by Dean Murray
“Out of town for work, but you’re a paramedic. What do you mean?”
His response was nearly monotone, not soothing and in no way trying to curb my anxiety. “There is this emergency responder course in New Orleans for three months, which starts tomorrow. My boss asked me if I wanted to go, and I thought it would be a good opportunity. I’ll be back the first of May.”
“May? You’re leaving for three months? Today? But why?” I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, threatening to stream down my cheeks. Not wanting to sound pathetic, I did my best to add a frustrated tone to my last two words.
“I just told you, it’s a good opportunity for me. One of the guys was supposed to go and had to cancel at the last minute. I told my boss I’d go.”
Why would Max volunteer for a three month trip? This didn’t make any sense. Trying to steady myself as much as possible when I really wanted to curl up in a little ball, I asked, “Oh, well, is that why you couldn’t stop by yesterday?”
Max didn’t answer, then after a very long pause I asked, “Did I lose you?”
“No, I’m still here.”
“Am I missing something? Why didn’t you come by yesterday? Were you tied up at work?”
“Lauren, I was at your house yesterday. I was so stoked to see you that I showed up early. I saw you and Seth together in your front yard and was…I don’t know what I was, but I knew I had to leave.”
“You were here and you didn’t say anything? Where?”
“I was parked across the street from your house. I told you before I don’t want to be the guy who busts up you and your boyfriend. You and Seth are not as over as you led me to believe. “
Panic overtook me when I realized he had driven that black truck that squealed its tires all the way down the street. “No, Max, really, that was nothing…Nothing! We broke up, I swear we broke up. I called a cab but Seth said he would give me a ride, no strings. You can call him if you don’t believe me. We really broke up! Max, don’t leave, please.”
“Lauren, I didn’t say I was driving off of the face of the earth. I’m going out of town for a few months. I’ll be back the first week of May. This way I’ll know that it is really over between you two before I … before we start spending time together.”
“Max, don’t go. I promise we broke up.” I could hear my voice pleading with him, and there was no way for me to mask the emotion. I needed him to understand that he hadn’t seen what he thought he had.
“It’s three months. No pressure. I’ll see you when I get back.” His tone was resolute, Max had made up his mind well before now, and the panic I was feeling gave way to hurt. Max hung up the phone, and I was devastated. Max had been in my every waking thought since Thursday, and I had to wonder, if he could walk away so easily, had I really thought this through?
I had convinced myself that he felt for me the way I felt for him. I sat on the couch for a long time. Seth came by to take me to school, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well. I went upstairs to my room and stayed the remainder of the day. I tried calling Max’s number hundreds of times, but he never answered my calls.
The hours turned into days and the days turned into weeks. I tried calling Max several times a day that first week. By the second week I had weaned myself down to just calling once a day in the evening. Each time I left a voice mail asking him to call me, but he never did. By the third week of his absence he had already missed my twenty-second birthday and Valentine’s Day without so much as a card, a call or even a text. I felt so very irrelevant, I distanced myself from everything.
Chapter Ten
I wasn’t physically able to go back to work, so school was my only outlet to the rest of the world. The logical part of my mind was telling me I was in mourning over a person I had been with less than 30 minutes. It wasn’t possible for me to be this upset over someone I hardly knew, and the fact that he had made no contact with me at all just made me feel that much more isolated.
Eventually, Seth got used to the idea that we weren’t going to become a couple again. He asked if I wanted to go to any end-of-year parties with him, but I said no. Dancing really wasn’t an option, and as graceful as I normally was coupled with my reliance on crutches - drinking was out of the question. I really felt like Seth would be better off hanging out with someone else. My heart was broken, but it had nothing to do with Seth. As weeks turned into months, I eventually stopped calling Max. After two months apart, many of my vivid memories started to become hazy. I wasn’t certain if I would ever see him again.
I went through the entire month of March knowing I had let my future slip away because of a single innocent event. By late March, I stopped getting notes from strangers about the shooting, and I had sent out all the thank-you notes to well-wishers. The mother who had sent me twenty thousand dollars for jumping in front of her son turned out to be a very nice lady. I tried a couple times to give the check back, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was adamant that I take the money, and after my parents talked to her, they agreed.
My checking account balance was huge; being movement restricted, I didn’t find much of an opportunity to spend any of it. Every time Mom or Dad asked what my plans were for after graduation, I would remind them that job-seeking on crutches doesn’t leave the best first impression. It seemed like a waste of money to go onto grad school if I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. As long as we were talking about my money, I was going to know what my plan was well before I committed my own cash. Although their frustration was apparent, they didn’t push the subject. All my friends had already received their offer letters from employers and acceptance letters from graduate programs, unlike me who hadn’t even applied anywhere.
I had decided to use some of the money for a car. In another couple months I wouldn’t be able to catch a ride with Seth where I needed to go. But car shopping while incapable of test driving was worse than a waste of time, it was a drag.
As April arrived and graduation grew closer, I became a hermit. My leg was nearly healed, though I continued with my three appointments every week with the physical therapist. Ivan was just as ugly to me as ever.
During my last appointment, she had me doing leg extensions on a new machine in her office. After ten repetitions on each leg, I was resting before my next set when she walked up behind me, in her usual warm manner, “Wonderful Lauren! Good job! Now that you have practiced your form, how about putting some weight on the machine?”
Surprised at her compliment, I looked back at the weight selector and told her, “I just did 40 pounds.”
“Congratulations, you can lift a bag of potatoes with your legs. I am soooo proud. Now, do you want to be a grocer or do you want to be a fully functioning adult?” She reached for the selector bar and put it at 80. I wasn’t sure, but I guessed this was her idea of positive reinforcement.
Other motivational compliments she gave me included: “No, take your time, I don’t mind that you waste my time. It’s more important that you take a break. I wouldn’t want you to exert yourself.” “This is too much work, it’s too hard; maybe you can pay someone to come do your therapy appointments for you?” And my all time favorite, “It’s okay, I think if we sprinkle fertilizer on your leg, the muscles will grow back on their own, and you won’t have to do anything.”
She told me during my very first appointment in the hospital that in three months my legs would be stronger than they were before the shooting. I would never admit it to her, but she was right – her constant barrage of insults must have pushed the right buttons for me. I had to keep using crutches until my thirty-sixth appointment, but I could tell that I really didn’t need them even now.
I found that I was really looking forward to summer, and had even talked to Wanda about returning to the restaurant. Everything seemed to be back to normal, with the exception of that huge hole in my chest where my heart used to be.
Although my memories were no longer sharp, I had these images of Max – very outdoorsy. His brawn
, with his happy-go-lucky attitude (at least from my brief exposure to him), his tanned skin even when I met him in February, always made me think of him in rugged venues. With as little as I knew about him, he could have just hit a gym with a tanning bed – but since the fantasies were mine, I saw him playing football in a park, tossing a Frisbee on a beach, and doing lots of other activities, but always outdoors.
I hated that I had to rely on my imagination because I wasn’t all that imaginative. I had convinced myself that Max was more a figment of my imagination than a real person. This might have been my way of dealing with the rejection or whatever Max’s abrupt departure had been.
Seth and I saw each other nearly every day, but emotionally he kept his distance and even half-heartedly socialized with other girls at school. After February, he never openly mentioned that he wanted to start things up again, but I had my suspicions that our mothers were still scheming. Nothing overt, just comments like, “You and Seth should go see that new movie” or, “You two should plan a big bash after graduation.”
I had a strange dream one night, strange from the perspective that, up until that night, when it came to Max, I had always had roughly the same dream. In the usual dream, Max told me he was my destiny; my courage would bring us together. But this time the dream was different. It started the same as the other: he sat across from me in the chair by my window. The fantasies my imagination conjured up during the day were nothing like the crispness of my dream at night.
Max sat quietly in the dark as I watched him in the chair, waiting for him to go into his regular monologue. When he didn’t speak, I was worried he was going to fade away right there in front of me.
I did something I had never done, I asked him, “Why won’t you call me?” I was shocked at the sound of my own voice. In the conversation in my, “Max Dream,” the same conversation we had hundreds of times, I had never heard my own voice.
“It takes time, Lauren.” His voice sounded reassuring.
“What takes time?”
“Destinies are mapped; they don’t unravel immediately. Stay strong. Remember your purpose.”
“My purpose, right. You won’t call me. You left for no reason. You wouldn’t even listen to me.”
“How can you know passion if you don’t deny yourself the thing you want most?”
“What? Are you out of your ever-loving mind? How do I know passion if the only guy I’ve ever been the slightest bit attracted to skips town before we can even go on a date?”
“Passion is important. It guides decisions you make. I promise you’ll know passion, if you are just patient.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to get out of bed and go over and shake him. I wanted to know why in the hell he left and didn’t call me. The only passion I was feeling in this moment was quickly twisted up with fury.
Patient? It had been over two months. He knew how to get a hold of me, but he didn’t even try. I closed my eyes, determined not to let this dream play out, willing myself to wake up.
I felt a coolness on my temple. I reached up to swat away whatever was there and had a strange sensation of a person’s hand. When my eyes opened, I felt like Max had been right there beside me on the bed, like he had evaporated in front of me the second my vision was clear. My heart sped up, my palms turned clammy, and I struggled to discern dream from reality. I sat up straight in bed, turned on all the lights, and looked all around the room. I was alone. I felt the bed where I was sure he had just sat - nothing was there.
As I sat alone in the dark, I wondered how it felt to go crazy. Hallucinations weren’t something to dismiss. I had had that same dream over and over since I was eighteen, as if it were a scratched DVD. The dream would play up to a certain point, I would wake up, then the next night it would start over again at the beginning. My conversation with Max had always been engrossing; even though the dream had played so many times, I never tired of it.
This dream was different from the other. He had sat on the bed with me, or had he? He couldn’t have; Max couldn’t have been in my room. Of course, it was a dream.
The next morning I sat at the table with Mom, asking the question that had been eating at me all night. “Mom, does mental illness run in our family?”
She didn’t even look up. “I must have been crazy to tell your dad we could go car shopping for a Corvette this weekend. Other than that lapse in judgment, I can’t think of anyone. Why do you ask?”
“What about your aunt in Idaho? She was a little weird, right?”
Mom looked at me and carefully answered, “What’s this about?”
“I just wondered if anyone in our family had ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?”
“No. Is this some sort of project for school?”
Fat chance. My last semester included Accounting, Web Design, Statistics, Database Design, and Scientific Theory. “No, I was talking to a friend at school, and she was worried that she’d been hallucinating. I wondered how to tell if it was stress induced or chemical.”
“You should tell your friend to go to a doctor. I’m no expert, but I think hallucinations are neurologic from either a trauma or chemical imbalance.”
My mind raced. Maybe I was mentally ill. That would explain a lot. That would explain why I dumped Seth. Max and I had spent maybe thirty minutes together, and one kiss was enough for me to kick Seth to the curb after spending years together. I still didn’t feel any romantic connection to Seth, but I felt empty inside and started second guessing my decision. For the last couple months I had held out hope that Max would call, or write, or maybe just knock on my front door, but he never did.
Seth stepped halfway through the front door, tapped the face of his watch, “Tick tock, let’s go.”
I stood up from the table, grabbed my bag, my crutches, and my purse and started for the door. “Are you picking me up from Gretchen’s tonight?”
Mom didn’t look up from her paper, “Uh-huh.”
“Was that a yes, or should I call Dad?”
Her tone told me she was getting as tired of the endless appointments as I was. “Yes, Lauren, I’ll pick you up from physical therapy at five.”
Seth cut in before I could get a snotty response out, “I can empathize with you, Molly, I’m ready to put one of those ‘Taxi-cab’ magnets on my car. Lauren’s got more appointments than an exotic dancer.” Seth’s smart ass response stopped me in my tracks…empathize…
I stood there, frozen, trying to remember why that word had significance. I heard Max’s voice echo in my mind, “Empathy is a struggle; to achieve this one requires you to nearly become someone else, to step into their shoes…” When the flashback was over, I saw Mom and Seth staring at me. One of them must have said something I didn’t hear. Rather than ask them to repeat it, I started toward the door as if I were ignoring them.
The day was routine enough, ending in the physical therapy house of horrors. Gretchen was her ever endearing self when she greeted me with, “I’m glad you could put down the Ho Hos long enough to do your workout.” Her office was right across the street from the school’s campus, so making it on time wasn’t an issue. This had been my thirtieth appointment. I hadn’t missed any. I had done her prescribed exercises every day since the day I met her. I felt like I didn’t need the crutches at all, but she insisted I use them all the way up to appointment thirty-six, which was now only two weeks away.
Gretchen still had the personality of a postage stamp, but her demeanor was easier to stomach now that I had spent so much time with her. As I sat outside her office waiting for Mom to pick me up, my mind found its way to thoughts of Max again. I hated that I couldn’t get him out of my head. I pulled a book out of my book bag, thinking studying might help. It didn’t.
*****
April fifteenth was a sunny Saturday afternoon. I was watching the news with my parents, some mindless story about people waiting until the last minute to file their taxes, and which post office in town was going to stay open for them until midnight.
When the doorbell rang, I hopped up to answer it; yes, after two and a half months, I had become extremely agile, while keeping little if any pressure on my wounded leg. The mailman handed me a box, “Hi, Lauren, how’s the leg?”
“Doing great! Thanks for asking. I should be able to get rid of my crutches entirely in nine days. I can’t wait.”
“Glad to hear it! This is for you.”
He handed me a box and asked for my signature. There was no return address: the upper left corner simply read, “Max.” It startled me so much that I nearly dropped the box. My hand began to shake: I was so overjoyed at those three little letters. I tore the box open to find a letter accompanied by a cell phone.
Dear Lauren,
My training is just about over. I will be home on Saturday, Apr. 29th. If you are available, I would really like to see you.
I didn’t bring your number with me. I guess I didn’t trust myself not to call you. I would love to hear your voice. My numbers are already programmed in the phone. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll know that things worked out with you and Seth after all.
No matter if I never get a call from you, I wanted you to know that I will never forget you.
Max
I read the note ten, fifteen, twenty times. I hit the power button on the phone, selected the contacts list to see two numbers: “Max Cell” and “Max Hotel.” I called his hotel immediately and asked to be connected to his room.
“Hello,” was the answer on the other line.
“It’s you, it’s really you! I just got the box! How’ve you been?” I didn’t even try to mask the excitement in my voice.
“Lauren! Wow, I’m glad to hear your voice.”
“You’re coming back in two weeks? I was worried, that….that you weren’t.”
“I hafta ask, only for my sanity, so don’t take this the wrong way. Did you and Seth patch it up after I left?”
