I liked driving him crazy.
The first night he’d showed up for tutoring, he’d stood the entire time, like an at-ease officer, and waited for Kit and me to eat. Now, he’d long since given in, and he and Kit sat in visitor chairs on either side of me, the bed lowered to table height, dinner spread out all over it, wedging containers between my ankles or up against my knees.
Maybe it was the food, or the easy rapport between me and Kit, or just being far enough from Myles—but sometimes Ian seemed like a different guy entirely. An easygoing, smiley, likable guy. The more we saw that guy, the more we wanted to see him. It became a game.
Kit and I ganged up on Ian a lot, trying to make him smile, or blush, or laugh out loud—ideally all three. Embarrassing him worked like a charm. We cursed. We talked about shocking “lady” things. We made him teach us Scottish insults. Turns out, there were plenty, and they were delightful. Both words—“clipe,” “dobber,” “scrote,” “roaster,” “numpty,” “jakey,” “walloper”—and phrases: “Shut ye geggie,” “erse like a bag o’ washin’,” and “yer bum’s oot the windae.” Not to mention “baw,” meaning “testicle,” which apparently goes with just about anything: “bawbag,” “bawface,” “bawjaws.” Plus, just words for regular things were awesome: “oxter” for armpit, “cludgie” for toilet, “blootered” for drunk, and “puggled” for out of breath.
Ian gave us the shocking news that the Scottish accent was not as universally adored in the U.K. as in the U.S.
“They’re just jealous,” Kit said.
“Should we not make fun of your accent, then?” I asked. It was one thing to make fun of an accent that was unassailably cool—and quite another to kick an accent that was down.
“You can make fun of Scottish,” he said, “if I can make fun of Texan.”
Kit and I looked at each other. “Can you make fun of Texan?”
Ian pointed at me. “You say ‘tumped’ for ‘fell over.’ You know that’s not a word, right?”
“It is a word,” I said.
Ian shook his head. “Only in Texas.”
We loved to try to copy his accent, but we were bad at it. We also gave him American words to try, especially Native American place names that Kit Googled on her phone, like the Caloosahatchee River, Lake Tangipahoa, and Quittapahilla Creek. It cracked her up to hear him try, and it mesmerized me. I’d watch his lips forming those sounds, pulling back, and pouting out, and making that classic Scottish o. Sometimes I forgot to laugh. Sometimes I got hypnotized by it.
He turned out to be remarkably game. We got started to bring him out of his stoic shell, but it always got us going, too. We laughed so hard at dinner sometimes that we couldn’t even finish our food. It was the kind of goofy, uncontrollable laughing you almost never do in grown-up life: Things weren’t just funny, they were hysterical—even things that were objectively not even funny: the noise of a scooting chair, a veggie dumpling that got dropped on the floor, a nurse coming into the room to investigate the noise.
It’s strange that I could have laughed so hard under those circumstances, during that very dark moment in my life. But I’ve decided sorrow can make things funnier. Endure enough hardship, and you start really needing a good laugh. I remember my dad and his brother, on the day of their own mother’s funeral back when I was a kid, in the car, driving to the cemetery, making fun of all their relatives and cracking each other up. They were in the front seat, and Kit and I and our mom were in the back, and I watched those two grown men, now motherless, having just lost forever a woman they both truly loved, not just chuckle a bit but howl with laughter.
I was maybe ten at the time. “What are you doing?” I demanded of my dad. “How can you be laughing?”
“Sweetheart,” my dad said, “if we don’t laugh, we’re gonna cry.”
That’s what this laughing was like. It took us over. It made our faces hurt. And it happened not despite all the sadness, but because of it.
Kit was bolder than I was. She begged him to wear a kilt to work one day.
“Wear a kilt to this building,” she said, “and I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.”
“She doesn’t have ten thousand dollars,” I whispered to Ian.
Ian smiled. “And I don’t have a kilt, so we’re even.”
Mostly, it was Kit and me egging Ian on, but one night, eating sushi, he picked up a teaspoon-sized wad of wasabi with his chopsticks, held it up so we could see it, and then said, “Do you dare me to eat this?”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “The whole thing?” One tenth of that wasabi ball would be enough to send steam out his ears.
Ian nodded.
“No,” Kit said. “I won’t dare you. Not even I am that crazy.”
“I’ll dare you,” I said—and before I could take it back, Ian had popped the whole thing in his mouth, swallowed, and thrown his arms up in victory.
Kitty and I both gaped at him.
“Not so bad,” Ian said, but the words were barely out before tears started running down his cheeks, and his face turned red, and he started panting and hissing like a feral cat.
He grabbed his water and drank the whole bottle in one go. Then he grabbed my water and drank it all. Then Kit’s, too.
“Whooo!” he said, pacing around the room. “Fuck—that stings.”
“Curse in Scottish!” we called out.
But he was jogging in place now. “Not my best idea.”
“Say ‘bawjaws’!” Kit suggested.
“Call yourself a ‘numpty jobber’!” I jumped in.
“Dobber,” he corrected, while bent over at the waist, panting. Then he banged his head against the foot of the bed. Then he realized he was drooling, and took the wad of Kleenex I was waving at him.
In all, it took half an hour for him to recover, and that’s when he threw us a bone and gave us a little Scottish. “I am a dobber,” he said. “What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking,” I said, not even bothering to hide the affection in my voice, “that you’d entertain us.”
It was like we had all made an unspoken pact to choose to have fun.
“That’s backed up by science,” Kitty, Queen of Googling, said, when I noticed how much just the idea of dinner with her and Ian was impacting the rest of my sad days. “Anticipating a reward lights up the same region of the brain as actually getting a reward,” she said. “That’s what a dum-dum the brain is. It doesn’t even know the difference.”
There was nothing, truly nothing, fun about any other part of my day. But I anticipated the hell out of dinner.
Twenty-one
THE MORNING OF my furlough was a usual morning—bathing, cleaning, failed attempts to wiggle my toes—and my parents came for their usual lunch. But then, instead of heading off to the rehab gym, I transferred to the chair, and my parents wheeled me down with a little overnight bag to where Kit was waiting in my father’s sedan.
I felt surprisingly anxious about leaving the hospital.
I would have said I’d be thrilled, elated, ecstatic to leave. Instead, I just felt shaky. I didn’t trust Kit to drive my dad’s big car. I didn’t trust all the idiot drivers texting their way through intersections. I didn’t trust the big, bad, chaotic world outside my controlled little hospital biosphere.
Even in the car, I couldn’t relax. If I’d been a cat with claws, they would have been impaled in the dashboard. Every turn, every red light, every touch of the brakes made me wince with anxiety.
“You have got to chill,” Kit said.
I nodded. “Yes. Good advice. Chill.”
But I had no idea how to do that. How do you make yourself chill?
By the time we made it to the cabin, the tension in my neck was migrating to my head. I felt woozy and headachy, and Kit declared I had to take a nap.
Of course, the house was not wheelchair accessible. Why would it be? We got me into the chair and across the gravel drive, but then we had to pause for a while to puzzle out how to get me into the house.