(a short story)
by Kerry Ann Wiley
The Drive
The crutches rested between her knees. She had folded her arms across her chest, bracing against a cold that never fully left her anymore. The heat was on, but her skin stayed pale. She hadn’t said much since we left the cabin.
Neither had I.
Outside the windows, New York passed in dull colors—salt-stained pavement, bare trees, the collapsed remains of old barns along the two-lane. The sky had held to gray for days.
I kept one hand on the wheel.
We didn’t play music. We never did on drives like this.
I kept seeing the fall. and hearing the sound her body made. The way her leg gave out before I could reach her. But it wasn’t just the fall. It was all the moments before it that I hadn’t understood. The subtle shifts I misread. The things I ignored.
She had stopped using her left leg on stairs. No limp, she moved too deliberately for that. Just a pause. A weight shift. One stair. One curb. One uneven sidewalk. I noticed. I said nothing.
I used to ask. Before the ring came back.
She had set it next to the coffee maker six months ago. Sapphire, two emeralds. There was no conversation. Just a choice, already made.
I remembered her before the brace. Before the poles and crutches she hated. Before surgeries. She moved like gravity didn’t apply. She climbed things without reason and ran ridge trails with reckless ease. Not to escape, but to feel resistance, to test the edge between control and surrender. There was a language in the way her body moved. Unscripted, but certain.
That version of her didn’t disappear. She eroded. Each injury, each diagnosis, peeled her away. She returned each time, but never quite the same. I kept waiting for her to come back, like the pain was just a phase.
My fingers tightened on the wheel.
She used to sit sideways in my lap around campfires, talking with her hands. I would trace her shoulder blade while she spoke. She glowed when she moved. Now, she was closed off.
Her foot shifted suddenly, the brace catching. I reached down and adjusted the padding. She didn’t stop me. Didn’t look at me either. I left my hand there longer than I needed to. Her leg twitched underneath it—the wrong muscle firing again. Compensation. I filed it away.
Touch had changed between us. It wasn’t sudden. Just fewer hands on her back. No more curling up together without thought.
Yet, on this drive, something shifted.
My hand moved, deliberately. Over the brace. Behind her knee. I wasn’t checking anything. I wanted her to feel it. She didn’t pull away.
She was holding something back. I saw it in how tightly she gripped the crutch. In the shape her mouth held around words she hadn’t said.
Then she spoke.
“What if it spreads?”
Her voice was flat. Controlled.
“What if it moves to my hands?”
I didn’t answer right away.
It had started in her foot: length-dependent sensorimotor polyneuropathy. The nerves die off from the ends first. Sensation fades, then control. It moves upward—feet, then calves, then hands.
She had told me once, not long after the diagnosis, “Sometimes I have to check if my foot’s touching the floor. I don’t always know.”
I thought she was being dramatic. I know better now.
“It might,“ I said. “And if it does, we’ll deal with it.”
She went still.
Then, after a long pause—“I didn’t want to lose you that way.“
I said nothing.
Half a mile passed. I took the car off cruise and eased into a rest stop. Picnic tables sat crooked beneath bare trees.
“You made that decision for me,” I said. “You decided I wouldn’t stay. Cut me out before I could even try.”
She didn’t speak.
“You thought you were protecting me, but all you did was lock me out. You didn’t even give me the conversation.”
Her shoulders folded inward. Barely, but I saw it.
“I loved you when you ran. I love you now, even if you can’t feel the ground.”
Her breath hitched. She tried to bury it.
I got out of the car and walked around to her side.
I wasn’t thinking about the day of the fall, but it came back anyway.
I heard the sound—sharp, hollow. I ran barefoot through the hallway. She was on the floor, one arm folded under her, the other braced against the wall like it might hold her back from falling farther. Her breath was shallow.
Instinct surged: airway, orientation, spine. But it died the moment our eyes met. She wasn’t in shock. She was tired, worn down from keeping herself upright in a body that had stopped responding.
I’ve lifted people from wreckage. From fire. From water. I’ve held necks still, found pulses in chaos. But this—watching her fall, knowing I wouldn’t get there in time—this was something else.
They don’t teach you that.
That sometimes love means staying still.
That it isn’t about fixing.
That not reaching can hurt more than stepping in.
There was no blood. No visible wound. Just the slow collapse. I had nothing to offer but stillness.
That day I wasn’t the EMT. I wasn’t the one tracking symptoms or answering doctors. I was hers. Whatever that still meant.
When I opened the car door, she looked startled.
I slipped one arm beneath her knees, the other behind her back. She didn’t fight me, but she didn’t lean in either.
Her sweater was worn thin. The fabric rough where it brushed my wrist. I sat down with her in my lap. Her weight was unfamiliar. Less pushback. More pause.
“Julian,” she said, “what are you doing?“
I didn’t have a good answer. Just memory. She used to curl into this seat, into me, during long drives. Back when silence meant ease. Now it felt deliberate.
Still, I held her.
She whispered, “I don’t know what it all means.”
She didn’t mean the moment. She meant tomorrow. And after that.
I didn’t speak at first. I saw the wet at the corners of her eyes. The way her jaw was set to hold it all in.
I traced her spine with my hand. Slow. Familiar.
“They’ll start with nerve conduction testing,” I said. “Pads on your skin. Small pulses. They’ll time how fast the signals move.“
She said nothing.
“Then the EMG. Tiny needles pressed into muscle.”
I did not say this—Listening, hoping for a signal. Any sign the nerves were still trying.
Her shoulders twitched. Her breath shifted.
I felt her slipping again—into worry, into silence, into all the spaces between appointments and explanations.
“Jul,” she said. “I didn’t want this.”
I didn’t respond. Not out of helplessness—but because for once, I knew that silence was enough.
This wasn’t the moment to explain or reassure. Just stay.
I knew how she twisted the hem of her shirt when she was holding something in. How she stared into side mirrors when she didn’t want to be seen. The long blink before she lied.
I didn’t move. I kept my hand on her back. Steady. Light. Let her know I was still there.
The Night Before
I looked at the cheap clock that glowed red on the dark wall: 2:38 a.m.
She had been restless. She shifted beneath the blankets; the brace caught, snagging the cotton.
We were in the hotel, a thin-walled room just off the highway. The appointment was at 10:30 a.m. She had asked if I’d set the alarm, then turned toward the window, pretending to sleep.
I didn’t answer. Not because I forgot—but because saying anything might’ve broken whatever was holding us both together.
“Damn it,“ she muttered.
She never cursed.
She sat up, frustrated, and dragged herself to the bathroom. The door closed hard.
I waited. Then followed.
The faucet was running. Too loud. She didn’t want me to hear her cry.
But I did.
She stood at the sink, shoulders drawn, eyes red.
“I hate this brace,” she said, not turning. “It’s too heavy. It got stuck. I almost fell.“
I let her say it. The words were true, even if they weren’t all of it.
She was afraid.
I stepped in behind her. She was wearing a thin tank top and soft pajama pants wide enough to fit over the brace. I let my hand slide beneath the fabric of her shirt, found her lower back, moved upward. Slow.
She let out a breath. Not a sigh. Something deeper.
I didn’t speak. I just let my hand rest there, open. Steady.
“Come to bed.” I said.
By four, her body gave in, though her mind held on, afraid to sleep. Her breathing turned shallow. One leg still caught in the brace. I didn’t touch her—just watched her chest rise, fast and light.
At the Clinic
Everything echoed. The technician’s voice was too soft. The lights were too bright. She sat on the paper-covered table, legs bare and trembling from the cold. Or from fatigue.
The nerve conduction began. Electrodes taped down her leg. Sharp pulses snapped through her foot. It jerked each time. Her face stayed still, but her hands were white-knuckled hanging on to the table.
Then the EMG. Fine needles into the muscle. Each twitch made the machine click. She stared at the ceiling tiles. Then she looked at me. Just for a second.
Her eyes dropped to my neck, to the chain, to the ring—hers. Sapphire and emeralds flickered under the fluorescent light, and something shifted in her expression. She bit her lip, hard, until a thin bloom of red rose to the surface.
She wasn’t one to cry often, but the diagnosis had worn her thin. She was exposed. Still, she saw something—maybe in me, maybe just in the fact that I hadn’t looked away. And I saw her like lightning in the dark, not just the flash but everything it revealed.
The doctor said her function was stable.
Stable. Not worse. Not better.
Just unchanged.
Afterward
She sat on the edge of the table, staring at the floor like she didn’t trust it anymore. I offered my hand. She took it.
Outside, I opened the car door, helped her in, slow and careful.
Just as I was about to close it, she said my name. Her voice was hoarse. Her eyes were full. But not unreadable. Not to me.
