I'll Be Seeing You (3 page)

“That’s awful.” Reba’s eyes grew wide with sympathy. “Is he nice? Do you like him? Was I right—is he cute?”

“Slow down. My brain’s only half awake.”

Impatiently Reba nudged her wheelchair closer to where Carley sat on her bed with her tray table positioned over her lap. “Well, hurry and wake it up. They’re taking me down for X rays soon.”

Carley smiled at Reba’s zealousness. “And I’ve got to go to PT at ten. Yes, he’s nice. Yes, I like him. Yes, he’s cute.”

“Do you realize that this could be the start of a major relationship? And to think you met right here in the hospital.”

“He was scared and alone last night. We
talked. But I don’t think he’s ready to make me his girlfriend.”

“Well, I want you to introduce me to him. Will you do that?”

“Of course I will. But he’s probably sound asleep, and besides, I’m sure he’ll be here for days.”

“Yes, but by this time tomorrow I’ll be down in surgery, then in Recovery and ICU. It may be days before I’m up and rolling again.”

Carley shook her head in defeat. “All right, let’s go next door and pester Kyle.”

She poked open his door cautiously, not wanting to wake him if he were sleeping. He was sitting up in bed patiently pressing the TV remote from channel to channel, pausing to listen for a moment before moving on.

“We’re here to rescue you,” she said, moving into his room and holding the door for Reba.

“Carley!” He sounded so pleased, it made her heart skip a beat. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“This is my friend Reba.”

Reba rolled up alongside Kyle’s bed and touched his arm. He groped with his free
hand until he caught her hand. “I’m in a wheelchair,” Reba said. “It’s electric, so if you hear a whirring sound, you’ll know it’s me.”

“I’m hearing sounds I never noticed when I could see.”

Carley didn’t want him to get depressed about his eyesight again, so she changed the subject. “Reba here is sort of the social coordinator of the floor, but she’s got a date with her surgeon tomorrow and she didn’t want you to get checked out before she recovered enough to be back on the job.”

Reba giggled.

“I’m here for probably a week,” Kyle said. “An ophthalmologist is keeping tabs on my eyes and another doctor keeps a check on my burns. As soon as they heal enough, I can go home.”

“I hope it works out for you,” Reba said.

“What about you? Will your operation get you out of your wheelchair?”

“No. They can’t fix what’s wrong with me. But the operation will make me more comfortable.”

Kyle’s expression was one of shock that
Reba couldn’t be “fixed.” Carley wondered how he would have reacted to Reba if he’d been able to see her. Or to Carley. She felt insulated and safe so long as he couldn’t see either of them.

“I—I’m sorry.” Kyle’s fist balled up among the covers. “It’s so frustrating not being able to see anything. I feel like a nonparticipant. I can’t even get out of bed without someone to help me. I hate asking for help all the time.”

“I can help out a little,” Carley said. “If you want something—even company—call my room.”

“I can’t dial the phone.”

“Sure you can.” Carley came closer, picked up the phone, and placed it in his lap. “Take the receiver and feel the numbers pad.” She watched his fingers trace over the raised buttons. “I’m in Room eight-twenty-eight, so you dial a seven plus eight, two, eight. Get a mental picture of how the pad looks and let your fingers locate the numbers. Now push them.” She pressed his fingertips from number to number and dialed her room. “Each key has a different tone,
you know. Pay attention and pretty soon you’ll be able to dial area codes, seven-digit numbers, even foreign cities.”

Gingerly he experimented, listening attentively to each electronic tone. He was rewarded by the sound of a phone ringing from next door. His face broke into a grin. “All right. I did it.”

“A piece of cake,” Carley said. “If I’m in my room, we’ll talk. And if you want something, I’ll come hopping over.”

Kyle asked, “How do you know so much about dialing the phone ‘blind’ if you can see?”

“I can tell your parents have never put you on phone restriction.” Carley patted his shoulder as if she were indulging a small child. “Why I’ve learned to slip this sucker under the covers at night, dial in the pitch-dark, and not misdial a single digit.”

Reba clapped.

From the edge of Kyle’s bed Carley performed a mock bow. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Kyle laughed. “I can tell I’m in the presence
of a true genius in devious maneuvers. I’m impressed.”

Carley felt a twinge of guilt. Would he consider her failure to tell him about her scarred face devious? She gave Reba a sidelong glance, but Reba was looking raptly at Kyle, so it didn’t seem as if she thought anything was amiss in Carley’s purposeful omission.

“Did you know that you and Carley both live in Oak Ridge?” Reba blurted out.

“No. Why didn’t you tell me, Carley?”

She felt her cheeks flush, then realized he couldn’t see her embarrassment. She shot Reba a look that said,
Blabbermouth!
Reba shrugged innocently. “I was going to, but we got interrupted last night,” Carley explained.

“Where do you go to school?”

Her heart began to pound. More than anything, she didn’t want them to be students at the same high school. She took a deep breath and named her large public high school. “I started in September as a sophomore,” she said. “But I don’t do any after-school stuff—you know, clubs and things.”

“I go to Webb.” It was a prestigious private school. “I’m a junior. And I used to belong to the chemistry club.”

Carley breathed a sigh of relief. At least that hurdle was crossed. “I’m sure your membership won’t be revoked due to your mishap.”

“And I go to middle school, but not in Oak Ridge,” Reba offered, as if the only important information was their schools. For Carley the most valuable information was that she’d never have to meet Kyle in the halls and have him stare or, worse, turn his head away in distaste.

Two white-coated doctors and a nurse’s aide swept into Kyle’s room. “Good morning,” one of them said, glancing at the three of them. Carley automatically dipped her head to allow her long brown hair to sheild the left side of her face. “Kyle, it’s Dr. Goldston and Dr. Richmond. Are we interrupting anything? We’ve come to take you down to Ophthalmology and change your bandages.”

“It has to be done in the dark,” Kyle explained to Carley and Reba. “My eyes are real sensitive to light.”

“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.