Page 79 of Brain Damage

I recognize Clark’s voice before I even turn my head. He’s dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt, and he looks so healthy compared with the rest of us. Angela turns to look at him, and her eyes start bugging out.

“Is that your husband?” she hisses at me, grabbing my arm. She shakes her head. “Charly, you never told me how hot he was!”

I shrug, but secretly I feel sort of pleased. I raise my right hand to wave at Clark. “I’m here!”

Clark glances awkwardly around the room then walks over to where I’m sitting. “Valerie told me to come fetch you,” he explains.

“For what?”

“She wants to start teaching me how to take care of you.” He shrugs. “I guess they feel you need to leave here sooner rather than later.”

“Okay,” I say. A week ago, that would’ve really scared me. But now that I know I’m going home with my husband, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much.

Clark seizes the handle of my chair and pushes me out of the gym, and down the hallway to my room. I am getting slightly better at pushing the chair myself, but it’s a slow process, and half the time I bump into a wall. I don’t want Clark to see me hitting the wall. So I just let him push me.

Valerie is waiting in my room. When I come in, the first thing she does is look down at her watch and roll her eyes. “Well,” she says, “the only thing we have time for is to do a transfer, considering you’re forty-five minutes late to our session.”

I feel my cheeks get hot. “I am?”

“Not you,” Valerie says. She’s looking at Clark.

“I’m really sorry about that,” he says. “Something really important came up.”

Valerie just shakes her head.

The first thing Valerie demonstrates is how to transfer me out of the wheelchair into my bed. I can’t really help with that, so it’s lucky she’s very strong. The first thing she does is remove the right armrest of my chair and both leg rests. Then she stands in front of me, with my knees between her knees, bracing me. She bends forward, and I grab onto her shoulder with my right hand, and she puts my left hand on her shoulder. She grabs onto my pants then basically lifts me out of the chair and onto the bed. I can’t really help at all, aside from hanging onto her with my right hand.

Once I’m sitting on the bed, I feel like I’m upright, but I suspect that I might be leaning to the left by the way Valerie keeps holding on to me. She helps me get back into a lying down position. And then we’re done.

“Easy as pie,” Valerie says. Except I think she might be being sarcastic, because there’s a line of sweat at the top of her forehead. Plus, Valerie is sarcastic a lot. I can only tell sometimes.

Valerie gets me back into the wheelchair, then she steps aside to let Clark have a turn doing the transfer. He looks really nervous, but like he always does when he’s nervous, he acts extremely confident, like he’s done this a million times before.

Clark braces my knees with his like Valerie did, then I put my right hand on his shoulder. His shoulder feels so broad and strong compared with Valerie’s. It makes something stir inside me, something long forgotten. I check Clark’s face, to see if maybe he’s feeling the same way, but he’s just looking down at my lap.

I feel Clark’s fingers lace into the waistband of my sweatpants. “Okay, now lift,” Valerie instructs him.

I feel myself rising into the air, but I don’t feel secure like the way I did when Valerie was lifting me. I feel anxious, like he might drop me. I tighten my grip on his shoulder, but at the same time, I feel my left arm slide off him.

“You have to brace her,” Valerie says.

“I’m doing it,” Clark insists.

I feel myself falling to the left side, and my heart starts to pound as I realize there’s nothing I can do to prevent this from happening. But fortunately, Valerie is there to support me, and I make it to the bed without incident.

“If you don’t brace her,” Valerie says, “you’re going to drop her.”

“I was bracing her,” Clark says.

Valerie squints at him. “Are you seriously not aware that you almost dropped her?”

“We would’ve been fine.”

Valerie sighs and shakes her head. They practice the transfer back to my chair, and then back to the bed again. The second time, Clark does much better. Or at least, he doesn’t almost drop me.

“That’s all we have time for today,” Valerie says. She looks at him pointedly. “Next time, hopefully you can come on time.”

Clark nods. “For sure.”