Page 69 of Maybe in Another Life

“Whoa, there,” he says. “Take it slow.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Got away from me.”

“I guess we know you probably won’t ever be a race-car driver.”

“Pretty sure I ruled that out when I got hit by a car.”

Henry could, at this moment, feel bad for me. But he doesn’t. I like that. I like that so much.

“Well, don’t be a pilot, either,” he says. “Or did you already cross that one off because you were hit by a plane?”

I look up at him, indignant. “Do you talk to all of your patients this way?” I ask him. There it is. The question I’ve been pondering for days. And I said it as if I didn’t care about his answer in the slightest.

“Only the bad ones,” he says. Then he leans down and grabs the arms of my wheelchair. His face is in mine, so close that I can see the pores on his skin, the specks of gold in his eyes. If this were any other man in any other situation, I’d think he was going to kiss me. “If you happened to roll yourself out of this room,” he says with a sly smile across his face, “I’m sure it would take a minute before I caught up with you and wheeled you back in here.”

Henry slowly takes his arms off my chair, clearing the way.

I don’t look at the door. I stare at him. “If I just happened to scoot my wheels this way,” I say, “and push myself right out into the hallway...”

“I might not notice until you’d had a nice breath of air out there.”

“So this is OK?” I say, looking at him but heading for the door.

He laughs. “Yeah, that’s OK.”

“And if I get to the threshold?”

He shrugs. “We’ll see what happens.”

I keep rolling myself forward. My arms are already tired from pushing myself. “If I just roll on right past it?”

He laughs. “You should probably take your eyes off me and watch where you’re going,” he says, just as I ram a wheel into the door frame.

“Oops,” I say, backing up and then straightening. And then I roll myself right out into the hallway.

It’s busier than I would have thought. There are more stations, more nurses, than I get a glimpse of in my room. And I’m sure it’s the very same air I breathe from my hospital bed, but it seems fresher somehow out here. The hallway is even blander, more banal, than what I imagined from my bed. The floor underneath my wheels is squeaky clean. The walls on either side of me are an innocuous shade of oatmeal. But in some ways, I might as well have landed on the moon. That’s how novel and foreign it feels for a split second.

“All right, Magellan,” Henry says, grabbing the handles on the back of my chair. “Enough discovering for one day.”

When we cross through the doorway back into my room, I thank him. He nods at me.

“Don’t mention it.”

He wheels me back to my bed.

“You ready?” he says.

I nod and brace myself. I know it’s going to hurt when he picks me up, when he puts me down. “Go for it,” I say.

He puts his arms underneath my legs. He tells me to put my arms around his neck, to hold on to him tightly. He leans over me, putting his other arm around my back. My forehead grazes his chin, and I can feel his stubble.

I land back on my bed with a thud. He helps me move my legs straight and puts my blanket back on me.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“I’m good,” I say. “Good.”

The truth is, I feel as if I am about to cry. I am about to break down into tears the size of marbles. I don’t want to be back in this bed. I want to be up and moving and living and doing and seeing. I have tasted the glory of sitting in the hallway. I don’t want to be back in this bed.

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