The tune I was humming has left my lips. The silence hums. I hear the creak of machines. The little gasps of pain beyond the door. The anxious voices complaining faintly, reporting their symptomology.
“Whenever I sit…”
“Worse when I stand up…”
“Here…”
“And here…”
“Should I put ice on it or heat?”
“Heat on it or ice?”
My bones are beginning to ache. I stand up just to check. Sit back down. Leg still swinging but more subdued now. I walk to the door. Open it. In the hallway, no sign of Mark. Just an old man with a TheraBand around his ankles walking sideways through an obstacle course of orange cones. At the other end of the hall, a therapist with hair out of a Heart video is watching, arms crossed. She’s the one who put the orange cones in the man’s path. Laid a ladder of rope on the floor. His job now to step between the ladder rungs, while also dodging the cones. He’s shaky. Losing his balance. Taking the smallest steps. Mark made me do this very obstacle course once.
The old man looks at me. His eyes say, We’re stuck here, aren’t we?
I close the door. Stare at the ugly room. Mark’s never made me wait like this before, has he? Only Dr. Rainier ever made me wait this long. I remember whenever he finally showed up it would always feel like a miracle. Like getting a visitation from God. Silver hair gleaming. Smiling at me. Holding my medical history in his hand—divorced, mother and father deceased—like it was the key to me.
Your pain is your loss, Ms. Fitch, he would say. The loss of your husband, your mother. Your pain is a vigil to all of this, don’t you see that? He wouldn’t even look at my MRI. He just stared at my crooked body like it was proof. Proof of my grief, my inability to let go. I wanted to remind Dr. Rainier that I’d lost my mother a number of years ago, well before the accident. That I grieved her, of course I grieved her—I’d lost my one dark cheerleader, clapping violently in the wings. But her death had also freed me. Soon after, I left for Edinburgh. Found new solace in my craft, on a stage across the sea, playing Helen. I’d never connected with All’s Well before, but Helen’s orphan status, her drifting, lowly place in the world, her pain and longing for love, suddenly spoke to me, moved me beyond words. Grief, far from crushing me, had actually been a gift—it had given me Helen. And Helen had given me Paul. And Paul had given me back the family I’d lost. You eclipsed them all, he said to me that first night. And just like that, there were my mother’s hands on my seven-year-old shoulders again. And we were happy. So happy for a while. The theater—my place on the stage, Paul’s place in the audience—brought us together, wedded us. Only after I hurt myself were those spheres disrupted. I wanted to remind Dr. Rainier that the loss of my husband and career had been casualties of the pain, not its cause.
But I fell off the stage…， I began. That’s how this all started. I fell, and then I injured—
We all fall, Ms. Fitch. We fall and we rise again. Bones and tissue heal. But sometimes we want to hold on to the pain. Sometimes we have our reasons for not being able to let go.
I gazed at his thick black eyebrows. His silvered hair cropped close to his scalp, the haircut of all spine doctors, of all orthopedic surgeons. The haircut of serial killers. His dark alien eyes gazing at me with a thin attempt at humanity.
Losing your mother, your husband. Must have ripped your heart right out.
What could I say? Yes. I nodded. Yes. My heart. Ripped out. Ripped right out. I might have even placed a hand on my chest like a fool.
Now the door opens at last. Mark. Surely he’ll burst into applause. Surely he’ll gasp with me at my sudden improvement. But Mark is dry-eyed. Hands still in his pockets. Expression neutral.
“Well, that was quite a display, Miranda,” he says.
Suddenly I feel embarrassed. The way I stood up so gleefully in front of everyone.
“Sorry,” I say.
I watch Mark walk over to the sink and wash his hands.
“Don’t apologize. It’s good to see. Really. Really something.”
“That’s sort of how I’m seeing it,” I say quietly. “As just, I don’t know, something.”
“Right.”
“I mean it might get bad again, right?”
“It might,” Mark says. “Probably it will. But for now, let’s see it as a little victory.”
I look up at Mark, drying his hands.
“What does that mean?” I ask him.
“It’s a step. It means what we’re doing in here is working.”