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