call me.”
“Thanks, Helen,” he said, his momentary fright relieved. “I should be OK. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Have a goodnight, Bill,” she said, patting his hand. “Tomorrow, I think I’ll try to do some cleaning up around here. If that’s OK with you. Seems like it’s been a while, since anyone tidied up.” She looked around his apartment disapprovingly.
“Only if you want to,” he replied, accepting her offer with a submissive deference, entirely unlike his response to her first scouring of his apartment. “The place sure needs it, but only if you want to.”
“I don’t mind. A clean house is a happy house, I think.”
Bidding each other goodnight, she turned off the lights in his apartment, except for a light in the kitchen, and left, locking his door from the hallway.
Alone in the semi-darkness of his apartment, Bill did one of the few things that he could still do: He thought. Memories of his many former, miserable relationships with women came to haunt him, as they had so often in the past, while he was at home, but he sent them away. He was no longer under their spell. He was thinking about the future, and for the first time in his existence he was thinking realistically about life with another person.
In his current physical state, where he was entirely dependent upon the efforts of other people to help him live, the things that were important for his future and his present were different from what he had desired in the past. Although his infantile dependency would be over in six months, if his recovery progressed normally, his paralyzing experience had changed him forever. Youth and beauty were never going to be the primary qualities by which he judged any woman from now on, as appealing as those traits can be. Instead, he wanted—at the moment he needed—someone who would care for him and appreciate him. If he had never had the accident, he might not have arrived at this simple truth, but that thought didn’t make him grateful to Donna and Frank. He railed at his stupidity for not discovering on his own, a long time ago, what others seem to know intuitively, without coming close to the severe humiliation and crippling injury he had suffered.
The more he thought, the more his thoughts circled back to Helen. The sprout of love, which had germinated in him while in the hospital, was rapidly sending out roots in the rocky, dry soil of his heart; tiny, tender, branches and leaves—the arteries and veins of living affection—were spreading throughout his body. His flourishing emotional state, he could feel, was improving his physical one. Even his financial state showed every sign of thriving in the future, if she was a part of it. In the past, Helen had been perfectly delighted with a fifteen-dollar bouquet and a free donut social, so he wouldn’t have to purchase costly gifts or plan extravaganzas for her. She might not be the woman of his former dreams, but she promised to be the most suitable woman that he had ever known, someone who could cherish his well-being, as well as his wallet.
His prosperous thoughts were suddenly dampened by a devastating remembrance: Helen’s new friend Tom. The drama of Bill’s fall and his disordered thinking in the hospital had pushed Tom out of his mind, along with every other subject, unrelated to his desperate desire to avoid a nursing home. Were Tom and Helen still going out and swing dancing, he wondered? Bill started to fidget with impatience to know. He wasn’t sure what he could do about this potential menace to his budding happiness, if they were still seeing each other. But he wanted to know whether he should be doing something. After a few minutes of hesitation, his fear overpowered his self-restraint. He fumbled with the emergency call device, until he was able to press the button. It emitted a continuous high-pitched sound.
Minutes later, he could hear the sound of different keys being tried in quick succession in the lock of his door, until Helen found the right one and rushed in, turning on the lights.
“Bill, is something wrong?” she asked worriedly, coming to his bedside.
“No. No. I’m all right,” he prevaricated, uncertain how to ask what he wanted to know. “Everything’s OK. I was just...” Unlike so many times before, when he had spun fantastical, deceiving, sugary confections to lead women on with him to some imaginary place, he resorted instead to a direct question. “Do