Below the knee, at least.

One day I thought I wiggled a toe, but nobody else could see it. Another day, on the bike, I felt like I’d pushed off with the ball of my foot, but when I tried to repeat it, it just dragged.

My mother brought in some literature that said plateaus were normal as the body adjusted to previous improvements—and so “plateaus are normal” became my internal mantra.

Ian became quite the subject of discussion during my evenings with Kitty. She always wanted the Grouch Report, and I was under strict instructions to chronicle all hidden smiles, uttered words, and human moments. We spent so many hours trying to psychoanalyze Ian that we finally came up with a broader theory that we must somehow be doing deep psychological work. Maybe, we decided, women talked about men as a coping mechanism. A distraction from the real troubles in their lives.

No doubt, it was more fun to fret over Ian than to fret over myself.

Maybe we should have wanted to talk about Chip instead. But there wasn’t much about him that appealed to me right then.

Despite promises to the contrary, since his re-proposal, he’d managed only three short visits in three long days, standing the entire time for them, as if waiting to be dismissed. His timing was uncanny for the worst possible moments: just as an orderly was arriving for my sponge bath, or as Priya was forcing me to practice taking my sweatpants on and off, or as I was wheeling toward the bathroom. He’d stay for an obligatory thirty minutes or so, checking his texts over and over, and then give me a stiff kiss and head out. I half-waited to see him all day, kept my peripheral vision on the door in hopes he’d show up, but then, when he did come, I found myself wishing almost as fast that he’d leave.

I was muddled, to say the least.

Ian was a much juicier topic. He was almost a mysterious fictional character. Chip and his shortcomings were all too real.

After much discussion, Kitty developed a detailed theory about Ian, that there was a fun person trapped inside him, clawing against his ribs to get out. She labeled it her Beauty and the Beast theory and insisted that something terrible had happened to him in the past. But I disagreed. My theory was that he’d been left unattended too long as a baby in some remote Scottish orphanage and had missed a critical window for developing social skills and human empathy.

“Is he an orphan?” Kitty asked.

I shrugged. “No idea.”

Whatever Ian’s deal was, as strange as it sounds, he turned out to be good for me.

I really didn’t talk much during the rest of the day or with many of the other hospital personnel, but when Ian showed up, I unleashed every thought, theory, observation, dream, or opinion I’d held in since the day before. Partly this was my fear of conversational silence, but partly, I came to notice more and more, it was just fun to mess with him. It was like trying to provoke a guard at Buckingham Palace. The fact that Ian didn’t respond made me want to make him. I tried shock. I tried surprise. I tried every joke I knew. His blank face became more and more irresistible. He didn’t react, but he listened, and as the days went on, I found myself Googling crazy things in anticipation of seeing him, just so I’d have good material.

“Did you know,” I’d say, “that octopuses have three hearts?” And when that got no response, I’d move on to “Did you know there’s an underwater postal box in Japan?” And when that got silence, I’d plunge ahead with “Did you hear about the guy who had to be fed intravenously for a year, and he lost all of his taste buds after going so long without using them? They disappeared. His tongue just got all smooth, like a porpoise.”

It was the only time all day when I felt anything like my old self. It was the only time when the fog lifted. The game of it was so engaging that I’d forget myself—to the extent anyone ever could when trying, and failing, to walk the parallel bars from one end to the other.

It should have been my worst time of day, as I fell short on challenge after challenge. But somehow it was my best.

That same week, I got my bandages off the donor sites under my collarbones, and now I had two meaty red scabs like fat strips of bacon adding to the horror show that was my body. But my face was better, at least. A few penny-sized blisters on my jaw had scabbed over. Scabs are far more noticeable than blisters, but I was moving in the right direction, certainly, and the rest of my face barely looked burned anymore. It did, as the doc had promised, itch like hell—but I never scratched it.

Kitty continued to show up at night with a wide array of meals from both our favorite restaurants and ones I’d never heard of, leaving no cuisine undigested: Indian, Thai, Tex-Mex, Italian, Cajun, Japanese, Vietnamese. She made it a goal to surprise and delight me.

She’d also jumped on Priya’s knitting bandwagon, insisting I knit a scarf while we watched all her favorite musicals: South Pacific, Singin’ in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis. I didn’t even fight her on the singing anymore. I jumped into every song without protest, quietly at first, but going full Judy Garland by the end.

The scarf they were making me knit was terrible. I thought I’d picked a stormy-sky blue, but it turned out to be just plain gray. It looked like a mutant slug with tumors.

“We’ll make some pom-poms for it,” Kit said. “No problem.”

The truth is, some parts of my personality came back to me fairly quickly. I still found human beings—and conversation—to be the best possible distraction. When I had somebody to talk to, I focused on the talking, and compulsively joked around, bantered, and chatted. Those moments felt—if not good, at least better than usual.

But there were lots and lots of quiet, lost, nebulous moments when I felt the opposite of good. I don’t want to leave them out. Most were like that, in fact. Everything that happened—every PT session, or sponge bath, or viewing of Auntie Mame—was set against a background of just trying to keep my head up. The minute I was alone, or the second I saw something on TV that reminded me of the life I’d left behind, or the moment I came awake each morning and remembered where I was, the grayness would rush back in. The rule, not the exception.

*

ONE AFTERNOON, DURING the lull between PT and dinner that I had come to regard as a sacred napping period, I had an unexpected visitor. Chip’s mom, Evelyn.

She arrived while I was sleeping, and noisily scooted the visitor chair around until I opened my eyes.

“Oh,” she said, “were you sleeping?”

She knew I was. “Yes.”

“You seem surprised to see me.”

I was. I hadn’t seen anyone outside a very small inner circle since I’d been in here. On purpose. “I have a no-visitors policy.”

“I told them I was your mother-in-law. To-be.”

“Guess that worked.”

She hadn’t seen me since the ER. “You look much better.” Her words were kind, but her eyes were critical as she took me in. The way she was studying me made my face start itching. She went on, “Except for those scabs on your neck, and—oh, God!” She’d caught a glimpse of my skin grafts. She looked away and tried to regroup.

“Did they have to shave your head?” she asked after a while, like of course the answer would be yes.

“No,” I said. “It’s just a pixie cut.”

“I’m sure it’ll grow out again soon.”

“I’m going to keep it this way. I like it.”

“Oh, don’t!” she said. Then, “It’s a little masculine.”

“I think it’s cool.”

“I’m sure you’ll change your mind once you’re back to your old self.”

Chip’s mother was a lot like my mother. Overly put-together. Overly focused on how things looked instead of how things felt. Overly hard on both herself and others, but too gracious to say it in polite conversation.

Still, sometimes it leaked out in funny ways.

I’d known her long enough to know what she was thinking. She and my mother played tennis together, and got pedicures together, and had a genuine friendship that they each treasured. They’d lived next door to each other for ten years, and in that time I don’t think they’d ever had a disagreement. It was a remarkable coincidence that two such women should wind up neighbors. They shared the same thoughts on almost everything, and the principal gist of every conversation was to validate each other’s worldview. What are the odds?

Of course they were rooting for Chip and me. Of course they wanted us all to be just one big, happy family.

Which is why I didn’t see it coming when she frowned, pulled her chair a little closer, and said, “I want to talk to you about Chip.”

It was funny to hear his name. He had started showering again, I noticed at his last visit, which felt like progress. He’d also sent several flower arrangements, and even though I’d left instructions for all flowers to be sent down to the children’s wing, the ones from him managed to make it through.

My mother liked to arrange and rearrange them on the windowsill.