The Orchid

by Robert Waggoner

  I could not help but laugh.

  “My dad explained to me that night that he wasn’t angry at me or mom and that he was sorry he had taken his anger out on us when all he really wanted to do was love us. He called me his little princess and hugged me.” Her fingers tightened again. “Do you know how long I waited for him to call me his little princess? After he left my room that night I laughed and cried because I felt so much better!”

  When the silence stretched into minutes, I said, “Did you ever have to use the rabbit statement?”

  She nodded. “A few times; but it worked every time! My father kept that promise. He never wanted to hurt mom or me. I even taught mom to say it when daddy was being mean.” She looked at me. “I don’t think he drank anymore after that night.”

  I knew when she met me that I was just like her father. I was mad at the world and now I knew how she saw through me so clearly. I was curious about the tears she shed that day I was mean to her.

  “What made you cry the first day we met?”

  I could see her mind going back to that first day. “You stepped on one of my hurts growing up. My father used to get angry and tell me I was worthless, good for nothing. It really hurt until I realized that he was doing what his dad did to him and he didn’t really mean it.” She took a breath and smiled at me.

  “Ah, Lindsey,” I said softly. To myself I thought I don’t deserve you and never could. I squeezed her hand.

  When she went home that night, she stopped at the door to the room, then came back, and put her hands on my knees. She leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “I’m glad you didn’t die, Jimmy Turner,” she said. Then she was gone.

  With that settled finally between us, I found that I actually got much more pleasure out of being around her than I had thought possible. She knew her heart long before I knew mine so it was not much different for her. For me it was like walking into the sunshine from a gray world. Now instead of my world only being in color when she was next to me, it was in color all the time. Life was wonderful!

  Nothing changed in our physical relationship, except that she would spontaneously get up from whatever she was doing, come over to where I was, lean down, and kiss me. Then she would return to whatever it was she had been doing with a pleased smile on her face. She held my hand and put her head on my shoulder when we were alone…I guess the physical part did change a lot. For me, the best part was that we could talk about love now. There was never any danger that it would get beyond kissing. There was freedom in knowing that too.

  The rest of the school year passed quickly. I thought about blood clots but stopped worrying about them.

  Most of the seniors had trouble studying after Christmas. I had no trouble at all. Lindsey learned for the sheer pleasure of learning. It was impossible not to feel the same way when she was around. She wanted to learn what I was learning and taught me her subjects too under the pretense that I was helping her.

  I graduated with honors because of Lindsey. She pushed me to know more than the books and study sheets. Her thirst for knowledge built a hunger in me too. She was not surprised when the student body asked me to give the Valedictory speech.

  I wondered how I could use what I had learned from Lindsey’s approach to life. I wanted to thank her publicly—but it would be uncomfortable for her if I spoke her name.

  I started cataloging the things that were different since Lindsey stuck her head in the door and invited herself into my life. It seemed impossible to me that she had actually been eleven years old back then. She physically looked eleven years old but her attitude and her uncompromising standards gave her a maturity beyond her gapped teeth and ponytails. I thought about how kind and gentle she had been in all of her dealings with me over the last two years. How many times had I felt like I was the youngest? Sometimes it was just embarrassing!

  I thought back to the hospital—what did I learn from that? I learned she refused to give up. She refused to let fear rob her of today. Oh, man! That was it. Lindsey lived in today better than anyone I knew. That thought was too heavy, so I pushed it to the back of my mind.

  Lindsey never guessed her way through life. She really wanted to know why and how. I could not count how many times she stopped a conversation we were having and wrote the topic down. “We should learn about that,” she would say. The next day she would pick up the topic again—having done a ton of research. The girl never watched television. She considered it a waste of time. I found her more fun to be with than the television. The television I could not live without before Lindsey was gathering dust in the corner.

  I pondered my speech. I looked at the list of things to research that Lindsey and I had written. I counted forty-eight topics that we had come back to because she said we were just blabbering about stuff we did not understand. Dolphins, constellations, sand, specific algebraic equations…I laughed aloud—amazed at the variety and volume of topics we had researched.

  We had laughed a lot. Sometimes I laughed until my stomach hurt and I could barely breathe. It was not because she was trying to be funny, she just was. She had a simple way of disarming the angriest of moments. I suddenly remembered her saying the words “fucking and shit”—the only time I ever heard her say them—and how it completely disarmed me. I tried to remember the last time I cussed. I could not remember. I did not need to cuss anymore. Before the accident, my vocabulary was very limited and full of slang with cuss words sprinkled in to impress my friends who were trying to impress me. All that changed. Lindsey simply said once, “You don’t need to cuss,” and she was right. Before Lindsey, I cussed all the time in my head because of my anger at being in the wheelchair. I hated that everyone saw my wheelchair before they saw me. Lindsey saw me. She never saw the wheelchair. That was her gift!

  I did not know how to express that single idea—Lindsey saw me after the accident! She saw me, not the wheelchair. She was interested in me, not in how I felt about sitting in a wheelchair or being handicapped. She looked at me and saw something everyone else was having trouble seeing. With her around, I did not need to curse because the anger had simply evaporated like mist dissolved by the sun.

  I began to write disjointed ideas and thoughts. I knew I would not use notes—I would not need them when it was time to sit and deliver. When the time came, I knew what I would say.

  On graduation day, I donned cap and gown with the extra gold braid reserved for the top ten percent and the tassel that signified valedictorian. I studied my image in the mirror. I had come a long way since the accident. Looking into the mirror, I realized that I liked who I was now. Thank you, Lindsey.

  The cafeteria or the gymnasium held the graduation ceremony depending on the number of people expected. This year it was in the gymnasium, not because of an anticipated large crowd, but because the cafeteria stage had no ramp. With only sixty-four students graduating, the school planned for 300 people in addition to the students. It turned out that they had to scramble to get chairs from the cafeteria to handle the overflow. Almost 600 turned out.

  The last thing on the agenda before the graduates got their diploma was the valedictorian speech. I knew everyone was anxious to get out of the gymnasium so I kept my speech short. When the principal announced my name, I rolled out of the front row and turned my chair to face my classmates. A microphone was on a stand and the principal handed it to me before he sat down. There was clapping and cheering before I even started speaking so I had to wait a minute for it to die down. That was embarrassing.

  I nodded to my fellow graduates. They seemed interested. The bleachers and the chairs at the back of the gym were full. I took a deep breath, hoping I was going to say something worth hearing.

  “Classmates, Teachers, honored guests; it is my honor to speak before the graduates of Cross Field High School. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Three years ago, I was a sophomore practicing on the varsity football team with just the normal worries that affect the majority of us. In only five seconds one afternoon, d
riving home with my mom, chatting about something I cannot remember, my life changed. “Some of you look at me and say that it changed for the worse that day. I agreed with that for a year. I think I know what made it so hard. People no longer saw Jimmy Turner, they saw the wheelchair and a poor crippled boy whose life was greatly diminished because he could no longer use his legs to play football, tennis, and soccer…you name it. Even my friends no longer saw me—instead, they saw the wheelchair. And guess what? I saw the wheelchair too. It was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night. All day long, I saw the wheelchair. I sat for nearly six months looking out the window of my bedroom thinking of all the reasons why I should and did hate my diminished life.”

  Babies cried, people coughed, but nobody was walking out yet. I thought that was a good sign. Lindsey was in the bleachers to my right but the glare from the spotlight on the stage kept me from seeing her clearly. I continued.

  “A year after the accident, just before I came back to school, someone walked into my life…someone who couldn’t see my wheelchair. At first, it made me angry that this person did not see my obvious and compelling reason for being mad at the world. This person refused to bow before my anger but instead simply and bravely saw what was deeper, and began to acknowledge that person instead of the one everyone else noticed.”

  A murmur went through the audience as people guessed whom I meant.

  “Since then, I watched that person do the exact same thing for people with invisible handicaps. I say invisible because I have learned of other handicaps that limit me besides the one represented by this wheelchair. I speak now of fear, intimidation, laziness, and feelings of worthlessness. We all share these invisible handicaps. They keep us from doing. I am not going to finish that sentence. A handicap keeps you from doing, period.

  “We are not going to be overcome by our handicaps unless we admit and believe that they have defeated us. A handicap may keep us from doing one or two things…or even a hundred things…but there are a million possibilities that lie waiting to be picked up all around us. Why should fear or discouragement keep us from doing any of those things?

  “Here’s what I think the secret to our future success is: admit that you have a handicap and then press on with your life. I think the greatest thing that this person, this friend taught me, is that once I stop focusing on my wheelchair, nobody in this world can use it against me. If I stop focusing on my fear or my anger or my discouragement, I can get on with life “Seniors, we’ve got a lot of living left, let’s get on with it!”

  People were standing and clapping as I rolled back to my place in line. A few were wiping tears from their eyes.

  Chapter 9

  Lindsey and her parents drove off to Boston for their annual vacation in June, just after school let out. As I watched them disappear down the street, I thought of how much I would have enjoyed another summer at the beach. Lindsey was the same indefatigable girl that she was when she poked her head in my door three years earlier. I could almost mark the day in June that it happened. I was a different person. I tried to sort it out in my head and decided that one day I would have to write a book about Lindsey. I could not shake the twin emotions inside of me. First, that Lindsey was too young for me to miss her the way I was missing her and second, I missed her anyway!

  Dad and mom wanted to go to Pennsylvania to see the Civil War battlefields and soak up the history of that period. We left a few days after our neighbors did. The cemeteries were somber reminders of what can happen when a nation disagrees with itself. Rolling through the well-manicured graveyards with cannon and other artillery pieces on display near the headstones, I began to think about what Lindsey said to me—about her desire to be with me for the rest of her life.

  She saw everything differently than I did. She saw marriage as companionship whereas I had been looking at it as a physical relationship. The more I tried to sort that out, the more sense it made to me. Lindsey did not see the world in physical terms. It dawned on me that Lindsey did not discriminate the way other people did. She did not strive to be with the “popular” girls. The girl that the boys all made fun of because she was awkward and pudgy and unpopular, Lindsey reached out and pulled into our group. That girl was a lot of fun to be with when she realized that Lindsey, and by extension the rest of us, liked her just as she was. The so-called “popular” girls were welcomed as easily as anyone else was. Hanging around Lindsey, we learned to look for, and enjoy, the person buried underneath the façade of self-consciousness or importance.

  I really missed Lindsey.

  When we returned exhausted from vacation, mom went with me to Tennessee University for orientation. The campus was huge. I was not the only freshman in a wheelchair; there were a dozen or so. I met a couple of them during the lulls in the speeches and tours. Coming from a small school where I was the only person in a wheelchair, it was a huge change to see handicap parking places, ramps and wide doorways and dozens of wheelchair students. I was going to like this school!

  When our birthdays rolled around in August, we had already begun the tradition of celebrating mid-way between them. Four days after Lindsey’s birthday and three days before mine, Lindsey took me to dinner. She made me drive to our favorite restaurant and then afterwards, she made me drive to our hill. Our hill was the one place from which you could see the lights of Nashville way off in the distance. We held hands and talked. Lindsey put her head on my shoulder and then, because there was no wheelchair with bulky handlebars in the way, she put her arms around me and I put mine around her. I smelled the strawberry shampoo she had used and the soft scent of baby-powder deodorant but my eyes were looking over her head into the future. What would that be for us? How could there be a future? Then she noticed my distance and brought me back by lifting her lips.

  Tennessee University was thirty miles from home and I took them up on their full scholarship. A great benefit of TU was that I could commute. That meant I could be home at night and could take Lindsey to High School in the morning.

  I decided on the medical field—not to be a doctor—but to be a medical scientist who specialized in blood disorders. I was interested in how clots formed and what I could do to help handicapped people who were prone to get them. I did not know until later that thousands of people die each year from clots for reasons that sometimes baffle the medical community. The prevailing theory—and one that seemed to be accurate—was that clots resulted from inactivity.

  College was a welcome change of pace for me. I loved the campus and it blew me away that the Profs and students ignored my wheelchair. We were there to learn and it was refreshing to know that I was lumped right in with ambulatory students because the school was interested first in training student’s minds. I attended classes and went home to study. Campus dorm life and extra-curricular activities did not interest me at all.

  Lindsey entered her sophomore year and immediately assumed the presidency of the chess club—by unanimous acclaim. She asked me to be the club’s mentor and coach as allowed by the club rules and I happily accepted.

  Lindsey had the chess club organized so that members were required to play at least two games a week against me. With ten members in the club, I was playing twenty games of chess. Much of that happened on weekends so Lindsey and I could study together weeknights. I looked forward to the time alone with Lindsey. We shared an intimacy that went beyond the physical.

  My dad supported our studies behind the scenes by bringing in contractors to knock out a bedroom wall, which doubled the size of my room. Mom found chess tables, with built in boards, and bought them. Dad put them in the enlarged section of my room. Lindsey asked her dad to build shelves in my room to hold the overflow of books that we used as reference materials. Then he found a wireless internet service provider and bought two computers equipped with wireless technology and set those up in my room. As if that was not enough, he hooked up a satellite dish and we were able to dial in educational programming. He even put a s
mall refrigerator in my room so that we could have cold drinks and snacks available to the chess club. Mom baked cookies all the time and the chess club began to call her mom.

  Sometime in December, Lindsey finally reduced the number of games that I had to play with each of them to one as they progressed in their skills and the games took longer to play. She required chess club members to keep their grades up above a B average—which was not a chore for most of them. The ones that struggled got all the help they needed from Lindsey or me during the week. It was not long before more kids got interested and the chess club started to grow again. Nerds are just as hungry for friends as jocks, and my house was the gathering place. Others were there too: kids that did not fit into any other group fit ours perfectly.

  It did not take long for Lindsey to crack down on the kids who were coming for the wrong reasons. She was not mean or harsh in anyway. She simply explained that if they wanted to be part of the chess club they would achieve the required grade point average by getting better study habits or tutoring as needed. (We even enlisted my mom to help with math tutoring and she loved it.)

  Lindsey easily handled older kids. She reminded all of the chess club members of the goal they were trying to reach at every official club meeting. “We simply want to become what we can be by doing what we should do.” It was her motto and soon became the motto of most of the kids that hung around with her.

  One night I asked her about the motto. “Where did that come from?”

  She looked at me for a long moment before answering me. “I think it sums up what you stand for,” she said.

  “Me?” I was perplexed. “It describes you far better than it describes me.”