Nick
12
“She’s persistent, you have to give her that,” Jackson said. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the hippo in a tutu, singing “You Got a Friend in Me” to me. It was not my birthday; there was nothing special about this date in early March in any way, shape, or form.
“Me . . .” the hippo concluded the song. It did a pirouette and then handed me a bunch of balloons and a note.
I looked at Jackson. “Tip her . . . him . . . it.”
Jackson sighed and pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket. He handed the hippo a twenty and it blew kisses at us as it jogged down the steps toward its brightly colored van.
“You were wonderful!” Lupita cried, laughing and clapping.
I handed her the balloons. There was no way I could navigate my wheelchair and the balloons and get back into the house. Plus, I was very aware that I bore a horrible resemblance to the old man in the animated movie Up, being in a wheelchair with helium balloons all around me, but, of course, Lexi didn’t know that.
I spun around and Juan opened the door, letting me through so I didn’t have to hit the automatic door opener. I felt hot and itchy in my own skin. The hippo had said, “This is from Lexi,” before it broke into song. At this point, as soon as the bright-colored van had shown up, I’d known it was from her. What was my little sister playing at, and why did it have my emotions rocketing all over the place? Over the past week, she’d been relentless. Every other day had brought a new message from her in some form or another.
First, she’d sent a picture of five-year-old me, holding her as a baby. I had the same picture somewhere, and it gutted me that she’d obviously kept one, too. Still, I was able to shake it off. I reminded myself that she really only wanted me in her life to help her with her project; otherwise why hadn’t she shown up before?
But Lexi was playing hardball. Next there’d been a stack of comic books, particularly Flash: The Next Generation, which were the same comics I had read to her when I was eleven and she was six and our family was beginning to unravel. Flash had gotten us through some seriously dark days.
Frustrated by her obvious tactic to manipulate me emotionally, I had sent Jackson to tell her to cease and desist. That had been so successful, note the sarcasm, it was followed up by a cake delivery the very next day. It wasn’t just any cake.
“What sort of cake is this?” Lupita asked with a frown.
She lifted it out of the box, and I felt my throat get tight. I’d seen this cake before, hell, I’d made this cake before. The recipe is quite simple. Have two junkie parents who forget it’s their seven-year-old daughter’s birthday. Take one twelve-year-old big brother, who loves his sister enough to risk being arrested for shoplifting for her. Have him pocket all the candy bars he can fit into his backpack along with a can of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting from the grocery store, and run like hell when the clerk spots him.
At home, find a marginally clean pan in a round shape and chop up all the candy bars, mashing them into the pan until they form a solid block in the shape of a cake. Frost the round block of candy with the stolen frosting. While the parents are out trolling for drugs, present the cake to the little sister and sing her “Happy Birthday.” Have her look at you like you are the single greatest person who ever lived, and for one brief shining moment your life isn’t a complete shitstorm.
“What’s in that?” Jackson asked. “It looks lethal.”
“And a bit lopsided,” Juan said.
“Get out,” I said.
The three of them snapped their heads in my direction. I couldn’t blame them. The voice that came out of me sounded like the growl of a wounded animal, and in that moment I was. I was just a giant sucking wound, festering in the gangrene of my own pain. I couldn’t bear to have anyone look at me.
“I said get out,” I repeated. This time it was through gritted teeth.
Through the haze of anguish melting my insides, I saw Lupita reach for me. Juan caught her hand in his and shook his head. Thank god. If she had shown me any comfort, I would have broken down completely and assumed a fetal position on the floor. Jackson opened his mouth and then snapped it shut.
They left me, in my wheelchair, in the kitchen contemplating the ugliest cake I’d ever seen. It broke my fucking heart, and before I could push it down or hold it in, a sob tore through me, and I sat in that goddamn wheelchair and cried like I hadn’t cried since the day Lexi moved three thousand miles away to start a new life.
Today, I refused to cry. Instead, I wheeled my chair into the living room. No one came to check on me, sensing, rightly, that I needed to be alone. I contemplated the note in my lap. In my sister’s distinctive script—I’d gotten to know it quite well over the past few days—she’d written Nicky.
I expected a note inside. There wasn’t one. Just a picture of me in my dad’s cowboy hat and boots and Lexi in a Buzz Lightyear costume I’d made out of a box, Magic Markers, and some empty soda bottles. On the back, in Lexi’s handwriting, in fresh ink, it read, You’ve Got a Friend in Me. On the bottom in faded ink in different handwriting it read, Halloween 1996. It took me a second to realize the handwriting was mine.
Jackson was right. She wasn’t going to go away, but I couldn’t let her into my life like this. We’d been apart for twenty years. She clearly still saw me as her big brother, the one who could make everything all right, which was exactly why she was looking for my help with her housing project. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be less in her eyes now than I was then. It would kill me. But unless I took out a restraining order, she wasn’t going to stop. There had to be a better solution. There just had to be.
My neurologist answered on the third ring. “Nick, how are you?”
“Not good,” I said. It had taken me all of Thursday morning to work up the cojones to call him. “I need you to run more tests.”
“Why don’t you come in and we’ll talk,” he said.
Dr. Garth Henry was quite possibly the most patient person I’d ever met in my life. Ironically, his overabundance of patience seemed to fray the last little bits of mine.
“What is there to talk about?” I asked. “There’s still something wrong with me. You need to do some tests and tell me what it is. Then you can fix it.”
“Eleven o’clock on Monday then?” he asked.
“Sure, or now,” I said. Jackson and I were out, making a Dutch Bros coffee run. I had given up caffeine but every now and then I just needed a small hot Cocomo with whip.
There was a sigh on the other end. “Hang on.” I waited while he checked his schedule. “You are in luck. I had a cancellation for an appointment this afternoon. I can see you at three.”
“I’ll be there.”
Later that day, Jackson drove me to the office where we had logged a lot of time in over the past few months. I didn’t have my wheelchair with me. It made me edgy. Jackson must have sensed it because he matched his stride to mine, walking on the side with my bum leg. I appreciated his silent understanding more than I could say.
Patty, the receptionist, smiled and waved us forward. She leaned over the sign-in desk and whispered, “Dr. Henry said for you to go right on back to his office.”
We thanked her, and Jackson and I made our way through the waiting room and down the hall into the large plush office that was Dr. Henry’s inner sanctum.
“Nick, Jackson,” he greeted us. His thick silver hair was combed in its usual precise side part. He gestured to the chairs in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”
We sat in the two leather chairs, and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and lacing his fingers together. “What can I do for you, Nick?”
“I can’t live like this,” I said. “There has to be something I can do to fix what’s wrong with me.”
He met my gaze directly. His eyes were kind, which I found annoying at present. I didn’t want kind. I wanted a light of understanding to go off and then I wanted a cure, a pill, an exercise regimen, something that would alleviate my body’s inexplicable fits of weakness.
“Still suffering from the sudden numbness in your leg?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And the other issues, the fatigue, anxiety, and fuzzy brain?” he asked.
I clenched my teeth. I hated all these symptoms with the fire of a thousand suns. They made me feel weak, and I hated being weak. “Yes.”
“You know those are all typical conditions after an ischemic stroke?” he asked.
“Yes, but I thought they’d be gone after six months.”
“There’s no absolute timetable on these things,” Dr. Henry said. He considered me for a moment before asking, “Have you noticed if there is a trigger?”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“When your leg gives out, are you overtired? Feeling stressed? Dehydrated?” he asked.
“No,” I said. We’d had this conversation before and I was over it. I needed answers and I needed them now. “Listen, I have life stuff happening, and I just can’t live like this anymore. I have to get to the bottom of why I’m still struggling to recover fully. It’s been nine months.” Nine months since the second-worst day of my entire life.
Dr. Henry nodded. He leaned back in his chair and said, “Have you considered the possibility that your symptoms are a sort of self-protection?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Nick, you suffered a major trauma,” Dr. Henry said. “It could be that your—”
“Are you about to tell me that the numbness in my leg, my heart racing, and my forgetfulness are all in my head?” I asked. I wanted to yell. I was not mental. This was not imaginary. And I resented that first Jackson and now Dr. Henry both seemed to think I had a sort of post-stroke PTSD happening.
“I want to refer you to a colleague of mine, a specialist,” Dr. Henry said.
My eyebrows raised. “Why haven’t you mentioned him before?”
“You weren’t ready,” he said. He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a business card. He reached across the desk and handed it to me. “Give Dr. Franks a call and tell him I sent you.”
I looked down at the card, expecting to see an alphabet soup of letters after the doctor’s name. There wasn’t. There was just a word in italics off to the side but it still hit me like a slap across the face. I glanced up at Dr. Henry. “A psychiatrist?”
“It’s the only remaining avenue of help I can offer you,” he said.
When we got home, I couldn’t stomach the thought of food. I excused myself and disappeared into my room. I sulked in there for a couple of hours, contemplating what I should do. I was not going to a head doctor. No way. No how. Forget about it. There was nothing wrong with my mind. It was my body that was damaged. Dr. Henry had just run out of ideas. Clearly, I needed to get a second opinion and possibly a third. There had to be someone out there who understood why I had become a prisoner in my own body.
Alone, I pushed myself up to my feet. My leg felt fine at the moment, which was a relief but it was always shadowed by the anxiety of wondering when it would go out again, which caused me to spiral into a swamp of fear that I had to claw my way out of. It was exhausting.
Jackson and I had been working hard on my legs. I was convinced that if I could get them to be as strong as my arms, then I wouldn’t have to worry about the left one randomly collapsing. I took a few steps toward the window. My leg held. I reached the wall and leaned against it, feeling relieved that if my leg did give out, I could catch myself or slide right down the wall. Undignified sure, but better than concussing myself on the furniture or the floor with an abrupt fall. It had happened before.
I thought about Lexi’s appearance here a few nights ago. I wondered how long she had waited to get access to the inside of the estate. Even though Lexi had refused to come across with a description or a name, I knew who had let her onto the property. Annabelle Martin, my exasperating tenant. Even when she wasn’t flagrantly breaking the rules, she was causing me grief. I was going to have to make sure she was more careful with her comings and goings.
The whole scene with Lexi could have been avoided if Annabelle had been paying attention and closed the gate after herself without letting anyone in. If Lexi had snuck in behind Annabelle, then a mugger, burglar, or rapist certainly could have.
The thought of my tenant being harmed while residing in my guest house made my blood run cold. Not because I cared about her, I assured myself. I’d never even met the woman, not really. No, it was just the thought of something bad happening on my property that upset me. It would be more grief that I had no desire to deal with.
I pushed aside the heavy drapes and peered down across the backyard. It was aglow from the blue lights in the pool and the violet in the hot tub. Both were vacant. At least my tenant had respected my request to stop using the hot tub. I glanced past the lemon and lime trees at the little house set amid the olive trees. The lights were on. Unlike me, Annabelle never closed her drapes. I hated to admit it, but it had unlocked a voyeuristic tendency in me, which, up until now, I’d been completely unaware of. I told myself I was just checking up on her every now and then to be certain she wasn’t burning the place down, but that was a lie.
The pretty brunette was becoming a minor obsession. I looked for her in the morning, when she drank her coffee on the patio, and I looked for her again at night. She flitted around her kitchen as if listening to music and I frequently saw her working late at the desk in her bedroom. I told myself I was just keeping tabs on a single woman living alone in the city. I was looking out for her, really. That was another lie. The truth was she fascinated me, from the way she moved to the smile I saw on her lips when she sat in the sun. And truthfully, I enjoyed her sassy notes, and her pencil sketches showed remarkable talent. Jackson was right. She really was a goddess. I shook my head. Man, I needed to get out more.
Knowing all this, I also knew that the right thing to do, of course, would be to close the drapes and walk away. I knew that. Just because my tenant left her curtains open, it was not an invitation for me to look in at her. Like right now, I could see her nestled in her chair in her living room, reading a book by the fire, and it looked so damned cozy and inviting that I—
I blinked. Once. Twice. I did not just see that. Damn it! Yes, I did. I squinted. Maybe I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong. As I watched, a black-and-white feline sauntered from the patio outside, through the open French door, to hop up onto the red throw on the sofa of the guest house. My tenant looked up from her book and smiled as if greeting a friend. I had to be seeing things. Nope. As I watched, it lifted its hind leg and licked its butt.
There were no two ways about it. Despite my detailed list of rules, which clearly stated no pets, my tenant had acquired a cat. A cat!