Going the Distance (16 page)

“You were in an accident, Danny. You’re in the hospital?” he offered, and it came back to me.

I nodded and lay back as he moved his hand. “Bad dream?”

My mouth opened to answer him, but as quickly as the dream had hit me, the memory of it vanished. I struggled to grab what I could about it, but all I could remember was holding a basketball and people laughing at me, which didn’t seem that scary at all. Instead I just nodded and reached for the water before I realized I was still strapped down to the bed.

“How you feeling?” my dad asked, pouring me a fresh cup of water.

I downed it before answering. “Sore but nothing serious.” My leg throbbed, but it was a dull ache compared to the knives of agony I had been through before. “How long was I out?” I asked, not sure how much time had passed.

“Not long,” he said, pouring me another cup and putting it on the tray closer to me. “So you think you’re feeling up for a visitor?”

I paused. Who would want to come see me?

Before I could even ask, the door opened, and Nate burst through with a handful of balloons bobbing over his head. “Man, the things you do to get my attention!” he said with a huge smile on his face.

I could feel my face break into a matching grin when I realized he was really there and not some drug-induced hallucination.

“There’s no need to fear,” he said, handing me the balloons. “Natedawg is here.”

And for the first time since I woke up in pain, I felt better.

I had no idea why my dad had called Nathan, but I got the feeling he thought something “more” had happened between us in Florida. There was really no way to explain to him that Nate and I were just friends, but at that very moment, I didn’t care. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed him until I started talking to him. He ended up eating my Jell-O as we watched
SportsCenter
during lunch, the entire time telling me how the season was for him and his team. My dad went home, hopefully to shave and change clothes, and we watched football until dinner.

As I ate my tasteless hospital meal, he chowed down on a burger he had bought from the vending machine. “So… tell me this was an accident and not a cry for help,” he said as we watched the scores scroll past the bottom of the screen.

I almost choked on my chicken as I looked over to him. “What?”

He kept watching the screen. “I heard about your season and that you got pretty beat up.” I felt my stomach start to knot as the thought of my attitude reaching Nate’s ears passed through my mind. “Couple of people said you got pretty cocky.”

I wasn’t hungry before, but now I felt sick to my stomach and put my fork down carefully. He looked over at me, and all I could do was nod.

He took another bite and went back to watching TV. “Yeah, I did that too in high school, was a complete dick.” I almost choked as I tried to think of Nathan being as bad as I had been this year. “I thought I was the second coming of Jordan or something and started telling everyone what to do.” He shook his head at the memory. “Complete douchebag.”

“What did you do to change?” I asked, feeling like we were talking about a fictional character rather than him.

“We got our asses kicked, and I ended up having the best stats on a losing team.” He tossed the wrapper into the trash and looked back at me. “And in the end that made me a loser too. Remember that, young Jedi,” he advised with a smile. “The team wins or no one does. That’s the only way it works.”

I felt three kinds of shitty, but there was a light at the end of this tunnel, I realized. There was a way to get out of this. I just needed help. “How long you staying?” I asked him, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“I’m here as long as you need, bud.” His smile was infectious. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

I felt like things were looking up, right up until my dad walked in with the doctor.

The look on the doctor’s face was so neutral that it came across as fake. He obviously had his poker face down pat when delivering bad news to patients. If it was just him, I might have missed the way his eyes never lingered on me for long or the way he kept his distance as he talked. But as it was, it wasn’t just him, and my dad has a horrible game face.

I suppose my face wasn’t all that slick as well, because Nate grabbed my fingers and squeezed them to get my attention. When I looked up at him, he gave me a reassuring smile, which made me more confused than anything else.

“So, Danny,” the doctor said, looking at my chart. “How’s the pain?”

“Right now? Not bad,” I answered truthfully.

He nodded and checked something off. “Turns out you’re allergic to codeine,” he said, still not looking at me. “Would have been nice to know that before we gave it to you, but it turns out you’ve never needed it before now.” He glanced up at me. “See what being healthy gets you?”

I’m pretty sure that was an attempt at a joke, but I didn’t smile.

“So here it is,” he said, closing the chart. “The car that hit you impacted the driver’s side going somewhere around sixty miles an hour. It was the fact that your Jeep was so far off the ground that you’re here to talk about it. Instead of hitting you straight on, it caught you below the waist.” He paused and let those words settle in. “I’ve seen enough car crashes in my time to know, you would have most likely been killed in a normal car. You got lucky.”

If this is what lucky felt like, I did not want to be unlucky.

“Now the bad part. Your leg is broken in three different places, and there is a hairline fracture in your hip. I have no doubt that you’re going to heal from it completely. You’re young and in great shape.”

I nodded, not understanding the bad part of the news.

“But there is a chance you aren’t going to be able to play ball anymore,” he said flatly. “I mean, maybe recreationally, but professionally?” He shook his head as a way of finishing his sentence. “Anyway, we aren’t there yet. We have a lot of physical therapy in front of us first. You thought you exercised before? Wait until you try rehab; you’ll wish you could go back to just working out.”

Nate, who was still holding my hand, looked at the doctor. “You’ve never done two-a-days, doc, and you’re wrong.” He looked down at me and grinned. “He’s not only going to play basketball again, he’s going to kick ass at it.”

My dad asked the doctor some questions, but I ignored it as I looked up at Nate. “You really think so?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I know so.”

He said it with such conviction I had to believe it myself.

T
URNS
OUT
the doctor was not wrong; physical therapy sucked balls.

I was released with crutches and pain killers after a week and a half, a week and a half that Nate spent by my bedside. I asked him if he had other places to be, but he always shook his head no before going back to watching TV. “Nope, I’m where I need to be.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

When I got home, I found my dad had replaced my bed with a much larger hospital-style one. “Turns out there were still a few of these in storage on base from when it was a hospital,” he explained when I looked at the thing, confused. “You’re going to need to keep as much weight as you can off that hip for the time being. This is going to help.”

I found it hard to believe that my dad found a free hospital bed just lying around, but I was too tired from hobbling from the car to my room to argue. I sat down on the edge of the mattress, and my dad took my crutches. I saw most of my stuff had been moved out of the way, and my old bed was against the far wall. At the end of the bed stood two suitcases and a duffel bag with the A&M logo on it.

“Nate’s using your old bed. You don’t mind, right?” my dad asked me. I heard Nate clattering into the house, hauling the rest of my stuff in from the car,

“He’s sleeping in here with me?” I asked, panicked.

My dad gave me a small smile. “Relax, it’s going to be okay.”

Having Nate in my room as I slept was not my definition of okay at all. But I was too tired to argue. Instead I leaned back into the bed and scooted myself up, which brought an explosion of pain from my hip.

“
Fucking shit!
” I screamed. My leg felt like it was being torn off by a shark with a pretty serious grudge against me. I saw spots form in front of my eyes even though they were closed from the pain. I felt my dad’s hands grab my shoulders and steady me as he called out to Nate for something.

I had really thought I’d felt pain before in my life. You’re talking to a guy who worked out no less than four hours a day and thought he was pretty good friends with pain. I really thought pain and me were on speaking terms and that this was going to be something we could get through together. But as I lay there feeling like my leg was on fire, I realized pain was not my friend. In fact, we barely knew each other.

That and I was going to end up being its bitch for a while.

Telling me the pain would be gone in a little bit, my dad shoved a couple of pills into my mouth and followed them with a drink of water. I didn’t believe him because there was no way two little tabs of anything could take away the engulfing agony that made up my entire left leg. I didn’t need two tablets of what I’d swallowed. I needed a whole pizza full of serious pain crap, because this was not going to work if I had to….

And then I felt light-headed.

“Oh wow,” I said after a few minutes, lying back on the bed.

“There we go,” my dad said, breathing a sigh of relief.

Nate’s face loomed over mine for a moment as he looked down at me. “Do not try to move like that without someone helping you, dumbass. You want to hurt yourself more?”

I reached up and pinched his cheeks. “You’re cute,” I said, drunk as I’d ever felt before.

“Leave him for now. He needs some rest,” my dad said to Nate. “Ignore what he says. He’s out of it.”

Their voices started to fade away as my world grew darker, and I finally slept.

When I woke up, it was night. I could see the full moon peeking in through my window. My mind was fuzzy from the meds, but I could hear Nate snoring quietly across the room. I sat up, and I heard a bell ring down by my foot.

“Huh?” I heard Nate say in the dark. “Danny, you up?” I heard the bed creak when he rolled off, and he was next to my bed. “How you feeling?”

“Hungry,” I said before I could even think about it.

I saw Nate grin in the darkness as he took the bell off my toe. “Figured. Let me grab you something. Everything else okay?” he asked, pausing for effect.

I nodded. “And maybe something to drink,” I added.

“You sure? That’s everything?”

“Um, I think so, yeah.”

“Okay, ’cause I’m going to be in the kitchen for a while, and you can’t get up by yourself.”

“Um, okay,” I said slowly.

“Do not get up,” he repeated sternly.

I gave him a mock salute. “Aye aye, captain.”

He rolled his eyes and walked out of the room… and then it hit me.

I had to piss.

I looked out my door and knew there was no way to get his attention unless I practically shouted, which seemed like a bad idea since it was almost three in the morning according to my alarm clock. I didn’t want to wake my dad, but I didn’t want to piss myself either. Which I was about to do.

“Nate,” I screamed in a whisper out the door.

Nothing.

“
Nate
!” I tried again.

All I could hear was running water from the kitchen.

Oh fuck, the water was not a good thing to hear. I looked around in a panic for something to piss in. A cup, a mug—shit, I’d take a water balloon right now, but there was nothing.

“Nate!” I whispered again.

I looked across the hall and could see the bathroom from where I was. I could do this. I could limp across the damn hall. I mean, I used to run miles, for God’s sake. Across the hall couldn’t be that hard. I winced as I moved my legs off the side of the bed, and my head swam for a moment as I tried to force past the pain coming from my hip.

“Come on, Monroe,” I encouraged myself. “You can do this.”

The toes of my uninjured foot touched the carpet, and I took another few seconds to catch my breath. I waited to see if Nate was coming, but water was still running in the kitchen, and it was driving me nuts. Taking a deep breath, I steadied myself and tried to stand up.

And screamed as loud as I ever had as I fell to the ground.

I say I fell, but it was more like I threw myself as hard as I could at the floor, because there was no way in hell my foot could support my weight, not even a little. Of course hitting the floor didn’t do anything for my hip, which joined in with the pain symphony my leg was belting out and let me tell you, they liked the song something fierce. I couldn’t move because everything I did was just more pain, but just lying there was like lying in molten lava.

It was like nothing I had ever felt before.

You think you know pain well enough from all the times you stub your toe or slam into a pole, but man, that pain wasn’t even in this pain’s league as far as I was concerned. Normal pain was two ten-year-olds throwing the ball around after school. This pain was all-NBA, trust me. Nate came rushing in with my dad hot on his heels. That whole plan of not waking him up? Yeah, that didn’t work. They hovered over me, not sure what to do, since every time they tried to get me up, I screamed louder as my hip and leg began to go into the third chorus of “You’re a Fucking Idiot and Should Have Waited.”

Finally my dad grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up in one motion like I was a scarecrow. “Grab his legs and swing them onto the bed,” he barked at Nate, who grabbed my feet as my dad eased me into the position I’d started in five minutes earlier. “Okay, down gently,” he said, which was funny because if there were any additional pain from them laying me back down, I was not going to feel it over the blinding clusterfuck that was my left side.

“You goddamned idiot!” my dad roared once I was lying back down. “Do you have any idea what ‘do not move’ means? The doctors aren’t even sure you’re going to be able to run again, much less play ball, and you want to try crawling out of bed? What the fuck were you doing, Danny?”