.
“No, it’s fine.” Her voice is a little breathy. “That must have been horrible.”
“It wasn’t great. My husband and I were hiking, and our guide decided to take a scenic route that wasn’t on the map.” I swallow thickly. The memory strikes an old nerve—an echo of how I felt during the hike because it had seemed wrong, and I’d been scared.
But Liam had been so unbothered, and the guide had given me such a look of disdain that I felt pathetic, shut my mouth, and went along with it. God, how different life might be right now if I’d listened to my gut.
I take a small, cleansing breath before I go on.
“The ground was unstable, and he had us go first. I should have known that was wrong, but my husband thought it was fine, so I followed along. Liam went ahead of me, and the ground gave way. I tried to grab him, but I slipped, and we both tumbled over the edge.”
“Oh my god,” she whispered.
I shrug. It’s such a weird gesture in this moment, but it’s all I’ve got. “My head got bashed open pretty bad on some of the rocks. Liam wasn’t so lucky.”
West swallows thickly. “Did he—”
“Died on impact.” I’m well aware how flat my tone is, but I can’t help it.
It’s how I’ve dealt with losing him, and now it’s more habit than anything.
“I guess that was a blessing for him. I don’t remember much, but I was awake for the hour and a half it took for them to get a rescue crew out there, and I’ll never forget the pain.
I was put into a coma in the hospital so I could heal properly, and I woke up a week later, once the swelling in my brain had gone down. ”
“Did you know what was wrong with you?”
I grimace. “Not at first. I mean…I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t walk, the right side of my body didn’t move as easily as the left.
But my brain couldn’t seem to understand that I was injured, and it didn’t register that Liam had died for a long time.
I kept thinking if it was all a bad dream, but I couldn’t seem to wake up. ”
West stares at me for a moment. “How long was it like that?”
“Months,” I answer with a shrug. “I started to regain a lot of my cognizance in the first few weeks after I was taken off the sedatives, but it took a lot longer for me to be able to communicate.”
It’s odd, but in this moment, I realize talking about this doesn’t hurt the way it used to. I tend to avoid this conversation like the plague, but it doesn’t ache the same as when I first moved here. It’s like an old, tender bruise.
“Did you do OT and all that stuff?”
I sit back and fold my arms over my chest as I remember my occupational therapy sessions—the frustration and the anger that came with it because it didn’t fix what was wrong with me.
In the beginning, it almost made it feel like the sole purpose of those sessions was to drive home all the things I could no longer do.
I understand them better now, but god, that pain hurts worse than remembering how I got there.
“I, ah…I had a very enthusiastic occupational therapist when I was in the rehab center. He was overly fixated on me setting goals to meet, and all I wanted was to rot under a blanket because my husband was dead and I couldn’t read my own name on a piece of paper anymore.”
She winces. “Yikes.”
I laugh. “Yeah. He meant well, but I think he was afraid he was going to have to talk about the stuff he couldn’t fix, you know?
And I was stubborn about it, so we didn’t make as much progress as I probably should have.
Eventually, they released me, and my brother took me in.
I started outpatient rehab, and it was easier after that. ”
West leans forward. “I have another question, but it might seem insensitive after you basically just poured your heart out about losing your husband and all the pain you went through.”
Leaning my elbows on the table, I nod at her. “Go on.”
“Would you tell me to do this job, or should I pick literally anything else? Because I hadn’t considered I’d have patients like you who were dealing with overwhelming loss.
I kind of pictured all that shit from the movies, you know?
” She waves her hand in the air. “Like a montage of parallel bars, struggling to put one foot in front of the other, and each session gets better and better until there’s a smash-cut to them running a marathon.
I get that’s unrealistic, but…I assumed that’s what most of the job would be like. ”
I grin. I like that she’s honest. “Well, I guess I need to know what’s motivating you to do this before I can give you an answer.”
West pales for a second, and then color rushes into her cheeks.
“My dad hurt someone. Well, he hurt a lot of people, but when I was younger, he hurt someone really badly, and I visited him two years later, after my dad got sentenced and went to prison. I was in a foster home at the time and I snuck out after I googled him and found out he was still in town.”
That was not what I expected her to say. “Oh.”
“My dad was a bad person. A really bad person. He hurt my brother a lot, and my mom.”
I can tell from her tone she doesn’t want to talk about her family. “Was the man angry at you? The one who got hurt?”
West’s eyes widen a bit, and she shakes her head.
“At first, yeah. He didn’t really want to see me.
He definitely didn’t want my apologies,” she said, her voice quiet.
There’s a loud crash, which makes us both jump, and she leans back to look toward the front counter before turning her attention back to me.
“I was only thirteen at the time so I was also probably very annoying.”
I snort. “I’m sure you weren’t that bad.”
“Trust me, I was.”
With a small smile, I gesture for her to go on.
She shrugs. “Anyway, things got complicated for a while after that, but right before I turned seventeen, my mom got sober and we got to come home. I started looking for him again, but it wasn’t until I started college that we ran into each other.
He was working at the library and he recognized me before I recognized him. ”
My eyes widen. “Oh. That’s…”
She flushes. “Maybe fate? We started talking and he was a lot less angry now that he was several years into his recovery. He talked to me about his rehab, and everything he went through. Then one thing led to another…”
I lean back in my chair. “And?”
“And he proposed to me last week.”
That was the wrong moment to sip on my latte. I choke and have to pound on my chest. That happens too often since my injury, especially when I’m surprised, and the corners of my vision go white for a second as I clear my lungs.
“Sorry,” West gasps. “Shit, I didn’t mean to kill you.”
I wave her off and wheeze, “No. Not your fault. It’s just a thing that happens.” I cough several times, then swipe my hand over my teary eyes. “I was not expecting you to say that.”
She laughs and glances away. “Yeah. I know it’s probably weird as fuck.
My mom can’t really look him in the face, but mostly because she blames herself for what my dad did.
I don’t think my brother likes him very much either, but I don’t care.
He’s my person and the fact that he wants to love me forever in spite of where I came from means something. ”