Amy Inspired (20 page)

He took my ankle in his hands. With his help I turned my foot ever so slightly to the right, then the left, wincing as I did so.

“It’s not broken. I think she just sprained it,” he said to Zoë. “But we need to get her on ice.”

“Can you walk if we help you?” she asked.

“I think so,” I managed.

Together they lifted me up from the ground.

“Don’t put weight on it,” Michael said. “Use us as a crutch.”

With one arm around Zoë’s shoulders and another around Michael’s back, I hobbled slowly up the trail. It took us fifteen minutes just to get back to Leonard Field, and by that point I was sweating and close to tears from the pain.

“Wait,” I said. “I need a second.”

I hobbled to the bench that sat half sunk in the mud just outside the trail.

Zoë gaped at the size of my foot. “Come on, Amy, we have to get back,” she said. “It’s freezing, and your foot is getting huge.”

“I know, just give me a few minutes,” I pleaded.

“There’s a bus stop ten minutes away.”

“She’s too hurt, Zoë,” Michael said. “She can’t do it.”

“I can so do it,” I muttered. I stood back up to prove it, balancing my body against a nearby tree and willing myself to stare directly into his eyes, though the pain blurred my vision. “I’m fine.”

“Get on my back,” Michael said as if he hadn’t been listening.

“What?”

“I’ll carry you.”

I said no, but he knelt down on the ground and waited. Humiliated, I climbed onto his back and wrapped my arms around his neck. He sometimes carried Zoë this way, but I was a good five inches taller and more than a few pounds heavier. I pressed my face against his shoulder, praying desperately that none of my students would see us.

At home, he untied the laces of my shoes and delicately peeled my sock from my swollen ankle. I was sporting a carpet of blond leg hair fit for a Viking, but he didn’t seem to notice. He sandwiched my bare ankle between two bags of ice, setting a pillow on the coffee table on which I was to keep my leg suspended. Zoë watched the operation from her reading chair.

“Keep your foot on ice until the swelling goes down,” he told me. “And don’t put any weight on it.”

“I have class at ten o’clock.”

“You’re going to have to cancel.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Swear you won’t walk on it.”

“I swear,” I said.

I smiled at him reassuringly despite the pain. The scent of his cologne lingered on my clothes.

When the swelling did not go down by the next afternoon, I told Zoë to call Eli—I needed to go to the emergency room. I gingerly tugged on a pair of jeans and hobbled down the stairs, leaning on Zoë to get to the car.

“What are you doing?” I asked when she sat down in the driver’s seat.

“I can’t get ahold of Eli and Michael’s at work. I’m driving you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Look at your foot!” she said in exasperation.

She held the key aloft, searching the dashboard, staring down at the pedals, the gearshift.

I pointed to the right underside of the steering wheel. “The ignition’s there.”

“I’ve got it,” she said.

“You
can
drive, can’t you?” I asked.

“Of course I can drive.” She pressed on the gas so that the engine revved. “Oops.
Not
the brake.”

I reached for my door handle. “I want out.”

“Here we go.” The car lurched two feet and stopped. The sudden change in motion forced the passenger door I’d just opened to slam shut.

“Stop, Zoë. We’re not doing this.”

“Would you chill out?” She started laughing. When we hit and dragged one of Katherine’s rubber Hefty trash cans, she whooped out loud. “Oh, she is going to
kill
us!”

“If you don’t.”

We crawled out of the neighborhood but hit Main Street like it was the Indy 500. She full-stopped at the first four-way for a complete five seconds, then proceeded to run a red light in town. The hospital was only ten minutes off campus; by the time we arrived I wanted to kiss the ground.

At the desk, I was given a work sheet featuring the drawing of a unisex figure on which I was to circle the places that were giving me pain. On the right margin was a chart numbering the severity of pain, 1 being mild, 10 being the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. Each number came with a corresponding smiley or frowny face.

“Why would I have a whole body to choose from?” I asked. “It’s my foot.”

“Circle the head and see if they ask you about depression,” Zoë said.

We were moved to a private room immediately, but it was an hour and a half before I saw the doctor. He walked through the door reading my chart, glancing up long enough to offer a hearty handshake. His name was Dr. Santini. He looked nineteen.

“Swelling and sharp pain?” he asked.

My pant leg was already rolled up. I had taken pains to shave that morning, though vanity seemed beside the point considering my ankle had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. Dr. Santini’s examination was far more brutal than Michael’s had been.

“Probably a sprain,” he murmured. “But I’d like to get this X-rayed. Better safe than sorry.”

I wondered how often he practiced his tone and delivery. It was hard to talk with young physicians without seeing my brother.

While we waited for the X-ray results, Zoë pulled a chair up to my bed and belabored the inefficiencies of the hospital. She dismantled everything from the outdated chart system (“they’re all online now”) to the outdated yellow curtains (“an offense to the patient’s sensibilities”).

“It’s not a resort,” I reminded her.

“It’s not the UC medical center, either.”

Zoë was a very devoted fan of the oncology centers that had administered her mother’s treatments. She stood beside these hospitals, like an alumna eternally defending her alma mater.

Dr. Santini’s verdict was that I had very badly sprained my ankle. His recommendation was that I stick to a careful regimen of RICE.

“
R
est,
I
ce,
C
ompression,
E
levation,” he explained.

“But I work on campus,” I said. “I walk everywhere.”

He shook his head. “Best way to let it heal is to stay off it as best you can. Crutches the first five days, some exercises as followup. You’ll be in an air cast for at least four weeks—maybe as many as six.”

“Don’t worry, dearest.” Zoë laid her head against my shoulder. “I’ll drive you.”

“That doesn’t worry me at all.”

Dr. Santini wrote me a prescription medication for the pain, along with specific instructions on what exactly I was and was not to do. Zoë, who loves being needed, wrote everything down in her Hello Kitty notepad.

10

News of my malady spread through the ranks. Mom called to inform me that the First Fundamentalist Church of God prayer chain had been alerted to my condition; Grandma FedExed a Ziploc bag of crumbs that had once been homemade oatmeal cookies; and Brian called to ask if the painkillers had had any adverse effects. I was touched, though I suspected he only wanted to test his memory of pharmaceuticals.

My brace was plastic instead of plaster, but Eli drew on it anyway. A cartoon old man holding a bundle of balloons rode a bicycle on the left side of my ankle; a field of overly large flowers sprouted on my right. Over the Velcro straps he wrote
Feelings Happen
in fat bubble lettering.

“I broke my leg when I was twenty-one,” he said. He was coloring the daisies in with a hot pink marker he’d bought just for the occasion.

“What were you doing?”

“Being an idiot.” He set his foot on the couch and rolled up his pant leg. He had thin legs covered in wiry black hair. A scar ran up his ankle, lines of tender pink skin in a row neat and orderly as the dotted punches of perforated paper. “I was trying to jump off the roof of a shed onto a trampoline. My leg broke my fall and the fall broke my fibula. Worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”

He rolled his pant leg back down. The silver charm of his hemp bracelet caught the light and winked.

“I suppose it would be predictable on my part to ask why you would be trying to jump from a rooftop to a trampoline.”

“It was a dare.” He’d returned to his drawing. “And I wasn’t exactly sober.”

“Was there ever a time in your life when you weren’t abusing your body in every way imaginable?”

He pulled the reading lamp over my foot. “Sit here at least half an hour—until the ink dries.”

When I went to bed that night I was startled by a blur of light at the foot of my bed. It darted erratically like a stage Tinker Bell dancing. The pink daisies on my cast were glowing in the dark.

The next morning, Mom called to update me on her progress with Mr. Moore. This required a half hour conversation clarifying the difference between dating and going out.

“I just don’t understand why you say ‘going out.’ You’re not
going
anywhere.”

“It’s an expression,” I said. “It’s the modern equivalent of being pinned. It means you’re together.”

“I still think it’s unsensical.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you and Mr. Moore are going out?”

“Well, we’re not just holding hands at the park,” she laughed. I had no idea what this was supposed to mean.

“How’s your ankle?”

“It’s fine, but I have to wear this ridiculous air cast.”

“You’re not walking on it,” she stated in disbelief.

“Not everywhere.”

“Amy Gallagher! You go tooling around campus on a hurt leg and you’re libel to mess up the other one. Make That Eli drive you.”

My mother had more or less accepted the fact that Eli was a long-standing guest. She’d recommended we make him sleep in the garage beneath us. I told her that was a great idea, then did nothing to discourage her belief that I’d acquiesced. Despite her erroneous faith that there was now an entire floor between her only daughter and the traveling vagrant, she had not yet given up her right to disapprove. She only referred to him as “That Eli” and only when she’d come up with some new chore he should do for us.

I promised I would stay off my feet as much as possible. With the air cast I managed a stilted kind of walk. Driving, however, was out of the question since it was my right ankle. The bus that passed down our street went directly to campus, but I still had to make it to the stop some four blocks away and then hobble another ten minutes through campus, the bus stop outside the Humanities Building posing the impossible challenge of a steep hill. When it came to getting to work on time, I was forced to beg rides.