“You brought me flowers,” Dena said, but there was no appreciation in her voice. Just the quiet notation of fact.
“They’re kind of from Amelia,” I said as I placed them on the bedside table beside her.
“I thought she was in Nicaragua.”
“No, Kim went, she stayed behind.” I had forgotten to ask for a vase…but shouldn’t Amelia have thought of that? This couldn’t be the first arrangement she’d ever made for a hospital room.
“My parents are in town.”
I pulled a wooden chair up to the side of the bed. “So they’ve already been here this morning?”
Dena shook her head. “I guess they were here last night but I was out of it. Monty’s putting them up. Mary Ann’s going to be staying with him, too, for a little while.”
“She doesn’t want to stay in her apartment,” I said slowly. “God, of course she doesn’t. I should have asked her if she wanted to stay with me.”
Dena looked away, choosing not to comment.
I gently fingered the petals of a downy orchid. I had a lot of questions but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted the answers.
Dena stroked the blanket that covered her legs. Her nails were painted with OPI’s “I’m Not Really a Waitress” red. “I can feel them,” she whispered.
For a second I didn’t understand. It wasn’t until I noted the way she was staring at her legs that I got it. “Oh! That’s wonderful!”
“Wonderful?” she repeated. “Wonderful that I can feel a part of my body? We’re supposed to be able to feel our legs! We’re supposed to be able to USE them! But I can’t do that, can I? Maybe, someday if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to walk a block in less than ten minutes!”
I drew away from the orchid. “It’s not going to be like that.”
“NO?” She spat. “This morning I talked to my doctor about walkers and braces. WALKERS and FUCKING BRACES, Sophie!”
Outside the room we could hear the high-pitched sound of nurses laughing as they walked down the hall. Dena winced as if their merriment was a personal insult. “He did say that with intensive physical therapy I might get to the point where I can walk with only a cane,” she continued, “but I shouldn’t get my hopes too high. I shouldn’t expect to be able to walk as well as my fucking grandmother, right? I mean who do I think I am? A healthy thirty-two-year-old woman? A woman who hasn’t had everything taken away from her in five fucking seconds? Is that who I think I am?”
“You don’t need to get your hopes up,” I said. Every muscle in my body was tensing and I pushed myself to the edge of the chair. “This isn’t about hope.”
“You know, Mary Ann spent the night here and Jason was here a little less than an hour ago. They were both trying to fucking coddle me,” Dena went on, apparently not hearing me. “Hugging me all fucking morning. I don’t need sympathy and cuddles. I need to be okay again but that’s never going to happen!”
“Shut up,” I whispered. The muted pastel tones in the room were blurring together as I stared hard at my friend.
“What did you just say?”
“SHUT UP!” I was louder this time and my heeled boots pounded against the linoleum floor as I jumped to my feet. “You’re pissed off? Fine, great, I am, too. But don’t just roll over! You don’t roll over for anyone! You’re a friggin’ dominatrix for God’s sake!”
Dena recoiled slightly, her head making wrinkled patterns in her paper pillow case. “Sophie—”
“I’m not done talking. See, this is how it’s going to go. You and I are going to take all this anger and we’re going to channel it. We’re going to find this guy who shot you and we’re going to fuck him up big-time. And then you’re going to take the rest of your anger and you’re going to use it to fuel your recovery. You’re going to walk again without ANY help—just to spite your attacker. This isn’t about keeping hopes high. This is about kicking ass and making the asshole who did this cower and beg for mercy and YOU know how to do that!”
Dena stared at me for a moment as I tried to steady my breathing. “Was that a pep talk?”
“God, I don’t know. Aren’t pep talks supposed to be more…peppy?”
Dena’s lips curved into the tiniest of smiles.
“You’re right,” she said, softer this time. “I do want to stay angry.”
I sat back in my chair. “It’s an awesome emotion.” I blinked my eyes until the room came back into focus. “Where would you and I be if Susan B. Anthony hadn’t gotten pissed off? Hell, our whole country owes its existence to the temper tantrum a bunch of moody Bostonians had over some tea.”
“You have a point.”
“Don’t I always?”
“No, not always.” A small flock of birds could be seen from the window and Dena followed their path with her eyes. “There’s more, Sophie. My doctor told me…he told me that sex is going to be…different. He said that after an injury like mine some women have reported that they are no longer able to have orgasms. He said that some of the women started experiencing pain when they had sex.”
I felt my heart go into free fall. This was worse than losing the use of her legs. This was like blinding an astronomer or cutting off the hands of a pianist.
Dena grabbed my wrist. “Promise me that it was more than just a pep talk, Sophie. Promise you’ll help me make the guy who did this pay.”
And at that very moment Mary Ann’s ex-boyfriend, Rick Wilkes, stepped into the room.
It took us both a split second to recognize him. His hair was shorter than the last time I had seen him and he was wearing a suit that seemed way too formal, not just for the hospital but for the city as a whole. But what really threw me off was the fact that the bottom half of his face was hidden behind a bunch of tulips. He must have brought two dozen of them and they were all carelessly crammed together in a small vase.
“What,” Dena said in a tone of utter disdain and impatience, “are you doing here?”
“I heard what happened.” He lowered the tulips slightly and gave me a small nod of acknowledgment. “I thought I’d come by and…” His voice trailed off and he thrust the flowers forward to demonstrate the point of his mission.
“You’re not family,” Dena said evenly. “And we’re not friends. What made you think you owed me flowers?”
“I didn’t think I owed them to you.” Rick put his bouquet next to mine. My black orchids seemed all the more dark and moody now that they glared up at Holland’s national flower. “Besides, we are friends. We were practically family for a while there.”
“Are you kidding me?” Dena tried to raise herself up on her forearms, and when the pain from her wound stopped her she settled for making her automated bed lift her into a sitting position. “You’re here to score points with my cousin?”
“That’s not what I said!”
“You might as well have! We were practically family,” she mimicked. “We were never anything close to family, snot-face!”
Rick gingerly put his hand to his nose as if he thought the insult might be literal.
“But here you are,” Dena continued, “hoping that if you show up with some ugly ass flowers Mary Ann’s going to see how sensitive and considerate you are and fall into your arms!”
“That’s not true!