How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  pinball

  Pop-A-Shot

  racing

  canoeing

  zip-lining

  ping pong

  wheelchair obstacle course

  horseback

  “What is all that?” my mom asked when she came in, peering over my shoulder.

  “Ideas for the summer camp,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it, too.”

  “You have?”

  “If we built it,” she said, “maybe the camp sign could be a mosaic. That would give us something to do with all your broken dishes.”

  That’s how Kit got me to try harder. The same way she got me to sing. By tricking me. By playing a tune I couldn’t resist. But I do have to give her credit—or maybe I have to give it to Ian’s mom. Because the next thing I doodled on that paper was her famous quote: When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for somebody else.

  * * *

  KIT LEFT THAT morning, but it was okay. I didn’t have that same sense of panic I’d felt when she left the hospital.

  Now I had a project.

  Or maybe the project had me.

  In the following weeks, I got consumed. I took over the dining table. I drew plans for buildings and consulted an architect. I made lists of ideas, resources, people to work with. I did real estate searches online—looking for land that was far enough out to be cheap but close enough to be accessible. I looked at other, nonprofit camps online to see how they did things and what they offered. I brainstormed names and investigated graphics. I made plans for a nature trail, a library, a ceramics studio, a yarn café, a bake shop, a butterfly garden. Everything would be wheelchair accessible—and everything would be architecturally beautiful. I had rolled my eyes so much at my mother decorating my hospital room—but after we’d taken it all down, I’d seen her point. The feeling of the room changed. Without her quilts and curtains and table lamps and splashes of color, it felt like the saddest place in the world.

  I wanted this place to feel like sunshine. I wanted it to feel like hope. Warm, but cool. Bright, but shady. Alert, but calm. I wanted it to feel like magic.

  “You could call it Hell on Wheels,” my mom suggested one night at dinner.

  “‘Hell’ might give the wrong vibe.”

  “What about Camp Magic?”

  I gave a shrug. “Might sound like an academy for young magicians.”

  “Not a bad idea,” she pointed out.

  I pointed at her. “Yes. We should offer magic classes.” Then back to the name: “It needs to sound fun enough for kids, but serious enough for grown-ups.”

  My mom grinned. “So the Margaret Jacobsen Center for Spinal Cord Recovery is out.”

  I gave her a look. “Too cutesy.”

  “What about Camp Hope?” she asked.

  We let that idea simmer while we sketched out ideas for a camp T-shirt with the slogan THAT’S HOW WE ROLL.

  It was both a lucky and a slightly unlucky thing that my mom was a contractor.

  It meant that she knew a million workmen, plumbers, electricians, surveyors, real estate agents, bricklayers, painters, distributors, suppliers, A/C guys, and demolition experts. They knew the dirt on everybody and knew how to get the best deals. That was all in the “pro” column.

  Under “con”: If I really did this, I was about to spend a truckload of time with my mom.

  And it did look like I was going to do this. I couldn’t seem to make myself think about anything else, for one thing. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to use my brain again—to use all my business training, and skills, and design sense, and creativity. The project brought together almost everything I loved to do.

  More than that, it got me out of the house.

  At a certain point, I had to start looking for land, and meeting with people, and talking with them about ideas and strategies, having lunches and coffees with potential contributors and partners. Leaving the house just for the sake of leaving the house had never interested me. But leaving the house to get a donation pledge of five thousand dollars? That I could do.

  I dusted off my old pantsuits and my pearl earrings, and I gutted up and went to lunch.

  Kit even made me set up a Kickstarter campaign, and then she posted about it to her now sixty-six thousand followers. Donations flowed in. Money piled up. The whole thing started to look like it might actually happen.

  “They love you!” Kit said on the phone. “Send me a picture of you in that pinstripe Ann Taylor suit!”

  Was everything suddenly all fixed and perfect? No. Did I get pitying stares in restaurants? Constantly. Did I still have profound moments—hours, days—of hopelessness, anger, bitterness, frustration, despair, self-hatred, and grief? You could say that. And did I one day run into Neil Putnam from Simtex HR, the guy who had hired-me-but-not-officially for my dream job before the accident and then nixed the whole thing afterward? And did he not recognize me at all? And when I finally explained who I was, did he say, “You changed your hair!”?

  Yes. That happened.

  But the tone of my life was different now. I had a purpose. I had a reason to take a shower every morning. I had a reason to take care of myself. More than that, I was figuring out how doing something for other people could—in fact—be doing something for yourself. Amazing.

  It felt good to feel better, and so I started looking for other ways to amp it up. I got addicted to audiobooks. I joined a choir. I kept knitting, even though I never got any better. I taught myself how to make pastries from scratch. I let my mom sell my old condo.

  By the time I put the three hundredth X on my suicide calendar, I had signed an earnest-money contract on a hundred-acre plot of land outside of town with a two-hundred-year-old oak tree, three hills, and a catfish pond. I used the money from the condo as a down payment. That night, even though my dad still had not come home after all this time, and even though my mom might well have been X-ing off her own set of impossibly strange and altered days, we celebrated with champagne.

  Despite everything, I decided at last to bet on hope—and I stuffed my suicide calendar in the recycling.

  If this is the rest of my life, I found myself thinking one day, it’s okay.

  It really was.

  Twenty-six

  THEN CHIP DECIDED to get married.

  Married.

  To that sneaky, soup-making ex-girlfriend, Tara, a.k.a. the Whiner.

  In Europe, of all places. In a famously charming town in Belgium called Bruges.

  The invitation arrived on Valentine’s Day, of all days. Which forced me to notice three things: One, it was Valentine’s Day. Two, it had been exactly a year since the crash. And three, I had completely forgotten about Chip.

  I also noticed something else: My mom, my dad, and Kit were the only names on the invitation.

  My mother knew about the engagement, though. She was still friends with Evelyn. She just couldn’t give her up. Although Evelyn never came to the house once I moved home. For a long time, my mother snuck out to meet her, saying she was “running errands,” but I knew what they were up to.

  “You can be friends with Evelyn,” I told her one night after dinner. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m not!”

  “It’s not disloyal to me. I’m fine.”

  “He cheated on you! He gave up on you.”

  “It was a messy time.”

  She didn’t need to be mad for me. She really didn’t. Hadn’t we all lost enough?

  I got it. I did. Best friends are not easy to come by. The two stayed friends, and they avoided talking about either one of us, until one day Evelyn just had to tell her about the upcoming nuptials.

  My mom got the scoop: Chip had been promoted not once, but twice, and had risen through the ranks of his investment bank in exactly the way you’d expect a guy as handsome and WASPy and confident as Chip to rise. He was highly promotable. In fact, they’d transferred him to their Brussels office.

  “Chi
p is living in Belgium?”

  My mom nodded.

  “He doesn’t even speak French!”

  I felt a flash of resentment—quick but distinct. Chip got promoted? To Europe? The crash sure hadn’t slowed him down. Was his life really going to be that easy? I got that sour feeling that comes when you make the mistake of thinking someone else is beating you at life.

  But then I took a mental breath.

  So what? Chip was in Brussels. But I was genuinely okay in Texas. We had both moved on. We could both be okay at the same time. We weren’t on a seesaw, for Pete’s sake! There was plenty of okay to go around.

  Just because Chip had gotten what he’d wanted so easily, without ever having to question it, without ever having to struggle—that didn’t necessarily mean that what he got was better.

  “I’ve known about the wedding for a while,” my mother confessed. “Evelyn warned me.”

  “You didn’t tell me?”

  “I thought it would fall through,” my mom said. “Apparently, that girl followed him to Brussels. She showed up at the airport with all her bags and announced she was coming along.”

  I shrugged. You had to give it to her. “Ballsy.”

  My mother closed her eyes. “Please don’t talk about balls at dinner.” Then she went on, “The good news is, it’s in Europe, so no one could possibly expect us to go.”

  “Did you know they were going to invite everybody but me?” I asked, showing her the envelope.

  From her face, she didn’t. “That must be a mistake,” she said.

  That calligraphy did not look like a mistake to me, but before I could say so, my mom’s phone rang.

  It was Kit.

  My mom put her on speaker.

  “Did you hear about the wedding?” Kit demanded.

  “We just got the invitation,” my mom said.

  “And I’m not on it,” I added. “They invited everybody but me.”

  “I think it was an oversight,” my mother declared.

  “Maybe they’re sending you a special one,” Kit suggested.

  I gave my mom a look. “Unlikely.”

  “Well,” Kit said, in her determined voice, “you have to come anyway. You have to crash.”

  “Hell, no,” I said, just as my mom said, “We’re boycotting, like decent people.”

  “Listen,” Kit said. “They invited Dad, too. Evelyn called him, since she knew he was ‘on sabbatical.’”

  “I hope he is boycotting, too.”

  “No,” Kit said. “He’s going.”

  My mom frowned. “Why would he go? He doesn’t even like to travel.”

  “He’s going,” Kit announced, “because I talked him into it.”

  “Kit—”

  “And I talked him into it because we’re going to Parent Trap him.”

  My mother frowned, totally uncomprehending.

  “We won’t tell him you’re coming,” Kit went on, “and you’ll show up looking devastating—and the shock of it will catapult him into your arms.”

  “There may be some logic flaws here,” my mother said.

  “He talks about you all the time,” Kit insisted. “He misses you all the time. I think it’s pride keeping him away. I think we need to give him a reason to get past it.”

  “You want to surprise him into forgiving me?” my mother asked.

  “Shock and awe,” I said, nodding. For a terrible idea, it wasn’t too bad.

  “Exactly,” Kit said.

  I shrugged. “It might be just dumb enough to work.”

  But my mom was shaking her head. “No. I can’t.”

  “Yes! You can!” Kit said.

  “It’s too much,” my mom said, and she suddenly looked remarkably old to me. Smaller, too. She’d always been so forceful—so certain and bulldozer-like about her choices. It was strange to see her hesitating and uncertain like this. It was disarming to see her hang back and hesitate. The little frown lines between her brows seemed deeper. As disorienting as it was to see her this way—so timid—I have to confess, it humanized her, too. It made me feel almost protective.

  “Mags and I will help you,” Kit offered then. “We’ll go with you. We’ll make it work.”

  My mother lowered her voice, like I might not hear. “I can’t ask Margaret to do that.”

  “Hello?” I said. “I wasn’t invited.”

  “Skip the wedding, then,” Kit said, like, Duh, “but come to Belgium. Easy.”

  But would it be easy? Traveling so far might not be easy. Leaving the safe nest I’d built this year might not be easy. Facing a thousand unknowns had definite potential to not be easy. And flying again—something I’d just assumed I’d never do—would be the exact opposite of easy.

  But Kit was ready to make this happen. “Family trip to Belgium! End of discussion!” Kit said. “I’ll organize everything. Hit the mall and find something heartbreaking to wear.”

  My mom squinted at me, like, Is this a good idea?

  I gave her a nod, like, Hell, yes.

  Was it a good idea? I didn’t know. It actually seemed pretty risky—for everybody. I had just barely let go of my suicide calendar, after all. I hardly even had my head above water, and it wouldn’t take much to wash me back under. Could I do this?

  I suddenly thought maybe I could.

  Especially as it hit me that Belgium was really not all that far away from Scotland.

  It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to help my mother get some closure with my dad—and then maybe just pop over to Scotland for a little closure of my own.

  A terrible, heartbreaking, foolish idea—but once I’d thought it, I couldn’t seem to unthink it.

  The idea even woke me up from a sound sleep that night and gnawed at me until I Googled the distance. A nonstop flight from Brussels to Edinburgh took under two hours. Easy.

  I could pop over for a day or two, maybe. Pretend to be in town “on business.” Call Ian in a super-casual way, like I’d remembered him as an afterthought. We could meet for coffee. I could be near him again, even for a few hours. But, as I considered the idea, I had to think about what that might look like.

  I’d be—as ever—in my wheelchair. It would be gray outside. We’d meet at some café with a door too skinny for my chair, so Ian would have to leave me outside while he ordered us to-go cups, if they even had things like that in Europe. He’d lead us to a bench nearby, and I would be utterly saturated with longing—like a starving person looking at a fresh-baked loaf of bread—and he would be … What? Vaguely pleased to see I was still alive? Professionally curious about the state of my spinal cord? Polite? Even—oh, God—falsely friendly? Or worse! Maybe he’d be seeing someone by now, someone tall and able-bodied—a fellow triathlete—and he’d blithely bring her along so we could meet. You know, thinking that would be fun for me. I’d sit in asexual agony in my chair, watching the two of them on a bench with their able bodies side by side, smiling and stealing glances, but trying to keep it down for the desiccated, noodle-legged spinster in their midst.

  It would be the worst circle of hell. My stomach cringed at the thought.

  But I still wanted to do it anyway. Or maybe needed to.

  Kit loved this idea—but then, terrible ideas were her favorite kind. She wanted details. “What are you going to do—show up outside Ian’s flat and surprise him?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to surprise him on the phone, like a normal person.”

  “You mean, like—once you’re already there. Like, around the corner, in one of those little red phone booths?”

  I shook my head. “This is not a spy movie. I’ll just tell him I’m in town on business or something.”

  “I love it. A sneak attack.”

  “I’d just chicken out otherwise.”

  “How will you even find him?”

  “I have no idea.” I thought about it. “Maybe I’ll ask Man-Bun-Rob to get his address from the hospital.”

  Kit clarified: “You’re going to ask a
former PT to help you stalk his former colleague.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Perfect,” Kit said. “What could go wrong?”

  Twenty-seven

  KIT ARRIVED IN Texas three days before the trip to get us focused.

  We spent more hours than I can count strategizing over outfits for my mom—and me, too. Kit wanted my mother in green—my dad’s favorite color—and she dragged her to four stores before they found the right look. After that, Kit insisted she get her hair and nails done and buy all new makeup.

  “I don’t need a new lipstick,” my mother protested.

  “It’s crunch time,” Kit said. “Go big or go home.”

  Me? I was trickier. Kit spent more time on me than on my mother, and I wasn’t even going to the wedding. I could easily have just worn some clothes I already owned, but Kit wouldn’t hear of it. Nothing in my “sad closet” would do. Kit wanted me in something “smart, sophisticated, and with a just a touch of go-fuck-yourself.” But subtle. If I really was just going to “pop by” in Scotland to “say hello” to Ian, I’d have to meet the challenge of finding plausible business wear that could also “reduce a man to tears of longing.”

  “We might be setting our sights a little high here,” I said.

  “Hush. I’m working.”

  It took Kit two days to find my perfect look: a gray pantsuit with a crisp white blouse that cost four hundred dollars.

  “Worth it,” Kit declared.

  She also forced me to buy my first lingerie in over a year. “What if you meet a handsome stranger in the airport?” she demanded, pulling a pair out of my dresser. “Are you going have your way with him in a sports bra and sad gray Jockeys?”

  I gave her a look. “I’m not spending two hundred more dollars on uncomfortable underwear that no one will ever see.”

  “Don’t be such an old lady,” she said, holding the panties out. “I have to room with you. I’ll see your underpants, if no one else. And this situation right here”—she dropped the pair in the wastebasket—“makes me lose my will to live.”

  In the end, she gifted me the lingerie. Against my will.

  She also Instagrammed photos of our shopping day—but then she refused to post the final outfit. “You’re too gorgeous,” she declared. “You’d break the Internet.”