Page 20 of My Unfinished Heart

I stare hard at him, sure he’s screwing with me.

But he just sits there with his hands in his lap. Waiting.

“You can’t get up?” Please, God, don’t tell me he’s paralyzed for life.

He throws the covers off, and I stare at the bandage around his entire right thigh. “What is that?” I don’t know why I say that. It sounds so absurd the second it leaves my mouth. My only excuse is my brain’s not working as well as it should be.

He breathes very deliberately like he’s trying to keep from shouting at me. “This is how I almost died.”

His words manage to cut all the remaining power to my brain. It takes a minute before the back-up generator kicks on. The secondary power source doesn’t work as well. “What happened?”

“I was in a car wreck.”

“I mean to your leg.”

“For fuck’s sake. Can you just help me?” he says through gritted teeth.

So, it turns out sometimes people go into comas when they lose a lot of blood, say by being in a car wreck and getting their thigh muscle nearly sliced in half by a piece of metal. They said coma, and I just thought coma. He’d wake up. A coma is a brain thing, right? It is on TV. This is a testament to how checked out I am on all matters regarding my brother. It is not one of my proudest realizations.

My incompetence as a brother isn’t the point, though. The point is, I have to help him into a wheelchair.

In my whole stupid life, I have never felt as clumsy or useless as I do in the three minutes my brother goes from being comfortable in bed to settled in the wheelchair. He won’t let me pick him up—he pushes my arms away. He won’t hold my hands either, so I wind up standing there with one arm sticking out so he can grab onto it and leverage himself off the bed using his seemingly undamaged leg. He’s unsteady, so I reach around his back to support him, but when I put my hand on him, he gives me another ball-shriveling glare until I move away. He isn’t paralyzed, though. Small mercy.

I swear, the instant Connor sits down—and I mean the exact instant—a nurse strolls into the room looking all shocked that Connor is already in the chair. If I could have murdered that woman with the rage in my eyes, she’d definitely be dead, but she never even looks at me. She rattles off some discharge instructions and wheels my brother down to my rental car. The nurse helps Connor get in, her hands all over him, and Connor never once complains or pushes her away. Instead, very sweetly, he thanks her for “everything.”

The day goes downhill from there.

On the drive, Connor starts talking to me again.

“You look exactly like I figured you would,” he says.

I turn away from the road to check his expression—gauge his level of sarcasm.

He smiles at me, showing all his straightened, white teeth, those little snakebites gleaming. “That didn't come out right.”

“Well, it came out,” I manage to say. “Regardless.”

“And what have you been up to these last six years? Or do I have to guess?” His voice is bright and cheerful. Unsettling.

I have no interest in hearing what are sure to be multiple offensive guesses, so I tell him. “I've been in school.”

“As in college?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

I glance at him while he studies me like I’m some kind of curiosity—a mutant animal at a zoo. Everything about him unnerves me, but most of all his eyes. When I look into them, I swear I see my mother staring back at me. “Yes. Really.”

“Surprising. Did you finish?”

My fingers clench the steering wheel. I manage a curt nod.

“What'd you study?”

I wish I’d pictured this moment when I chose my major. If I’d done that, I would have studied law or medicine even though I can’t stand the sight of blood. Did I think no one I used to know would ever ask? For the first time since I graduated, I’m not proud of anything I’ve done. My mother would have laughed her ass off if I told her I got two degrees in Art History. “I don't want to discuss this.”

“Just tell me, or I'll start guessing,” he replies.