Page 16 of How to Walk Away

I picked the bed nearest the bathroom, but then my mother said she’d read an article inReader’s Digestthat looking at nature was “very healing” and didn’t I think it might be good to stay near the window?

As usual: I chose one and wound up in the other.

At my new bed, we did the whole wheelchair rigmarole in reverse to get me in. It took an hour, and I was panting and nauseated by the end. My parents stood at the foot of the bed the whole time like statues, watching.

“Where’s Chip, again?” I asked.

“Sleeping off his hangover,” my father said. This time, my mother let it be.

I turned to Nina. “How long until I get this catheter out?” I asked, as she pulled up the sheets at last, and I leaned back against the crackly hospital pillow.

“That’s another question for the doctor.”

I got the feeling she said that a lot.

As soon as Nina was gone, my father went for coffee downstairs, and my mother started decorating the room. This was part of her job. She and my dad ran a contracting business together, and he generally handled the construction end of things, and she did the design. So it was both her professional and personal responsibility in almost any situation to make things look better.

She’d brought a blue-and-white-checked quilt from home and a fuzzy throw blanket. She’d been collecting get-well cards all week from friends and relatives, and she’d brought some Scotch tape to affix them to the walls. She’d bought magazines, which she arranged in a fan shape on the side table, and she’d found my favorite stuffed animal from childhood in the attic (a fuzzy bunny named Fuzzy Bunny) and brought it with her. When she ran out of things to do, she took a seat on the reclining side chair and criticized the décor.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking with this God-awful mauve on the walls. It’s like the 1980s threw up in here.”

I’d just survived a plane crash, so of course this was what we talked about. Nothing pissed Linda Jacobsen off like bad décor.

“Mauve and gray,” she went on. “It’s toxic. They’re poisoning you visually.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said, like,Come on. “It’s a hospital room.”

But she lifted her chin. “The person who decorated this hospital,” she announced, like a woman claiming her dignity in the face of unspeakable horror, “should be in jail.”

I took a slow breath.

“You could open the curtains,” I suggested at last.

She turned toward the window, as if she’d forgotten it. “Of course. Yes.” She clicked right over, her heels making the same noise they’d made my entire life, and yanked the curtain back.

I don’t know what either of us had expected to see, but the window overlooked the airshaft of the parking garage.

My mother turned to me. “It’s worse open.”

Indeed it was.

Just then, the heavy door to the room swung in, and a doctor I’d never seen before walked in, straight toward my bed, grabbing the computer cart on the way and pulling it behind him. He said, “How’s everything feeling?” as he leaned in to check the dressings over my neck.

I didn’t know how to answer. “Weird. Surreal. Bleak.”

“Pain?” he specified.

Oh.“I’m not sure.”

“That’s the drugs. They’re disorienting. But we’re weaning you off them, so you should get a better read on the pain tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure I want a better read on the pain.”

It was a weak, embryonic joke. But he gave me a shrug. “Point taken.”

He stepped back to the computer, swiped his ID badge, and started checking my charts. “The good news is,” he said, “everything we grafted is working. No rejection of tissue.”

Oh! He had operated on me. I guess we had met before.

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