Ian shrugged. “It’s not rocket science, man, but if you want a lesson, let’s go. For Maggie’s sake, if nothing else.”
Chip looked at me. “Did he just call you Maggie?”
I shrugged. “He can’t pronounce Margaret.” I turned back to Ian. “I don’t need help.”
Ian shook his head. “You do.”
“That’s not what you said before.”
“Before, I was teaching you a lesson.”
“What?” I said. “That you’re kind of an asshole?”
Ian blinked, and I could not read his expression. “A lesson that you can do it yourself,” he said. He looked over at Chip. “But that doesn’t mean you should have to.”
Chip looked at me. “I can’t understand him at all. It’s like a speech impediment.”
Ian didn’t take his eyes off me. “Watch yourself, little man.”
There was a knock at the door, and then my dad’s voice. “Is everybody done kissing?”
“Yes,” Chip and I called flatly, at the same time.
My dad stepped in—with my mom trailing behind him, looking dazed. “Look who I found! At the candy machine!”
“Where’s Kit?” I asked.
“She had to go,” my dad said. Then, in a stage whisper, “She’s got a date with Fat Benjamin.”
My mother, a few feet behind my dad, held an unopened Hershey bar and looked shaken and pale. I made a stab at mental telepathy, trying to promise I’ll never tell him from my brain to hers. But I don’t think it worked.
My dad was as jolly and unaware as could be, and that just made it sadder all around. He put his arm around my mom and gave her a little squeeze. Then he said to Ian, “I’d like to see how to do a transfer, too.”
“You heard that conversation?” I asked.
“Sure,” my dad said. “You can hear everything out in the hallway. That’s how we knew you and Loverboy were done making out.”
“Then why did you ask?”
He lifted his eyebrows like, Duh. “To embarrass you.”
Ian coughed. Then he reached behind me to grab the transfer board and lower the bed.
I regarded Chip for a second. Next to Ian, he suddenly did look like a little man. I’d always thought of him as “trim” or “sporty,” but standing next to Ian gave him a slightly shrimpy vibe.
“The trick to the transfer,” Ian told us all then, “is letting Maggie do as much for herself as she can. But stay close by. There’s a temptation,” he added, “when someone you love is struggling, to want to help too much. Keep in mind that the struggle makes her stronger.”
I gave Ian a look. I might be in danger of many things, but “getting too much help” was not one of them.
Ian wasn’t looking at me. He was looking right at Chip. “The most important thing,” he said, “is being there.”
When he’d finished staring Chip down, he patted the board and crooked his finger at me, like, Come here.
I pulled back my covers, and then we all beheld—because I was wearing a gown for the whole using-the-potty project—my bare legs.
Chip had seen those legs a thousand times, and caressed them, and kissed them—even shaved them once, in an exercise in erotic suspense that worked much better in theory than in practice. But these weren’t the legs that he knew. They’d atrophied so much even in the short time I’d been here, they were like a newborn calf’s legs—spindly and soft and splayed.
The sight of them made me feel deeply ashamed. I hated them. I wanted to beat them with my fists. I wanted to pummel them into bloody bruises on the mattress.
Ian was unfazed. “You’re going to need some pants for the therapy gym, lass.”
I pointed my mother toward the cabinet, and she found a pair in a gym bag, along with my last clean bra—hot pink with tiger stripes. She also grabbed one of the several T-shirts we’d cut at the shoulder.
Ian gently helped me into the sweatpants, edging them up, and when it was time to pull them under my butt and around my hips, he leaned down so I could circle my arms around his neck. I pulled up just enough that I inhaled the most delicious scent of him. Kind of gingery. Sweet, cookie-ish spices mixed with a microscopic hint of salty manliness.
I can’t even put it into words, but you know when they bring the dessert tray around at a restaurant and you immediately just know what you want—like, That one. Right there! I had that reaction to the smell of him. That one.
But we were on to the dressing-the-top-half phase, and so my mother asked the men to leave the room.
“Even me?” Chip asked.
“Especially you,” I said.
Minutes later, when the men got the all-clear, I was all decked out in my Flashdance look with the bra strap on the burned side tucked down under my armpit. On a normal person, this outfit might have been provocative. On me, it was just sad. My mother promised to bring me something normal tomorrow.
Ian began his lesson, but I didn’t even listen. I was too busy trying to catch another whiff of him.
*
LATER, IN THE gym, on the mat, as Ian worked my legs, I said, “I’m sorry I called you an asshole.”
Ian didn’t meet my eyes. “You called me ‘kind of an asshole.’ That’s different.”
“Not really.”
With a normal person, that might have been the start of some kind of conversation, but Ian just let it die. As we continued to work, first on one side, then on the other, then doing some actual sit-ups, I watched the other therapists talking to, encouraging, and playing around with their patients, and I couldn’t help it: I felt a little shortchanged.
Every attempt at talking fizzled out like a spark going dark.
“Are you married?” I tried.
“No.”
I waited for more.
Nothing.
Uncomfortable pause.
Me again: “Any kids?”
His jaw went tight. “No.”
Pause.
Me: “Hobbies? Things you do for fun?”
Another pause so long I thought he wasn’t going to even answer at all. About as conversationally agonizing as I could imagine. Finally: “Triathlons.”
“You do triathlons. For fun.”
“For a challenge.”
“Is there anything you do for fun?”
“Challenges are fun.”
I’d say, on the whole, he seemed about as excited to talk to me as he’d been to talk to Myles. But, dammit, I wasn’t Myles. I wasn’t taunting him like that. Or provoking him. Or out to get him.
But maybe I was, in a way.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the fact that Ian was so reticent might have been good for me. With some people—not all, but some—when they run away, it makes you want to chase them. That was Ian: so withdrawn, it coaxed me out.
I tried again. “Thanks for the transfer lesson, by the way.”
Nothing.
“My family’s all a little freaked out right now,” I attempted.
Not even a nod for that one. He was working my ankles and just kept his head down.
Finally, I tried this: “Did you know you can drink your own pee?”
His head popped up, and he was all surprise, and he flashed a shocked smile for half a second before dropping his head back down. “I didn’t know that, no,” he said, getting back to work.
But now I knew that smile existed. I wanted another one.
“Some tweed coats are dyed with it.”
Nothing.
“Romans used to brush their teeth with it to whiten them.”
When that didn’t get a response, I peeked around at the side of his face to see if he was stifling a smile. He was.
He was hooking giant rubber bands around my ankles now, for resistance. Then he rolled me over onto my stomach and told me pull against them until I could touch my heels to my butt. Apparently, it would strengthen my hamstrings, which were still working.
“You want me to touch my heels to my butt?”
“Just try.”
“Do I have to actually touch?”
“No.”
“Are you saying trying is more important than succeeding?”
“Always.”
Another long silence while I tried, and failed, to touch my butt with my feet.
“Not a big talker, are you?” I said.
“Not when I’m working.”
“Other people seem to be able to do both.”
“I’m not other people.”
“Apparently not.”
“We’re here to get you stronger. Not joke around.”
Just then, a group of other PTs burst out laughing at something one of the patients had said.