I shut my eyes, as if what I’d said was less of a question and more of an order, and one by one, I heard them filter out of the bedroom. A minute later, only one still remained in the room. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know who that one was.
“Joze, you look in as rough of shape as I do. Get some rest, okay? There’s nothing you can do by hovering beside my bedside day in and day out that’s going to help me get better or make me more comfortable, so get some rest. Go out and live your life for a few hours. Only one of us broke our backs, so there’s no need to act like we both did.”
For a moment, she was silent, so silent I almost cracked open my eyes to see if I’d been wrong about her lingering behind. She finally spoke. “It’s comments like those that make me wonder if you even know the person you’re in love with.”
My brows pulled together, but I kept my eyes closed. “What does that mean?”
I heard her take a step closer. “It means you rise, I rise; you fall, I fall. You hurt, I hurt; you succeed, I succeed. You break your back—” Her voice caught in her throat for the shortest second. “I break my back. Please stop acting like you’re the only person in the world who’s affected by this. Because you’re not. You’re not alone, so stop acting like you are.”
Her words, along with the tone she’d said them in, were enough to make a ball the size of my fist form in my throat. At exactly the right time, she’d said exactly the right words. In a few short sentences, she’d comforted me more than a person in my condition should have been able to be comforted. The problem wasn’t her—it was me. She knew the right words, did the right things, believed in the right ideals . . . but she was hovering beside the wrong man. I wanted to let her camp out at my side and never leave, but I also knew of no surer or quicker way to crush her spirit than to allow her to stay at my side.
“I am alone, Joze. So why don’t you stop acting like I’m not?”
She replied in the way I’d both hoped and dreaded she would: by walking out of the room and closing the door.
MY DOOR STAY closed for I didn’t know how long. Might have been half an hour, might have been a decade. I couldn’t tell. When I finally fell asleep, I slept hard and long. I slept the sleep of the dead, but when I woke up to the sound of my door opening, I wished I would have stayed with the dead. What was left for me with the living wasn’t worth living for.
Jesse strode in and shifted a few things in the corner to make room for what was coming through the door. What was wheeling through the door. A middle-aged guy sat in one of those huge electric wheelchairs and puttered into the room, heading for the spot Jesse had just cleared. The rooms in the Gibsons’ old farmhouse were small to start with, but having that giant machine inside it made the guest room seem like a coat closet. It became tough to breathe, as if either the oxygen had been stripped from the room by that wheelchair or it had brought in too much. I couldn’t tell, but I knew I needed it out of there.
“Who are you?” I asked the man in the wheelchair. I guessed Jess knew better than to invite some other crippled person to come over and commiserate with me like some kind of mini support group, but I couldn’t figure out another reason why the hell a guy in his wheelchair would be rolling into my room right after I’d been deemed paralyzed.
The guy didn’t glance up as he finished maneuvering the chair into the corner. From the look of it, he needed to take a few more driving courses with that thing before he ran it through a wall or ran over a person. “I’m Steve.”
I waited for something else, but nothing else was offered. I was just about to ask Steve why “Steve” was in my room when he shoved himself out of the wheelchair onto two strong legs and approached me with an outstretched hand.
“I’m the manager of the medical supply company in town,” he said, letting his hand hang in the air for another moment before he realized that unless he picked my hand up and put it there, I couldn’t shake his hand. His arm dropped back at his side as he cleared his throat. “I don’t usually do the home deliveries, but when I heard who this chair was going to, I had to see to it personally.” A smile spread across his face as he looked at me. “I used to follow you in the local circuit when you were just starting out, so I was a fan before you hit it big. You’re a talented rider, Mr. Black.” Steve nodded at me in what I guessed was approval.
While I’d been complimented and praised by hundreds this past year, instead of the flattery making me feel awkward yet grateful, Steve’s made me feel like each word was a knife slashing at my throat.
“I think what you mean is that I used to be a talented rider,” I replied, my tone so bitter I could actually taste it on the back of my tongue. “Kind of hard to be any kind of a rider, good or bad, when I can’t even wipe away the drool rolling down my chin.”
I noticed Jesse shift on the other side of the room. He wasn’t used to not knowing what to say or how to fix something. I’d never seen him at such an utter and total loss in all of the years I’d known him.
Steve shifted a couple times too. “I’m having one of my best employees—he’s the most familiar with this type of chair—come over later this afternoon to go over how it works with you and get you all set up. This baby’s got too many bells and whistles for me, and with my luck, I’d wind up running you over.”
My throat did that running dry thing it had been doing a lot of lately. I wasn’t sure if that was due to the paralysis or due to the rough topics being discussed, but it seemed like shit luck that one of the few pieces of my anatomy I could still feel would be uncomfortable. “Well, the nice thing about running me over, Steve, is that you wouldn’t have to worry about injuring me any more than I already am.” I winked at him, but it had the opposite effect of what I’d intended.