Carolina

Carolina hasn’t moved from the couch in four hours. Somebody kill her.

Per doctor’s orders, she’s flat on her back, her right leg propped on pillows above her heart to reduce the swelling. As a leg, it’s unrecognizable, entombed from thigh to ankle in a black steel immobilizer straight out of The Terminator. Queenie even has to help her to the bathroom and moved her useless crutches across the room to ensure she doesn’t get frisky and go for a wander.

It’s unnatural for the body to be still like this. Every nerve cell screams at her to move! The muscles in her left leg twitch every few seconds in the same way Mrs. Roper noses at Carolina’s shins when she wants to go outside. Hey. Pay attention. You’re cramping my style.

Right this minute, however, Mrs. Roper snoozes, curled against her hip. Her orthopedist is recommending surgery. Both her ACL and MCL, two of the major ligaments in the knee, have torn beyond the point of self-repair. She’s injured them too many times before.

“I can get you up and walking again,” Dr. Chung had said. “But the days of strenuous runs are over.” To top off the bad-news sundae, she strongly encouraged Carolina to start thinking about finding a new outdoor passion. “Your body is begging you.”

Maybe that’s true. But every time Carolina tries to picture a life without running, her throat begins to close, and the tears threaten.

She is too tired to cry anymore.

Instead, she’s on her insurance provider’s website looking for a new orthopedist. Someone who can fix her knee and make it strong enough to run again. Carolina will surrender herself to surgery, but not if, as Dr. Chung warned, it requires nine to twelve months of recovery and leaves behind a disappointing, dysfunctional limb. Her good leg twitches as she googles.

In the procedure Dr. Chung recommended, the surgeon creates a whole new ligament by grafting a piece of one of her other healthy tendons into the torn ligament’s place. The article she’s reading comes with photos that make her so queasy her blood pressure drops, and her stomach prepares to empty itself.

“Queenie? Where’s the barf bowl?”

“Under the coffee table.” He’s working from home but left everything from power cords to painkillers within her reach. She grabs the empty Tupperware container. Her stomach stills.

This. Sucks.

She’s also had to take several days of personal leave from work after discovering that email and painkillers don’t mix. Unfortunately, she cc’d the CEO on a lunch order she sent to her administrative assistant at 2:47 a.m. Hours later, she woke to an email from the head of HR, copying Sandra. Per the employee handbook, it is strongly recommended that you not return to work while taking prescribed narcotics.

Carolina has no memory of that email. Which leads to the question: Who else did she write to that night?

Following the mishap, Queenie took away her work laptop and replaced it with her personal iPad. It effectively feels as if he’s left her with nothing. Without her work tether, there are no meetings to attend. No Slack chats. Stuck here in the condo, there are no flybys at her desk. No break room run-ins.

Nor can she relieve her stress with a midday run. Not even a walk in the fresh air. Couch Potato is not a woman Carolina understands, and she wants this stranger gone.

The intercom buzzer startles her from her malaise. It’s the most excitement her heart has had in days.

“Queenie? Did you order food? Someone’s in the lobby.”

He’s already heard the buzzer and bustles toward the door while pulling a sweatshirt over his head. “It’s freezing in here. Did you jack up the air-conditioning again?”

When he presses the intercom button, the voice that emerges is Andi’s. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d check in on Carolina.”

“In the neighborhood?” Carolina says from the couch. “Baloney.”

She told her friends she didn’t need fawning over. Fern sent flowers, anyway. Emma a card. All of them chipped in on an Uber Eats gift card, since Carolina won’t be cooking anytime soon and Queenie, the carnivore, isn’t likely to become vegan literate overnight.

And now Andi is at her door. Queenie buzzes her up.

As soon as Carolina sees her face, she knows this wasn’t simply a get-well call.

“What’s it like to lose a piece of you?” Andi asks.

Queenie puts the kettle on and retreats to the office, closing the door behind him. Andi sits in a lounge chair, holding a mug of tea. Carolina’s mug is on the coffee table, growing cold, since it’s impossible to drink hot liquids while lying flat without getting second-degree burns on your chest.

“What do you mean? Like with my knee surgery?”

Following the appointment with Dr. Chung, she’d texted her friends with the news. “She says my running days are behind me, but she may as well have told me to just lay down and die.”

They’d predictably responded with blind encouragement. We can do hard things! You got this! You’ll find something new to love! Carolina threw her phone out of reach to keep herself from replying, Yeah? Would you find something new to love if you lost one of your kids?

Andi shook her head. “I mean, what’s it like to lose a part of your identity? A piece of you that’s so fundamental you don’t recognize yourself without it. The way you’ve lost your ability to keep running.”

Carolina flinches at what is anything but a foregone conclusion. “Are you having an identity crisis, too? No offense, but I don’t know if our friends can handle more than one at a time.”

She’s kidding, of course. Sort of.

Andi doesn’t laugh. “I’ve never been so fulfilled as a lawyer than I am right now. I love the ICSW work. It’s what I envisioned for myself in law school—at the crossroads of institutional injustice and real people’s lives. The problem is, all the work I’m doing for other families is hurting my own.”

Carolina frowns. “Cameron in trouble again?”

At this, Andi does laugh. “No. Can you believe it? Just the opposite. He’s turned a corner for the better. Less moody, got a job at the grocery store and is making some money. He even comes out of his room from time to time. Yesterday, he smiled at me without prompting.”

“And that’s—” Carolina doesn’t know the ins and outs of raising teenage boys.

“Huge. Gigantic. A unicorn riding a phoenix.”

“Okay. So that’s great progress.”

“I know.” Andi slumps.

“I don’t see the problem.”

“All of this improvement happened after I quit traveling. It’s better at home when I stay home. But I can’t do this kind of work if I don’t travel.”

“Ah.” Carolina doesn’t bother to argue otherwise. If there was a way to stay in town and be effective, Andi would have found it.

Andi says, “Why don’t men seem to experience this impossible pull? When I’m doing my best work, my family falls apart. And when I give my family the time it needs, my clients pay the price.”

It’s the same dilemma they’d tried to solve at brunch.

“What if you cut back on the cases you take on?” Carolina asks. “You said the partners aren’t going to let your team exist forever.”

“That’s the other problem,” she answers. “We’ve brought great international exposure to the firm, but even that perk has its limits. At some point, if I want to keep my job, I’ve got to start bringing cash to the table.”

“The almighty dollar.”

“All hail the king.”

“Shit.”

“With a cherry on top.”

Neither speaks for a moment.

Carolina understands what brought her friend all the way across town for this face-to-face pop-in. It’s a question as old as womanhood itself.

Lacking answers, she picks up her painkillers and shakes the bottle. “I’m happy to share. One of these will buy you a few hours of peace, but you may wake up with more trouble than you went in with.”

“I’ve got plenty of troubles already, thanks.” Andi’s eyes glisten with tears as she laughs.

Carolina’s well up in loyal response to her friend. “I wish I had wisdom to share.” If she did, maybe she wouldn’t be desperately googling for a new orthopedist. “As I’m sure you can already see from my glamourous appearance, losing a piece of yourself feels pretty terrible.” She holds up a matted strand of hair. “There’s only so much that dry shampoo can do for a gal.”

Andi pulls a tissue from the box on the coffee table and dabs her cheeks. “I’m worried that no matter what I decide to do, it’ll feel wrong.”

It probably will, Carolina thinks.

“If it’s any help, my doctor said something that I haven’t been able to let go of. She told me that my knee injury wasn’t an accident. It was avoidable. She’s been telling me to cut back for years, warning me that the next injury could be catastrophic. But I didn’t believe her. I thought I was strong enough to do it all.”

Andi says, “Running is your stress relief. It keeps you physically and emotionally healthy.”

“Or so I thought.” Carolina motions to the cage on her leg. “Queenie says he thinks I’m compulsive. That I don’t need to work as hard as I do, and that if I’d just cut back on my stress, I wouldn’t have to push my body so hard to compensate.”

Andi gives her a sympathetic smile. “But what do you think?”

Carolina dodges the question. Queenie may be right, but she’s not ready to admit it. Instead, she says, “Here’s what I think: I think I’d rather lose my knee than lose my son.”