“Worse?” he repeats.
I nod. I think of the brief relief I felt last night after that drink. How I sailed home from the bar as if on air and slept, then woke up to the familiar pain.
“Much worse.” I sound apologetic. Or do I sound challenging? Maybe both.
He gently shuts the door to the treatment room. Lest I infect the other patients in the gym beyond with my lack of faith. My misgivings.
He leans back against the medical table where I will soon be positioned flat on my stomach, my face pressed tightly into the too-small doughnut hole, leaving a crease on each side for the rest of the day. Meanwhile Mark will prod at my back with a surgically gloved finger. He’ll roughly scrape the skin with a cold metal instrument. He’ll knock on the knobs of my spine like they are doors leading to potentially interesting rooms.
Now he crosses his legs like we have all the time in the world even though we have only thirty minutes. Twenty-three, really, because Mark was late again. He’s always late these days.
“Tell me,” Mark says. “Talk to me.” He says it kindly, gently, as if he actually wants me to tell him the truth of how I feel. Like we’re about to have a serious heart-to-heart.
I look at Mark patiently waiting for me to speak. The soul patch under his lower lip. His freshly buzzed crew cut. A yin-yang pendant hanging from his neck on a corded rope, the features of his handsome bro face arranged in an I’m listening expression.
But this is a lie. Does he really want me to talk to him? Surely our relationship couldn’t bear such honesty. Surely he couldn’t.
I open my mouth to tell him the words and phrases that I have been practicing all the way over here. In my car to the streaked windshield, to the empty passenger seat at stoplights. In the waiting room, where I stared at the covers of dated, heavily-thumbed-through fitness magazines until my eyes watered, the pages wavy as though they’d been dragged through water and then dried out, greasy with the fingerprints of a thousand injured wrecks. Enumerating my points on my fingers. Typing notes into my phone so I wouldn’t forget. All the parts of my body that had not been improved by our year together. All the exercises that hurt to perform—that felt like I might be doing actual damage to myself. That I felt like we didn’t really have a plan anymore, Mark and I. That we were just in a weird rehab limbo now. No destination. No goals.
It was Dr. Rainier who first recommended Mark to me, nearly a year ago. Fortunately for you, he said, there’s a nationally renowned spine rehabilitation center right here in Massachusetts.
Really? I said through my drugged tears.
Oh, yes, Ms. Fitch. Right here in this very building. In the basement, in fact. He smiled. And I know just the therapist to pair you with. He’d be perfect for you. Mark.
And I remember I repeated the name as though I were receiving the Eucharist. Mark. I held it on my tongue like it was holy sustenance. I closed my eyes. Surely Mark would be better than Luke. Or Matt. Or Todd.
He’s going to help you, Ms. Fitch.
He’s going to help me, I repeated. And I believed it. When I first took the elevator down to the basement, to SpineWorks, Mark was standing there just beyond the doors. Waiting for me, clipboard in hand. His yin-yang pendant gleamed around his neck.
You must be Miranda, he said.
Wow, he said. I just love your T-shirt. The koi is my favorite fish, truth be told.
I gazed at Mark like he was a god.
Tell me, Miranda, he said gently. I want to know the whole story.
And I did tell Mark. I told Mark my whole case history—my fall off the stage, followed by the left hip pain, followed by the failed surgery, the bad recovery; the sudden pain down my right leg; the disc herniations; the MRI no doctor could agree upon; the steroid shots to the hip, to the spine; the acupuncture, the biofeedback, the man in the white lab coat who stabbed my breast like he was driving a stake through the heart of a vampire, the Chinese-medicine doctor who needled my peroneal nerve and then I involuntarily kicked him in the face—and Mark listened; he nodded; he made little noises of what I presumed to be sympathy; he pressed his palms together as though he were praying for me; he pressed the tips of his index fingers to his lips.
Tell me more, Mark said. Like he couldn’t get enough of my story. Not since my stage days, in fact, had I had such a rapt audience.
It was hard to keep everything straight, of course. Facts and precise descriptions and the order of things kept escaping me. I kept apologizing for this.
Never, Mark said. Never apologize. You’re doing so great. You’re doing so well.