A Leg to Stand On

by Colleen Haggerty

Finally, I took a breath and stepped into my room. I thought that at least in here, the room that had always been my refuge—particularly there in the bed where I talked to Dad every night before sleep—I could sort through the feelings that had been taunting me in the middle of the night at the hospital. I was still on pain medication, but not a high dose, so perhaps I could think more clearly now in the safety of my own space.

  Unfortunately, as soon as I managed to take off my pylon and climb into bed, a flood of thoughts and fears came crashing down on me. What was I going to do now? Go back to school and act normal? Would I be able to go to college? Get a job? Would I need Mom’s physical and financial help the rest of my life? How would I make money and provide for myself? All of my classmates were planning their futures with an air of hope and expectancy. I would be planning mine with heavy feelings of doubt and dread. I had already convinced myself that I was far too ugly now to ever have a normal relationship with a man. Was I even going to be able to look people in the eye? Especially the boys? Can a girl with one leg flirt with a boy? I didn’t know what the new rules would be for me.

  Thinking about all of this was not a good idea after all. It was just going to drive me crazy. There was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. I leaned back against my pillows and closed my eyes. My life was out of my control. In my exhaustion, I started to drift off to sleep. And then out of the blue came the scene of the accident. The cold of snow falling on my face. The sound of traffic passing by. The green Pacer coming at me. I awoke to my own gasp just as the car was about to hit me. Why didn’t that stupid jerk slow down?

  With my eyes now wide open, I looked around the room for something to anchor me. Jeans on the chair. My desk. The door that led to the hallway and to the rest of my family. And I wondered if he even knew my name or what had become of me. I’d heard his name was Harvey. The church had said we should pray for our enemies, but I wasn’t talking to God anymore, and I certainly wasn’t going to pray for the man who ruined my life. Tears sprang to my eyes as my anger intensified.

  “Colleen, are you already in bed?” Mom called as she walked in to check on me. “Do you need anything?”

  I took another breath and turned my attention to her smile. “No thanks, Mom.” I knew she wanted to tend to my immediate needs, but what I needed right then was for her to answer my growing list of questions about how I was supposed to move forward. I knew, though, I just knew, she didn’t have the answers. “I’m fine. Good night.”

  A few days after I returned home, Mom asked the therapist she’d been seeing the past few years to make a house call to see me. I was conflicted about this. On the one hand, I was nervous about talking to someone I didn’t know. In my naïveté, I was afraid he’d somehow hypnotize me and force me to bare my soul, exposing all the private thoughts that had been swirling around since the accident. On the other hand, I was hopeful that there might be someone with an answer to all my questions about who I was supposed to be now.

  Mom walked Mr. Riggs into the family room where I was waiting for him. After introductions, Mom left us alone. She shut the family room door behind her. I heard the muffled sounds as she spoke to my brothers in the kitchen next door.

  I never had the chance to find out what would have happened if I’d opened up to Mr. Riggs. He spent most of his hour with me talking about a friend of his who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident—and assuring me that I’d be fine.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said at one point.

  How could he say that? Things were not going to be fine. If I had two legs, everything would be fine, but I didn’t. That’s why he’s here, isn’t it?

  I didn’t know much about therapy, but I knew the therapist wasn’t supposed to do most of the talking. Like my friends who visited me in the hospital, I sensed his discomfort with me. I stopped listening to him after fifteen minutes and decided that, if a therapist couldn’t handle my feelings, I’d have to rely on myself to deal with my amputation and my future.

  The following week, I was sitting on the living room floor reading a book after dinner. Mom sat on the couch, with the coffee table in between us. She interrupted my focus by placing a few pieces of paper on the table. I glanced at the papers and then looked up at her. Her eyebrows were raised—not in a question, but in expectation.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “This is a list of everyone who helped out while you were in the hospital, people who sent flowers and did nice things. You need to write thank-you notes to these people.” She pushed the list across the table to me.

  I stared numbly at the list of nearly fifty names. Beads of sweat started to form on my brow, and I felt tears forming in my eyes. She wanted me to write thank-you notes? What I could possibly say to these people? I couldn’t imagine writing the words “thank you” fifty times after what I had been through. Thank you? Thank you for what? Thanks for sending flowers after I lost my leg? Thanks for sending over a casserole after I lost my leg? This wasn’t like a birthday or Christmas.

  My agitation increased as Mom kept her eyebrows arched in that “do as I’m telling you” expression. I was dumbfounded. Shouldn’t people be writing notes to me? I’m the one who lay on the side of the road and watched my leg be carried away by a paramedic. I’m the one who endured hours of physical therapy, sweat dripping down my entire body, as I learned to walk again. Thank-you notes? I couldn’t believe she was asking me to do this, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to challenge her. Challenging my mother wasn’t what I did, and I wasn’t about to start now.

  So I took the list from her and dutifully wrote each and every thank-you note. I wrote “Thank You” again and again and again. While I was being the obedient daughter I had always been, I did so secretly resenting each word I wrote—and my own quiet compliance.

  After taking a lot of time off from work, Mom needed to return. She arranged for her friends to take turns checking in on me while she was at the office. I knew these women since they were all from church and bridge buddies of Mom’s, but I felt awkward spending time alone with them. And then the perfect distraction arrived.

  One afternoon while I was still recuperating, Rob called to ask if he could visit. I spent an hour fixing my hair and finding something to wear to hide the pylon as much as possible. With the feeling of an Alka-Seltzer tablet exploding in my stomach, I worried I might actually throw up from the excitement of seeing him again. I had been barraged with visitors, but no one made my skin tingle or made me forget my heartache like Rob did when he walked in our front door. He came at about four in the afternoon, and we spent the next two hours talking nonstop. All my old feelings surfaced as I caught a whiff of his scent and watched his eyes glisten as he laughed. That was the first normal conversation I had had with someone outside my family since the accident. Rob and I talked like old friends, picking up from where we had left off when he graduated last spring. With my other friends, the conversation was steered around the elephant in the room; with Rob, the elephant didn’t exist. I found myself laughing too loudly as he did his impressions of different Monty Python characters with an exaggerated British accent and his face drawn like an old butler. He ended up staying through dinner and watching TV with the family afterward, and then we talked some more, sitting on the living room floor in front of the fire. Our conversation turned more serious as he talked about how my accident had affected him.

  “Colleen, when I heard about your accident and how you could have died, it was a wake-up call. I realized I have feelings for you, and now is my opportunity to let you know how I feel. I don’t want to let this moment pass.”

  My face flushed. Fears that I could never be loved as an amputee came forward, but I pushed them away. I looked up at him, not knowing what to say.

  “I have to ask. Do you share these feelings toward me?”

  I laughed and exhaled my pent-up angst and disappointment.

  “Yes, Rob, I do. Actually, I have for a long time.” After years of keeping my feelings for
Rob a secret, I felt like I was betraying myself by uttering those words. But I knew I had to admit my feelings to him in order to propel this conversation forward. And I so much needed this to happen.

  “Well, then,” he said, very formally, “I’d like to ask if you will be my girlfriend.” His eyes squinted in anticipation of my answer. My own eyes popped open in surprise and elation.

  “Really?” I squeaked. This was happening so fast. Did he mean it? But looking into his hopeful face, I could see this wasn’t a mean joke. I took a deep breath before I said yes.

  We were sitting on the floor, and I was still figuring out how to maneuver my body with the cast and the pylon, so our hug was awkward. We stood up, and he looked deep into my eyes. “May I kiss you?”

  All I could do was nod my head.

  I didn’t know or understand what swooning was until I kissed Rob that night. I felt like the earth had completely disintegrated, and I was floating in a sea of happiness. The doubt and anger I had experienced during the past three weeks seemed to vanish. A simple kiss and a warm, generous hug from the boy I had liked for so long made me hope I could set aside the ugliness of my self-hatred and the fear of the future.

  In three short weeks, I’d been initiated into an extreme range of emotions. The despair and pain my heart could tolerate shocked me. From day to day, I could hardly understand, let alone name, what I was feeling. And then, in one moment, the knot of sadness was replaced by the beauty and joy now filling my heart. But, love notwithstanding, I couldn’t escape the sobering facts that I still needed a prosthetic leg, I still needed physical therapy, and I still needed to learn to walk without crutches. At least, I told myself, I had Rob, the boy of my dreams, by my side to help me weather all that was ahead.

  5

  A NEW PART

  As I emerged from the accident, I learned there was more to recovery than focusing on my own healing. There was a world of people out there I had to consider—all who had their thoughts about who I should become. Two years of high school drama paid off well. I already had the skills to portray myself on the outside as something completely different from how I felt on the inside. I was also quickly figuring out how to align myself with other people’s expectations.

  When I was home recuperating after my hospital stay, one of Mom’s friends gave me a copy of Reader’s Digest with a page dog-eared, pointing to an article about an amputee who had scaled a mountain. In an attempt to give me hope, many people had begun to relay such stories to me of amputees they knew or heard about who had defeated the odds in one magnificent way or the other. But I wasn’t inspired by those stories or by the Reader’s Digest article at first; instead, I was privately horrified that anyone would dare compare me to a mountain climber. What people assumed would be motivational stories only served to mount the pressure of who I was apparently supposed to become. Another of Mom’s friends knew an amputee, a college girl, who offered to talk to me about her experiences living on one leg. She came over a few weeks after I returned home from the hospital. When she walked into the room, a slight hitch in her gait, I wrote her off immediately: she was gorgeous, blonde, and thin. When she told me she had been a cheerleader in high school, my jaw dropped. How did she jump around for her routines? This was who they wanted me to model myself after? There was no way I could follow in her footsteps. Where was the demented crazy person who has torn all her hair out in anger and frustration? Now that would be someone I could emulate. No one expected anything special from me when I had two legs, but now that I had lost one, I had to be the Disabled Role Model of the Universe? Before the accident, I didn’t like running on two legs, and now I was supposed to be superhuman on one? Was this fair? I didn’t appreciate those stories, because I didn’t want to play the part of an inspirational amputee. But I could tell people didn’t want me to go back to just being me—minus a leg. Everyone saw this as an opportunity for me to finally be something special.

  And as much as I balked—as terrified as all this pressure made me feel—some small voice inside me was buying in. My situation did make me special. And what adolescent girl doesn’t want to be extraordinary?

  The morning of my first day back at school, I was sick to my stomach with fear. I had been away for four weeks, and I didn’t know what to expect. Everyone I knew from school had been supportive. I’d received cards from so many people at school: the entire drama department, the cheerleading squad, and even the football team. Even so, I wasn’t assured that people wouldn’t treat me like a freak when I walked around school on crutches with a metal pylon—my temporary leg. When I went back to school in eighth grade after Dad died, I felt like people avoided me like the plague. If people reacted that strongly to death, how would they react to dismemberment?

  Mom drove me the three miles to school. My first greeting was on the school’s big reader board: “Welcome Back, Colleen.” In a school of 1,800 students, it was unusual to see anyone’s name on the reader board, let alone just one student’s. “Oh look, Colleen, look at the sign! Isn’t that so sweet?” Mom was absurdly cheerful in her typical manner. The sign did make me feel special, and my stomach settled down a bit, but I also wondered if most of the students at the school were wondering who the hell Colleen was, just like in The Wizard of Oz, when the witch inscribes in the sky SURRENDER DOROTHY and the munchkins all wonder, “Who’s Dorothy?” I shared a kinship with Dorothy, lost in a new land with only the most basic of instructions on where to go or what to do.

  I clumsily got out of the car and walked into the foyer of the school. I felt like a celebrity immediately. “Hey, Colleen, welcome back!” “Way to go, Colleen!” These words were offered by staff, friends, and strangers. A gush of warmth filled my chest, and I couldn’t help but smile. Other people, the ones I was afraid of, the ones I tried to ignore, stared at me, pointed indiscreetly, and whispered out of the sides of their mouths to their friends. I could tell that suddenly everyone knew who I was, not because of my theatrical experiences, not because I had coordinated homecoming-week activities or because I was on the yearbook committee, but because I was the girl who had lost her leg in an accident. I had morphed into the school sensation. The secret part of me that felt I deserved this kind of attention, loved it. For once, there was a reason for people to remember who I was. I wasn’t just a wallflower. I was special.

  The one place I wouldn’t be treated as special was in the presence of Beth Lewis, our drama teacher. Play rehearsal began directly after school and ran until five. Miss Lewis always sat in the back of the auditorium. She was a tall, thin woman with big lips and jowls. She wore the stylish oversized brown glasses of the late ’70s, and with those on and her short, wavy, brown hair, she looked like a bug. Miss Lewis wasn’t a warm, fuzzy woman. She was practical and methodical, and she took her job as director of two plays a year quite seriously. All of us high school actors joked, “You don’t mess with Beth.” She sat at a table littered with pastel-colored papers bearing the name of each character, her glasses dropped to the end of her nose so she could simultaneously watch us on stage and quickly jot praises or admonishments about our performance. At the end of practice, cast and crew would gather around her as she either scolded us on a bad rehearsal or praised us for a good one. When practice ended, she yelled out our character’s name and, with a flick of her wrist, tossed us our feedback sheet.

  Half the fun of rehearsals was hanging out backstage among the other cast members and stage crew, waiting for a cue. There were plenty of real “characters” involved in drama; I wasn’t one of them. I was the giggly girl who was entertained by them and stroked their egos by laughing at their antics. Our whispered tones increased in volume over the course of every two-hour practice, interrupted only by scene changes and Miss Lewis barking orders from the cafeteria floor: “Quiet! Down!” During my first rehearsals for Funny Girl, everyone was very nice to me, but something had changed. I didn’t feel the same kinship with these people anymore. I wanted to blame them, but I wasn’t sure what to blame
them for. I felt removed from the conversations and the jokes, like my four-week absence had distanced me from the intimacy a play usually inspires.

  Onstage, I felt awkward. My crutches were cumbersome and hard to maneuver around the set. Following the script was difficult, words weren’t coming out the way they used to, and I often forgot my lines. From the sides of their mouths, my cast mates cued me by whispering the first few words of my next line. I had played various speaking parts in previous plays, and memorizing my lines had always been easy. Now, when I read the Funny Girl script at home, I had a hard time concentrating on the words.

  About three weeks after I’d been back at rehearsal, I received a shocking feedback sheet. “Strakosh, learn your lines,” Miss Lewis had scribbled with a hard hand and lots of underlining. “Time has come when you must know them well. I’m seeing absolutely no character development growth—or growth in concentration. You just must learn your lines and begin to focus in on what is and/or should be happening on stage. You are pulling down your scenes.”

  My body reacted immediately and without my consent. I looked at the page to read the remarks again, but my tears made the words too blurry. The sounds in the background—the jostling of backpacks, the gossiping of my cast mates, the shuffling of feedback sheets and scripts—were sucked from the room as if by a vacuum. A fuzzy fog enveloped me.

  I had been raised to respect my elders, to not question authority, to do as I was told, and to follow the rules. It wasn’t in my makeup to throw that piece of paper back in her face and tell her, “Back off. I’ll memorize my lines when I’m good and ready.” Instead, the words pierced my brain like jolts of electricity, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to assimilate them gracefully.

  Internally—but only internally—I gave way to an explosion of protest. I have to focus on what’s happening on stage? I can hardly focus on what’s happening in my life. I don’t know where I am or where I belong.