Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (25 page)

Oh, shit. This was, like, helping accident victims cope with their newfound paralysis? Welcoming them into the world of wheelchairs? Helping them learn how to bathe themselves?

For some reason, this was the one that looked good to me.

In hindsight, it probably was a hormonal decision. I had just become a mother. Teaching adults how to do basic stuff, like wiping their own asses—it was pretty much the same as raising a baby, right?

 

“Are you nervous?”

James turned into the school parking lot. Sal was sleeping in her car seat in the back of the car. I was nervous.

“No!
Pfft.
” I waved my hand in the air and fidgeted with the leather handle on my bag of books. “It's going to be fun. I'm totally going to reinvent myself.” I was speaking to James, but I was really just talking to myself. The classes were at night and on Saturdays, so James would be able to watch Sal while I was at school and I could be with her while he was at work.

“Being a student will be great! I'm going to get discounts on everything, and I get to sound young and stupid. And I need a little competition in my life again. Sal is no match for me right now. I can beat her in pretty much everything but bodily fluids, and even then, if I really put my mind to it, I could totally beat her at crapping my pants. Volume-wise, anyway.” James stopped the car near the front doors, not believing my spiel at all, and I looked at all the other students walking through the main doors, like suburban androids.

“I'm really proud of you,” he said. “This is a really responsible thing for you to be doing. You'll still be able to write.”

“I know.” I nodded. “See you at five.” I kissed him good-bye and took one last look in the rearview mirror at Sal sleeping before I headed into the school, as a girl preparing to be a widow.

My backup plan for James's demise was really coming together.

The room was filled with a mishmash of characters: Slacker teens whose parents were forcing them to go to school. Smart teens doing an eighteen-month program so they could make decent money while they decided what they
really
wanted to do with their lives. A few women in their fifties whose children had just moved out of the house. A rodeo clown. And me. I've always had the potential to be a good student, but I never really worked for grades in high school. I mean, getting good grades so I could go to another school and then work for the rest of my life just wasn't the greatest incentive.

The courses were basically all biology and kinesiology, so I sat in the back row beside Melanie, a fifty-year-old mother who'd probably watched the exact same episode of
Oprah
that I had, and I resolved to become a machine, to remember every last bit of information I learned.

I would let no one get better grades than me—not those little teen bitches, not that rodeo clown. So I studied extremely hard and ended the program at the top of my class, with a 98 average. My reward? Not a trip to Amsterdam, as I was hoping, but the chance to choose where I'd do my practicum—a month-long trial run, broken up between two facilities. Most trainees were assigned to their facilities by an instructor, based on their strengths and weaknesses. I would get to be trained wherever I wanted and have the joy of working there for free. The instructor made a very big deal about my accomplishment, as teachers often do, and pulled me up to the front of the class. And while the other students rolled their eyes and clapped, I awaited my prize, like I was on winner's row on
The Price Is Right
. I was going to choose my placement right there, in front of my classmates, who had won NOTHING.

My instructor gave me my options:

“Okay, Kelly. You can choose from the Rockyview General Hospital burn unit, a senior care center, a sports center, or a brain injury care home.”

Holy shit. What was this,
Sophie's Choice
? My instructor stood there smiling, waiting for me to choose, but my stomach was dropping like a bad Chinese meal. This was terrible!

“Um, just give me a second,” I said, and ran through my options like it really was my Showcase Showdown.

Who would choose the burn unit? No one in their right mind. Jesus Christ. Fresh burn victims? I couldn't imagine the mental and physical torture the patients go through. There was no way I could deal with that. As it was, I was already only one mental break away from closing myself in the garage and letting the Pontiac Sunfire run. Sports center? Nope. Not interested in hearing jockwads reliving how they fucked up their knee playing tennis. If I had to listen to a bunch of hockey players talk all day, I'd light myself on fire.

Soooo . . . it was looking like seniors and the brain injured for me.

At least neither of them would remember me when I left.

The brain injury center was run outside a hospital. Every day the clients were bussed in to the center, where they had private rooms to work in.

On my first day, I stood in the lobby and watched as they were led, or wheeled, in. If it wouldn't have been so insensitive, I might have thought it looked like kind of a zombie parade, but of course I didn't think that because I'm not a sociopath. I'm not saying I had no empathy for them. I had the MOST empathy for them. I've just always naturally turned the worst things into comedy for myself. It's a coping mechanism to keep myself from crying through the majority of my life. I wouldn't be there if I didn't want to help rehabilitate these people, and if I wasn't so scared of becoming a single mom waitress.

Once they were all wheeled in, I just stood there uncomfortably, not knowing where to go or who to look at. Eventually some competent staffers started fanning out among them, taking each wheelchair and wheeling its occupant into the big room off the lobby. So I looked around, saw a wheelchair with a woman who looked like she was sleeping with her eyes open, and grabbed her wheelchair. She had beautiful hair.

“Hey! I'm Kelly.”

“Margaret, this is Kelly,” said Ray, a nursing aide.

Margaret woke up from her open-eyed unconsciousness and looked at me. I could feel she was smiling, though her face didn't move.

“Hi,” I said again, as Ray started pushing her chair down the hall.

Ray lowered his voice. “I'll have to clean her up before you work on her. The people at the home are supposed to change her before she comes in, but they never do. They left her feeding tube in three times last week. They are assholes. Margaret had a severe stroke two years ago, one of the worst I've seen. No kids. Her husband is still around; he comes in and talks to her and drinks rum. They liked their rum together.”

The phrase
no kids
hit me in a way it wouldn't have before I had a kid. I suddenly thought about having no kids and being old and stroked out in a hospital, and it felt way lonely. But what a selfish ass I was—glad to have kids so that I wouldn't be alone when I stroked out?! Shit.

I followed Ray, a sweet and portly blond man with a constantly flushed face, to Margaret's room and helped him move her from her chair to the bed. Moving wheelchair-bound people is an art. It's all about the angle of the chair beside the bed and the angle of the lifters to the bed. The trick is making the move as swiftly as possible. I was nervous. I hadn't really touched many people in my lifetime, I realized, and I definitely hadn't touched someone with paralysis. I was pretty proud that I could disassemble and reassemble a wheelchair in a couple of minutes, but I was scared to touch people as part of the job, and that was embarrassing.

Moving patients in the hospital was immediately different from the classroom exercise of moving classmates from chairs to beds, for several reasons:

1.   Though Margaret probably weighed an actual 140 pounds, when we picked her up she magically weighed around 300.

2.   When I lifted her from her chair, the waft of feces and urine was so strong I had to struggle to keep myself from dropping her and running.

“Are you comfortable with helping me change her?” Ray asked.

“No.” I smiled. And I retreated to the corner of the room as he pulled her elastic pants down and undid her adult diaper. My first thoughts:
no bikini wax, atrophied thighs, but all around a good body
. I immediately hated myself for thinking it, but thanked myself for not saying it out loud. I was
way
too unprofessional to be in there. I was a crude and terrible person.

Ray called in another aide, a no-nonsense older woman. He turned to me. “This is going to take a while to clean up properly.” Oh dear Lord.

“Okay, I'll go find someone else to work with.” And I left the room, as relieved as if I'd just made parole or was a dude in
The Great Escape
or something. Instead, on my first day, I ended up working with Roger.

As she was leading me over to Roger, Nancy, a stout, polo-and-khaki-wearing soccer-mom type, gave me fair warning. “When he calls you a bitch, you have to tell him it's inappropriate,” she said. “He can't call you names.”

Roger was missing the left front part of his forehead, all the way back to where his ear would be. His brows and eyes were intact, but his eyes were floaters. He was dark ginger, with a mustache, and his head rolled around constantly on his neck. Nancy told me he had short-term memory problems and anger issues. Oh, and he might be blind, but they weren't sure.

“Not sure? What do you mean you're not sure?”

“When he's tested he gets everything wrong. His eyes don't move in response to stimulus. But he can find objects when he wants to. And he's talked about things around him as if he can see them.”

“So, what do you think—he's messing with everyone?” Suddenly this was exciting.

“We don't like to think so.”

Well, I did. I liked to think he was messing with everyone—because
he was missing half his brain
. I already loved Roger.

We walked up to Roger and his half brain.

“Roger, this is Kelly. She's going to be working with you today.”

“SHE'S A BITCH FROM HELL!”

Roger jumped back in his chair—jerked back, really. He kinda stunk, and his sweater looked like one a kid in my fifth grade class had back in 1987. I was in love with Roger— seriously.

As the therapist was reprimanding Roger, I went through the list of activities I had to do with him that day. Nothing too hard—just a few hand exercises and then some memory games.

As soon as Nancy left, Roger lolled his head my way.

“Kelly, can I get a coffee? Two creams, one sugar. Don't be a bitch about it.”

I leaned over, making sure I was out of my goody-goody therapist's earshot, and whispered, “I'm kind of a bitch about everything.”

It took him a second, but his head stopped rolling and his eyes stopped floating and then his eyes started moving as though he was reading text. Then it came out:

“BAH!!!!!!!!”

Roger banged both his armrests and bellowed the loudest barking laugh I'd ever heard. It bounced off the ceiling tiles like piñata candy bouncing off a tiled floor. There was one tiny mouse of a woman in the corner, half her body paralyzed, the other half recoiling from the noise. “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness,” she whispered, like the little girl in
Annie
with the voice of Piglet in
Winnie the Pooh
.

“BAH!!!!!!!!!” he screamed again, beating his legs and kicking his chair.

Shit. Nancy was coming back over.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, he's laughing. Is that cool?” Jesus. People were so uptight about noises.

When Roger finished his coffee, I sat on a bed and he in his wheelchair in the exercise room. We were knee to knee. I held his hands and did the physical therapy exercises and stretches I'd learned in class over the last few months. This was a lot different from doing hand exercises with my classmate the ex–rodeo clown. For one, Roger's hands were rock hard—I could barely move his fingers. The ex–rodeo clown's hands were totally normal, except for the great amount of shame they held in them.

As we worked, I asked Roger questions.

“Where are you from?”

“I was in Bosnia and my head blew off.”

Oh, wow. What was this guy, a genius? Sure he was off topic, but of course I wanted to know how it came to be that he had a giant hole in his head. And I really couldn't stop looking at it. Where the doctors had stitched his forehead together, they'd obviously shifted some skin from his scalp down to his brow, so he was growing a few sprouts of hair down there, too far down his forehead to make any sense. I wanted to pull them so badly, but I also didn't want to go to jail for assaulting a man with a brain injury.

“You were in the army?”

“Canadian army.”

“Oh. Well, where did you grow up?”

“Edmonton.”

“Me too!”

He didn't seem very interested, but he didn't seem upset either, and I figured all my questions were basically memory exercises, right? So I kept going.

“Where did you go to school?”

“Strathcona.”

“Strathcona Composite? Roger. You did not.”

“I did!!” He nodded furiously.

“I went there too.”

“Oh,” he said, unable to register the coincidence, or maybe not even giving a shit. Note: He
was
missing half his head.

“What year did you graduate?”

“Nineteen ninety.”

“I was nineteen ninety-five.” We didn't overlap at all. How weird was this? We walked the same halls. We might have had the same locker in the burnout hallway by the silk-screening and photography rooms. Was he hot when he was in high school? I didn't think he was my type; he had a mustache, plus he'd joined the army. I can't imagine anyone who attended my high school joining the army. But I was the class of Pearl Jam and he was the class of . . .