"Counting what?"
"Stairs. Making sure they haven't added any since I left."
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't not-laugh either. She does that thing she does — a small exhale through her nose, a sound that lives between amusement and worry. I add it to the list. The list doesn't have a name. It used to be short.
Step fourteen. The landing. My door.
I get my keys out. This takes longer than it should because crutches occupy both hands and I have to park one against the wall to free my fingers, and keys are slippery when your palm is doing the thing palms do when you're pretending not to be nervous about bringing a girl into your apartment for the first time under circumstances that are not even slightly how you imagined it.
The lock clicks. I push the door open.
And something hits me in the shin.
Bagel.
Ten pounds of orange fur and zero concept of personal boundaries. He's already on my right leg — the one that works — pressing his head against my calf with the force of a creature who has been abandoned for almost two weeks and wants you to know it, loudly. His purr is so aggressive it sounds structural — like a motor redlining.
Behind him, sitting on the kitchen counter like she owns the building and has strong opinions about the new management: Poutine. Black. Motionless. Staring at me with the expression of a cat who specifically arranged to be on the counter when the door opened so the visual impact would be maximum.
She doesn't come to greet me. That's not her style. Poutine's style is:I'll be here. I've always been here. You're the one who left.
"Salut, les bêtes," I say — hi, beasts — and my voice does something I didn't authorize. It cracks. Just a wobble around the vowel, a tiny structural failure that I disguise as a cough. The cough pulls on my hip and the hip reminds me it's broken and the broken reminds me why I was gone and none of this is supposed to make me emotional because they're cats, they're just cats, but Bagel is vibrating against my leg with his whole body and Poutine is watching me from the counter with those unblinking eyes and they're bothhereand I'mhomeand—
"The crutch," Nora says.
I look down. Bagel has wrapped himself between both crutches like a very affectionate safety hazard. If I take one more step, I'm going to trip over the cat and land right back where I started.
"Bagel." I try the authoritative voice. He looks up at me with an expression that saysno. "Bagel, move." He purrs harder.
Nora bends down and scoops him up. He immediately melts into her arms — all ten pounds redistributing into a boneless orange puddle — and starts kneading her collarbone. She holdshim like she's done this before, which she hasn't, she's been in the apartment, installed things, measured things, but always without me, always when it was a project and not a life — and Bagel doesn't care about the difference. Bagel runs on warmth.
I watch her hold my cat in my doorway and my chest rearranges itself in a way I'm going to blame on the stairs.
"Your hip?" she asks, reading my face.
"Yeah," I say. "Stairs."
Marc cameby while I was in the hospital — fed the cats, cleaned the litter, left a note on the counter that saysGet better, idiot. Poutine ate my shoelace.He gave Nora the spare keys so she could come set up the bathroom before I was discharged. There's a stack of mail, a dead plant I forgot I owned, and a package on the kitchen table.
The package is from Sophie — she sent it to Nora, who brought it over. Inside: a foam roller, compression socks, a jar ofOrganic Turmeric Recovery Elixir, a 400-page book calledHealing Your Hips: A Journey, and a card covered in hand-drawn hearts. At the bottom: fuzzy socks with firefighters on them.
"She ordered the socks at 2 AM," Nora says. "Texted me the receipt with crying emojis."
"She also told me to keep her car until she's properly back from Calgary," Nora says. "Apparently this is her contribution."
I hold up the book. "Four hundred pages."
"She means well."
"She means well loudly." I put it down. A shadow shifts in her expression — behind her eyes — and then it's gone.
The bathroom isa problem I've been not thinking about.
In the hospital, there were rails. There were nurses. There was an entire infrastructure designed around the premise that a person might not be able to do basic things without help. The hospital bathroom was humiliating, but it was humiliating in a medical way — clinical, expected, part of the process.
My bathroom is not clinical. My bathroom is a narrow room with a shower-over-tub I can't step into, a toilet I can't easily get down to, and a sink that requires exactly the kind of twisting my pelvis has specifically been told not to do. Nora installed a grab bar by the toilet — the screw holes are neat, neater than anything I've drilled in this apartment, and I don't know if she's done this before or just learned fast, but either way it tells me something about her that I'm adding to the list.
There's also one of those raised toilet seats from the pharmacy. And a shower seat in the tub. A non-slip mat. A small basket of supplies on the shelf within arm's reach so I don't have to bend.
