Push Girl (6 page)

Suddenly I was painfully uncomfortable in this hospital bed with my parents staring at me like some kind of science experiment.

“That’s a long time,” I said, the panic inside me creeping out through my voice. “Two weeks is a really long time. That’s not normal. What’s wrong with me?”

“Honey, when the paramedics got to the scene of the accident, they didn’t even think you’d survive the ambulance ride to the hospital.” Dad’s voice was a gravelly whisper, and it was obvious that this was hard for him to talk about. I guess it should have been difficult for me to hear, too, but it still didn’t even feel like my life. Maybe I was still in that shock Mom was talking about. “Your body underwent so much trauma. And you had to have an operation on your back. You needed the time to recover. It’s okay that you were out that long. In fact, the doctors said it could have been months. We’re so glad you are awake now.”

I couldn’t ignore the dread for another second, not with their tight lips and wrinkled brows. I knew those faces; there was something they weren’t sharing with me. Something more than the fact that no one thought I would make it. “So, I’m going to be fine, then? Now that I’m awake, everything is fine?”

My parents shared a look, one I’d seen a million times since I was a kid. It was a look that said there was something they needed to tell me, but they were having a silent argument over which one of them would deliver the bad news.

“Come on,” I pleaded. “What are you not telling me?” I tried to brace myself for what could possibly come out of their mouths as the dread pumped through my body. Did they officially file for divorce already? Did I need another operation? How awful could this be?

In an effort to prepare myself to hear their bad news, I moved my arms up and tried to use my elbows to readjust my position on the bed. And as I did that, a tingly feeling spread up and down my arms, like they’d fallen asleep. There was an unusual feeling in my midsection, a definite soreness in my upper back, and … that was it.

That was it besides the dread, cold and complete, overtaking my body and my brain, because I couldn’t feel anything below the middle of my back.

There was no pain. No tingling. No discomfort at all. Just nothingness on my bottom half, as if my body ended somewhere around my middle.

And I realized slowly, maybe more slowly than I should have, but denial is tricky that way, that I couldn’t feel my legs.

At all.

CHAPTER 6

I tried squirming around on the bed, but I couldn’t make the feeling come back into my legs. It wasn’t the tingly falling-asleep feeling I’d had in my arms. It was a
nothing is there at all
feeling, and it freaked me out in ways I couldn’t even begin to explain. The more I moved around and didn’t feel anything, the more I panicked. My heart pounded like crazy, sending the monitors I was attached to beeping out of control, and, within seconds it seemed, my room was flooded with nurses and doctors as my parents flailed and cried and I screamed. “My legs!” I screeched as loudly as I could. “What’s wrong with my legs?”

People in scrubs and white coats sped around the hospital room, checking monitors and shouting out things to each other and to my parents. One of the nurses came right up to me, rested her hand gently on my shoulder, and leaned over so she was right in my ear. “It’s okay, Kara,” she said. “Just relax. It’s okay.”

A doctor scanned my charts and asked my parents questions, and Mom and Dad kept flapping around and trying to answer him and doing their best not to freak out.

Like I was.

All the air I tried to take in caught in my throat, like no amount of effort could get the oxygen to my body. My heart pounded in my chest and in my ears, and I tried to roll myself over, just to see what would happen, but the bed’s side rails pinned me in place. I clawed at the tubes attached to me, because this had to be a dream, and I needed to do something to wake myself up.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. And I felt nothing past my midsection. How could I not feel my legs?

I jerked everything on my body I could feel, every way I could, until two nurses held me down. “We need you to get your heart rate down,” one of them said into my ear. “Everything will be okay, Kara. You just need to do your best to get calm.” I wanted everything to be okay, more than anything ever in the world, so I followed her lead and sucked in as many deep breaths as I could.

Eventually my heart rate slowed back to normal, and the doctor who’d read my chart, a tall Asian guy who was surprisingly young-looking to be a doctor, came to my bedside and smiled at me. “I’m glad to see you awake, Kara. I’m Dr. Nguyen.” His tone was a little lighter than the no-nonsense voice I expected from a doctor. “Now, I’m sure you have some—”

“What’s wrong with me?” I yelled, panicky and confused. “Why can’t I feel my legs?” While I was glad he was cool, I wasn’t going to calm down until we dealt with the elephant in the room.

“I’m not sure what your parents have told you since you woke up, but—”

“They told me I was in a car accident. That I’ve been asleep for two weeks. That’s pretty much it.”

“I’m sure that was a lot for you to take in,” he said. “But there’s more I need to tell you. You sustained a spinal cord injury as a result of the accident. Because of that injury to your vertebrae, you’ve suffered paralysis from the waist down.” His jaw clenched, and he said, “I’m so sorry.”

What? Paralysis? I was paralyzed? No. That couldn’t be right. He had to be wrong. He had to be. Fighting back the tears that welled up in my eyes, I looked over at Mom and Dad for some kind of signal from them that this was a joke. Some slight smile creeping up Dad’s face, or a crinkle in the corner of Mom’s eyes that would tell me they were playing some horrible, elaborate prank on me. That Dr. Nguyen was actually one the guys my dad worked with, promised an extra day off or something to goof on the boss’s daughter. There was absolutely no way that this was real life.

But all I saw on Mom’s face was heartbreak. And Dad showed nothing but sadness and grief. They weren’t stifling laughter at this epic joke; their faces mirrored exactly what I was feeling inside. Tears welled up in my eyes and hovered there, right on the brink of spilling. I wanted to cry, but the tears held their ground. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and swallowed down the lump forming in my throat; then I pulled my hands away and made every effort to keep myself together.

“Forever?” I asked them, my voice wobbly. But I didn’t even wait for an answer. I knew. I’d known the second that feeling of dread crept across my skin when I woke up.

I’d never be able to use my legs again.

Dr. Nguyen was talking about operations and physical therapy and wheelchairs. Recovery and statistics and adaptations. But I wasn’t listening. I tuned out after he said “paralyzed,” because that was when my life stopped being my life and my future stopped being my future, and I stopped having any idea who I even was.

My eyes closed.

I don’t remember going to dance class for the first time, but it was a story my mother loved to tell. She brought me to the intro class for kids at the studio, and I knew the minute I walked in there, at five years old, that it was my new home. I’ve seen the pictures; I wore a pink leotard and pink tights and tiny pink ballet slippers and my blond hair knotted tightly on the top of my head, secured with a pink ribbon. Mom told me she thought I would be scared. Every time she dropped me off at kindergarten, I cried until I saw Amanda, who was my best friend and attached at my hip from day one, so she thought my reaction to dance class would be more of the same. But instead, when she introduced me to my first dance teacher, I hugged Miss Jana’s legs and smiled the biggest smile Mom had ever seen. I stayed right in the front for the entire class, and I cried when Mom tried to take me home.

Even at five years old, I knew I was made to be a dancer. My first effortless pirouette. My first kick into the air, when my leg flew impossibly high. My first routine learned and performed to perfection. Dancing was always in my bones, in my skin, just waiting to come out.

I watched Curt play water polo and I saw how easily it came to him. Treading water while throwing a ball across a pool into the goal and defending himself from the other team. He made it look like it was something he could do in his sleep, even though I knew how much he practiced, how hard he worked for it. Dancing was like that for me. It was my entire life. From five until seventeen. I was going to dance in college. I was going to figure out a way to dance as a job.

That had always been the plan.

Before this. Before some A-hole drunk driver plowed into my car, yanking my dream, my life, the thing I loved away from me.

Dr. Nguyen stopped talking, and when I opened my eyes again, he was looking at me, waiting for me to reply. I’d zoned out so long ago, I had no idea what he’d even been saying.

“I’m a dancer,” I told him, as if bringing this fact to his attention would make him realize what a horrible mistake this whole thing was. It’s not like I was just some random teenager who lost the use of her legs. I needed to be able to walk because I needed to be able to dance. I needed to be able to dance like I needed to be able to breathe.

Dr. Nguyen looked at me,
really
looked at me, and a flicker of sadness and sympathy passed through his eyes. “I know.”

CHAPTER 7

My restless, dreamless sleep was interrupted by voices in my hospital room. I used to be a deep sleeper, able to doze off anywhere and everywhere and sleep like the dead until Mom literally dragged me out from under my covers. But since the accident, since all these nights in the hospital, I woke at the slightest noise. I never felt rested. I never felt comfortable. I never felt like myself.

Today, these voices jolted me from sleep because they were different from the voices I’d grown used to. These voices weren’t Mom or Dad, who’d started visiting in shifts. They didn’t belong to Dr. Nguyen or any of the nurses I’d gotten to know—Laura during the days, usually, who tried to make me laugh with her terrible corny jokes, and Carmen in the evenings, who told me the plot lines of all the soap operas she watched. No, these voices were new. Not unfamiliar, but not ones I’d heard since I’d been in this room.

“She’s awake,” Amanda said when my eyes fluttered open. She had her trademark huge smile on her face, that smile that always made me feel better when I was bummed out about something, and her eyes sparkled. Like me waking up right now was the single most miraculous thing she’d ever witnessed.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Jack said. He sat next to Amanda, and he wore his normal beanie, even though it was late September in Southern California and probably still surface-of-the-sun hot outside. His hair was a little longer than the last time I saw him over the summer, and blond curls circled around the edges of his knit cap.

It was no surprise that Jack and Amanda were my first nonfamily visitors. They lived next door to each other and they were friends with both each other and me; we’d been quite the trifecta back when Jack and I were dating. But we hadn’t been a threesome in almost a year, despite the best efforts of both of them, and being all together again like this gave me both a sense of nostalgia and a feeling of unease.

And I won’t even mention my epic disappointment that my first nonfamily visitor wasn’t Curt.

“Stop lying.” I tried to sound light, like we were chatting over lattes at Starbucks and not uncomfortably gathered in my sterile hospital room. Since they were here, I figured I might as well try to ease some of the awkwardness. “I know I’m a hot mess.”

After much begging, Mom finally brought me a mirror yesterday and let me see myself. Trying to prep me for the reality of how I looked, she warned me that I was still healing from the damage of the accident and that, unlike my spine, none of the damage on my face was permanent. Luckily the air bag and seat belt kept my head from smashing through the windshield, but I was still pretty banged up. Cuts from the shattered window, two black eyes from a broken nose, swelling from all of the above. It was surreal looking in the mirror; it was like I was looking at someone else entirely. Because besides the injuries, the person in the mirror looked lost. Empty. There was no light in her eyes, no life in her weak smile. If not for my long blond hair and the small scar I’d always had right above my eyebrow from when Amanda’s little brother, Sean, threw a toy truck at my face when we were kids, I’d have never recognized myself in that girl. But what was a swollen, cut-up face and lost-looking eyes when my legs didn’t work? At least this would change with time. At least this would heal.

Jack smiled a nervous smile and put his hand tentatively on my arm. It was the lightest pressure, but it was comforting. “You look amazing, Kara. Truly.” He let out a small staccato laugh. “Besides, modeling is actually ranked one of the worst jobs for women in America. The average working model only makes like eleven dollars an hour. Looking perfect all the time isn’t even worth it.”

I rolled my eyes. “How long have you been holding on to that fun fact?”

“We saw pictures of your car,” Amanda said, changing the subject. She twirled her long braids around in her hand, a sure sign she was as nervous as I was. “It’s a miracle that you survived. When you didn’t wake up right away, God, we were so worried. I’m so glad—”

“You’re such a rock star for making it out of that accident, Kara. Not everyone would’ve survived that.”

“I didn’t do anything special,” I mumbled. And I thought,
It’s not like I tried to stay alive. And I ended up paralyzed, anyway.

But it occurred to me suddenly that they might not know about my legs.

I pulled my arm out from under the light pressure of Jack’s hand. “So, did my parents tell you? About…” I trailed off because I hadn’t said it out loud yet, and I didn’t want to. It was almost like me saying it, admitting it, meant I’d never be able to turn back.

Amanda’s eyebrows drew together. She gave me a little nod, and we didn’t say anything else. Jack didn’t even jump in with a fun fact about how many paraplegics go on to fly to the moon or cure cancer. They didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it.