by Dale Mayer
“And it will be heartbreaking if he doesn’t notice,” Meredith said brokenly. There wasn’t much else she could say, so she nodded and said, “Am I to avoid him in the rest of the place too? I hate to make it obvious like that because he will wonder if it’s my decision.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Dani said, speaking slowly as she thought about it. “We don’t want him to think you’re doing that. If he asks you what happened, just tell him that I changed your roster.”
Meredith stood. “Okay, I can do that.”
Dani looked up at her and smiled. “You’re being very brave.”
“I don’t feel very brave,” she said. “Since he arrived, I feel like I’ve been on nothing but a roller coaster ride. It’s been very rough.”
“I know,” Dani said. “Believe me. I do know.” And, of course, that just referenced Dani’s crazy up and down relationship at the beginning with Aaron, another patient and a longtime friend of Dani’s.
Meredith smiled, gave her a hug and said, “At least in your case you are at a point where you no longer have all those doubts.”
“No,” Dani said with a smile, “thankfully I’m well past that.”
“When’s the wedding?” Meredith teased.
Dani’s face flushed. “Not sure,” she said, “but we are talking about setting a date.”
“Well, you know that everybody here will want to be part of it,” she said with a laugh. “So you better plan for that too.”
“Absolutely,” Dani said chuckling. “But that just adds to the logistics issue.”
“No, not at all,” Meredith said. “Get a minister and have the ceremony here. And for the reception? You know the kitchen will want to handle that. Whoever is here at the time gets to attend, and, other than that, it’s really not about anybody else. It’s all about you and Aaron.”
“True enough,” Dani said. “We’ll think about it.”
“I’m sure you do nothing but.” Meredith smiled.
“Well, it is kind of nice,” Dani replied. “As you said, I already know that we’re together, and that makes a world of difference. I don’t get to see him anywhere near enough, and, for a couple years, that’s the way it’ll be, but after that? Well, it’s a whole different story.”
“Do you think Stan is seriously interested in working with Aaron?”
Dani beamed. “He can’t wait for him to get here. He’s needed a partner for a long time. Whenever Aaron is off, he comes down and helps anyway. He’ll do part of his practicum with Stan as it is.”
“Now that sounds perfect,” Meredith said warmly. “I’m really happy for you.”
And, on that note, she turned and walked out. She might be happy for Dani, but Meredith still had a long way to go to get her own life together. She could only hope it happened a little sooner rather than later because this was just too hard. She went to bed thinking about Gregory, and she woke up thinking about him. How fair was it to know that now she wasn’t even supposed to work with him? That had been the one light in her day. So many times in a day she got to check up on him. And now, … well, even that was gone. She understood the reasoning, and a week wasn’t a long time to see if it would make a difference or not. But it would seem like forever, … at least to her.
Several days later Gregory finally asked the question on his mind. At first, he hadn’t been sure, but now too much time had passed. “Why did Meredith ask to be removed from my team?” Gregory asked Shane bluntly.
Shane stopped what he was doing, crouched so he could look at his face and then said, “What are you talking about?”
“She’s not part of my team anymore.”
“I don’t know,” Shane said. “Doesn’t mean it was her choice though.”
“Of course it was,” Gregory scoffed. “Obviously she doesn’t like to see who I am now.”
“I think you’re doing Meredith a great injustice,” Shane said. “Of all the things I know about her, she sees people very, very clearly.”
At that, Gregory closed his mouth and went back to work. He didn’t like these exercises at all. They were working on one of the strips down his back that had been badly mangled. Part of it was still there; part of it was damaged, and the scar tissue kept pulling. Shane kept working on it. Softening it, loosening it, telling Gregory that they could ease some of these knots and get it to stretch out properly. But, so far, Gregory didn’t believe him. It just seemed like pain upon pain with absolutely no joy at the end of the day.
It’d been four days since he’d seen Meredith.
“Do you think she’s avoiding me?” he muttered, not letting the subject go.
“No,” Shane said firmly. “She’s incredibly busy. We’ve had a lot of new people come on board, and I think she’s just a swamped as everybody else is in here. Now, focus.”
At that, Gregory shut up because he didn’t have a job himself right now. And that’s what Meredith’s position here was—it was a job for her—unlike him, who was here twenty-four hours a day, whereas she didn’t have to be. She could have a life outside of this place.
When he was finally done, his hands were shaking, but unfortunately, he was afraid it was a buildup of rage inside, a rage that had been building slowly for the last few days. He didn’t know what to do about it, but he was terrified he would lash out and hurt somebody. He closed his hands into fists and clenched them tightly, trying to let out some of that energy. When he opened them again, Shane stared at him calmly but knowingly.
“You’ve got to let it blow, you know?”
Immediately Gregory shook his head. “I can’t.” His tone was harsh. “I might hurt someone.”
“Maybe,” Shane replied. “But you can’t keep it inside.”
“Why not?” he snapped. “It’s what I have done so far.”
“Sure,” he said, “but a rage like that is not healthy, and it’s holding you back. I get that you’re not who you were. I get that life dished you something you didn’t want to see. … I even get that you had choices that you could have made before that would have changed where you are right now, … but none of it matters. Because you can’t go back. You can’t change it. You can’t fix it. All you can do right now is play the hand you’ve been dealt.”
Gregory knew everything Shane said was true, but it didn’t matter. Gregory glared at his hands, and he could feel the vibration starting deep inside. “I need to go to the pool or something,” he said, his voice thick.
“Ever used a punching bag?”
He lifted his head, stared at Shane and frowned.
“If you haven’t, now might be a good time to try it. If you have, I’ve got one down in one of the other rooms.”
“What kind?”
“Get in your wheelchair, and I’ll take you,” Shane said. “You need an outlet, and you need it fast.”
Once he was in the wheelchair, Shane grabbed the handles and pushed, not even giving Gregory a chance to go on his own power. Shane took him past more rooms, then brought him to a room he’d never been in before. Shane opened it up to reveal a beautiful hardwood floor with several hanging balls and punching bags. Gregory got up, grabbed his crutches mounted on the back of his wheelchair, hobbled over and said, “It’s not exactly something I can do with crutches.”
“No,” Shane replied. “But I do have this over here.”
Gregory walked over to see a generic prosthetic, probably useless for most cases, but it would give him the ability to stand. They quickly strapped it on, and he took several experimental steps. “Even this is so much better than crutches.”
“Your prosthetic is on the way,” Shane said. “We took the molds. We don’t know if the stump has healed enough yet to support it, but we thought with extra socks and maybe a bit of a cushioning, you’d be okay with it. This, however, isn’t it. This is just something for you to get around with for right now.”
Gregory nodded. He stared at his good fist. That same damn rage sat in his gut, burning a hole. “I didn’t even
realize how angry I was,” he said. “It’s a red haze that’s building.”
“Because you’re not acknowledging it,” Shane said. “You’re keeping it stuffed inside, and it’ll just hurt you. It’ll eat you from the inside out, and it will demand an outlet. Whether you like it or not, it will insist on coming out. It has to. Have you ever used a punching bag before?”
Although Shane had asked the question before, Gregory hadn’t answered him. He nodded. “I’m not the best at it though. My hands won’t handle much.”
At that, Shane walked over to the side and picked up two gloves. He helped strap them on Gregory’s hands, and, when they were secure, Shane said, “I’ll hold the bag, and I want you to pound into it as much as you want and as hard as you want. Release as much of that anger as you need to in order to get your mind back on getting you in shape. Are you ready to release? You’ve got a ways to go yet in your therapy, and you’re making it a very slow, arduous journey. We already need a couple months. But, if you don’t deal with this, it’ll take six months instead. I don’t know that I can get you as high or as far or as fast if you can’t let this out.”
Shane may have said all that only to shut him up, but Gregory’s instinct to reach up and pound into that bag was instinctive, and he struck out, pounding the bag once, twice, and then he couldn’t stop. With Shane holding it somewhat steady and taking the force of the blunted blows, Gregory beat on that bag as if it were every damn commander who had made a wrong decision. For every wrong decision Gregory had made. For his body not recovering as fast as it had been blown up. For everything and everyone he blamed for his life and his fate and his so-called karma. For every damn thing in his world that had gone so very wrong.
Gregory just kept pounding … and pounding … and pounding … and pounding, until finally, he could hear somebody’s voice in the background. He slowly collapsed to his knees. He wrapped his arms around his chest and started to sob. His humiliation was complete when he heard another voice. Then both disappeared. All of it disappeared into the silence around him, and he realized that Shane had moved whoever it was out of the room and stood outside in the hallway with them.
Gregory sat here, feeling his body completely collapse in on itself. So much pain. So much anger. So much torment in his soul. It was as if there was no freedom, no way out.
As he had always done before, he slammed a lid down on his emotions and collapsed, so he lay on the floor and stared up. The tears were tears of exhaustion at this point in time, and he knew he couldn’t even unlace his gloves. They were darn hard to get in and out of normally, but alone it was almost impossible. Especially today, … right now …
He took several deep, calming breaths, trying to find a center that would allow him to move forward in life. But he couldn’t even sit up. How the hell would he go anywhere? Finally he heard the door open, and Shane walked back in.
“How do you feel now?”
“Empty,” he croaked as he reached up one gloved fist. “Could you help me with these, please?” His voice was low and quiet. Empty.
Shane quickly unlaced them and tugged them off. He set them aside, then brought the wheelchair over. “I would suggest that pool now to finish off your workout, then a bit of time in the hot tub.”
Gregory shook his head. “No,” he said, “the only thing I want to do is go to my room and stay there.”
“That’s the worst thing you can do.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s the worst thing or not. I don’t have the energy to go to the pool. I don’t have the energy to do anything. I’d like to go back to my room and be alone now.”
Shane hesitated. “You know something? I think the answer to that is no.” He helped him into the wheelchair, then, without giving him a chance, grabbed the handles on the back.
“I don’t want to go anywhere public,” Gregory snapped in outrage. He tried to grab the wheels, but Shane was too strong, too fast, refusing to listen. “And I definitely don’t want to go to the cafeteria.”
“Doesn’t matter what you want at this point,” Shane said, his voice and tone brooking no argument. “Your therapy session isn’t done.”
“It is done,” he snapped. “And I want to go back to my room. You can’t force me to do anything.” Hating it, his voice rose like a truculent child.
“Yes,” Shane said, “I can. You’ll have to get up off that chair to stop me.”
Gregory was so angry. Again. Where had that anger come from? How could there possibly be any more anger? He was exhausted; his body was pummeled from the therapy. Then he’d beaten his hands to death in the gloves, and his shoulders were killing him. There shouldn’t have been any more anger, but it was rising yet again in another red wave.
“I’ll have you fired for this,” he roared. He knew he was attracting attention, but, shit, he couldn’t stop himself.
Shane chuckled. “If it was that easy to fire me,” he said, “I would have been fired a long time ago. I’ve been dealing with guys like you for over a decade,” he said, “and I do understand a lot about it, and I understand that layers and layers and layers of rage are inside. The sooner we can deal with them, the better we all are.”
“Didn’t I get enough out already?” Gregory snapped. “You not happy with your job? Is that what this is? Are you just angry because you don’t see another little successful check in a box beside your name?” he asked snidely. He hated the way he was acting, but he didn’t know how to stop it. It was just too unbelievable. Suddenly they were at the pool level.
He glared at the beautiful gleaming water, even though part of him desperately wished to be swimming in it. But he didn’t want Shane to know that.
Except Shane had absolutely no intention of giving him the upper hand. He hit the edge of the wheelchair with the ladder and locked down the wheels to the chair. He walked in front of Gregory and said, “You go in voluntarily, or I’ll pick you up and put you in.”
Gregory glared at him and said, “No way in hell you’ll get away with doing that.”
Shane nodded, scooped him up underneath his arms, and then, with a quick flip, tossed him into the deep end of the pool. Gregory hit the water, and his outrage came in a scream of fury as he kicked and pounded and screamed underwater. Suddenly he came up, gasping for air, to find Shane already in the water beside him.
Gregory glared at him and said, “What kind of a sadistic move was that?”
“It was a good one,” Shane said. “I haven’t thrown a patient around in a few years, which is too damn bad as it’s really cathartic.”
“It’s also not legal.”
“Stop being such a crybaby, and listen to your therapist.”
“Like hell,” Gregory roared as he stroked away from him. There was something so damn calming, so peaceful and so good when doing that. But he was also exhausted. Four laps later, he found himself doing the breaststroke, trying to maintain his floating, and realizing that he’d burned out so much energy that it was all he could really do.
He rolled over onto his back and just floated, letting his body and mind relax. Without any warning, a huge sigh worked up from his belly and his chest. He could feel something inside him letting loose, a great big boulder that he’d been hanging onto. He didn’t recognize it. He didn’t know how, but, with whatever had happened this afternoon, he could just feel it pouring from his mouth and chest as he released heavy sigh after heavy sigh after heavy sigh.
And yet, again feeling tears in his eyes, he turned over to float facedown so that nobody could see. He didn’t know what had just happened, but, for the first time in a long time, he felt a hell of a lot better.
But he’d be damned if he’d let Shane know that.
Chapter 11
As the week went by, Meredith thought these were some of the worst days she’d ever experienced. Dani’s request had been official, so Meredith avoided Gregory as much as she could. Of course, it was impossible to avoid him all the time, and she did not deliberately go out of her way t
o avoid him in public settings, like the cafeteria or the pool. However, she rarely caught a glimpse of him, and, when she did, it was always from a distance.
However, every time she did see him, her heart ached at the pain on his face. She understood that Shane was working him hard, but there was also a murmur of some kind of a breakthrough. And, for that, she was absolutely overjoyed. If it came because of her absence, that made her seriously sad, but, if that’s what it took to get Gregory back on his feet, then that’s what it took.
To keep her mind off of him, Meredith became super efficient and super busy. She kept herself occupied every moment of the day, until finally, Dani called her into her office to talk. Meredith plunked down on a nearby chair, her arms full of files and tablets. Looking at Dani, she raised an eyebrow. “What’s up?”
“You,” Dani replied bluntly. “Several of the staff members have noticed that you’re very edgy, that you’re working too hard and that it’s obvious how you’re stressed about something. The idea was to relieve the stress, not to increase it.”
Her back stiff, she stared at Dani, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do now. “The idea was to reduce Gregory’s stress, I believe, not mine.” Then she winced at her cattiness. Finally, she sagged in place and said, “I can’t stop thinking about him, and the only way I can avoid spending too much time doing that is if I stay busy. And, if I’m not busy, then I just wallow.”
“Understood,” Dani said gently. “And I do have an official word here from Shane saying that Gregory’s not completely over it all yet, but he hit one of those walls and broke through it. A lot of Gregory’s anger has been released from his soul. They’re working on getting some more of it out, but Gregory has reached a turning point.”
Meredith beamed. “I’m really glad to hear that,” she said. “I’m really sorry it came because of my absence, but I understand.”
“I’m not sure it came from your absence at all,” Dani said. “In a way, actually it might very well have been because of your absence but for another reason. I think he was angry that you weren’t there for him. Whether it was because he understands you didn’t have a choice or not, I don’t know. But that anger at what he perceived as a slight from you was enough anger to push him up and over the edge.”
