Page 129 of How to Walk Away

My mom grinned. “So the Margaret Jacobsen Center for Spinal Cord Recovery is out.”

I gave her a look. “Too cutesy.”

“What about Camp Hope?” she asked.

We let that idea simmer while we sketched out ideas for a camp T-shirt with the sloganTHAT’S HOW WE ROLL.

It was both a lucky and a slightly unlucky thing that my mom was a contractor.

It meant that she knew a million workmen, plumbers, electricians, surveyors, real estate agents, bricklayers, painters, distributors, suppliers, A/C guys, and demolition experts. They knew the dirt on everybody and knew how to get the best deals. That was all in the “pro” column.

Under “con”: If I really did this, I was about to spend a truckload of time with my mom.

And it did look like I was going to do this. I couldn’t seem to make myself think about anything else, for one thing. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to use my brain again—to use all my business training, and skills, and design sense, and creativity. The project brought together almost everything I loved to do.

More than that, it got me out of the house.

At a certain point, I had to start looking for land, and meeting with people, and talking with them about ideas and strategies, having lunches and coffees with potential contributors and partners. Leaving the house just for the sake of leaving the house had never interested me. But leaving the house to get a donation pledge of five thousand dollars? That I could do.

I dusted off my old pantsuits and my pearl earrings, and I gutted up and went to lunch.

Kit even made me set up a Kickstarter campaign, and then she posted about it to her nowsixty-six thousand followers. Donations flowed in. Money piled up. The whole thing started to look like it might actually happen.

“They love you!” Kit said on the phone. “Send me a picture of you in that pinstripe Ann Taylor suit!”

Was everything suddenly all fixed and perfect? No. Did I get pitying stares in restaurants? Constantly. Did I still have profound moments—hours, days—of hopelessness, anger, bitterness, frustration, despair, self-hatred, and grief? You could say that. And did I one day run into Neil Putnam from Simtex HR, the guy who had hired-me-but-not-officially for my dream job before the accident and then nixed the whole thing afterward? And did he not recognize me at all? And when I finally explained who I was, did he say, “You changed your hair!”?

Yes. That happened.

But the tone of my life was different now. I had a purpose. I had a reason to take a shower every morning. I had a reason to take care of myself. More than that, I was figuring out how doing something for other people could—in fact—be doing something for yourself. Amazing.

It felt good to feel better, and so I started looking for other ways to amp it up. I got addicted to audiobooks. I joined a choir. I kept knitting, even though I never got any better. I taught myself how to make pastries from scratch. I let my mom sell my old condo.

By the time I put the three hundredthXon my suicide calendar, I had signed an earnest-money contract on a hundred-acre plot of land outside of town with a two-hundred-year-old oak tree, three hills, and a catfish pond. I used the money from the condo as a down payment. That night, even though my dad still had not come home after all this time, and even though my mom might well have beenX-ing off her own set of impossibly strange and altered days, we celebrated with champagne.

Despite everything, I decided at last to bet on hope—and I stuffed my suicide calendar in the recycling.

If this is the rest of my life,I found myself thinking one day,it’s okay.

It really was.

Twenty-six

THEN CHIP DECIDEDto get married.

Married.

To that sneaky, soup-making ex-girlfriend, Tara, a.k.a. the Whiner.

In Europe, of all places. In a famously charming town in Belgium called Bruges.

The invitation arrived on Valentine’s Day, of all days. Which forced me to notice three things: One, it was Valentine’s Day. Two, it had been exactly a year since the crash. And three, I had completely forgotten about Chip.

I also noticed something else: My mom, my dad, and Kit were the only names on the invitation.

My mother knew about the engagement, though. She was still friends with Evelyn. She just couldn’t give her up. Although Evelyn never came to the house once I moved home. For a long time, my mother snuck out to meet her, saying she was “running errands,” but I knew what they were up to.

“You can be friends with Evelyn,” I told her one night after dinner. “It’s okay.”

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