Page 71 of How to Walk Away

I dangled my legs over, and he bent down in front of me and backed up. “Climb on.”

“What?Onyou? Like a piggyback ride?”

He nodded. “Pretend I’m a horse.”

“A Clydesdale, maybe.”

“Move it, lass. Make it happen. Squeeze with your thighs.”

The good news was, I could do that. My thighs worked just fine. It was everything below them that didn’t. I leaned forward until my chest fell against his back, and then I wriggled my legs into position around his waist. I wrapped my arms around his neck.

“Not a choke hold, though,” he instructed. “Low, on the collarbones.” He moved my hands down.

He stood up. “Is this okay?”

A piggyback ride. When was the last time I’d had one of those? “Yes.”

“We’re not touching your donor sites? Or pulling on your grafts?”

“I’m good. I should travel like this more often.”

He pulled the quilt off my bed and grabbed a pillow, and then he walked us out past the nurses’ station—where every single person stopped what they were doing to gape at us going by. As we passed, without even slowing down, he grabbed a bag of Milano cookies off the reception desk.

He took long steps and moved fast. He really was a Clydesdale. He didn’t walk, he strode. I hadn’t moved that quickly through any space in weeks, and despite everything, it gave me a tickle of a thrill in my stomach. I felt an odd urge to laugh, but I held it back.

He walked us to the elevator, and we rode up to the top floor, then got off and strode to the end of a corridor, directly toward a door with a push handle that saidNOTANEXIT—ALARMWILLSOUND.

“Hey—that’s not an exit,” I said, as we barreled toward it. “Hey! ‘Alarm will sound’!”

We burst through the door anyway, though. No alarm sounded.

“It’s disabled,” he explained, as the door swung closed behind us. “It’s where the nurses go to smoke.”

Then we were outside. I caught my breath. It was a crisp, clear March evening—with the most stunning orange and purple sunset I’d ever seen. Or so it seemed. It would have been breathtaking in any situation, but I literally had not been outside since the night of the accident. How long had that been? We were ending my second week in the inpatient wing, and I’d spent a week in the ICU before that, so: three solid weeks without seeing the sky, or feeling the breeze, or breathing fresh air. No wonder I was feeling so crazy.

That, and everything else.

Ian took us across the roof to the far edge, which had a view of downtown Austin and the capitol building. With me still on his back, he laid the blanket out flat and dropped the pillow and the cookies. Then he got down on his hands and knees and backed up to the blanket like a dump truck and tilted up so I could slide down onto my knees. The whole thing gave me just a smidge of vertigo, and I rolled onto my side in the middle of the quilt. He brought the pillow aroundto prop me correctly so I could lie back to see the sky without damaging my grafts.

The sky. The wind blew across me and fluttered my hair back. I felt a little cold, but it was okay. It made me aware of all my edges—where I stopped and the rest of the world continued. I was still alive, I thought then. It hit me out on that roof for the first time.

I was alive.

In the next second, I felt Ian lay his fleece sweatshirt over me, and then he flopped down beside me and got settled on his back. Then he lifted a cookie up into my field of vision, and I reached up and grabbed it.

Nobody spoke, and for the first time ever—maybe in my entire life—that was okay. We listened to the wind, and the muted traffic ten stories below, and the crunch of cookies as we chewed. We watched the sky darken as the sun sank out of view. So much of life is just grinding through. So many moments just exist to deliver you to the ones that follow. But this moment was a destination in itself.

Did I feel happy right then? Not exactly. When you feel happy, or joyful, it’s kind of like a brightness in your chest, and my heart was too numb for brightness.

If you think of human emotions as music, then mine were like an orchestra with no conductor. I felt a lot of different sounds, but I didn’t know quite how to read them or combine them in ways I understood. And yet there was no doubt that the instruments of my body were playing—my skin under the wind, my lungs drawing in crisp breaths, my eyes taking in the vast and brilliant sky. There was music—good music—even if it wasn’t a melody I recognized.

Given the context, it seems odd that I should have felt such good feelings right then, and I guarantee it didn’t last. My brain still knew that my entire future was ruined—that Chip’s confession marked more than just the end of our relationship: It meant the end of my life as I’d known it.

But the physical pleasure of being outside for the first time in so achingly long was too real to deny. Later, there would be fallout—momentsof rage, and bleakness, and grief over everything I’d lost—as I tried to understand what Chip had done and why. But not yet. Not tonight. Ian had given me this impossible gift—a little pause from it all. An experience so viscerally alive that nothing else could compete.

It was just us, and the wind—and now, suddenly, the stars starting to appear—for a long, quiet while.

Then I heard Ian’s voice, surprisingly close to my ear, say, “Myles’ll fire me for this, for sure.”

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