Spasticity, Mark called it. The result of hypersensitization. My sympathetic nervous system being overactive. Like your imagination, he doesn’t say but implies with the silence that comes after. But when I got out of the car, my leg straightened. I gasped as I stood there, stood on straight legs, on the icy sidewalk, the breath leaving my mouth in dancing smoke. I haven’t been able to straighten my leg since my first nerve-block injection, when I rose drugged from the hospital gurney and hugged my physiatrist in tearful thanks and felt his scrubbed body go rigid in my rank embrace. It lasted an hour, that release. But here it was happening again. A trick. Surely, a trick.
Do you like tricks, Ms. Fitch?
I was able to walk to the apartment door without limping, without dragging the dead weight of my leg behind. I still ate dinner standing up, peed standing up, drank my vat of wine standing up out of sheer fear, in case it was a fluke, because surely, surely, it was coming. The avenging rage of my body, the blinking webs, the crushing weight of the fat man. Yet I did not lie on the floor, like a dog playing dead, watching terrible television. Instead I stood there in my low-ceilinged living room, reading All’s Well aloud, making new notes, my limbs buzzing, my heart thrumming wildly in my chest, a strange smile creeping across my lips. I gazed at my red couch longingly, more tempted to sit than I’d been in the longest time. The cushions gleamed bright red as cherries, as my former lipstick. Before every lipstick clashed with my grief.
Go on. Sit on me, Miranda.
But what if I can’t get back up? I whispered to the couch. There is no husband, remember? And I can’t call the super again. Can’t have her coming in here ripped out of her mind from a day of boxed wine and joints. Talking at me about her miserable life while I lie imprisoned on the floor. Pouring it all into me like emotional Drano. Forgetting she’s supposed to help me.
Try me.
So I walked over to the couch.
I sat down, I braced myself.
Nothing.
No scream of pain down my right leg. No slice of an invisible knife behind my knee.
I held my breath. I stood back up… and?
And nothing. No seizing of the leg. No clenching thigh muscles. No foot drop. No concrete. My back hurt still. Hip hurt still. But the leg was just… fine. I could bend it. I could straighten it. Bend, straighten.
I laughed. I sat down again: nothing. I stood up again: nothing. I sat down, I stood up, sat down stood up sat down stood up, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and oh god I was really laughing now. I laughed and laughed as I sat down and stood up and sat down and stood up, jumping on and off the seat cushions like I was on a trampoline, like I was a child again, my mother watching, clapping, enjoying my performance, how I loved to be center stage, even then. I laughed until tears fell.
Then I saw the lonely man in the apartment across the way. Watching me through the window, in the middle of watering his plants. Plants that defy the laws of nature, of photosynthesis, with their ability to flourish in darkness.
He smiled and kept watering the green glowing leaves. I sat down. I stood up. I sat down. I picked up All’s Well. I read again and again the scene in which the King is miraculously healed, which happens offstage. The lords discuss it as a miracle. It can happen onstage or it can happen off. Depends. Depends entirely on the production.
“Definitely, something’s different,” Hugo says now. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, Miranda.”
The way he says my name, the way he’s looking at me. My body blooms under his gaze. My heart lifts. Alley shadows lightening, dead leaves brightening, whirling wildly now in the gutters.
“We should get together sometime,” Hugo says. Speaking a line right out of my dreams, the ones I used to have drooling on the office floor. “To talk about the play. You know this play much better than I do. I’d love to hear more about your vision, Miranda.”
“My vision,” I say. “Yes.” A bright blue sky shot through with a rainbow. Me and Hugo holding hands onstage. I’ve come back from the dead. He’s gazing at me like I’m everything.
“Why don’t we meet off campus sometime after rehearsal?” he says. “For a drink.”
“A drink?” A drink with Hugo in the evening. Not weak tea in the afternoon. Not Hugo’s eyes distracted by every moving object that passes through his field of vision. I picture Hugo’s face in the bar. A candle between us. He’s holding a glass of wine. No, probably Hugo doesn’t drink wine. Fine, he’s drinking a lager. Seeing only me, my vision.