The Year We Fell Down Read online

“Stacia is far too high-maintenance to have a long distance relationship,” Hartley said. “She needs somebody local to carry all those shopping bags. But it cuts both ways, you know? The minute her little European vacation is over, he’s forgotten.”

  “He lives in New York.”

  Hartley just rolled his eyes. “To Stacia, that’s long distance. And I can’t believe you’re stalking my girlfriend’s… friend.”

  “She’s a piece of work,” Bridger said.

  “And this is news?” Hartley asked.

  Dana flipped over an ace, put the cards on the table and smiled like a kitty cat.

  “Christ,” Bridger swore. “You just stole the deal, didn’t you?”

  “Hartley gave me the idea,” Dana grinned, “when he said legalized cheating.” She winked at me, and I made sure to smile. But everything Hartley had just said was eating me alive. His girlfriend was fooling around, and he didn’t even care?

  My little hope fairy made an appearance then. I hadn’t heard from her lately, but there she was, whispering in my ear. Maybe they’ll break up, she said, her tiny wings tickling my ear.

  Right. Not likely.

  Bedtime might have been awkward. But it wasn’t, because Hartley was incapable of awkward. No matter what, he was always just Hartley, with the lopsided smile and the “fuck it all” attitude.

  “Why is there an enormous bed in your den, anyway?” I asked, digging my PJs out of my bag.

  “After I broke my leg, I couldn’t get up the stairs to my room. My aunt was moving, and her new apartment wasn’t big enough for this thing. It’s a California king. So she brought it here to get me off the living room couch.”

  “That was nice of her,” I said.

  “It sure was. You want the bathroom first?”

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I take forever.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  By the time that I took my turn and got back to our room, he was already snoring.

  I shucked off my braces and tucked myself in. He hadn’t been kidding. There was a vast expanse of mattress between Hartley’s sleeping body and my own. I lay there, listening to the comfortable sounds of his sleep. Drifting off, I wondered how Stacia would feel about the rooming assignments. I knew I wasn’t really competition for her. But a girl could dream.

  Sometime later, I woke up to the sound of a gasp. Disoriented, my eyes flew open in the dark. Hartley was standing next to the bed, his head bent forward, his arms on the mattress.

  “What’s the matter?” I croaked.

  “Calf. Cramp,” he bit out.

  “Which leg?”

  “Good one. Can’t put enough weight on the other one to…argh.”

  “Give it to me,” I said, sitting up. I knew a thing or two about leg cramps.

  With a grimace, Hartley sat on the bed and spun his good leg toward me.

  “Press your heel here,” I said, patting my blanketed hip. When he’d anchored his bare foot against me, I grabbed his toes with both hands and flexed the ball of his foot back toward him. He let out his breath in a great tumble. After a minute, I slid my hand under his calf and probed with my fingers. “Ouch,” I said, finding the knot.

  “Happens all the time,” he said.

  “Overcompensating for your bad leg is straining your good one,” I said. I made a fist with my hand and tried to knuckle into it.

  “Agh,” Hartley said.

  “Sorry. I have superhuman strength.” He grimaced as I flexed his foot. “What do you do when you’re alone?”

  “Suffer. And yearn for the competent hands of Pat the Therapist. Although you’re no slouch.”

  “My father taught me. He’s good with things like this,” I said. “Wait — now I’ve got it.” The knot in Hartley’s muscle relaxed under my hand.

  He exhaled. “Jeez. Thanks.”

  “Keep that flexed,” I cautioned as he pulled his leg back onto his side of the bed.

  “Don’t worry, I will.” He settled himself onto his back, his extra pillow under his knee. “Sorry for the midnight drama.”

  “No worries.” We were quiet for a couple of minutes, but I could tell that neither of us was sleeping.

  Another minute of silence passed, and then Hartley rolled to face me. “You never told me it was a hockey injury. You said ‘accident,’ and so I thought it was a car.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed, rolling to mirror him. We stared at each other for a second. “The thing is, Bridger was right. Hockey is only the seventh most dangerous sport. Cheerleading and baseball have greater injury rates. So do football, soccer, and lacrosse.”

  “So you’re saying that you have to be spectacularly unlucky to have a bad hockey injury?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Unfuckingbelievable,” Hartley said. We lapsed into silence, and I found myself wishing the bed weren’t so large.

  There’s a mere two feet between us and that luscious mouth, my hope fairy whispered.

  “I love your mom,” I blurted, dragging my mind out of the gutter.

  “She’s great,” Hartley smiled. “And she likes having the house full of people. I’m not just saying that.”

  “I can tell. And Bridger’s little sister is a cutie. She loves your mom, too.”

  Hartley propped his head on his hand. “Yeah. But she’s Bridger’s biggest problem.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Well, their dad died about two years ago. And his mom isn’t holding it together.”

  “She’s depressed?”

  “She’s a drug addict.”

  I sucked in a breath. “That’s dark.”

  “Tell me about it. Bridger is worried that his mom will lose her job and fall apart. He might have to drop out if things get too ugly.”

  “He can’t drop out! In a year and a half he’ll be a Harkness grad.”

  “Bridger’s only a sophomore, actually. He took a year off before college, and now he’s kicking himself.”

  “You know…” The house was so quiet that even our whispered conversation seemed loud. “I get stuck inside my head too often. I forget that other people have problems.”

  Hartley was quiet a moment, watching me. Then he reached slowly across the expanse between us and covered my hand with his. Even that small touch made me stop breathing. “Everybody has their shit to shovel, Callahan. Everybody.” He gave my hand a squeeze, and then took his back. “Now, yours is right up front where everybody can see it. I don’t envy you that. But everybody has some, whether you can see it or not.”

  I had to stop and think about that. To look at Bridger, you wouldn’t know that he was dragging around such troubles. But I suspected there were others who had no shit at all to shovel, or else had an entire team of minions to shovel it for them. Stacia sprang to mind.

  “Are you sure?” I challenged him. “Because it seems like some people’s biggest problem is that the leather upholstery in their Beemer doesn’t come in the perfect color.”

  Hartley’s face broke into the most beautiful smile. “For that, there’s always custom, Callahan.” He rolled onto his back, putting his hands behind his head. “Thanks for the calf massage.”

  “Anytime.”

  He chuckled. “Don’t say that, or I’ll wake you up every night next week.”

  Sadly, I was so deep into him, I would probably look forward to it.

  Hartley began to breathe deeply as I lay there listening. He was a warm shape in the dark, and just a few feet away. I would have given anything for the privilege of sliding over, closing the distance between us, and wrapping an arm across his chest. It was difficult to even imagine the luxury of belonging with him. I wanted to roll over in the night and curl up against his body. I wanted to feel his breath on my neck while I slept.

  This is torture, my hope fairy grumbled, curling up on the pillow beside me.

  She wasn’t wrong. But it was a sweet kind of torture.

  Chapter Eleven: I'm Good With Gore

  — Corey

  Fri
day, we watched football, ate leftovers and played a lot of cards. Lucy made sure that there was at least one hand of Uno to every game of euchre.

  On Saturday, we took Theresa out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, which offered fifty different varieties of dumplings. Hartley’s mom looked worn out from two nine-hour shifts in holiday retail hell. But her tired brown eyes were happy nonetheless. Hartley sat next to his mother, and from time to time she reached over to muss his hair. Dana tried to teach Lucy how to use chopsticks, and I ate my weight in chicken cabbage dumplings.

  But later, after both Theresa and Lucy had gone to bed, and the guys had gone out to the garage to drink beer and change the oil in Theresa’s car, I had to admit that I was feeling off. There was a vague pain in my stomach, and my body felt hot and weary. Even though it was only ten o’clock, I took a couple of pain relievers and went to sleep.

  That night, I didn’t even hear Hartley come in and lie down next to me. That should have been a clue that something was wrong. The American Medical Association should add Indifference to Hartley as a symptom in their compendium.

  Even my hope fairy slept through it. I should have known.

  The next morning, I hid my increasing discomfort. I took more Advil and drank two glasses of water. Still, I felt dizzy and hot.

  “You’re quiet today, Corey,” Theresa observed, proving that you can never get anything past a mom.

  “I’m just been thinking about exams,” I lied. I refilled my orange juice glass and forced a smile on my face. I needed fluids, and I needed to get home.

  Luckily, Bridger had to get the car back to his mother, and so our weekend at Hartley’s drew to a close by late afternoon.

  By the time we got back to McHerrin, I felt feverish and increasingly ornery. With a heavy heart, I phoned the Nazi police. “Mom, don’t freak out,” I said. “But I think I might have a bladder infection.”

  She freaked out.

  Ten minutes later — after listening to my mother rant about all the nasty things that can happen if a UTI is left to fester — I told Dana that I was under orders to roll myself to the hospital E.R.

  “Crumbs!” she said, jumping off the couch. “I’ll come with you.”

  “You really don’t have to,” I argued. “It’s going to be hours of waiting around for someone to hand me a prescription.”

  “I’ll bring a book. Let me get my coat.”

  When we went out in the hallway, I held up a finger to my lips. The fewer people who knew I was a wimp, the better. I could hear Hartley’s music through the door of his room as we snuck out.

  By the time we got to the E.R., I felt shaky and exhausted. The fluorescent lighting made even the employees look ill. The hospital was the very last place in the world I wanted to be. The only saving grace was that the place seemed deserted. “Thanksgiving Day is always nuts,” the triage nurse told us. “People visiting with family tend to injure themselves. Go figure. But tonight they’re all in their cars on the way home. If most of them aren’t drunk, we might have a quiet night.”

  She took my forms. “Callahan? I pulled your file already. Your parents called ahead.”

  Of course they did.

  “Don’t admit me,” I begged about a half hour later, after peeing into a cup. (By the way, that’s no easy feat when you can’t squat over the toilet.) “I’ll take the medicine, I promise. I hate the hospital.”

  The young E.R. doctor nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sure you do. But your fever is something we want to watch, and there’s a risk that the infection could spread to your kidneys.”

  “But it hasn’t. I don’t have much pain.”

  He smiled, but we both knew that it didn’t matter what I reported, because decreased sensitivity down there made me an unreliable witness. “We have to stomp it out, Corey. Spinal cord patients have to be careful. There have been cases when UTIs permanently impaired patients’ bladder control.”

  That made me cringe.

  “I believe you that this is probably a fluke,” he went on. “But it isn’t worth the risk, okay? I just need to ask you a few more questions. Have you been drinking enough fluids?”

  I nodded.

  “And voiding your bladder regularly?”

  Here’s where I had to fess up. “Yes. The only thing that changed is that I didn’t self-cath for a couple of days.” Each morning and evening, I was supposed to use a catheter to fully empty my bladder. But I hadn’t brought catheters to Hartley’s house, because I didn’t want anyone to see them. “I’ve gone without it a few days before, and I didn’t have any problems.”

  He frowned. “When this is over, you’re going to need to be vigilant again, I’m sure you realize that.”

  I nodded, embarrassed.

  “Another trigger is sexual activity, both touching and intercourse,” he said. “Try to urinate before and after. Especially after.”

  “That’s really not the issue here,” I said, turning red.

  He actually laughed. “File that advice away for later, then. For now, you’ll get one night of intravenous antibiotics, Okay? You’ll conk out in a room upstairs, and in the morning we’ll release you. You’ll be gone before you know it.”

  Liars.

  Dana went home. I put on the stupid gown — open in the back, of course — and watched some bad TV while a nurse stuck a needle in my arm. Overnight, I was interrupted no fewer than four times, as nurses clocked my vital signs and swapped out my IV bag.

  I peed about fifty times in the chilly hospital room toilet.

  When morning came, I began to ask every human who wandered into my room when I could leave, from nurses’ assistants to the bringer of breakfast cereal. Unfortunately, the human I saw most often was a large, surly nurse with garishly hennaed hair. And Big Red was not helpful. “The resident will start rounds at ten,” was all she said.

  I put on my underwear, jeans and socks. I transferred to my chair, but I couldn’t change my top until my IV was removed. Ten o’clock came and went. I stared at the clock, fuming.

  Hartley texted me from econ class. Yoo hoo! Did U oversleep? U R missing a stimulating lecture on international trade.

  Me: Sounds better than my day. Having a little snafu. C U back at the ranch.

  Around noon, a doctor came in. Naturally it wasn’t the youngster from last night, because that would have been too efficient. This doctor had plenty of gray hair and a hasty demeanor. He yanked my chart out of the holder and squinted at the notes. “Okay,” he said finally. “Fever’s down. I’ll leave a prescription with the nurse, and you can be on your way.”

  He left.

  I still had an IV in my arm. Someone brought me a plate of gray mystery meat and rice, which I did not eat.

  When Big Red came back, I told her what the doctor had said. “So let’s remove this IV?”

  “He didn’t leave that prescription,” she frowned. “I’ll check.” She turned to walk out.

  “Wait!” I called as her wide bottom retreated.

  Another hour passed, and when she came back in with my prescription, I could barely be civil. “Would you please take this out?” I begged. “And then I can go?”

  She looked at my wrist as if she’d never seen an IV before. “The assistant does that. And I can’t release you without someone over eighteen to accompany you.”

  “What?”

  She nodded. “Students need to be picked up after a procedure.”

  “But…” I felt my blood pressure double. “An IV is not a procedure!”

  Big Red shrugged. “That’s the rule.” She left.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, sounding like Hartley. I looked at my watch. He had his Monday afternoons free, because that’s when he should have been at Hockey.

  No. Sitting there half-dressed, I was not going to call Hartley. Anyone but Hartley. He was the last person who I wanted to see me with unwashed hair in this awful hospital gown.

  Unfortunately, Dana had Italian class until two every single day. I texted her, asking me to
call when she had a second. Pretty please.

  Two o’clock came and went, with no call. I texted again, and she didn’t reply. If her phone was dead, I’d never reach her. I couldn’t think of what to do. If the E.R. doc who had admitted me was working today, I could try to find him and explain my problem. But that involved wandering the hospital half-dressed, with an IV tower at my side.

  I dialed Dana again, putting my phone to my ear. It went right to voice-mail.

  “Damn it!” I hollered. I would have stamped my feet, if only they worked.

  — Hartley

  “Is there a problem in here?” I asked, fighting a smile.

  Corey’s head whipped around to find me in the doorway to her hospital room, leaning on my crutches. “Arrrrgh!” she cried, curling over herself. “I just want out of here, but they won’t let me go.”

  “Because you don’t have someone over eighteen to escort you off the premises?” I crutched into the room.

  Her mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

  “I ran into Dana after lunch, and she told me you were here. So I thought that might happen. And Bridger had to spring me after my knee surgery. So why didn’t you call?”

  Something passed across her face that I couldn’t read. “Because it’s a long crutch from McHerrin.”

  “It wasn’t too bad. So let’s get out of here. Didn’t you ask them to remove that IV?”

  The look on her face threatened an imminent explosion. “ONLY TEN TIMES!”

  I held up both hands. “Easy, Callahan. Watch that blood pressure, or you might end up in the hospital.”

  At that, Corey deflated. “Would you please come here a second?”

  “What do you need?” I made my way over to her.

  She held out her left hand. “Press down on the IV tube.”

  Uh oh. “Why?”

  “So I can take it out, Hartley. And change my shirt. And leave. And get on with my life.”

  “You are a piece of work, Callahan.”

  “Just press here,” she instructed. Trying not to notice the way the little tube poked right through her skin, I trapped the plastic under my thumb. Then Corey removed all the tape. “Okay, you can let go. Thanks,” she said.