Wish You Were Here(74)

“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.”

But ten times with the left leg leads to ten times with the right. And then come toe tapping and arm lifting. When Maggie asks me to grip the armrests and try to lift my body weight an inch, I can’t even budge a finger.

“Come on, Diana,” Maggie urges. “You got this.”

I can’t even raise my head from the back of the chair. I could sleep for a week. “Rehab,” I say, “is staffed by sadists.”

“True,” Maggie agrees. “But when you’re a dominatrix, the pay is shit.”

At that, I start to sob.

Immediately, her demeanor changes. “I’m sorry. I crossed a line. My mouth just doesn’t know when to stop—”

“I was on a vent for five days,” I wail. “Five fucking days. How could I get this bad this fast?”

Maggie crouches down in front of me. “First, it’s not as bad. Not compared to some others I’ve seen—people who’ve been on a vent or ECMO for months; people who have suffered through amputations. It may feel ridiculous to you to sit in a chair and tap your toes, but that’s how you’re eventually going to walk out of here. I promise you, these are small things, with exponential benefits.” She meets my gaze fiercely. “You can be pissed at your body, or you can celebrate it. Yes, it sucks that you got Covid. Yes, it sucks that you were on a vent. But a lot of people who did the same aren’t going home, and you are. You can look at this situation and feel bitter, or you can choose not to be negative. Most adults don’t have many firsts left to them—but you get to experience yours all over again.” She takes a deep breath. “Give me two weeks, and your body will belong to you again.”

I narrow my eyes. I look down at my lap and grit my teeth. Then I grab the sides of the chair, squeeze, and start to push myself up.