Page 23 of How to Walk Away

“No what?” Later, I would decide that it wasn’t just the consonants that were exaggerated—it was the vowels, too.

“No,” I explained, “I can’t do this right now.”

“Look,” he said, putting his hands on his hips and narrowing his eyes. “Every day—every hour—that you lie in that bed, your muscles are atrophying. Nothing will make you sicker than lying motionless all day. You have to get out. Whether you feel like it or not. You have to come with me to the physical therapy gym every day, always—not because you want to, or because you feel inspired, but becausenot goingwill put your health in genuine peril.”

I had to work to mold all those syllables into meaning. His words seemed to sit on top of each other, stacked in columns instead of laid out properly in sentences. And for a grand finale, he clacked hisron “peril.” I wondered if an American could pull off a word like that in conversation. But I got his gist.

“Thank you for the inspiring pep talk,” I said. Then: “No.”

“You’re coming.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I won’t.”

I don’t really know where we would have gone from there. He didn’t much seem like the type to give in, and I was—suddenly—just spoiling for a fight.

But that’s when Nina walked in—a last check before she went off shift—and I don’t know if she’d been listening at the door or what, butwithout skipping a beat she said, “Oh, this one’s not starting till tomorrow. It was a typo in the chart.”

Ian looked back and forth between us.

“Ask Myles, if you want. She’s still got one more day.”

He eyed us—suspiciously, like we might be in cahoots. Finally, he said, “Tomorrow, then.”

He walked out.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Nina said then, typing into the computer at the same time. “They are not giving you that guy for PT. I already told them to switch you out.”

“What?” I asked. “Is he bad?”

“He’s not bad,” she said, “but he’s not for you.”

“Not for me?”

She kept her eyes on the monitor. “He’s just not kind. He’s relentless. Merciless. Thoughtless. That works for some people. Not you. We’ll get you someone else. You’ve got enough going on.”

On a different day, I might have asked more about him. But who cared about that heartless guy, really? Who cared about anything?

“Nina?” I asked then.

She kept typing. “What is it, sweetheart?”

“My drunk fiancécame in here this morning and told me I was never going to walk again.”

Nina looked up.

“Is that true?” I asked.

From her face, I could see that it was.

Still, I waited for more—some words of encouragement, or some little crumb of hope to pick up. But she just let out a long sigh, and paused longer than could possibly be good news. “That’s—”

And then I knew exactly how she was going to finish, and so I said it with her: “A question for the doctor.”

Six

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