Jake looked around the bathroom at the lowered sink and mirror, the shower chair, grab rails, the widened doorway. An experienced carpenter, his father could have easily made these renovations in a couple of days to prepare for his only son’s return from the rehab center, where Jake had gone after the hospital. But Ed hadn’t lifted a finger. His mother’s church group had done it, all eager to help Tansy Stevenson, their pastor’s administrative assistant, during this difficult time with her son. They took up a collection to pay for it and assembled a volunteer work crew before Jake returned home.
His mom told him this when she came to visit him. She sat next to the therapy table in a flowered dress and sensible shoes, an outfit usually reserved for church or holidays. He could tell she hadn’t wanted to make too much of the renovation to save his pride. But Jake knew his mom read it as a sign of God’s love that all those people had come out to their crummy double-wide to help Tansy Stevenson by helping her son. Jake lay on the table and his PT showed his mother the exercises she’d need to help him do to prevent contractures—permanent shortenings of the muscles that would make him even more of a freak. He watched his foot move toward and away from his face in the PT’s hands. He didn’t ask if Ed had sat in front of the TV sipping tall boys while the earnest members of the congregation remodeled the bathroom. He didn’t have to ask because he knew Ed wouldn’t even have had the decency to leave the house while they were doing the work he should have done. That must have been hard on his mother too. Anyway, he was grateful he could use the damn bathroom by himself.
Jake cracked the window and heard a car rattle past, its radio blaring Mumford & Sons’ “I Will Wait.” That song. His stomach dropped. He swiveled the chair and reached for the hair spray. He surveyed his bare chest and shoulders in the mirror, flexed his biceps, and smiled grimly. His upper body was stronger than it had ever been, as he’d started lifting weights to fill the long days.
When he’d returned from the rehab center last fall, his mother tried to get him to keep going to his support group in Portland. She nagged him to call the local mentor he’d been assigned—a Paralympic skier who lived nearby in Mosier. She stood in the doorway of his room, her purse over her arm, as she got ready to leave for church.
“You should get out of the house, Jacob,” she said. “You need to see people and start getting on with things.”
Getting on with things. His body flushed with anger, but he didn’t say anything. He just stuck his earbuds in and turned back to his computer. He was playing Tomb Raider and winning—a hollow victory since he was playing against himself. At least he didn’t say something horrible to her. She was sweet, his Jesus-loving mom. It wasn’t her fault that her only son, who was kind of a screw-up to begin with, had fucked himself up so badly.
They hadn’t been drunk, not even a little buzzed, on that weirdly warm April day last year. Someone had set up a Slip ’N Slide in the yard at Tom Pomeroy’s house, and they had taken turns belly-flopping down the slick yellow plastic. There were about twenty people, all juniors and seniors. The guys whooped and the girls screeched as they careened down the lawn. When Jake threw himself into the wet tongue of the slide, he felt a streak of joy. He let himself forget about the pressure of life after graduation and the stress of finals that he was pretty sure he would fail. He pulled his thoughts away from the lost scholarship to music school, which had hurt so much at first and finally settled into a dull ache that he could ignore from time to time. As he walked among his friends in the warm sunshine, he felt like a kid again. He went up onto the porch as someone cranked the stereo. Mumford. That song. It was just a few moments, an ordinary collection of seconds that had an extraordinary impact on his life.
Jake grabbed a beer out of the cooler and bummed an American Spirit. He didn’t smoke, but it was a party, so why not? He climbed the stairs to the second floor behind Megan Shine, who was telling some story about her spring break trip to Mazatlán, where her rich parents had taken her and her sisters. Megan was super nice even though she didn’t need to be because she was also gorgeous. Cheerleader hot. Blond and all that. Not his type, but still. She laughed at something he said and took his beer away from him, tipping her head back to drink, and he snuck a look at her beautiful breasts. Surely she wouldn’t mind even if she noticed his eyes diving down into her bikini top, her lovely flat stomach, her short pink shorts. Someone grabbed him from behind. Pomeroy squeezed Jake with one arm and gave him a playful smack on the side of his shaved head.
Pomeroy was a good guy, if kind of an ape. He was one of those dudes who always had to be doing something physical—a push-up contest or jumping off the train trestle into the river or skateboarding through the Mosier tunnels in the dark—and rallying everyone else to do the same. Nothing fazed him. The guy was always doing shit that should have gotten him hurt, but he was like a cat, always
