Critical Injuries (31 page)

Is there one? No, couldn't be. She isn't like that, and neither is he. She saw him in court the same way he saw her: as if they should know each other. Like there was something between them that could make all the difference.

For the longest time, nothing good happens to him and then, suddenly, something good does.

Various Monstrosities

Lyle is mowing the lawn, back and forth, back and forth. He's wearing blue jeans but some time ago took off his shirt, so that the golden summery tinge of his chest and back has begun shading to red. He keeps his eyes focused downwards as if mowing the lawn were the most demanding of tasks, requiring his entire attentiveness.

Still, now and then in the process of turning and heading back in the direction he's come from, he looks up to smile, or to make a small friendly gesture.

In advance of today's gathering, Lyle gets to spruce up the grounds and Isla gets to soak up the day's warmth and its many manifestations and shadings of green. The sweet scent of newly cut grass combined with gasoline fumes has to be one of the world's finer smells. Too, the fumes create a hovery, hazy effect in the heat as Lyle and the mower make their patient, slow, thorough way back and forth, back and forth.

The smell of gasoline means movement to her, going someplace.

Well, here she is. That's going someplace. To be sitting again on this porch off which, more than a year ago she light-heartedly, mistakenly stepped, that's a very long journey.

If a circular one.

She has been waiting for this very scene. Her picture of this sunshine, this greenery, this prospect and perspective, as it now finally appears on this August afternoon, has been her private reward, her lure, her temptation, her desire, for months. And now, here she is. She hadn't pictured some of the details exactly, like the old shades-of-blue woolly afghan tucked around her knees, keeping her legs from the sunburn they wouldn't be able to feel any more than they can feel the warmth of the wool. She hadn't taken that sort of thing into account. But looking out and away from herself, the view is precisely what she held in her mind's eye.

Finally she has one thing she wanted and, moreover, deserves.

She is settled in here again. She has learned that the mind often likes to have its thoughts reflected by the body; so when it says
settle in
, it intends the body to show, with a certain shifting of hips, how that's done.

When, long ago, she rose up out of warm dreaming drugs and into, again, a vision of anxious, kind faces, it was, as she muzzily saw it, another moment out of a very old movie: melodrama or horror, it wasn't clear which. In this movie a new face — it's always a face — is being unwrapped, a new person in some way emerging. There has been surgery, performed out of vanity (in which case it goes badly) or to repair some mutilation (in which case it most likely goes well), but the main thing is the moment when everyone gathers to see the results.

The head is wrapped in layers and layers of white gauze. Slowly, slowly the long winding bandage is unfolded, unwound. The camera moves from the watched to the watchers, recording their stunned, wordless response, giving nothing away. Finally, in a mirror, the camera seeing now through the eyes of the patient, the new face is revealed. Lips widen in rapturous smile. Eyes widen in shock. Whichever. It's a big moment.

Those old movies didn't generally venture too far into the aftermath. Isla quite sees their point.

Dr. Grant appeared overhead, but by then she already knew.

She could feel her shoulders on the sheet, her spine rippling down the mattress, her arms, her curled fingers. Some of those fingers were curled into a hand. Long fingers, strong grip, slightly roughened skin, therefore Lyle's. Madeleine, on the other side, was stroking her forearm. This was altogether a miracle. To feel!

Therefore to move; although not yet.

There were her lungs, pumping; her heart, beating; her blood, she could almost feel the blood slipping warm through her arms to her fingertips, and along the multitude of small venous trails winding in complicated ways around her ribs' sturdy, flexible structure. All those nearly lost places.

But. Thereafter, the no weight, no sensation of all parts below. It was oddly difficult to distinguish the precise endpoint. Somewhere around her hips, as near as she could tell. She looked up into Dr. Grant's face and thought that like half her body, he was erasing sensation, expression. Watching hers, though, assessing it.

“So you see,” he began. “Good news and bad news.”

“Yes, I do see,” she agreed.

A half measure, then. One of fate's, or God's, or mere chance's little compromises. She had thought, mainly, death or life, kill or cure. She hadn't very closely examined half-life, partial result, semi-cure. Just one goddamn time, and this would have been a good one — oh, anger flared up, she could feel anger quite well — she would like a total, complete, one-hundred-per-cent measure of something. Something good, of course, was what she meant; total disaster being strangely common in the world. Look at people fleeing starvation, rape, war, who have lost everything — there's total disaster on both large and personal levels. So obviously that's possible. Why not total joy?

Now what? “Now what?” she asked. To feel Lyle's fingers holding hers was a magic thing, to understand Madeleine's fingers stroking her arm also was, and to know that with some effort she could embrace Jamie and Alix, both of them hanging back, both of them watchful, undecided. But she was not, right at that moment, grateful. “Now what?” was an accusation, and intended to be.

“Now you have a lot of work to do, and a lot of good things to look forward to. Now you're far, far better off than you were a few days ago. Although I do realize it's not everything you hoped.”

No shit.

Work, yes. Weeks and weeks, month upon month of it.
Rehabilitation
, that sterile, unfreighted word that amounted, mainly, to anguished learning of new tricks, compensating ways of hauling herself up, down, and along. Boring
and
painful, an especially unfortunate combination. Praise for finally pulling herself upright with a tight grip on parallel bars, and dragging herself along them a very short way purely with the new rippling, tensing, surprising powers of her arms, the happy applause from her trainers and dear Martin who was there at the time, was distressingly gratifying. She was, in truth, flushed with accomplishment. Later she wondered if that was just pitiful; but decided it wasn't, quite.

Very annoying, those legs, though. Eventually she could have whipped along fairly perkily without their dead weight.

Brave, daring Lyle had the tiny, trouble-making fragment of bullet set in a silver ring. “A souvenir of the wars,” he called it as she opened the small velvety box, and looked relieved when she first laughed, and then smiled, and then placed the ring, gleaming dully, on her middle finger, right hand.

He has an odd, good touch with the celebratory and sentimental.

It's good, too, to be able to think of him again in terms of light touches; but what will he do, what has he been doing, for more adamant, ardent touches? That golden body out there mowing the lawn, back and forth, back and forth, is not one that goes unused easily. He told her long ago that in the several years between Sandy's death and meeting Isla, there was no one important to him but his sons. He didn't say, and he's a lawyer and speaks carefully about delicate matters, that there was no one in his bed, or his life, just not in his heart.

The rules of love, even if there are such things, alter. She has been the shocked survivor of this hard fact before.

He went to the hospital just about every day except when he was out of town for something to do with one case or another. Same when she was shifted to the rehab centre at the same hospital. Madeleine went almost every day, too, except for a few-week stretch when Bert got the flu and then she got it, too. Both she and Lyle learned the exercises Isla had to do, they were both taught how to help her.

Isla hasn't minded Madeleine raising and lowering her legs, bending and turning them; although Madeleine is obviously uneasy, scared of doing harm she can't predict or understand. Isla imagines it must be a lot like having a new infant in the house: constant assessments and cautious gaugings, as well as small triumphs. She hates to think of herself that way, but all this must surely seem somewhat familiar to a mother. At any rate, it doesn't seem totally unfitting to be helped and touched and manoeuvred by Madeleine.

Not by Lyle, though, and not by her children. Lyle should never even see her legs, or lift her, or wheel her or ever have to take her capacities and incapacities into account, although he has to, and does. To have as well her withering calves and thighs under his manipulating hands — no. Above all else she does not want to be his helpless child, his burden, his very own personal cripple.

Although she is all of that. He is attentive and has the wisdom also to just let her be; but he can't help it, neither can she, that balances have shifted.

That the unexpected word for this is
shame
.

It's different from being embarrassed. That has to vanish, or be bitten down on, or otherwise put out of mind, and she learned fast in the hospital, and again in rehab, that dependency is by definition immodest. Need instantly, flatly, overwhelms preference.

But
shame
— that's what swamped her in the moment, finally, of driving up the laneway, rounding that curve, seeing the place in full bloom, coming home just like that very first time with Lyle, years ago, except this time the kids had strung a huge red and white “Welcome home” banner between two porch pillars — in that moment of utter familiarity and absolute strangeness she glimpsed herself here again and felt shame: for no longer being the woman who marched capably around here on her own two feet, that woman who needed her loved ones only for love.

Now her needs are capacious. A physiotherapist is to come three days a week, for a while, to run her through her meagre paces, although many of the exercises Isla can now do on her own. She is committed, as in the rehab centre, to four half-hour sessions each day, raising and lowering herself from a bar, curling her arms, hands grasping weights, carefully shifting her head, up and down, back and forth.

Now her arms are taut and hard as metal, muscled and brown. They get stronger and more capable every day. In terrible contrast, her legs are shocking, remain shocking, become more shocking all the time, poor pale and skin-shrivelled hopeless things. She thinks if she were a sea creature, something sensibly designed along those lines, her useless legs would simply drop off. Humans are not so efficiently constructed, and so her legs, too, have to be exercised, the aim to sustain blood circulation, to stretch irrelevant muscles. So that, strangely enough, her legs don't have to be carved away somewhere down the line, atrophied and, moreover, diseased.

Also as Dr. Grant likes to say, you never know, fresh possibilities are always emerging. It's not, he insists, out of the question that these legs of hers will be of some use again someday.

One fine use would be wrapping them around Lyle's lean hips.

Now that she can feel his skin, she remembers desire, if in small, flickering ways. They seem to edge towards it now and again, but Lyle is careful, careful. Or tactful. Or unwilling.

The day before he brought her home, he said to her, as he did years ago in a quite different context, “Let's just relax and see how things go.” He was leaning forward in his chair, knees touching her wheelchair, holding her hands, looking into her eyes with an expression she thought contained too much kindness, which she saw as forbearance. “We'll find our own ways, don't worry.”

It was generous, what he said, and even probably true. But that still doesn't make it possible.

She also doesn't believe Dr. Grant. Or she has decided that what he said about hope has nothing in particular to do with her. She can't waste scarce hope on faint possibilities. It has taken months for her to retrain and redirect hope, so that it's becoming as taut, hard, metallic and muscled as her arms.

Diminished resources become monstrously precious.

She has been busy for months examining various monstrosities.

Now there are new ones, of a different sort, right in front of her, no avoiding them. A ramp, wooden and unweathered, swoops from the porch to the ground. Inside, Lyle has widened doorways to make way for her zoomy new wheelchair, what he calls “the sportscar model” for its lightness, manoeuvrability, and speed. He has refitted, carefully and capaciously, the bathroom downstairs so that it is now the very model of a spartan, gleaming washroom for the handicapped. She loathes the sight of it. He said he made a choice between converting a room downstairs into a bedroom or installing one of those chair-lifts on which she can ride up and down stairs, and decided on the latter. He custom-ordered it to blend with the house itself, with wooden arms and iron fretwork at the sides and a paisley cushion, but it is an ugly thing nevertheless, a blot on his wide, graceful staircase.

Those are the most obvious changes. Thanks to her practised, muscular arms, with concentration and care she can pull herself out of the wheelchair onto the sofa, or into bed. They can share a bedroom again. She can touch his skin in the night, and he can fold his arms around her. They cannot any more, though, fling themselves lavishly and fervently around one another, and there are things —
things
is how she thinks of them — that protrude from her body and perform various functions —
functions
is how she thinks of what they do — that cause her, and perhaps him as well, to do what is necessary to keep lower bodies apart.