If It Comes Back

Charles saw them both at the same time: the small white bird floating from among the park trees and the girl wheeling down the walk.1 The bird glided downward and rested in the grass; the girl directed the chair smoothly along the sunlit, shadowy walk.2 Her collapsible3 metal chair might have been motorized4: it carried her along so smoothly. She stopped to watch the ducks on the pond and when she shoved the wheels again, Charles sprang to his feet. "May I push you?" he called, running across the grass to her. The white bird flew to the top of a tree.

It was mostly he who talked and he seemed afraid to stop for fear she'd ask him to leave her by herself. Nothing in her face had supported the idea of helplessness conveyed by the wheelchair, and he knew that his assistance was not viewed as a favor.5 He asked the cause of her handicap; not because it was so important for him to know, but because it was something to keep the conversation going.

"It was an automobile accident when I was twelve," Amy explained. "I was readingto my younger brother in the back seat and suddenly my mother screamed and tried frantically6 to miss the truck that had pulled out in front of us. When I woke up in the hospital, my mother was screaming again outside the door. This time she was trying to escape the fact that I would never walk again."

"Pretty rough on both of you.7 What about your brother?"

"He came out of it a little better than I did; at least he was dismissed from the hospital before I was. It took us all a long time to accept and adjust."

They went for lunch, and he would have felt awkward except that she knew completely how to take care of herself. It was he who seemed clumsy and bumped into a table; she who moved competently through the aisle.8

"Do you live with someone?" he asked the next day for he'd made a point of9 asking to meet her again.

"Just myself," she answered. He felt a qualm10 in his stomach, and it was more in memory of his own loneliness than anticipation of hers.11

He came to like to feel the white handles in his grasp, to walk between the two white-rimmed metal wheels. And he grew almost more familiar with the slight wave at the back of her hair than with her eyes or her mouth. The chair was a moveable wonder; he loved the feeling of power and strength it gave him for so little exertion.12 Once, he said to the wave at the back of her hair, "I hope I'm the only chair-pusher in your life," but she had only smiled a little and her eyes had admitted nothing. When he looked up, he noticed a white bird flying from one tree toanother, tracing their route with them.

She cooked dinner for him once in June. He expected her to be proud of her ability to do everything from her seat in the wheelchair ?nbsp;and was faintly disappointed to see that she would not feel pride at what was, for her, simply a matter of course.13 He watched his own hand pick up the salt shaker14 and place it on one of the higher, unused cabinet shelves, then awaited her plea for assistance. He didn't know why he'd done it, but the look in her eyes a moment later gave him a shock in his easy joy. He felt as though he were playing poker and he had just accidentally revealed his hand to the opponent.15 To make her forget what he'd done, he told her about the little white bird in the park.