It starts with the hangups. The first time she does it she's drunk, which is hideously awful but also true. Technically she's not supposed to be drinking yet, couple more weeks 'til her guts heal, but it occurred to her that she hadn't had a real conversation with anyone but Joe in quite some time so she went to the Elephant and Castle with a few of the Neuro residents. It was fine.
Actually, it sucked.
She gets home and eats half a box of Wheat Thins standing up at the counter. She walks around for awhile. Abby is sleeping, the baby curled in bed beside her like a doll. Neela wonders when small things will stop making her want to weep.
Finally she just picks up the phone. She has enough of her faculties about her to hit *67 first, so the number will come up restricted on the other end. He taught her that trick, actually. He used to like to prank call Jerry at the desk.
She doesn't think for one moment that he's going to answer--she feels like he's died, and dead people don't pick up when you ring them--but then she hears his voice. "Hello?"
Her stomach turns, hard. She's not that drunk, but she swallows audibly, saliva pooling in her mouth.
"Neela?"
Shit.
She snaps the phone shut and goes into the bathroom to throw up.
She already knows she's going to do it again, and she's right.
*
Oh, fuck that.
He can't believe her. He honestly can't believe her. What are they, in sixth grade? She's gonna star six seven him and breathe in his ear for awhile and think he won't know it's her? He taught her that trick.
He's livid.
He's so fucking pissed.
It's been almost a month. It's summer and Ray had no idea that days could be so long.
He doesn't know anyone in Baton Rouge--Jacy only only moved here a couple of years ago--so he spends a lot of time on his own, which is fine. He doesn't really like seeing people anyway. Doesn't like being looked at. Ray's always kind of gotten off on being the center of attention--that's why you do music, isn't it? That's why you flirt with all the girls--and it's a weird adjustment, the impulse to avoid eye contact. He's supposed to go for a fitting this week--that's what they keep calling it, a fitting, like he's having his prom dress taken in and not picking out a damn pair of legs--so maybe after that he'll stop wishing he was dead, he doesn't know.
For now he's still in the wheelchair, like the homeless guys he used to see outside County sometimes, the ones he usually ignored. Ray tries not to think of karma. He's gross, he hasn't showered because showering is a fucking marathon and it's just easier not to. He figures if he wants to be dirty he'll be dirty, like the universe owes him that much. It's not like he's going anywhere. All he does is have doctors' appointments and watch television and wait for it to be time to take his meds.
His mom locked the pill bottles in her jewelry box; she keeps the key in the back pocket of her shorts. Ray can't say he blames her.
*
After she does it once it's like a tic. It's all she can think about. She slips her cell phone into Abby's purse before Abby goes to work, so she won't be tempted. This is actually a flawed plan, as she knows his number by heart and could just call from the landline, but Neela likes the idea of taking some control of the situation.
As if she had any control over anything to begin with.
The next time she does it she's stone cold sober and the phone rings four times before he picks up. "Yeah," he says quietly, instead of hello. She's caught; there's no question about that. She wants to say something--she wants to say so many things--but she hasn't the least idea where to start except with I'm so sorry, and she knows he's not interested in hearing it. She listens to him breathing. This is not rational behavior on her part. Everyone who knows her would say, Neela, this is unlike you.
When they lived together she had a terrible habit of dropping things, a glass or a plate, and then not bothering to make sure she'd swept up all the pieces, so that he once plucked a shard of glass from her foot by the light of the fluorescent coil in the bathroom. They didn't have any tweezers--sorry excuses for doctors, both of them--so he just did it by hand.
She wants to say, I should have taken better care with you.
*
He mentions it to Lucille, because sometimes it's just easier to quit the Good Will Hunting act and tell her what she wants to know. They're sitting in her office which is full of seascapes, and she's smoking a cigarette out the window. Ray sighs. "My old roommate from Chicago keeps calling me and hanging up."
Hearing it out loud makes him realize it sounds paranoid--when you try to off yourself and fail you suddenly become very aware of sounding crazy to other people, psychiatrists especially. He actually thinks it was the sanest thing he's done in awhile, but fuck if he's going to say that out loud. If he's ever a doctor again he's going to be a lot slower to ask for a psych hold. Lucille doesn't flinch. "Why would he do that?"
"She." He shrugs. "I don't know. I don't know why Neela does half the fucking annoying things she does."
Lucille raises her eyebrows.
*
They clear her for work, thank God. Lucien wants her to take it easy for awhile, but being in that apartment makes her crazy, and it would be nice to give Abby some space. Although trying to give Abby some space was what got her into this clusterfuck in the first place.
She tries not to think of his face the last time she saw him, the scrapes and the bruises and the deadness in the eyes. She wanted to crawl into bed beside him, and she might have if she'd thought he wouldn't have pushed her out.
Or maybe not.
She tries not to think at all.
*
The prosthetics hurt, the first few days, like nothing has ever hurt in his life. He's exhausted all the time, like the bones he has left are grinding to dust. He falls. A lot. It fucking sucks. There were calluses on his hands already, from the guitar, but the friction from the parallel bars wears right through them and his palms are a blistery mess.
He thinks of the doubles he worked back at County, the way he used to congratulate himself on powering through, and it seems like spring break. He wants to call them and tell them that: you think this is hard, but you're wrong.
His mom comes in towards the end of the week, sees him walking, and starts to cry. Ray looks away. He's pretty much done with the crying at this point--there were a couple of nights at the beginning where he wasn't sleeping anyway so he figured he might as well just get it out, if it was in there, and it was--and he doesn't want to start it up again. This is what it's going to be like. It's fine. It's...what it is.
His physical therapist is named Caroline. Ray can tell objectively that she's good-looking, blond hair and a sweet body, but just--nothing. She might as well be a dude. That kind of freaks him out a little. He wonders about his mojo, if it even matters anymore, if a girl will ever look at him again in his life and feel anything but pity or revulsion.
Neela calls while he's sitting at the kitchen table eating a sandwich and flipping through the Best Buy ad. She doesn't say anything--shocker--and when he finally hangs up he's so angry he doesn't know what to do with himself.
But he's the idiot who keeps picking up, so fuck him, right? You get what you pay for.
He's seen the medical bills, so he should know.
*
It's not fair to him. It's borderline harassment. But she can't face talking to him, and she can't face not hearing his voice.
So here she is.
Abby catches her staring at the phone. "Do you hear from him?" she asks quietly. She's walking Joe around the apartment, trying to coax him into sleep, and when Neela shakes her head--she could try to explain, but it seems like a lot of work for nothing--Abby runs a hand over her back.
"Don't be nice to me," Neela says, staring straight ahead. "If you're nice to me, I'm going to completely lose it."
"Well," Abby says. "In that case, get your damn dishes out of the sink, will you?"
*
It gets a little better. He's quicker on the bars--he's going to start trying it on his own in a couple of days. His arms ache like a motherfucker every night, but you know what, he's done a lot of pain in the last few weeks and this kind is nothing to whine about. Maybe he'll get really jacked and start competing in World's Strongest Legless Guy, if that's a contest. It should be. Maybe he'll start it.
He thinks if he ever gets his life back, he's going to roll his eyes at his patients a lot less.
She calls him one more time, late--he glances at the clock above the stove and sees it's time for the shift change at County, so there you go. He pictures her standing in the ambulance bay, then realizes that he has no fucking idea where she is and it doesn't really matter. They breathe. He watches the minutes flip by. Finally he can't take it anymore. "Neela," he says, and he tries to keep his voice even. His voice is really very even most days, now, if he's careful. "You gotta stop doing this to me."
She stops calling after that.
*
Well, that was clear, wasn't it? Maybe that was what she needed to get on with her life.
*
He fucks the physical therapist, just to prove that he can. He feels kind of like a piece of shit for doing it, but only kind of. Mostly what he feels is relief.
"Think that's enough of a workout for today," she says, and Ray laughs.
*
She works. She watches Joe. People say things to her, and she delivers appropriate responses. "Everybody keeps telling me how well you're doing," Abby says one night, over spaghetti in the kitchen. "I take all the credit, obviously."
"Obviously," Neela agrees.
It's July, and hot, and she thinks of cutting all her hair off. One more change might not be the worst thing.
*
"Does your roommate still call you?" Lucille asks, flattening the butt of a Marlboro Light in the ashtray on the windowsill. She's nosy as shit today.
"Cigarettes'll kill you, you know," he says. "Take it from me. Doctor and all."
"Funny." She waits.
"Jesus, Lucille, can you just cut me a fucking break?" he asks. "Seriously."
Lucille shakes her head, and for the first time since he started coming here she looks sort of sorry for him. "I don't think I can, kiddo."
*
She's just letting herself into Abby's building when her phone rings, and she nearly misses the call. "Neela Rasgotra," she says breathlessly, trying not to drop the stack of catalogues she's just pulled out of the mailbox. Perspiration is trickling down the back of her neck. The screen said Unknown.
"Hey."
Neela stops, right there in the hallway, and sits down on the staircase. She thinks of the first time a boy ever rang her, her heart pounding like that. "I didn't think I'd be hearing from you anytime soon," she says.
"Yeah, well." She can picture him shrugging, head tilting to the side. "I missed your heavy breathing."
"I don't breathe heavily!"
"Yeah, okay."
Neither of them says anything for a moment. "Hi," she says. What a nitwit she is.
"Hi." He pauses. "Are you okay? Katey told me about what happened at that protest."
"I'm fine. It was awhile ago, so I'm all mended." Stupid Katey Alvaro. What a cow. "Was she disappointed they didn't trample me more thoroughly?"
He laughs. "Maybe a little."
She wraps her free arm around herself--she's not cold, she's just--well, yes, all of a sudden she's a little cold. "Were you?'
"Neela. Come on."
"Ray." Neela leans her head against the beadboard on the wall. "I'm really glad you called."
*
He doesn't know why he did it. It was a dumbass move, actually, and it's not going to fix a single thing.
He just.
Missed her, or something.
*
So they talk, every once in awhile. About the weather, or who's having sex with whom at County, or what they've watched on the television. About Joe.
This is what they don't talk about: anything that might make anyone upset. It's antiseptic. It's polite. She's never had a polite conversation with Ray before in her life and sometimes she's so sure he hates her that she hangs up and cries. She wishes he'd yell at her. She wishes he'd just come out with it and tell her it's all her fault.
Everything feels weighted. Sometimes there's nothing to say.
It's not easy like it used to be when they lived together, when she'd barge into the apartment and regale him with all the banal minutiae of her day. Even the stupid absurdities that seem to occur constantly at County were sort of wonderful back then, because even as they were happening she was thinking of how she was going to phrase them when she told him over dinner, sitting on the counter or the couch. Neela has never been much of a joke-teller, but it used to please her very much to make him laugh.
"Is it still so hot down there?" she asks him, though it's August and he lives in Louisiana and he must think it's a miracle she graduated medical school, idiot that she is.
"Yeah," he says. "Still pretty hot."
She tries. Some times are better than others. She can feel him trying too, like they're both in the ER again, charging to 350, working to save a life.
*
His days are taking on a shape here. He's gotten to know some guys at the gym--kid whose Jeep got hit by a mom with three kids in the car, a guy from the National Guard back from Fallujah--and they go out for beers sometimes. Three amputees living with their moms, drinking at the Applebees in Baton Rouge. It's kind of deeply hilarious. They're good guys. They talk about making a sitcom, but they can't decide on a name.
It's stupid, having these phone calls. He doesn't understand what they're supposed to accomplish, even if he does look forward to them in some weird masochistic way. They've picked up a rhythm--once or twice a week, never for very long. Just enough time to torture each other, he guesses.
"Will you tell me how it's going?" she asks one night. They haven't talked about it much: he thinks she's probably been afraid to bring it up. "Your rehab?"
"Neela..." He hesitates. Actually, it's going really well. He's walking on his own now--he looks like a fucking moron, but he's walking--but he just doesn't want to talk about it with her. He doesn't like the idea of her thinking about him this way. He doesn't know how much she thinks about him at all, but if she does, then just--he doesn't want it to be like this. "It's going fine."
The next day Caroline rides his ass for being distracted, and she's right.
*
One night Neela calls and a woman's voice answers. "Ray's phone," she says, and Neela can hear him laughing in the background.
"Give me that," he says, and there's a bit of rustling. "Sorry. Hello?"
Neela hangs up.
It's not like she was expecting...anything, but Jesus.
She wasn't expecting that.
*
He calls twice and she doesn't call back, which bothers the hell out of him.
She has no right to be pissed. He didn't do anything. Shit used to make him crazy when he was back in Chicago, all those little comments about Katey, about every girl he ever brought home. And okay, it's not like he was bringing home Serious Intellectual Women back then, but what the hell did she care?
What the hell does she care now?
Still, he feels a little like a dirtbag, which he knows is idiotic. Neela has always been the only person in his life who could well and truly bitchslap him without even opening her mouth.
"I don't owe her anything," he tells Lucille, who agrees. Ray gets the sneaking suspicion that Lucille's pleased as punch he wants to talk about girls, that he wants to talk, period, and he almost doesn't want to give her the satisfaction. But the truth is he thinks a lot less than he used to about trying again with a bigger handful of Vicodin, so you know what, maybe she's not terrible at her job.
In any case, he keeps checking his phone.
*
She gets an email from him a couple of weeks later.
Did you die? it says, and she wants to write, I think I may have, but she's trying to wean herself off that kind of puerile drama. That was the problem with Ray to begin with, the intensity of him, of everything, of whatever he felt or didn't feel for her, of the gaping pain they put themselves through. It was too much.
She's not like that. It never would have worked out, even if--
well.
Even if anything.
Maybe it's better if they don't talk on the phone. Email is easier, after all--quick and efficient, friendly enough and most of all not loaded down with those terrible pauses, goddamn uncrossable chasms between where they are and where they used to be.
Did you die?
Nope, she types. Still here.