“You just came out of surgery,” she says. “You’ll be groggy from the anesthesia. Swelling can interfere with feeling as well, and you have quite a bit.”
I’ll say. I might have been relieved when I saw that there was still a shape beneath my sheet where my leg is supposed to be, but the fact that it’s twice the size of my other one can’t be good.
I want to ask when it will be normal again, when I’ll be able to walk, how Carolina is doing, why my mom and dad aren’t here, and where is here, anyway? I want to ask all these things, but they’re backed up, tripping over each other in my head. They must show in my face though, because the nurse puts her hand on my arm and smiles at me.
“Your surgeon will be in to talk to you soon,” she says.
My surgeon. Someone whose face I haven’t seen and whose name I don’t know but who’s been wrist-deep in my body, and is intimately familiar with parts of me I haven’t even seen. Except for that one glance, which I could have lived without.
“When?” I ask.
She’s saved from answering when a man walks in, his green scrubs telling me this is the guy I’m waiting on. He introduces himself as Dr. Singh, then takes my chart from the nurse.
“Catalan,” he says. “That Italian?”
“I don’t know,” I say, partly because it’s true, partly because it’s the last thing I care about right now.
“Catalan . . . Catalan . . . ,” he repeats, sitting on the rolling chair. “Seems like I’ve heard the name.”
“My mom’s an ob-gyn,” I tell him, realizing I must not be too far from home if she’s delivered babies in this hospital.
“Annette Catalan?” I’ve got his attention now, his eyes on me instead of a chart about me. “You’re her daughter?”
“Well, I’m adopted,” I say. Mom told me a long time ago I don’t have to say it like it’s a bad thing, or even say it at all. But I’ve always felt like I need to explain how I’m the daughter of a small, cheery blonde.
“Where is my mom?” I ask, and he looks to the nurse.
“On the way,” she says.
“You were flown in to Mercy General from county,” Dr. Singh says. “With injuries like yours it’s important that surgery happens as quickly as possible to improve your chances of recovery. I’m sorry that your mom couldn’t be here—”
“Recovery?” I repeat, interrupting him to grab onto that word. “How long? Softball conditioning starts in March.”
“Well, let’s see . . .” His eyes are back on the chart again, but I know he’s stalling.
I may not show my emotions, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see everyone else’s. I know Dr. Singh isn’t going to tell me anything I want to hear, just as surely as I know that Aaron is in love with Carolina, and has probably called her twenty times already. I can picture her clumsily texting with her left hand, propped up in a hospital bed like mine. I wonder if there’s a doctor with her as well, and if he’s pulling X-rays out of a folder, illustrations in the story about how her life just changed.
“You sustained serious damage to your right hip,” Dr. Singh says, holding them up to the light.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen my bones. I can still spot the fracture on my right femur from when Royalwood’s catcher—who is built like a brick shithouse—landed on me when I slid into home during summer league when I was twelve. I heard the crack on impact, but the ump called me safe. I lay in the dirt for a second, relishing the cheering before everyone realized I wasn’t getting up.
My coccyx is crooked from being broken twice, once when I fell off Nancy Waggoner’s horse, and again when it was my turn to be taken out at the plate by a runner. I held on to the ball even though I had literally broken my ass, and she was out. We won that game, too, and all the girls signed the doughnut pillow I had to sit on for a month.
But those old injuries are nothing compared to this.
“We put three screws in your hip,” my surgeon says, but he hardly needs to explain. I can see them, denser than my bones, so clearly defined that the threading even stands out. I grit my teeth together, remembering the time I helped Dad put up drywall, particles flying in my face as I drilled in screws. How much bone dust is on the floor of that operating room? How much of me was left behind when I was wheeled out, and can my leg still work with what remains?
I want to ask but I don’t get the chance because Mom comes barreling in. She’s wearing pajamas and her hair is a disaster, but she plucks the X-rays from Dr. Singh’s hand like someone with authority, holding them up to the light.
I didn’t cry when I landed in the field, mouth full of blood. I didn’t cry when they separated me from Carolina, or when I saw the meat of my leg, red and raw underneath the antiseptic lights of the ambulance. I didn’t cry when I woke up lost and alone, wondering if I was still in one piece.
But I cry now. I cry when Mom’s face falls at the sight of those screws, her mouth turning down the way it did last year right before she told me about the divorce. I cry because the pain has begun, a fiery hand clasping onto my hip that burns right through whatever they gave me to stop it. The nurse notices and puts a button in my hand, curling my fingers around it.
“For the pain,” she says.
I push it. I push it until the pain is dull and the room is fuzzy. I push it until I can’t tell Mom’s voice from the doctor’s. I push it until I’m floating and can’t hear words like options, therapy, and graft. I push it because I can’t be here right now, and that button is the only way I can leave.
Chapter Four
family: a household, including parents, children; a fundamental unit in the organization of society; any network of linked persons different from but equal to the above
Dad gets it.
He shows up a few hours later with questions about recovery times, physical therapy requirements, insurance coverage, and future mobility. He’s looking at this problem the same way he does anything else: something that can be controlled once enough data has been accumulated. Mom might be able to look at my X-rays and see what’s been done and what needs to happen, but Dad is the one making phone calls, marking up a calendar with appointments so far in the future that I’ll be a year older when I show up to them.
My life has been reorganized into time measurements called weight-bearing.
“Okay, Mickey,” Dad says, his chair pulled up next to my hospital bed. “Here’s what we’re looking at. For eight weeks you’re just healing—that’s your job, nothing else. Toe touch to the floor for balance but that’s all, got it?”
“Got it,” I say, trying to sound obedient. But my eyes are scanning the calendar he put in front of me, and eight weeks eats up a lot of time between now and March, when conditioning begins.
“So I can’t put any weight on it before that?”
Dad glances down at his notes, then back at the calendar resting on my legs. “Partial weight-bearing starts after eight weeks if you’re on track with physical therapy, but you’ll still need crutches. So you can walk on it then.”
“Then,” I say, flipping the calendar to February and pointing to the third week. “So when am I fine? When do I not need crutches? When can I walk? When can I run?”
“Um . . .” Dad looks at his notes again. “Full weight-bearing is allowed at twelve weeks.”
I count forward, flipping to March. Softball conditioning starts on the fifteenth, right around my eleventh week of recovery. Able to bear my own weight, but that might be about all. Dad’s eyes trace my finger, hovering over where I’d marked Conditioning! on the fifteenth in red marker.
“That’s not good enough,” I tell him.
“It’s close, Mickey. Best-case scenario you sit out a few games at the beginning of the season.”
Our best-case scenario doesn’t sound good to me.
“It’s a long way out, Mickey,” Mom says. “And we’ve got you scheduled with the best people in their field. Your therapists will get you on your feet as fast as they can.”
I let them fade out, the reality of the calendar and my broken body and what it’s going to take to fix it overwhelming me. Mom found the right doctors, the best therapists, then handed it off to Dad, the two of them working like the team they used to be. I watch them from my haze, wondering again how this could have fallen apart, or if the little smile hovering on Mom’s lips makes Dad think about how things used to be. Then Devra walks in the door, pregnant belly preceding her, and Mom’s smile is gone, any camaraderie that had been resurfacing between my parents disappearing.
Dad’s second wife is closer to my age than his, but that’s not why Mom’s face goes into a hard, polite mask that carries no trace of kindness. It’s not professional curiosity that draws her eyes to Devra’s belly, either. The baby growing in there is something she couldn’t give Dad, the jokes about an ob-gyn who can’t get pregnant going stale a few years into their marriage, and ending altogether once they couldn’t be said without bitterness. Dad liked to say that I was cheaper and came with less paperwork, but Mom always flinched more than laughed whenever he trotted that line out.
I give Devra the smile I’ve practiced for her. Much like Mom’s, it’s tight and small, enough that she can’t complain to Dad that we’re rude. She told me to call her “Devra” when we met, not “Mom,” since the idea of being a parent to a teenager was a little whoa to her. I’m fine with our arrangement, finding the idea of having yet a third person in the world who can lay claim to being my mom even more whoa than she does.
“Mickey, I’m so sorry,” Devra says, coming right for my bedside.
“I’m all right,” I tell her, even though technically she didn’t ask.
“She’s a tough kid,” Mom says, and it’s true. Right now I couldn’t be more glad that it’s the first thing that comes to mind when people think of me. Being pretty or smart or nice is all well and good, but none of those things can get me through what’s coming.
“That’s my girl,” Dad says, and while there’s a lot of pride in his voice, the nagging voice inside my head reminds me that technically, I’m not. Mom has been able to deal with the divorce, but she’s nowhere near forgiveness yet. Me, I understood all along.
Dad loves me, and thinks of me as his kid, but I knew there was a pocket in his heart that wondered what his biological child would look like, be like, act like. It’s the same way I feel when I think about my real parents, out there somewhere. I love Mom and Dad, but that doesn’t stop me from scanning the bleachers at games occasionally, wondering if that one person I can’t place might be my birth mom, keeping tabs on me.
Carolina laughed when I told her that at school one day, pointing to the statue of our school’s mascot outside the front doors. “For all we know that’s your mom and your dad,” she said, climbing the base until she was nose to nose with the stone Spartan to give it a closer inspection.
“Yep,” she declared. “The facial expression isn’t changing and it looks vaguely irritated. Definitely your people.”
“Dad,” I ask suddenly, “is Catalan Italian?”
“Um . . .” Dad glances at Mom, making Devra bristle. “I think it’s Spanish, maybe? Why?”
I don’t know why. It was a thought that had been floating in my head since Dr. Singh asked me, and whatever is in my IV pushed the question out of my mouth before I had a chance to consider if it was worth asking. Is this how normal people work? Do they just say what they’re thinking as soon as it occurs to them?
I shudder at the thought. Devra misreads it, pulling the blanket up to my chin. Now it’s Mom’s turn to bristle, and I’m trying to decide whether to thank my stepmom when a doctor comes in, one I haven’t seen before.
“Mickey, I’m Brad, Dr. Singh’s PA,” he says, introducing himself to me first, which I appreciate.
Introductions happen all around, made somewhat awkward when the doctor assumes that Devra is my older sister. Mom manages to turn a laugh into a fake cough, but I’m pretty sure the tears in her eyes once the fit passes are real.
“I’m here to talk you through what rehabilitation is going to be like,” Brad says. “Remember playing with these?”
He pulls a Barbie out of his scrub pocket, and I narrow my eyes at him, because no, I definitely don’t remember that.
“When you had your accident, your hip came out of the socket entirely.” He snaps the leg off the Barbie, and all the adults in the room wince. Not me. I saw the real thing.
He goes on to explain the screws now holding my leg in place, the multiple fractures, and what that will mean for future mobility. Mom drops the names of the physical therapy place I’ll be going to, and Dad recites the appointments that are already scheduled. Brad nods his approval and says it sounds like I’m in the best possible hands, but all I can think about is the calendar Dad showed me, grid lines like a ladder laid out for me to climb.
If I can get my leg up that high.
Chapter Five
friend: someone for whom the bearer feels affection or esteem
I don’t see Carolina until I’m home five days later.
Mom insisted on keeping the hospital visitors to “family only,” which earned her a side-eye from Devra, who had set up camp in the reclining chair next to my bed, the better to compare the aches and pains of late pregnancy to the trauma of having my leg torn out of its socket. Mom gave Dad enough hard stares to render him the one incapable of having children, but apparently he counts his new wife as family, because she stayed.
Carolina is in my room five minutes after I get home, trailing the outfielders behind her. They’re all named Bella, an unfortunate side effect of their mothers being overly involved in the Twilight thing a while back. On the team we keep it simple by calling them Left, Right, and Center.
I’m surprised to see the Bellas. Our friendships are like muscles you use occasionally to make sure they’re still there in the off-season, but don’t pay serious attention to until training starts. On the field we’ll slap each other’s asses and chest-bump and scream unintelligibly into each other’s faces during a victory yell, but in the hallways we keep it to an up-nod and reminders about the next practice. It’s like running into your teacher in the grocery store and trying to make small talk; I’m only comfortable with these people when we’re all wearing jerseys.
Now they’re in my room, carefully arranging themselves on my bed so as not to disrupt the pile of pillows my right foot is resting on. Carolina shrugs as if to say, deal with it.
“How you feeling?” we ask each other at the same time.
“I’ll live,” Carolina says, pointing to her cast. “It’s a nondisplaced fracture, which they said is a positive thing. Six to eight weeks and I’m good.”
It’s the beginning of January now. If Carolina is out of her cast that soon, she’ll be rebuilding muscles in her arm by February while I’m still tooling around on crutches.
“My doctor said if all goes well I should be back at it in time for conditioning,” Carolina goes on, breaking my concentration.
“Good,” I say, and hope I don’t sound bitter. I don’t need a calendar in front of me to know that she’s going to be throwing fire from the mound while I try to balance on a weak leg behind the plate.
“Yeah, she’ll be good to go as long as Aaron stops doing everything for her,” Center says. Her voice drops into a deep mimic. “Oh, let me get that door for you. I’ll return your lunch tray. Maybe I’ll carry you to class. Can I rub your back? How about your vagina?”
“Shut it,” Carolina says, but she’s blushing, and the swat she delivers to Bella Center’s upper arm has a little more force to it than necessary.
“What about you?” Bella Left asks, her eyes straying to the walker next to my bed. Mom and Dad put a lot of money into my rehab, but the walker they grabbed at Goodwill. It’s got a strip of duct tape around one leg, declaring it the property of Helen W.
I don’t know what became of Helen W. that she didn’t need the walker anymore, but I’m guessing it’s not because she suddenly became young and spry again.
“I’ll be ready,” I say, which is total bullshit. Dr. Singh had cautioned me about setting realistic goals, and Mom had repeated his words after my first physical therapy appointment, which left me dripping sweat and swallowing back vomit. The truth is it feels like the screws holding me together are on fire, my hip melting into them rather than growing. But my teammates don’t need to know the truth.
“I’ll be good for conditioning,” I lie.
Dad said our best-case scenario had me almost fully healed by then. So I just have to be better than best.
“Really?” Bella Center’s whole face lights up, like the idea of me on my feet is the best thing she’s heard since Westwood’s shortstop got pregnant.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “If I keep up with the physical therapy, I should be all right.”
I’m probably never going to be all right again, is what my therapist actually told me. I’ll probably be stiff as hell whenever I get up for the rest of my life, and will wear my teeth down to nubs from gritting them whenever I sit down. But I’ve been stiff before and have spent most of my life gritting my teeth, so whatever.
“When can you come back to school?” Carolina asks. “Not that I don’t love hauling your homework over here.”
“Next week,” I tell her, smiling. “My physical therapist said they want to make sure I’m confident on the crutches, and my family doctor has to sign off. And you do love bringing me my homework.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. “It feels awesome on my arm.”
“Damn,” Bella Right says, spotting the lineup of orange bottles on my dresser. “That’s some serious pills, girl.” She picks up one, reading the label.
“Oxy.” She whistles. “Nice.”
“For real?” Bella Left asks, reaching over my stomach for the bottle. She takes it from Bella Right, shaking the little white tabs inside. I keep the leftover smile on my face pasted on.
Heroine Page 2
