People were understandably alarmed. With every comment, Facebook sent me an email notification, so my inbox was flooded. People were “praying” and sending emoticons of hearts and kisses and angels. They made comments about how great I was and cheered me on. But the volume—there must have been a hundred—felt overwhelming to me.
I fixated on the photo itself, amazed that Chip had overshared so wildly by posting it. I didn’t even want to see pictures of people’s pedicures in my feed—much less bruised shots of tubes and vacuums and abject suffering. What had he been thinking? What was he trying to prove? In what universe would I want a picture of myself looking like a meatloaf posted for the world to see? I had barely summoned the courage to look in the mirror myself—and apparently, I was the last one to know. An ex-boyfriend had even left me a GIF of puppies and kittens licking each other.
This must have been how Neil Putnam at Simtex knew about my situation. The whole damn city seemed to know.
“I’m never going back to Facebook,” I said.
“Of course not,” Kit agreed. “Facebook’s for grandmas. Just follow me on Instagram.”
*
LATER, AFTER WE’D fallen quiet for a while, and Kit was already starting to make slow, snoozy sleeping breaths, I had to wake her up.
“Kit!” I whispered. Then, with no response, a little louder: “Kit!”
She startled and sat up.
“Great news!” I said, still whispering.
“What?”
“I have to poop.”
She leaned a little forward. “That’s great news?”
“Help me out of bed.”
“Didn’t you just go right before bed?”
I snapped my fingers at her, like, Let’s go. “That was pee.”
She got up and shuffled over.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” I said, as we worked me across the board into the chair.
Kit only had one eye open. “What does this mean?”
“It means I can pee and poo on my own.”
“Does it mean you’re getting better?” she asked.
“Well, I’m not getting worse.”
“Can I Instagram this?” she asked, as we positioned me onto the toilet.
“Say the word ‘Instagram’ one more time, and you’re on the first flight back to Brooklyn.”
“Noted,” she said.
She waited outside the door for me a long while, Googling random trivia on her phone to pass the time. “Did you know that Ben Franklin invented the catheter in 1752 when his brother John suffered from bladder stones?”
“I can’t say that I did.”
“Did you know you can use urine to make gunpowder?”
“That might come in handy.”
“Did you know that seventy-three percent of people with spinal cord injuries never void normally again?”
“Don’t tell me that! That’s depressing.”
“Not for you.”
“Where are you finding all this?”
“PeeTrivia.com.”
I took my time. Kit hinted several times that she was ready to go back to bed, but I was not rushing this miracle for anything.
Eleven
AT LUNCH THE next day, we did not linger more than sixty seconds on the triumph of my newly returned toileting skills before my mother declared the topic “unappetizing” and got back to worrying about my relationship with Chip.
“Has he been to visit you?” she wanted to know.
My BLT suddenly lost its flavor. “Can we not talk about this?”
“I did some reading on the computer—” she said next.
I glanced at my dad. “Here we go,” he said.
She continued, “—and I think maybe he’s afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?”
“Of what you represent. Of how you’ve come to symbolize his weakness and foolishness.”
“Have I?”
“Well, what other explanation can there be?”
“I can’t psychoanalyze Chip right now.” I had my hands full just making it through the day.
“Well, someone has to!”
“Looks like you’re doing a pretty good job.”
My mom set her sandwich down—a gesture that meant we were getting down to business. She started to speak, but then she caught herself, turned to my dad. “You know what, sweetheart? This sandwich is not very good.”
My dad looked at the sandwich.
“I hate to ask, but would you mind going back and getting me a Caesar salad instead?”
My dad had just taken his first bite of his own sandwich. He looked back and forth between it and my mother for a second. “You want me to drive back to the sandwich shop?”
My mother nodded, then gestured at me with her head. “We could use a little just-us-girls time anyway.”
My dad looked at me. Then he nodded and stood up with his sandwich in one hand and his keys in the other and left the room.
My mom leaned closer to me once the door closed, and kept her voice low. “I read an article last night called ‘Sexual Functioning After a Spinal Cord Injury.’”
“Mom! Don’t read that!”
“Because if Chip’s enthusiasm is like his father’s—or any man, really—that’s going to be important to him.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Please don’t talk to me about Jim Dunbar’s ‘enthusiasm.’”
“I’ve been best friends with Evelyn for years, sweetheart. I know everything.”
I was shaking my head. “Nope. Please. No.”
“The great news is,” she pushed on, “even though men in your situation often lose sexual abilities, women typically don’t. Which means even if you don’t walk again—which, of course, you will—you’ll still be good to go in that arena.”
Was it worse to talk about Chip’s father’s sexual functioning with my mom—or to talk about mine? Words cannot express how much I did not want to discuss “that arena.” But she had momentum now.
She went on. “You can have babies and everything—typically. In fact, the only trouble most women in your situation have is finding somebody who’s willing to—”
She stopped herself.
“Somebody who’s willing to what?”
But she turned her attention back to her sandwich, wrapping it up like she might save it for later.
“Willing to what?”
She started again, more carefully. “Women’s level of sexual activity does typically go down, but it’s not that the injury prevents it. It’s that nobody…”
She paused, like she couldn’t say it.
“It’s that nobody wants to fuck them anymore?”
She closed her eyes. “You know I hate that language.”
If I could have walked out, I would have.
Instead, with no other option, I banged my head back against the pillow. “Is that the inspiring message you came with today?”
She did have enough self-awareness to be a tiny bit cowed. She folded her napkin and smoothed it on her leg. “I just read the article, and it seemed like information you should have.”
“Why?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do with that? Root even harder for a miracle? Defy the laws of human physiology?”
“I’m trying to help,” she insisted.
“By freaking me the hell out?”
“The point is,” my mother said, “we have to be proactive. We have to face this thing head-on. All the healing and recovery you’re going to do takes place in the first six to eight weeks after the accident—and you’re already two weeks in.”
“Are you saying I’m a slacker?”
“I’m saying you need to get your head in the game.”
There was always a kind of backward logic to my mom’s crazy. I got it now. She hadn’t accidentally revealed to me that I was facing a possible lifetime of being unfuckable. She was doing it on purpose. She was attempting to motivate me. To get me focused. To rouse some unsinkable part of my soul that would stand up in outrage and simply refuse to give in.
The worst part was, it was working.
This was how she’d motivated me my whole life: fear of the worst-case scenario. She was trying to scare me into action. She was trying to generate a Rocky moment, trying to cue the music and shift me into a training montage.
Did I think that I could beat my spinal cord into submission? Of course not. Could sheer willpower overcome anything? Of course not. Was there a hazy line between determination and denial? Absolutely.