Love Story(40)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I never found out. A shadow stood in the doorway and cleared its throat.

I stopped kissing Hunter back and braced for him to jump away. He did back off, but very slowly. He sat back on his haunches and glared at the X-ray tech as if she had a lot of nerve. His cheeks were bright red.

“So, Hunter,” she said mischievously. “This is your girlfriend.”

“Hullo.” I gave her a small wave.

“And you got hit by a taxi while you were crossing the street to visit Hunter? That is so romantic! Have you seen Sleepless in Seattle?”

“Not romantic,” I said flatly. “I hate that movie. They don’t meet until the last scene. They don’t kiss at all.” Too late I realized I sounded like I was begging Hunter for more.

“But in that movie,” the tech said, “they talk about An Affair to Remember. Have you seen that? Deborah Kerr is crossing the street to meet Cary Grant and gets hit by a car. Years later he comes back to her and she’s paralyzed from the waist down.”

“You call that romantic?” I heard myself yelling. “That is repulsive!”

Hunter stood and put a heavy hand on my shoulder as he pushed my wheelchair past the tech and through the doorway to the X-ray machine. “Erin is in a lot of pain,” he murmured to the tech, “and she doesn’t want to think about being paralyzed from the waist down.”

After that the tech was a lot nicer, because Hunter had a way with people. Hunter lifted me onto the table and left the room so he wouldn’t be irradiated or see my bony ass. The tech rolled me around as gently as she could.

Then Hunter wheeled me back behind the curtain. A nurse finally gave me some pills for the pain, and that’s when the night began to fade. I remember a tech cleaned and bandaged my back. That was intense. I had been kidding about the gravel embedded in my back, but he found some small rocks, sure enough, and plopped them into a metal pan and showed them to me, and Hunter yelled at him.

I remember that a doctor told me my hip wasn’t broken but I would have a bruise the size of a grapefruit or, since citrus fruits were out of season, an acorn squash. I laughed at this but Hunter did not. He stood there with his arms folded. Some trick of the fluorescent lights overhead formed deep shadows under his eyes.

We began to talk of leaving. I mentioned the subway and he got angry, I thought, so I didn’t press it. My overcoat was retrieved, thank God, because I couldn’t afford another, but they’d cut my clothes off me when they brought me in. Hunter went to change out of his scrubs and stole some for me.

Toward morning I was too sleepy to protest as he stood between flashing ambulances in the driveway, hailed us a taxi, scooped me from the wheelchair, and placed me inside the car. I lay along the seat on my good hip with my head on Hunter’s hard thigh and his callused finger stroking soft patterns on my neck where my hair fell away. In a burst of adrenaline I might have run screaming into the street again if Middle Eastern rock had played on the radio, but this cabdriver had a taste for disco.

Under the throbbing beat I asked, “Why are you volunteering as an orderly in the middle of the night?”

“I’m a white male, so I need all the help I can get for admission to med school. The assumption is that if you’re a white male, you’ve had every advantage.” He yawned.

“Why do you want to go to med school?” I asked. “Were your broken ribs a turning point for you, and you’ve been driven to become a doctor and help other people like you ever since?”

“No.” I thought he laughed a little, but I couldn’t quite hear over the music.

I glanced up at him and saw only the lights of late-night clubs flashing pink and green across his face. Looking up at him caused me to shift my weight, which hurt, so I settled back and closed my eyes again. Talking to him this way was easier, especially considering my next question. “Are you sick?”

Suddenly I felt the same fear that had propelled me into the street at the hospital without looking both ways. He would be taken from me before we even knew what game we were playing.

“No,” he said.

I sighed my relief very slowly and carefully against his thigh so he wouldn’t notice. “Is your mother sick?”

He paused long enough that I thought I’d hit on the horrible explanation. But his finger never stopped stroking my neck. Finally he said, “No. She lives in New Jersey. She’s never taken much of an interest in me. My dad does not have good luck with women. Why do you ask?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you’re not majoring in business at the University of Louisville. I know you wanted to come back to New York, but you could have taken six or seven years and worked your way through Louisville. Swindling my grandmother out of a college education, volunteering at night—you’re going to a lot of trouble here.”

“That’s true.”

I waited for his explanation. When he didn’t give me one, I guessed. “Did you mention medical school to a high school teacher who told you that you couldn’t do it?”

This time his finger stopped on my neck.

“That’s it,” I declared. “They knew you weren’t well off and your mother wasn’t around. They assumed you weren’t med school material. Therefore you became med school material. You’re Gatsby. You’re working your way up. You probably have a journal where you keep track of your calisthenics.”

“You need to learn not to say everything that pops into your head.” His sharp tone cut across the disco beat.

“You’re right,” I said immediately. I had finally reached a friendly place with Hunter—very friendly, if you counted fake dating for the purpose of cheating the medical system—and then ruined it. “Hunter, I’m sor—”

“In the guidance counselor’s office in high school,” he interrupted me, “what they say to you is, ‘We can get you into a great college where you can learn to be a better millionaire.’ What they say to me is, ‘We can get you an entry-level job at UPS. You can work your way up. If you wanted to take a few college classes to make yourself feel like you’re going places, that’s fine as long as they don’t interfere with work. Someday maybe you will even get to drive the truck.’”

“I’m really sorry.” I had seen Hunter angry, but I had never heard him bitter, and I desperately needed to fix what I’d broken. I pushed up through the pain so I could sit upright and face him across the taxi.

He held me down with one heavy arm. “No, I’m sorry. I just

” He looked down at me and stroked his finger across my neck again, more deliberately now, as if forcing himself. “It’s not strange that I’m fooling your grandmother into paying for my education. It’s strange that you’re not. You could have lied to her about majoring in business and taken English classes on the side. You could still do it. Why is it so important that she doesn’t help you, and that both of you understand she’s not helping you?”