Critical Injuries (32 page)

It's early days. They are still circling new customs, devising new habits.

“It's a triumph for all of us, you know,” Dr. Grant said, “that you can go home.” Because if his surgery hadn't worked, if he hadn't restored some capacities, this would have been nearly impossible. Also if she hadn't worked so desperately, herself, all this would have been nearly impossible. She longed so hard for the picture that's in front of her now, so amazingly, vividly, perfectly real that it seems in some way unreal: the porch and its spindled railings, the gardens, the looming trees, the expanse of lawn Lyle, shirtless and golden, is methodically mowing.

Yes, she worked very hard for this. Yes, it was worth it. No, she would not want to be anywhere else.

Only, there is
shame
.

She tips her face up towards the sun. At this time of day, sunshine beams into the porch, lights it and heats it, and this moment, this very sensation, is what she longed for, precisely. She wanted air, she wanted colour, she wanted, to the extent that it's possible, to be free.

A year ago, if Lyle were mowing the lawn she'd be out crouched in the garden picking tomatoes or flowers or weeds. Or in the kitchen pouring beers for the two of them. Or taking a turn herself with the mower. The lawn is huge, but Lyle hasn't ever wanted one of those riding mowers because he says this one gives him needed exercise. Also contemplation time, since it's a dull job that needs to be done but leaves the mind open.

So what is he contemplating today, going back and forth under the sun?

In the old days they came home from their different, interesting careers, and outdoors they painted, and trimmed greenery together, made gardens and repaired eavestroughs and sheds, and indoors they cooked, cleaned, played together. Without kids, household chores had a different quality than they used to, which was that they didn't feel so much like chores. They went for walks, too, down the lane, across the fields, just small outings, nothing strenuous, but also nothing she can contemplate now.

Oh. Something else. Sometimes on their walks, they have lain in the tall grains of one or another of their rented-out fields and made airy, cool love.

These stabbings of loss sneak up.

Well, they are bound to. She knew that. She just didn't realize how they'd keep startling her.

She is hardly seductive now, or desirable, with her limp limbs and various attachments, unwieldy, repellent. She is watching a man of considerable beauty mowing a lawn, and has a desire to stand and go to him and lean into his back, wrap her arms around his ribs, his chest, his whole miraculous self.

Except that it's a theoretical sort of desire, reclaimed from memory.

Anyway, making love is many things, many ways. Many feelings as well, of course.

When he shuts down the mower, the silence is abruptly immense. He pulls his shirt off a fence post and wipes off his sweat-shiny chest. He looks across green and blue space at her, smiles. She smiles back. Before, she might have gone with him indoors, upstairs, into the shower. They would have roughly, gently, scrubbed each other's apparent and hidden surfaces. They would have laughed, embraced this way and that, and maybe made their damp way to bed, bodies linked top to toe, happy impulse.

Today, going by her he pauses, touches her shoulder, says, “You okay?” and when she nods, continues indoors.

She's cried several times since she got home; quiet weeping, like now. Not wanting him to know the extent of her grief. How scared she is.

She saw this moment, on the porch in sunshine, but as a photograph, a still life, an achievement. Which it is, but it is also a narrow, hard-to-discern opening to something else.

Snap out of it.

This is a glorious day. And among the changes, those details Lyle has known to take care of, as opposed to the details they each have yet to discover, is a smooth poured-cement walkway at the bottom of the ramp, a fresh trail across the lawn to the lane and the new moss-green van, with its handicapped parking sticker, which she may hate but which of course comes in handy. Practical, competent, thoughtful, foresightful Lyle: simply doing these things, taking care of them in her absence.

The smooth concrete beckons. She's become a damn good wheelchair driver, deft on the corners and a devil on the downhill, actually found herself enjoying the rehab centre parking lot, wheeling about, testing manoeuvres. For the moment, she's on her own. In a moment she has tucked the afghan tight and turned the chair, so lightweight and sturdy, and hurtled pell-mell down the ramp, flipping the switch for the motor, buzzing down, full-tilt, to the lane. Whirling at the end, buzzing full-tilt back. She is making her own breeze! This is fun. She'd like to travel a hell of a lot farther and faster, and one of these days she might learn to pop wheelies if that's possible in this thing, but meanwhile this is her on her own, having a whim.

Back and forth she goes, like Lyle with the lawn-mower, at each end of the walkway reversing and turning.

It begins to seem as if the laneway could be manageable. A small journey, not the whole way, but just a jaunt through a short distance of hard earth and gravel. Given patience and time and a decent surface, a person can go almost anywhere in a good wheelchair. She could go to town. She could travel deeper into the country. She supposes it's illegal to putter along the shoulders of expressways; otherwise she could really take off.

Just to do it; not to escape.

Okay, it's bumpy, and she has to go slowly, and keep her eyes on the ground to foresee ruts and large stones. Steering is certainly trickier on a rough surface, and probably a heavier wheelchair wouldn't bounce so capriciously. But how exhilarating, to be able to do this! To know she can get away, although she doesn't want to get away, just finds she very much likes knowing she can.

And can go back, too, when she wants. At the curve of the laneway she turns more slowly, cautiously, wary of the tilt of the land here, and stops. Here again is that first vision. Mutilated by ramp and walkway, yes, but that sturdy brick house, that embracing porch, those looming, sheltering trees. Well, home.

And Lyle now stepping out onto the porch, dressed up in khakis and blue shirt, hair plastered down from the shower, looking around, looking this way, starting to laugh when he catches sight of her, starting to wave.

She waves back.

This can work.

She throws herself into gear and hurtles cautiously forward. He steps off the porch. They meet on the new concrete path. She feels flushed and nearly triumphant. He looks, she thinks, impressed. It's interesting to feel impressive. She must have been used to that before, out in the wider world, but it's all new again to her now.

“Hey,” he says, “making a run for it?”

It's also nice that they've pretty much given up worrying about any painful qualities attached to verbs. Like
run
. That was hard work, too, all that censoring, the flushing over some blunder or other. Observing embarrassment, not to mention observing her own sensitivities soaring a little too high. “Yup,” she says. “Trying to figure out how far this puppy would go on one charge.” Every night, once she's in bed, the chair gets recharged. This one's her starter model, with a second on order. She and Lyle are, as he says, very fortunate not to be poor. Well, she is fortunate, it's her money, that exceedingly comfortable sum she and Martin got from selling the agency, that's paying for home care, physio, wheelchairs. Lyle financed the house renovations. The loathsome bathroom alone cost a small fortune.

“I was thinking about getting all the way to the road, so I could really zoom. And learning to pop wheelies, do you know how that's done?”

“Not a clue. On a motorcycle, yes, that's how I fell off once when I was a kid, doing a wheelie and the bike and I both went flying. Mind you, that was accidental. I was actually trying to go straight and flat, and the thing just reared up on me.”

“Were you hurt?” She's pleased there are still new moments of history to learn, that they're not running out.

“Nah, I was too startled to be hurt.” Yes, that shock of things happening: a useful, momentary anaesthetic. She knows.

“But listen, you want to get yourself up here and start getting ready? They'll be coming along one of these hours.”

To celebrate her coming home. Martin, and Lyle's sons, as well as Jamie and Alix, Madeleine and Bert. Lyle mowed the lawns, and hired a cleaning person to whip the inside into shape, and a caterer is bringing food, although there should only be nine or ten people, depending on whether Lyle's boys bring companions along. No doubt there will come a time when Isla will have figured out how to whip around the house, the kitchen, so competently and smoothly that with her and Lyle working together like the old days, a meal for ten will be a minor effort. Probably her only difficulty cleaning the house will become dusting the higher shelves. She will learn to trim low-slung shrubs, pick long-stemmed flowers. She and Lyle will find new rhythms for working and playing around here together.

But not today.

She likes that he doesn't offer to push her chair up the ramp. He doesn't
hover
like someone assuming she's gone either stupid or incompetent. To be honest, Madeleine hovers a little too much. Maybe it's finally age catching up. Maybe it's that Isla's her daughter. Still, she is coming early to help Isla get dressed. Isla will, of course, be wearing a long, camouflaging, summery dress, one of the new ones that now mainly make up her wardrobe, this one beige with a pattern of small blue and yellow flowers, more elegant than some of the others. It's a style that comes close to Alix's old Serenity Corps outfits. Too bad Alix got rid of them, they might have been useful.

Jamie is supposed to be giving Alix a ride today, since she is far too poor to have a car. He has become so reliable that he risks sliding into a solidity that is almost alarming. Her children, Isla thinks, are not good at half measures, although since she has found she so much resents half measures herself, she can hardly be critical.

Alix is another story. Naturally. She appears to have flown from serenity straight into chaos. This is not exactly true, of course. Where she has gone is from the Serenity Corps into two-rooms-plus-bath in the depths of the city; from fresh air to grime; from a loopy spiritual quest to a loopy social one. But there again, that is just Isla's frivolous take on the subject. Her real and serious one is more respectful, if also leery.

Her children have taken up solemn pursuits. Jamie is studying, for the next three or four years, psychology, sociology, and various workings of the actual physical brain. No more flowers for him. He is pursuing his notion of working with drug addicts, but it now seems unlikely he would relapse, even in very bad company. And Alix, wispy Alix no longer wears transparent dresses, and has redirected her attentions from old criminals to young ones. Which is to say, from the nasty Master Ambrose to the nasty kid who shot Isla.

And those like him.

Isla tries to avoid thinking along the lines of frying pans, fires. Too easy, for one thing. Probably wrong, for another. Alix has found a voice and it turns out to be quite a determined, even loud one. As when it rang out one night on the TV news, in front of the government buildings, loudly protesting, along with an exceptionally scruffy-looking bunch of supporters, the closing of a particular service for law-challenged youth. “Look at that,” Lyle said, leaning forward in Isla's rehab centre room. “Isn't that Alix?” So it was.

She visited that boy, Rod, every other weekend. “I'm trying to understand him,” she explained; which Isla thought, but did not say, would have to be quite a project, understanding the young man who had shot her mother. “I know it sounds awful to say, but he's really kind of sweet in a way. He doesn't know
anything
.” As if those were the same things. Naturally she met other people in the course of visiting him: families of young criminals, their girlfriends, some of the young criminals themselves, Rod's pals, presumably. “I want to know how these things happen,” she said. And became shrewd, in her transparent way: “Because it's terrible, what happened to you. We should find ways to keep it from happening to anyone else.”

Well, it didn't just happen, did it? Alix's sweet Roddy pulled a trigger, hardly a passive event. But yes, it would be a good thing if other sweet boys didn't pull further triggers on anyone else.

Alix earns a small living working in a youth job centre, finding training and work for the troubled. She also volunteers at a drop-in centre for street kids, although as Isla understands it, the boy who shot her was very far from being a street kid, was as close as damnit to being a bumpkin. She gives speeches in high schools and, for that matter, on street corners and in front of government buildings. She has become passionate on the subject of nipping crime in the bud.

“Because,” she says, “if you're young, it can all look so
bleak
. Not enough jobs, too many stupid jobs, not much of a future. They need
dreams
. They need to want something for themselves, and a lot of times nobody really helps them find it. They need
hope
.”