To qualify for rehab, you have to be able to tolerate three hours of therapy a day. Some of it is physical therapy, some occupational, and for those who need it, speech therapy. The silver lining is that I will see people again. The therapists are completely covered in PPE to keep them safe, but at least three times a day I will have company.
And the more time I spend with people, the less time I spend replaying my memories of Isabela.
I am moved into a small room with a private bathroom, and I haven’t been there for more than a half hour when the door opens and a tiny hurricane with red hair and snapping blue eyes blusters in. “I’m Maggie,” she announces. “I’m your physical therapist.”
“What happened to Prisha?” I ask.
“She doesn’t leave the hospital; I don’t leave the rehab unit. It’s theoretically a single building, but it is like there’s a special force field between us.” She grins; there is a sweet gap between her front teeth. “Big Star Wars fan here. You watch The Mandalorian?”
“Um, no?”
“The guy’s hotter with his helmet on,” she says. She has approached the bed and already has stripped back the covers; her hands are firm and strong on my feet as she rotates my ankles. “My kids got me into that show. I have three. One came back home from college because of Covid. I can’t believe it. He’s a freshman; I thought I’d just gotten rid of him.” She says this with another smile as she moves to my arms, pulling them over my head. “You got kids?”
“Me? No.”
“Significant other?”
I nod. “My boyfriend is a surgeon at the hospital.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Ooh, better be on my best behavior,” she says, and then she laughs. “I’m just kidding. I’m gonna put you through the paces like I do everyone else.”
As she moves my limbs as if I’m a rag doll （which, to be fair, I might as well be）， I learn that she lives on Staten Island with her husband, who is a policeman in Manhattan, plus her displaced college student, as well as a seventh grader who wanted to be a nun last week but has, as of Tuesday, decided to convert to Buddhism, and a ten-year-old boy who will grow up to be either the next Elon Musk or the Unabomber. Maggie says she’s already had Covid, which she’s pretty sure she contracted while volunteering to sew costumes for her son’s elementary school play, which is about a T. rex afraid to tell its parents it is vegan, which is what you get when you take your retirement fund and apply it instead to a private school for the gifted and talented. She talks about her apartment building, and the constantly rotating stream of morons who live just below them. One started feeding a skunk on the fire escape. After he was evicted, a woman moved in who slipped a note under their door, asking if they’d have objections to her putting in a skylight in her ceiling—which, of course, was Maggie’s floor. She keeps me so busy laughing that I do not realize I’ve maxed out my physical capacity until every muscle in my body is screaming.
Finally, she stops stretching my arms and my legs. I collapse against the bed, wondering how I can be so exhausted from someone else doing the motions for me. “Okay, sunshine,” she says. “Time for you to sit up.”
I push myself upright, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. It takes a lot of effort and concentration, so at first I don’t notice Maggie sliding a recliner wheelchair closer. She takes off one arm, locks the wheels, and then puts a board as a bridge from the bed to the chair. I look at it, then down at my unfamiliar body. “Oh hell no,” I say.
“If you do it, I’ll get you a Popsicle. I know where the stash is.”
“Not even for a Fudgsicle,” I mutter.
Maggie folds her arms. “If you can’t transfer to a chair, you can’t get to the bathroom. If you can’t get to the bathroom, you can’t leave rehab.”
“I can’t get in that chair,” I tell her.
“You can’t do it alone,” Maggie corrects.
She leans in front of me and uses all of her compact body for me to lean into as she slides my butt onto the edge of the board. Then she shifts my legs a bit, then leans forward again to help me amass the strength to creep sideways on the board. We do this a few more times until I am seated in the chair, and then she pops its arm back on.
I am sweating and red-faced, shaking. “Orange,” I grind out.
“Orange what?”
“Popsicle.”
She laughs. “Double or nothing. Can you kick your leg out for me? Yeah, like that. Ten times.”