Will & I by Clay Byars

that an ex-boyfriend of my sister’s said my mother was a bitch, another one of those guys broke his nose.
    Kenny was three or four years older than us, and the times I’d met him, he’d gone out of his way to be nice. He’d developed a gambling problem rather early in life. After he got out of rehab, he sold cutlery door-to-door to pay off his debt. This was still when it was “amazing” to see scissors that could cut an aluminum can in half. My mother bought four sets of the stuff. He started off commiserating with Will over me. After Will didn’t respond, he began to talk about the volunteer work he’d been doing for a place called the Crisis Center, which among other things has a suicide hotline. He said that the week before, some man had killed himself while still on the phone with him. The friend who told me this said he got so worked up by his own story that he started to laugh at its reality. Then he stopped and composed himself. She said it didn’t matter, though, as Will’s expression never changed.
    Upon reassessing, the doctors now said that I would remain paralyzed from my eyes down. I was given a tracheotomy to make breathing easier and a feeding tube attached directly to my stomach. This was also when the months of sponge baths, having someone hold my penis for me while I urinated, and the wiping began. But I no longer cared what happened to me.
    (What stands out most about this time isn’t that I was unable to move or communicate, or that other people had to guess what I needed. But because I could still feel, the most confounding part was simply having an itch. I not only couldn’t scratch that itch, I couldn’t tell anyone where it was either. I sometimes will have an itch and not scratch it if I’m otherwise engaged, just to make sure I still can, but the difference between being able to do something and choosing not to and not being able to do it is like the difference between going to a scary movie and being scared for your safety. Eventually, as soon as I would open my eyes after sleeping, I shut them again. This illusory control transformed into a kind of meditative contentment.)
    *   *   *
    After being “locked in” for what I later learned was two weeks and two days, I woke up. I was not literally asleep at the time. I had been moved out of the ICU and into a private room. It was in the afternoon, after the physical therapist who came to move my limbs around to prevent bedsores had gone. My sister was in the room, when with no warning I consciously lifted my right leg off the mattress. She ran to get my parents and a nurse. But then, she said, I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it again.
    I don’t remember any of this. Soon enough, though, I was moving my leg all the time. I do remember at some point being sort of pleasantly surprised at these new movements. I still couldn’t speak, with or without the tracheotomy tube in my throat. Most everyone said it was a miracle, and that now it was only a matter of time before I would be normal again. I almost let myself believe them. It was Will who shocked me out of that. He came into the room at one point and watched me perform my leg trick. He feigned excitement at first, with that same determinedly happy face, then started fidgeting and checking his watch. “Good job,” he said quickly, and left, the same as before.
    These abrupt reactions of his probably seem strange. He could feel that I was definitely not going to wake up and be fine, and I suspect it was as unbearable as when he’d first seen me. He may also have slipped into thinking along the same lines as me, that it wasn’t real. He was young. We were young, when this happened. We’d just turned twenty when I had the stroke. He didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t speak. He left.
    Somehow I was able to keep the fear at a distance, or far enough away to keep from losing hope. I