How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  “And it’s torture for you to work with him.”

  He gave a nod. “He goes out of his way to make everything harder. If I don’t play things exactly by the book, I’m out. But I’ve never been very good at playing by the book.”

  “Could you go work somewhere else?”

  He shrugged. “Nowhere else is hiring.”

  “Maybe in some other city?” I suggested, hating the idea even as I said it.

  “I haven’t wanted to look in other cities. But I might have to start.”

  Suddenly, I became aware that my shoulder was leaning against his shoulder. I leaned away—but that felt abrupt. Partly to cover, I said, “So you weren’t always so grouchy.”

  A faint smile. “No.”

  “Did you used to joke around?”

  “Of course.”

  “And listen to oldies rock?”

  “That’s a job requirement.”

  “I’ve decided it’s good that you’ve been mean to me.”

  “I haven’t been nearly as mean as I intended to be.”

  I looked over. “Why not?”

  He looked away. “Something about your eyes, I think.”

  I had to ask. “What about them?”

  “Let’s just say being mean to Myles makes me feel better. Being mean to you made me feel worse.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just let the wind blow.

  “Thank you for telling me about your troubles,” I said after a while.

  “It wasn’t very professional of me.”

  “Professional is overrated.”

  He turned to take in the sight of me, as if I’d just said something so true, it surprised him. Then he said, “We should get back.”

  I shook my head.

  But he nodded. “It’s late. You need rest.”

  I suddenly felt tears in my eyes. I wiped them on his sweatshirt. “I don’t want to go back.”

  Ian helped me get up on my knees so I could climb onto his back. “I’d offer you a cookie, but we ate them all.”

  “Promise me we’ll come here again,” I said, as I climbed on.

  “I promise.”

  “Soon.”

  “Soon,” he said, and as he stood us both up, the view—and the breeze, and the feel of his back against my chest, and the endlessness of the sky above us—made me so dizzy, I had to close my eyes.

  Seventeen

  I WENT THROUGH a period of—shall we say—disillusionment after Chip’s confession. Once I returned from the roof to my inpatient cell, I had nothing to distract me from the realities of my life—every awful one of them—and I kind of lost sight of the meaning of everything.

  To sum up: My motivation for physical therapy, and everything else, was rather low.

  There was no way to deny, at this point, that everything I cared about was destroyed, or broken, or had self-destructed. Even my own personal goals. Because that one inspiring fantasy of walking to Chip that I’d used to push back the fog had disintegrated the minute I found out about Tara and her soup.

  I would never walk to Chip again.

  I would never walk again, period.

  In some ways, if I’m honest, giving up felt good. It certainly took the pressure off. Staying hopeful was exhausting.

  In life, I’d always had tangible goals. I made good grades so I could get into a good college. I worked hard in college so I could get into a good business school. I worked hard in B-school so that I could get a great job, make great money, be a leader in the business world, break a few glass ceilings, and make my parents proud. Those weren’t the only things I wanted, of course. I wasn’t totally shallow. I wanted love and friends and babies and laughter. I wanted to be a good person and help take care of the world. But I’d spent my life working toward specific goals.

  What was I suffering for now? What was I working toward now? To get a little more movement in my legs? To not get an infection in my skin graft? To approach some vague approximation of the person I used to be? To make it through the day without freaking the hell out? I couldn’t motivate for goals like that.

  Somehow, the presence of Chip in that recovery fantasy had been the lynchpin holding it all together. Without him, the whole thing fell apart.

  My mother had fed me false hope, and I’d swallowed it whole like a baby bird with an open beak. I hadn’t questioned it enough because I hadn’t wanted to—but there was a fine line between determination and delusion.

  Some things really were impossible.

  My grandfather had been shot in the eye with a BB gun as a kid. He lost the eye and spent the rest of his life with a glass one, taking it out every night and—I swear this is true—putting it in a glass of water on the bedside table. Kitty and I used to sneak in before he was awake sometimes and steal it out of the cup—and then, totally game, he’d stumble down in his robe and PJs at breakfast time, a hand clapped over his face, saying, “Somebody stole my eye!” We’d cackle until he found it—and he never complained. But no amount of wishing or determination or denial could have grown that eye back.

  I hadn’t let myself think about that until now.

  Now, all I did was just keep breathing, and even that felt like a lot. One breath after another. Easier on some days than others. But let’s be clear: I had nothing—nothing—to look forward to.

  The day after our lovely night on the roof, for example, Ian showed up for PT, and I just refused to move.

  He was all business, of course. None of the warmth from the night before. He walked in as brusque and formal as if he had never carried me piggyback through the hallways, never made me wear his sweatshirt, never told me about his mistakes. From the expression on his face, I could have been anybody—one face in a parade of wheelchairs. Which was how I felt about myself, as well.

  He got the transfer board ready, but I didn’t sit up. I just stared out the window.

  “All right. Let’s go,” he urged.

  I didn’t say anything. Didn’t look over.

  He came around to peer at my face and double-check I wasn’t sleeping. “Maggie,” he said. “It’s time.”

  I wasn’t trying to be rude. Responding just seemed like it would take too much energy.

  “Let’s go,” he urged again.

  But I just kept breathing.

  “Are you not coming, then? Is this what I get for busting you out of jail?”

  I was locked in a stare out the window, but I heard my voice. “I just don’t see the point.”

  “You don’t have to see the point. You just have to come with me.”

  “Not today.”

  “Maggie,” he said, lowering his voice. “Can you look at me?”

  I couldn’t. I was stuck in that stare, and everything else seemed far away.

  Ian leaned his face down in front of mine, but my eyes didn’t refocus. He was just a blurry head. “You have to take care of yourself. You can’t let him win.”

  “Who?” I asked, still unfocused.

  “The prick who broke your heart.”

  But I wasn’t sure I had a heart anymore. It felt like maybe it had burned away in the crash. I just lay limp. One breath in, then out. Then another in, then out.

  “Are you refusing physical therapy?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I could refuse. I kept my eyes on the window. “Yes. I guess I am.”

  The next day, I refused again. The day after that, too.

  My family was concerned. Ian reported me to the supervising physician, who passed the reports on to the social worker and psychologist on staff, as well as my parents. The professionals agreed that a “dose of depression” was normal, even healthy, in my situation, but my parents, and even Kitty, disagreed.

  It threw our family ecosystem into disarray. I had always been the hardworking, cheery, rule-following achiever, and Kitty had always been the source of all our problems.

  Simple.

  What did it mean—to any of us—for me to be the problem?

  It
led them to desperate measures. I later found out that despite all the tension between Kitty and my mom—worse now—Kitty and my parents arranged a secret rendezvous within forty-eight hours of Chip’s confession to figure out how to fix me.

  They were all business—coming together for the greater good, focusing on the task at hand, meeting in the coffee shop of a Barnes & Noble and then scouring the self-help books to find some inspirational reading to get me back on track. Kitty and my mother wordlessly agreed to set aside everything that had gone down between them, and they wound up spending a hundred dollars on titles like Why Me? A Daily Guide for Getting Back to Normal and The Joy of Suffering.

  My dad suggested that Kitty should be the one to bring the books to me because I’d be less likely to view her as a foe.

  “I’m not a foe!” my mother protested.

  But she was outvoted.

  * * *

  IT WAS NICE for them to have a project, in a way, Kitty admitted later. What purpose would it have served to rehash all their conflict and strife, anyway? They left things unresolved but moved on to the more important pressing problem of me.

  “Didn’t the two of you at least apologize to each other?” I asked, when Kit confessed what they’d been up to.

  “Apologize? What for?”

  “Well,” I said, “you, for telling me Mom’s biggest secret against her wishes. And Mom, for pretty much your whole childhood.”

  Kitty shook her head. “There was no apologizing. Have you ever heard Mom apologize?”

  Fair enough. Apologizing wasn’t Mom’s thing.

  I refused to read the self-help books, of course. They should’ve seen that coming. When Kitty tried to read some excerpts aloud, I plugged my ears and sang Aretha Franklin. So, late at night—or rather, after 9:00 P.M.—after I’d fallen asleep, Kitty read the books herself with a flashlight.

  If I wouldn’t help myself, by God, she’d do it for me.

  It was the time pressure that got to all of them. I had three and a half weeks left before the window of improvement would slam closed for good, and, in the wake of my depression, my improvement had stalled.

  In truth, my improvements had stalled before Chip’s confession—the whole week before had been significantly absent of improvements, as well. We all just noticed it after the breakup. Before, when I still believed in my fairy tale, I viewed the stall as a natural plateau—an adjustment period on the way to more inspiring success.

  Now, I saw the slowdown as part of a different narrative: the beginning of the end.

  I didn’t say that to anybody, but I guess it was obvious.

  Then my parents decided I needed a “tutor.”

  My mother brought it up at lunch. We were eating Vietnamese noodle salad from their favorite spot, and my dad was enjoying it so much, he was smacking.

  “So,” my mother said brightly, holding a forkful of noodles, “you’re starting your last three weeks here—”

  “And a half,” I added.

  “After insurance runs out,” my dad said, “you’ll come home to live with us.”

  I snorted. “I am not coming home to live with you.”

  My parents looked at each other. My dad asked tenderly, “Where would you live, sweetheart?”

  “At my place,” I said, like, Duh.

  My dad proceeded very gingerly. “Your place is three stories high. With stairs.”

  I closed my eyes. “I’ll stay on the ground floor.”

  He was almost whispering now. “There’s no bathroom on the ground floor. Or kitchen.”

  I knew that, of course. “I’ll figure it out.”

  We all knew I wouldn’t. What would I do—climb the stairs on my knees? Actually, maybe that could work.

  “Nonsense,” my mother said, in her most authoritative voice. “You can’t keep that place. I’ve already spoken with a real estate agent. He says now’s a perfect time to sell. You stand to make a good profit.” Then she added, “He also loves your décor.”

  This from the woman who’d told all the neighbors I’d be good as new by summer. “I am not moving in with my parents,” I declared. “I am not a child!”

  “Just temporarily,” my dad said, ever the spoonful of sugar.

  But I pointed at my mother. “Do not talk to agents! Do not sell my place! You said I’d be good as new!”

  It was such a childish accusation, in one way—to get mad at her for my misfortune, the way little kids sometimes do before they’ve come to understand that, in so many big ways, parents are just as powerless as they are.

  At the same time, it was a declaration of independence. My whole life, I’d turned to my mother for instructions on what to do, and where to go, and how to get it done. My mother had insisted to me, and the doctors, and, apparently, all our neighbors, that I was going to “beat” this paralysis.

  She’d always interpreted my life. Though to be fair, I’d always let her.

  But maybe that wasn’t her job anymore.

  In the strangled silence that followed, we all felt the shift in my thinking like a little, earth-trembling rumble of plate tectonics. Even if we didn’t know what it was.

  Faced with this Kitty-like behavior from me, my mother dropped it. She put up her hands in surrender. “Fine. We won’t sell your condo.”

  “Of course not. If you don’t want to,” my dad said.

  “I don’t want to.” How could anybody possibly think that I would? Hadn’t I given up enough?

  “The point is,” my mom said, getting back to business, “you are running out of time here.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said, stubbornly leaving my lunch untouched.

  “And so we’re thinking,” my dad said brightly, “why not do everything possible right now to promote healing and recovery?”

  I looked back and forth between them for a good long minute before I said, in a low voice like a growl, “My whole life is ‘doing everything possible.’ I don’t go five minutes without ‘promoting healing and recovery.’”

  My mom leaned in. “Did I forget to tell you that I just read the most inspiring story? About a girl—a former ballerina—in just exactly your situation? She tried very hard for weeks, and got nowhere at all—and then one morning, out of the blue, her right big toe wiggled. Then, the next morning, her left big toe wiggled. The morning after that, she could wiggle them all. The morning after that, she could bend her knees. And by the end of the month, she could do a pas de bourrée!”

  Quietly, then—secretly—I tried to wiggle my toes.

  Nothing.

  I wasn’t even entirely sure I remembered how.

  I’d been thinking I hated these inspirational stories, but that wasn’t quite right. I loathed them. “What is your point?”

  My mom blinked. “We think you might need a tutor.”

  A tutor? I frowned at my dad. “What is this?” I said. “The SAT?”

  “Someone to give you a little extra practice,” my dad said.

  “That’s not a thing,” I said.

  My dad shrugged. “A personal trainer, then, if you like.”

  “Someone to help you—physically—do more than the bare minimum that insurance requires.”

  Bare minimum struck me as deeply insulting. Spoken like a person who had no idea what it was like for the bare minimum to be your own personal ultimate maximum.

  My mom went on, “We just want to be sure you’re doing everything—while you still can.”

  “I am doing everything I can!” I said.

  My mom gave me a look, like, Come on. “I saw you study for finals, and the SAT, and the GMAT. I know you’re capable of more than this.”

  I heard my voice get very quiet. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

  My dad jumped in. “I think your mother’s just trying to say that we want to help. However we can.”

  That wasn’t what she was trying to say. I suddenly saw it very clearly. She wanted to help—but only in the ways that she had already chosen. My mo
ther was always very helpful—when you did exactly what she wanted.

  A lifetime of following my mother’s every piece of advice ticker-taped through my head. A lifetime of never questioning her type-A standards, and working like a dog to meet them, and internalizing them without question. In that moment, possibly for the first time ever, it occurred to me: She didn’t know everything. She didn’t have it all figured out. I’d followed her instructions for life to the letter, and look where it had gotten me: right here, trapped in this bed, enduring stories about ballerinas. She said take advanced calculus? I took advanced calculus. She said major in business administration? I majored in business administration. She said get an MBA? I got an MBA. Top of the class. Always. Every time. Like a chump.

  Sitting there, I tried to scan back for even one time—one tiny time—that I’d rejected her “help” and done my own thing. That’s all Kitty had ever done, by the way—reject my mother’s advice—and it had made her teen years in our house pretty miserable for everybody. But had it made Kitty’s life miserable? Sure, she’d been through some rough times, and she had a crazy hairdo, and way too many piercings, and a defiantly funky lifestyle—but she was always, unapologetically Kitty. She knew who she was. She did what she loved. Who was I? What was I good at, besides keeping my apartment neat, and keeping myself groomed, and acing tests? What did I like? What was I passionate about? What would it feel like to do what I wanted instead of what was expected?

  I had no earthly idea.

  “No,” I heard myself say then.

  My mother blinked at me.

  “No thanks, I mean. I don’t need a tutor.”

  “I’m not sure you see the time pressure here,” my mother said.

  “I think I do.”

  “In exactly three weeks, your window of opportunity will slam closed.”

  “Maybe not slam,” my dad amended.

  But my mom was irritated now. “Don’t you want to get better?”

  “I can’t believe you would even ask me that.”

  “Because right now it doesn’t seem like you do.”

  I looked at my dad for help.

  He jumped in. “Maybe we just need to redefine ‘better.’”

  “‘Better’ doesn’t need to be redefined,” my mom said. “It is what it is. It’s better.”