True Love (23 page)

“We’ve got places to go.” Carley assured him, hustling to pick up her crutches.

In the hallway Reba stopped her chair and said, “Kyle sure is nice. And good-looking too. It must be terrible to be blind. I feel sorry for him, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’m betting he gets his eyesight back,” Reba said firmly. “Don’t you think he will?”

“No way of knowing.” Carley was aware that a small, perverse part of her was glad that Kyle couldn’t see. She felt bad about it, but also knew that his blindness was her safety net. So long as he couldn’t see her, he would think she was normal.

And for Kyle Westin, normal was what she wanted to be.

C
arley returned to her room, where she was hooked to an IV for her dose of antibiotics. By the time she was unhooked, it was time to go down to PT to begin rehabilitation on her leg. An aide took her down in an elevator in a wheelchair, along a covered walkway, to a separate building. Inside, a large and spacious physical therapy room was filled with equipment and tables. Therapists were working with patients of all ages.

“My name’s Linda Gallagher and I’ll be your PT.” The woman who stood in front of Carley was slim and youthful, with long hair that hung down her back in a French braid.
“I’ll be working with you twice a day thirty minutes per session in a series of exercises to get your leg functioning perfectly again. You’ll be off those crutches in no time.”

“What? Give up my crutches? How will I fight off my admirers?” Carley didn’t bother to hide her face from the physical therapist. She figured the woman was used to seeing deformity.

Linda grinned. “So, I have a comedienne for a patient. Believe me, you’re a welcome departure from the kind who grumbles all the time.” She helped Carley out of the wheelchair, boosted her up onto a low table, and started examining her leg, which was held rigid by a cast. “What happened?”

Carley told her about the accident.

“And this was the day after Christmas?”

“Yes, but after I’d spent almost two weeks in the cast, X rays showed that it wasn’t going back together just right, so Dr. Olson told us he’d have to operate and reset it.”

“And, according to your chart, that’s when they discovered the osteomyelitis.”

“The what?”

Linda smiled. “The infection.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I have to stay in the hospital until it goes away.”

“It’ll give us time to establish your therapy.”

Carley kept waiting for Linda to ask about her misshapen face. Linda didn’t. Instead she started right in explaining about the therapy. “We’ll start with simple stretching exercises. Your chart states that you sustained tendon damage around your knee and ankle too.”

“My doctor said he may have to operate on the tendons again.” She understood the severity of her break and how concerned her parents had been about it. But considering her medical history, she refused to get too agitated about a broken leg. It would be fixed. However, she regretted losing her Rollerblades over it.

After the leg had been set the first time, her mother had said, “Those Rollerblades are going in the garbage.”

Carley had protested, “But Mom, they’re brand-new. I just got them!”

“I don’t care. Don’t you realize that because
of them you could walk with a limp for the rest of your life?”

To which Carley had replied, “I’d look like Quasimodo in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, wouldn’t I?” She leaned over, curled her lip, and dragged her leg which was now encased in plaster.

“That isn’t funny, Carley,” her mother said.

“Why not? Bum leg and weird face. I think it’s funny.”

Linda, the PT, interrupted Carley’s thoughts. “You’ll also start riding the stationary bike and in about ten days you’ll begin partial weight-bearing exercises. I’ll start you out with two-pound weights, take you to four, and eventually get you to where you’ll once again have full ROM—that’s range of motion.”

“Will I be able to drive?” Carley had taken her road test in October, on her sixteenth birthday.

“Not right away,” Linda said. “But it is your left leg, so if you’ve got an automatic shift, it shouldn’t be too long before you can
drive. Just be careful. You don’t want to rack up the other leg.”

“That’s for sure. I hate being stuck in the hospital.”

“We’ll get you out as soon as we can,” Linda said cheerfully.

Carley thought about Kyle, lying upstairs, a prisoner of his darkness. “Do you work with blind people?”

“No, I don’t. But we have people on our staff who do. Why?”

“There’s this guy on my floor who’s blind, and I was wondering what you all did to help somebody like him.”

“First his doctor has to authorize it, but basically, in the beginning, he’ll have to be trained to move around safely. Plus he’ll need to be counseled from a psychological perspective. Blindness is a big emotional adjustment.”

Carley understood perfectly about adjusting to the emotional aspect of a catastrophic event. When she’d been told that the tumor removed from her face had been cancerous and that nothing could be done to reconstruct her lost bone and tissue, she’d gone
into a deep depression. She’d wept for days, even though her doctor had tried to console her with the news that he’d cut out all of the tumor and that after chemotherapy treatments she shouldn’t have to worry about the cancer ever returning.

At the time, they’d shaved her head, operated, and stitched her up so that black sutures ran in long lines over the top of her head and around her nose. With time, her hair grew back and the suture lines faded. But the deformity remained. Her face looked sunken on the left side, her nose scrunched, her eye half closed. She was ugly—no doubt about it.

“Well, I’m hoping his doctors can fix up this guy so that he won’t be blind,” Carley told Linda, forcing herself away from painful memories.

“I hope so too,” Linda said.

Carley started her therapy thinking more about Kyle and his problems than her own broken leg. She wanted the best for him. She just didn’t want to be in his line of vision when, and if, his bandages came off.

———

“Hi, Sis. Whatcha doing?” Janelle breezed into Carley’s hospital room, shopping bags in each hand, her purse slung over her shoulder.

“Bowling.”

Janelle laughed. “I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

Carley was sitting in a recliner chair, her leg outstretched. She tossed down the magazine she was reading. “Where’s lover boy?”

“Jon’s coming; he stopped down at the snack bar.” Janelle plopped the bags on the floor, leaned down, and hugged Carley, then grabbed another chair and pulled it closer. The bag tilted and spilled books onto the floor. “You’ve got homework in every subject.”

“That brightens my day.”

“Tell me what’s happening. Mom and Dad want a full report.”

Carley described her physical therapy session.

“Did it hurt?” Janelle asked.

“Like crazy. But you know what they say: No pain, no gain.”

“Jon says that all the time.”

“Remind me never to use that phrase again.”

Janelle eyed Carley narrowly. “Be nice.”

“Do I have to?”

“Why don’t you like my boyfriend, Carley?”

Carley didn’t know exactly how to answer. She hadn’t meant to sound so caustic. She hedged. “Jon’s okay.”

Before Janelle could press for more of an answer, Jon walked into the room. He carried a sack from the snack bar in one hand and a giant cup of cola in the other. “How you doing?” he mumbled toward Carley, careful to avert his eyes from her.

“Doing just great,” she said.

“You want to sit by us?” Janelle asked.

“No,” he answered, much too quickly. “I’ll just drag a chair over here.” He indicated the small table on the other side of the room. “Mind if I turn on the tube?”

“Help yourself,” Carley told him.

“I thought you came to visit.” Janelle sounded irritated.

“You girls want to gab. I’ll stay out of your way.” He opened the sack and extracted a
hamburger, fries, and a pile of ketchup packets. He switched on the TV.

Janelle turned toward Carley and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I thought he’d be more sociable.”

“I’m used to it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying it’s all right if he does his own thing. He’s
your
boyfriend. I wouldn’t expect him to get excited about coming to the hospital to see me.”

Janelle frowned as if she knew something wasn’t quite right, but since Jon was in the room she couldn’t make Carley talk about it. “Have you heard from any of your friends from school?”

“I don’t have friends like you do, Janelle.”

“What about that Dana girl?”

“We haven’t been friends since Thanksgiving.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“When the guys started noticing her, she dropped me like a hot potato.”

“Well, that was mean of her.”

Carley sighed. Janelle was wrapped up in her own social life. Not that Carley blamed
her. Janelle was in her senior year and planning on college. Plus, she was pretty and popular and outgoing. “I’ve forgiven Dana. Why should she be saddled with a social liability like me?”

“She’s petty. And you’re not a liability.”

“She’s normal,” Carley corrected.

“Well, have you made any friends here? A few days ago you were still groggy from your surgery, but surely you’ve poked around by now.”

Carley told her about Reba and Kyle.

Janelle sucked in her breath when she heard that Kyle was blind. “I’d hate to think of a guy with his whole life ahead of him being blind,” Janelle said.

“His blindness may not be permanent. His doctors aren’t sure yet.”

“That’s a relief.” Janelle tipped her chin forward and studied Carley thoughtfully. “Do you like him?”

“Of course I like him. Why wouldn’t I?”

“No, I mean
like
him, like him.”

Carley blushed under her sister’s keen scrutiny.

“You do, don’t you?”

“I hardly know him. We’ve had maybe two conversations.”

“So what? I knew I liked Jon the first time I laid eyes on him.”

“Well, Kyle’s never laid eyes on me. And believe me, if I have my way about it, he never will.”

T
hat evening Carley had just finished supper when her phone rang.

“It’s me,” Kyle said.

Her pulse fluttered crazily. “Hello, ‘me.’ ”

“I dialed the phone just like you taught me. Got it right on the first try.”

“I’d applaud, but I’m holding the receiver.”

He laughed. “Doing anything?”

“Counting the flowers on the wallpaper.”

“Want to come visit me?”

Her heart skipped a beat. “Sure. Let me grab my crutches and hop over.” He wanted to be with her! She forced herself to calm down. After all, he was trapped in the hospital
and didn’t have anything else to do. Plus, he’d never seen her face.

She went to his room and found him sitting in a vinyl armchair at the small table in the corner of his private room. “You’ve made progress. You’re out of bed.”

“Yeah. You missed all the excitement. I spilled my lunch tray all over the floor. My mom was just walking in the door when it happened and she pitched a fit because no one was helping me. I told her that the nurses were busy and I shouldn’t have gotten impatient. Besides, I don’t like being fed like I’m some kind of baby.”

Carley was sympathetic to his feelings. She said, “
Being
helpless and
feeling
helpless are different things.”

“Exactly. Anyway, Mom nailed my doctor and he sent someone who works with the visually impaired to see me. She taught me some things about how to negotiate in a seeing world.”

“Like what?”

“Come sit over here and I’ll show you.”

She watched him fumble for another chair. “I’ll get it,” she said.

“No.” His voice was firm. “I need to learn how to handle things like this.”

Slowly, he caught the arm of the second chair, stood, and pulled it out from the table. His movements looked choppy, but he did get the chair for her. She lay her crutches aside and sat down, propping her broken leg on another chair. “I’m impressed,” she said. “The last time a guy pulled a chair out for me was in seventh grade.”