Page 80 of How to Walk Away

“Unless,” I said, “it’s you applying it to me. Then ‘better’ means ‘fixed.’ As you’ve promised all the neighbors.”

She held her position. “Don’t you want to be fixed?”

“That’s not a relevant question.”

But she lifted one eyebrow the way she always did when she was about to win. “It’s the only relevant question there is.”

Sure, she had a point. There were some real, physical issues here that I needed to address in a timely way, and now might not be the best moment to give up. But I realized then—possibly for the first time ever—that my parents telling me what to do was making it harder, not easier, to figure out what to do. It was just a glimpse of a feeling, but I now grasped that it was my job—and only mine—to try.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I heard myself say.

“Fine,” my mother said. “We’ll take a break.”

I shook my head. “At all. Period. I’m not going to discuss any of this with you.” My voice, I noticed, sounded just like my mother’s when she was declaring the case closed. “If you want to come have lunch every day and see me, great. But the topic of my recovery is off-limits.”

My mother looked at my dad.

“If you try to bring it up,” I went on, “I will scream until you leave the room.” In my old life, I might have left the room myself—but now that wasn’t an option. “And if that doesn’t work,” I said, adding the thing my mother hated the most, “I will burst into show tunes.”

I could almost see her shiver. “Fine,” she said.

“I have to figure this out,” I said, my voice a little softer as I looked over at my dad. “You can’t do it for me. I have to do it myself.”

I could see a hundred protests forming in my mother’s head. Most notably: What if I did it myself—and did itwrong? She had a point. Even I wondered if this was really the best moment to thrust myself out of her nest. Weren’t the stakes a little high? Shouldn’t we start with what to eat for dinner and work our way up? But I let the questions go unanswered. For the first time ever, I didn’t care. This was bigger than me.

This was my mangled body and my hopeless soul, stepping up at last.

Eighteen

STANDING UP TOmy mother was surprisingly elating. In a life as out of control as mine was at that moment, little things can be big.

When Ian showed up for PT, I went with him willingly. He didn’t talk, and neither did I, but as we worked our way through stretches, and the stationary bike, and a machine I called the “Thighmaster,” I did everything he asked with a new kind of determination.

Neither one of us talked this time, and the vibe was decidedly different than it had been. Instead of babbling incessantly to fill the silence, I concentrated on my task at hand. Instead of staring out the window, he watched my form and—of all things—helped me.

“Good,” he’d say, as the weights on the machine went up. “That’s it.”

“Are youencouragingme?” I said, not looking over.

I felt, rather than saw, him give a little smile. “Nope.”

Even Myles couldn’t slow us down. He passed by several times to correct my form and then demand to know why Ian wasn’t paying better attention. He also pointed out that Ian’s scrubs weren’t regulation blue—even though they were barely a shade lighter than the ones Myles himself was wearing. At one point, Myles came by for no other reason than to let Ian know he had been “missed at the staff meeting this morning.”

Ian didn’t look at him. “I was not told about that meeting.”

Myles gave him a look, like,Please. “Pretty sure you were. There was a staff-wide email.”

“I didn’t get it.”

“You’re saying every single member of our team got that message but you?”

“Looks that way.”

“I think maybe you just don’t like meetings.”

“Idetestmeetings,” Ian said, standing up to full height and looking down at Myles. “Especially bullshit meetings that waste everyone’s time. But I never miss them—unless someone deletes my address from the recipients list.”

I caught a flash ofbustedcross Myles’s face. Then he regrouped. “I’ve started taking roll,” he said then. “So you’ll want to be sure to make it to the next one. On time.”

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