“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.