“You been hitting that morphine pump a little hard?”
“Matt! It’s hard to explain. But I feel like life has this, this fluidity about it now that wasn’t there before. And it’s a good thing. For us.”
“Okay.” He nodded slowly. “Good.”
• • •
Mary Ellen did her home exercises on a yoga mat in the den. At first, it was just a matter of lifting her foot off the floor and raising it to meet Sydney’s hand. After a week of that, Sydney began lifting the foot higher in the air, ever so gently, stretching Mary Ellen’s hamstring and the thick scar tissue that had knotted itself all around the muscle. This hurt so much that Mary Ellen would cry, which felt strange, because she’d never cried in front of her daughters before. Sydney would press her lips together and hold the stretch for another few seconds, then gently return Mary Ellen’s foot to the floor and stroke her shin, saying, “Good job, Mom, good job.” That also felt strange, but not in a bad way.
Matt and the girls had initially taken turns driving Mary Ellen to her physical therapy appointments, but before long, Sydney took over, sitting in on every session and pestering the therapist with questions. She took charge of Mary Ellen’s home exercises, keeping her on a strict schedule and recording her progress on her iPad. Mary Ellen stuck with the exercises, as painful as they were, because she loved seeing Sydney come into her own. She learned to breathe through the stretches, riding the pain like it was a fiery wave, not fighting it but joining it, letting it carry her to the place she needed to go. It got easier as the summer went on. It got less painful too.
Shelby seemed as directionless as ever, refusing to discuss possible majors or areas of interest beyond the World Cup. Then one day over breakfast, Sydney tearfully announced that the University of Pittsburgh had a better physical therapy program than Penn State, and that she’d like to give up her spot at Penn State to go there. Matt and Mary Ellen watched apprehensively as Shelby absorbed this news, as if she’d just been told she was going to have a leg amputated. But Shelby took a nonchalant bite of her English muffin and said she was fine with it.
“You’re sure?” Matt asked, getting his worried German shepherd look.
“Yeah,” Shelby said. “No problem.”
And just like that, the twins were separated.
• • •
Walking with a cane, Mary Ellen realized, was so psychologically wounding as to be counterproductive to her recovery. Once she made up her mind to stop using it, she began venturing out more, going to the occasional happy hour after work, rejoining her book group, even enrolling in a new class at the University of the Arts—printmaking this time. It was taught by a young Tyler student with ink-stained fingers who seemed intimidated by his middle-aged pupils.
Walking without a cane allowed Mary Ellen to start using her camera again, which she did on her short walks around the neighborhood. She found herself spending more and more time at the Logan Circle fountain, photographing the water as it spewed from the mouths of the bronze turtles and frogs, accelerating her shutter until it raced along with each droplet, creating fleeting sculptures in the air. It was the only thing that could stop the obsessive slide show that had been strobing in her mind day and night—coppery hemlock fronds, blood on the ice, the beam of a penlight shining in her eyes. The looks on the paramedics’ faces as they shouted at her, urgently wanting to know what year it was and who was president. Taking pictures, she found, brought her peace.
A show opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art that sounded interesting, but Mary Ellen hesitated to go, not trusting herself, or maybe just not trusting the art, but she finally went on a Sunday in late summer. Rather than walk through all the galleries, she forced herself to sit for a long time in front of a single abstract painting, her hands folded in her lap, waiting patiently for her thoughts to soften into feeling.
It was hard to focus, though, because she had too much on her mind. There was the long list of things to buy for the twins’ dorm rooms, and the luncheon she had to plan for her book group, and a mammogram she’d already rescheduled three times. Taking deep breaths, she trained her eyes on the painting’s lines, following them as they charged forward in energetic angles and plunged downward in great, graceful swoops. She imagined herself holding the hand of the painter, stretching her arm up to the very top, then jaggedly dancing across the upper corner and back to the center. Gradually, her thoughts began to relax into images and memories, charging and plunging along with the lines—jazz, pistachios, a golden afternoon with a single red leaf floating in the pool—until she could almost feel the painting in her chest, like the beat of loud music pulsing across a row of roof decks late at night.
While Mary Ellen was sitting there, Cheryl Jones, a fellow Penn Charter parent, came over to say hi, saying she’d seen the article about Mary Ellen’s accident in the Inquirer. It turned out Cheryl’s son was also going to start at Penn State that fall. On top of that, she was going to the same physical therapy practice as Mary Ellen for a knee problem—a pair of what-a-small-world coincidences that led to them having coffee, and later, lunch, and eventually a concert at the Tower Theater with a group of Cheryl’s girlfriends, one of whom worked at the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which had just launched a search for a director of marketing.
• • •
On move-in day, Matt took Sydney to Pitt, and Mary Ellen took Shelby to Penn State. Shelby was
