She Said, She Said

The Arts & Crafts room was exactly how I remembered it: unbearably cheerful. This time, it wasn’t just the bright colors of the room that screamed laughter and fun games, but also the people present. Ever since the boys from the BRC had come over for the small ‘dinner party’ everyone seemed to be in a better mood. Maybe the partners and patients had come to some sort of understanding over cupcakes and chocolate milk — I wasn’t really sure, but it was kind of nice to see that everyone didn’t hold a grudge like Caleb and me.

Monday morning sessions had gone quite well for me. I was getting used to the wheelchair so much that I hardly even needed anyone to push me around anymore. (I didn’t really know how to take this news; should I have been happy because I was finally comfortable with the wheelchair, or angry that I wasn’t nearly as upset as I should’ve been about almost accepting the no-legs thing.) Ingrid, my O.T, had even said that I might be getting prosthetics sooner than I was supposed to.

After sessions was the unavoidable visit to the Arts & Crafts room — where I sat now, alongside Noel, who was staring at his blank paper intently. Sylvia and Lacey were still in sessions, something about not improving as fast as they should’ve been. This also meant that Nathan and Samuel were nowhere to be seen, either. In my eyes, that just meant sucking all the fun out of the room.

And, to top it all off, the nurse in charge today was Mousey Mary (oh, excuse me, Marietta) the annoying and full-of-herself woman I’d come to meet on my first day here. She was still as uptight as ever, glaring daggers at us if we so much as giggled or whispered to our neighbors. If her attitude didn’t make half the people barf, her outfit probably did: a mustard-colored yellow pencil skirt and a blouse with too many ruffles.

“Noel,” I whispered, nudging the boy lightly with my elbow, “hand me that marker, will you?”

“Huh,” he mumbled, shaking his brown hair from his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, blinking. “What was that?”

I gave him an odd look which he probably didn’t see and then shrugged, smiling a little. “Never mind.”

So far, aside from Caleb, Noel was probably the only person I could not figure out. He’d been nothing but nice to me from the day we’d met, but there was just something about him that seemed to scream — what? Hurt? Despaired? Gloomy? Maybe it could be all of those reasons, or maybe it was only one; I wasn’t sure.

My mind kept suggesting that he was just depressed he’d had to leave his parents behind. But the idea just did not fit; Noel had been here longer than any of us (a month and a half, from what Sylvia had told me), so surely he’d had more time to adjust to the idea of being away from home. Whatever the reason was, I knew it was really having a negative effect on him. And, for some reason, I wanted to find out what was wrong — it was hard to see him in that state.

*

After half an hour or so, I couldn’t help but feel as though I was deflating into myself. It was already around two thirty in the afternoon, and Sylvia was nowhere to be seen. In half an hour or so, the ‘activity’ for the day would end, and we’d be sent back to our rooms. Usually, Sylvia, Lacey and I went back and watched a movie, or just sat around and talked. But, today, I knew I would be forced to spend some time alone.

The last time I’d had one of my nightmares was almost about a week ago, and ever since then I’d tried not to end up alone as much as possible. Because I shared a room with someone, and especially because that someone was Sylvia, I found myself too preoccupied to think about those nightmares. Even though Sylvia was totally oblivious to the fact, she always distracted me from thinking too much about the accident. There were so many other things to keep that subject away from my mind: sessions, movies, Aunt Debra, and, as much as I hated to admit it, Caleb.

As I thought about going back to my room alone, a panic seemed to grab a hold of me. I suddenly felt too nauseous to be drawing on a blank piece of paper.

“Noel,” I said out of the side of my mouth, trying to keep an eye on Mary, who, at that moment, seemed to be doing nothing but staring at her nails. “Do you want to go to Rex’s room after we get out of here?”

Again, he seemed to be snapping out of a reverie. He glanced nervously to the front of the room, and then looked at me. “I guess,” he mumbled, gripping his pen with his pale fingers, “what about Caleb?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure he’ll be okay.”

Noel’s lips almost curved into a smile at that. “Yeah, he probably will be.” He looked around, searching for something unknown to me. “Sure.”

For the next fifteen minutes, I tried to focus on my paper and actually get something done. The point of this class was to just relax a little and forget about the general mood of all the “pain and depression around here,” as Clara jokingly put it. (I didn’t see what was so funny about this, but, hey, maybe nurses’ senses of humors differ from mine.) Still, it was hard to forget about everything when you were sitting in a wheelchair.

Just as the clock struck three, I grabbed all the drawing supplies and placed them in the box that sat in the middle of the table. Crumpling up the piece of paper and tossing it in the small bin placed by the door, I rolled the wheelchair out into the hallway. The chatter and laughter I’d heard inside the room generally intensified outside, away from Mary’s eyes. Caleb, who had sat away from me on purpose, even when I’d offered him a seat beside me, came outside and walked right by me. A little way away, he stopped and turned around.

“Are you coming?” he asked, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“No,” I replied, shrugging as though it really wasn’t all that unordinary. “I’m going with Noel.”

As if he’d heard his name, Noel came out of the room and stopped his wheelchair right beside me. The smile he gave Caleb was ignored.

“Whatever,” Caleb mumbled, turning around and walking quickly down the hallway. He was immediately swallowed up by the crowd.

“Let’s go, then,” Noel said.

Room 353 was just as I remembered it. It was still larger than all the other rooms I’d been in, and was surrounded by the strong smell of disinfectant and vitamins. Rex was lying on his bed, and a nurse was taking his temperature. His eyes were only half open, and his curly brown hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat.

“We’re just here to visit him,” Noel reassured the nurse when she gave us a disapproving look. “We’ll sit on the couch,” he said, pointing to the said piece of furniture.

Taking my eyes off of the boy on the bed, I wheeled myself over to the couch and plopped down on it, leaning on the armrest.

“So,” Noel whispered after a few minutes of silence. “Any special reason you wanted to come here?”

I suddenly felt very embarrassed; I was using Rex as bait to talk to Noel. How pathetic can a person get, really?

“I don’t know,” I admitted lamely, looking at him from the corner of my eye. “I just wanted to talk to you, I guess.”

Silence greeted me. Noel looked away and trailed his slim fingers over his other hand. “Then talk,” he suggested, uncertainty lingering in his voice.

The nurse, done with her task, gave us one last look and walked out of the room with her clipboard clutched tightly to her chest. As the door closed halfway behind her, the light in the room seemed to decrease considerably; I found myself surrounded by a kind of eerie darkness.

“Look,” Noel started, startling me a little. “I don’t know what this is about. But if you want to ask me something, just get it over with. I really can’t take this awkwardness.”

I sighed loudly and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Well, it’s only going to get more awkward if I ask you my question.”

Noel, too, sighed and leaned back. “It’s okay,” he mumbled, “I’m used to it.”

As much as I wanted to ask him why, I figured sticking to my own conversation plan would be best. “Well,” I said, searching for something that I could start off with. “What happened to your...” Come on, think! “partner?” I finished, relieved that I could find a topic that wouldn’t be too awkward to deal with.

However, it looked as though I’d touched a nerve, because Noel seemed to come out of a kind of calm trance; he sucked in a huge breath and sat very still, his hands clamped into fists in his lap. “What about him?” he asked in a strained voice.

“Uh,” was the only intelligent thing I could say to this; I really didn’t know how to take this change in his mood. “Well, who was he?” I asked cautiously.

Now it was Noel’s turn to not know what to say. He slowly turned his head to look at me. And, for the first time, I noticed that his eyes were blue; they were like huge orbs that provided the only light in the room, save for the strip of daylight coming through the crack in the door.

“You don’t know?” he asked, puzzled. “Sylvia didn’t tell you?”

“No…” I trailed off, wondering what he was talking about.

“Oh.” We lapped into a silence again, as Noel tried to figure out what to say next. After a few uhh’s and umm’s he cleared his throat quietly. “His name was Ethan,” he said in a way that suggested he’d talked about this before. “He was a year older than me. Seventeen, I think.”

“Why was he here?” I asked in my most natural of voices.

“I can’t say,” he said, very quietly. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. “I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

This was unexpected — for some reason, I felt like he shouldn’t have to keep a secret for someone who was no longer in his life.

“He was really nice,” Noel continued, “but the kind of guy I wouldn’t have gotten involved with if I was still in high school, you know?” He paused and looked at me; when I nodded, he started again. “When he first saw me, he acted like he didn’t even see my twisted legs, like I was the most normal guy he’d ever met. He always looked at my face when he talked to me. Even in sessions, he always talked about his old school and any other average topic he could come up with — but never my legs.

“He told me about why he was in the BRC a week or two after he met me. I was still pretty new to the idea of him always being around… but he seemed to trust me. He came into my room, fifteen minutes before he was supposed to leave, and just told me. Afterwards, he told me promise not to tell anyone and was gone before I could say anything. We acted like it’d never even happened.”

Noel hung his head and placed his palm against his face. “Around the time that Sylvia came here, Ethan had to leave. He’d finally turned eighteen and could no longer stay at the BRC. He was supposed to have a trial or something. The night before he left, he came and told me that he would call me if he could just get away with a month or two of community service.” He shook his head. “He lied. Never called; haven’t heard from his since that day.”

I was shocked into silence. There were so many questions I wanted to ask. Like, how could Noel be so emotional about someone he’d barely known? Someone who was possibly a criminal? Was Ethan really all that special, enough, even, to mourn over? Instead, I reached out and took Noel’s hand in mine, intertwining our fingers together.

For the rest of the evening, Noel and I sat in that room, haunted by our own pasts. In the middle of it all, Rex, still lying on his bed, breathed in hushed tones, oblivious to everything around him.