Chapter 9 RONAN
Ronan
Another week, and the shoulder’s stopped fighting me.
The leg still complains. But it gives now—I push on it and it pushes back.
I’ve spent every morning leaning on it to find out how hard, every set past the count, while the house still sleeps.
The therapist’s pages are suggestions, and I’m done taking suggestions from a man who isn’t in the room.
Nine days of making the leg remember its job.
Today I get another shot, and this time the shoulder’s going to hold.
I hear the knock before the door opens.
“Morning.”
I glance up from the financial report Frank sent last night, the one I shouldn’t be reading and have read twice. She’s already rolling the vitals cart toward me, reaching for the cuff.
“Trying to ruin my morning before coffee?”
“Routine builds character.”
“I already have character.”
“Mm.”
I hate that sound. It’s the sound of a woman keeping score and not telling me the total.
She wraps the cuff around my good arm and takes the reading, two fingers at my wrist, and makes a note on the tablet. Then she straightens, and there’s something different in her face this morning. Lighter. She looks pleased with herself, and I don’t trust it for a second.
“What?”
A smile tugs at one corner of her mouth.
“I think you’re ready.”
I set my own tablet down.
“I’ve been ready for a week. You’re the one who keeps saying no.”
“No.” She meets my eyes, calm and certain. “You’ve thought you were ready. Today I actually agree.”
I’ve lost this argument every day for a week. I’m not going to talk her out of it now.
Then she rolls the wheelchair in from the hall.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s temporary.”
“It’s a chair.”
“It’s freedom.” She parks it beside the bed and sets the brake with her foot. “But that’s after. First you stand up and walk for me. Three steps. Then we talk about wheels.”
“I’m not ninety.”
“Good.” She unhooks the gait belt from the back of the chair. “Then this should be easy.”
She belts me and steps in close on my left. My good side. She slides under my arm until my forearm comes down across her shoulders, gets her hand fisted in the belt at my back, and sets herself. All of her against a man with ten inches and over a hundred pounds on her.
“Good leg first,” she says. “I’ve got the belt. Push when you’re ready.”
Right. I’ve got a leg to prove.
I push.
And I’m up. On my feet, in my own room, the right leg taking its share in a long burning line of complaint—and this time it holds. No lurch. No floor coming up to meet me. Seven weeks ago I couldn’t get off this mattress, and this morning I’m standing, and the leg is mine again. The shoulder holds.
She holds.
“Step,” I tell her.
“Slow.”
I don’t go slow. I take the step.
“Too fast, Ronan—”
I take the next one. The leg’s lit to the hip and burning, and it stays under me, and I keep going, because I’ve spent a long time losing to my own body and I’m winning this morning. Three steps is what she gave me. Three steps is an insult.
“Weight through the right, not the—”
“I’ve got it.”
I take a fourth, and a fifth, the burn climbing the whole right side, and I don’t stop, because the leg can complain all it wants as long as it does what I tell it.
“That’s five. We said three.” She’s moving with me anyway, her hand fisted in the belt, because the only thing worse than letting me do this is letting go while I do it. “Ronan. Three.”
Six. Then I turn us, slow, and walk it back.
I make it to the bed under my own power and stand there a second longer than I have to, just to prove I can.
I look down at her, and a smirk pulls at my mouth.
“That was twelve,” I say.
She is not impressed.
“That was twelve steps you’re going to feel tonight, and tomorrow, and probably the day after,” she says. “You ignored every word I said.”
“And I’m still standing.”
“For now,” she says, and steps in to unhook the belt, which puts her right in front of me, her hands at my waist.
She has to look up at me.
Neither of us moves. Her fingers stop on the buckle.
Then she swallows, and the belt comes loose, and she steps back.
“Sit,” she says, quieter than the order needs to be.
I sit.
She’s warm. Too warm, and too close, and I noticed. That’s a problem I didn’t have yesterday.
When she’s got her nurse face back on, she nods at the chair. “You earned that, too. And before you tell me what you think of it—” she holds up a hand, “—it’s the chair, or you sit in this room and look at the ceiling until lunch. Those are the options.”
I look at the chair.
Everything in me says no. A wheelchair is the picture of a man who’s been beaten, a thing that gets pushed where it’s told to go. I’d rather drag myself down the hall on my forearms.
But it’s the chair or another day staring at the same four walls, and I’ve run out of patience for the walls.
“Fine,” I say. “But you put one hand on it and I’ll know about it. I move myself.”
She lifts both palms. “It’s all yours.”
She helps me down into it, and I get my hand on the wheel, and I push.
It moves.
I take myself across the room under my own power for the first time since a drunk driver ran a red and put me here.
It’s not walking. It’s not the surf or the drive to Boston or any of the dozen things I want back.
But the moving is mine, my hand on the wheel, my arm doing the work. I decide where I go.
I push through the door before she can decide to help.
The hall opens up in front of me and I take it slow, learning the chair, the weight of it, how far one good arm gets me before the line wants to curve.
Tessa walks a step behind and to the side, hands loose, letting me find it out for myself.
She doesn’t reach for the handles. I notice that.
I notice most things she does now, which is a problem I’ll deal with later.
I push us through to the kitchen, where the back wall is glass from floor to ceiling and the morning’s pouring through it, the lawn and the dune grass and the flat blue water laid out past it. I roll up to the island and stop.
I’m sitting somewhere that isn’t designed for a sick man.
Tessa goes to make the coffee without being asked, and I watch her do it.
She crosses to the right cupboard for the mugs without looking, finds the good beans in the second drawer down, knows the muffins are in the tin under the cloth.
She moves through my kitchen like it’s hers, because somehow it already half is.
She sets a mug in front of me, fixed black, no sugar, and a muffin on a plate I didn’t ask for, without ceremony.
I drink the coffee. It’s exactly right.
“Bring it,” she says, already crossing to the wall of glass. “It’s July, and you’ve been looking at that ocean through a window long enough. We’re drinking these outside.”
She works the latch and slides the doors open, and the salt comes in.
Air on my face. I haven’t been outside since the accident.
I’d forgotten the world has weather.
I roll to the lip of the terrace, as far as the chair will take me, and stop. Past the lawn the dune grass runs down to a flight of weathered stairs and the sand below them. My sand. My ocean, by the deed and the property line. Forty feet away, and I can’t get to it.
Not yet.
I look at those stairs for a long time. Weeks ago I couldn’t get off a mattress. This morning I walked twelve steps. Give it a few more weeks and I’ll take that flight, the whole run of it, and stand in my own water like a man and not look back at a chair to do it.
The accident took the timeline. It didn’t take that.
Behind me Tessa stays quiet and lets me have the view without filling it with talk. I keep my eyes on the water.
It’s not the surf. It’s not Boston. It’s not my legs.
But it’s a start, and I’ve built everything I have out of starts.