Summary: A chance look at a newspaper article takes Gordon back to the days and months he spent recovering from his hydrofoil accident.

Author's Note: An older story of mine, posted under the "Tracy Symphony" as the first of "Trio: Gordon's Stories" on the Tracy Island Chronicles.

MEMORIES

I don't know what got me to thinking about all that old stuff again. My recuperation, I mean. Well, yes, actually, I do, if I'd shut up and stop kidding myself. It was what happened to Elaine. I mean, I haven't seen or spoken to her in more years than I can count. But back when we were school kids in Kansas, she was one of the kids I hung out with. It was always me, Jacob, Elaine, Konner, Morgan and Alexis. It was like some weird rendition of 'Our Gang' or something. We were inseparable for a few years there in, let's see, I think maybe seventh through tenth grades.

Then things just sort of happened. Elaine only had her dad; her mom had died when she was young, just like mine had. When her dad got a job transfer and she left, it was tough for the whole crew. After she moved, none of us felt like anything was the same anymore and all went our separate ways even though we were all still in the same grades together at the same school.

She had written me a few letters and sent a couple postcards, but I was always hell at writing back. She tried e-mail, too, and for a while that worked. I guess we kept the e-mail up until I went into WASP and then I just sort of cut ties with everyone. Curse of becoming part of an organization like WASP, I guess. I hadn't really thought about her too much until that article I happened to find on the Kansas City Star's website.

I wouldn't even have been at that site had it not been for the fact that Dad had asked me to find out how the different parts markets in Kansas were doing. He's thinking of moving part of our businesses out there and wanted some numbers, and I drew the short straw, so to speak. I pulled up the latest issue of what has become by now a purely on-line newspaper and an article right there on the first page caught my attention.

KC HIT AND RUN DRIVER SOUGHT

But I guess even that wouldn't have caught my eye if her name hadn't jumped right out at me from the first paragraph of the story.

Kansas City police are asking for the public's help in locating the driver of a car who, yesterday, hit a pedestrian crossing at Lange and Marsh streets. Thirty-three year old Elaine Pitcher had the right-of-way to cross at the crosswalk when a dark brown late model four-door sedan slammed into her.

As of the time this article is being written, the hospital will not comment on Pitcher's condition except to say that it's critical.

Police are asking that if you saw the events that occurred at approximately 5:25 p.m. on Wednesday, December 21st at the intersection of Lange and Marsh to call immediately and help bring the perpetrator of this hit-and-run to justice.

The article said nothing else. It wasn't enough. Something deep inside told me I had to know more. I looked up all the major hospitals in Kansas City and was lucky enough to hit the right one the first time.

"Hello," I said. "Could I please be connected to Elaine Pitcher's room?"

The phone rang three times before a female voice answered. "Hello?"

"Elaine?" I said, heart beating a hundred miles a minute.

"No, this is the night duty nurse, may I help you?"

"I'm trying to find out Elaine's condition."

"Relative?"

Shit. I'd forgotten about this part. Wouldn't tell me anything if I just said I was a friend. Okay, Gordon, it's a female nurse. Lay it on thick. I had a pad of paper and pen at the ready. "Well, of course, I'm a relative, Nurse..."

"Alicia. Just exactly how are you related to her?"

"We're engaged," I said softly. Now came the syrup. "I'm out of town on business and I saw the article in the Kansas City Star about the hit-and-run." I pretended to sniffle, just to really lay it on thick. "I'm so worried about her, I'm going to catch the first jet back home but please, I need to know first how she is."

I still had it, because Alicia fell for it hook, line and sinker. "Oh, I'm so sorry. What's your name?"

"Gordon. Gordon Tracy." And I sniffled again, just for good measure.

"Mr. Tracy, I'm so sorry, but Miss Pitcher is in critical condition." I scribbled "unmarried" on my note pad. "She was in surgery for four hours while they repaired her lumbar. They've got her on antibiotics and painkillers. She's regained consciousness a few times but we're pretty much keeping her knocked out." I kept scribbling as she talked.

"Lumbar?" I asked, my voice thick with emotion. And this time, the emotion was real. I even noticed my hand was shaking slightly. "What exactly are her injuries?"

"Four herniated discs, one cracked vertebrae...her doctors aren't optimistic that she'll even make it..." Alicia hesitated. "Mr. Tracy, I really shouldn't give out all this information, I could get into a lot of trouble. I only have your word that you're her fiancée." I had scribbled "herniated discs," "lumbar" and "cracked vertebrae" on my notepad.

"No, I understand," I replied, my voice sounding far away even to me. "Thank you, Alicia. I will be there as soon as I can."

As I cut the vidphone call, I just sat there staring at the words I had written down, I don't know how long. They brought back memories of my own accident so long ago. The hydrofoil crash that had almost taken my life and those words, those awful bone-crushing words my doctors had uttered started echoing around in my head like ghostly voices that I couldn't get rid of.

Never walk again...never walk again...never walk again...

Truth was, I'd been so full of painkillers, antibiotics and muscle relaxers that I remembered nothing of that time. My first memory had been waking three days later and feeling as though someone were taking a sword and grinding it through my back. I can't even describe it, there's no way to explain how that feels. I woke up screaming in pain. I registered my father's face. Nurses came, drugs were administered, and the blissful ignorance borne by the IV cocktail once again took me away to the clouds.

I got Dad his Kansas numbers. I saw the strange look on his face when I handed him the sheaf of papers. He knew something was on my mind, but a Tracy instinctively knows when to ask and when not to. Thank God for that, because now would not have been the time, Dad.

My mind raced forward as I slowly made my way down the front stairs and down to the beach. I kicked a shell, willing my thoughts elsewhere, willing the memories to re-bury themselves.

I looked at that thing called a walker and hated it. Hated how it looked and what it represented. Hated that anyone dared to think they could make me use it. It was ugly and it was for the weak and old. I was from WASP. From WASP! I wouldn't touch it. I wouldn't even look at it. No matter how hard Dad or the doctors or nurses tried, I wouldn't put a finger near it. They left it near the bed, I used my hands to throw it across the room. I hated what it meant. It meant I was no longer the man I had once been. I was weak. And that...that was unacceptable.

It was my father who had insisted upon the damn thing. The doctors kept saying I wouldn't be able to walk, not with all the sciatic nerve damage from crushed and ruptured discs. But Jeff Tracy got what Jeff Tracy wanted and a brand-new walker had been delivered in short order. I tended to agree with the doctors and thought my father was crazy. With the pain I was in, I couldn't even fathom sitting upright let alone walking. Especially with that walker. Weak, that's what it would make me.

Tracys aren't weak. Never have been. With a father who went to the Moon and then started what is now Tracy Corporation; with a brother who was a decorated Air Force man and an astronaut, another astronaut brother, an astronomer and an engineer, not to mention me being a hotshot WASP man, there was no such thing as a weak Tracy. I just sat there in my bed staring out the window, my arms folded across my chest, my useless legs sticking out from my body like two toothpicks some jokester of a God had seen fit to lay in front of me, to make me think I had legs that worked, to trick my father into thinking I could walk.

I knew better. For a long, long time, I knew better than he did, listening to my naysaying doctors who were thoroughly exasperated with my father by that time. The nurses had become sad and Dad...well, I guess he was the strangest of them all. The look on his face never changed once, not the whole time he was there. And he was there the whole time. That man left my room only to get food and coffee for himself. He went to the bathroom and showered in my hospital room's bathroom. He sat in a chair next to my bed probably 20 hours a day. But no matter what I said or he said, his face never changed.

I didn't realize it until years later, but the look in is eyes, that look on his face that never went away was a combination of two things: hope and determination. He would tell me, "Don't listen to those doctors. You will walk again, Gordon, but you have to be willing to try."

Try indeed. With that ugly gray metal thing that would make me look like a fool? I couldn't even get comfortable in bed on my own, it was too painful. Had to have my dad and the nurses and orderlies use the pads under my body to roll me left or right. If I wanted to be moved to my left side, I had to reach over and grab hold of the bed railings with my right hand; right side, had to reach with my left while they heaved. Couldn't move myself. Couldn't even pull myself up higher, had to have them do that, too, by pulling the sheets. I was helpless.

My arms and hands moved. I could flip through the 8 channels the hospital got. I could feed myself. But I couldn't get up to go to the bathroom. I had to have a catheter installed. That's the lowest of the low, to see your urine just sliding down a tube into a pouch hanging off your bed. I couldn't even stand at a urinal and take a piss like a man. If I wanted anything, anything at all, I had to ask my father, like I was a child again. Or if he was gone or asleep, I'd have to hit the call button and someone would come and ask what I needed.

"My left side is numb, I need to move to my right."

"I'm hungry."

"I need some water."

"I dropped the TV remote."

"The pain's worse."

I could do almost nothing for myself and yes, I went through a pity-fest that even now makes me ashamed to think about. I'm sure my face is bright red right now as the sun sinks lower in the sky.

"You will walk again, Gordon, but you have to be willing to try." Dad. He never left my side. I don't know how he ran the companies during that time. He was never on the phone that I knew of except to give updates to the family.

I'll never forget the morning I woke up and used the button to push the back of my hospital bed up so I could see what looked to me like miserably shrunken legs. I threw the covers off them and onto the floor and just stared at them.

Once they had allowed me to run through the yard from the swing set into the house for a cool glass of Grandma's lemonade. Once they had allowed me to play tag football during recess at school. Once they had kicked faster than anyone else, allowing me to win a gold medal at the Olympics. Once they had fit into flippers that allowed me to dive to the depths of the ocean. And once they had let me walk.

I sat there and looked at those legs. It was 3am and Dad was asleep in the room's other bed. I sat there and looked at them and remembered how I had used them. My back was aching, but it wasn't so I couldn't stand it, and so I just sat there and looked at them. I took stock of the rest of my body. I'd been fed by IV bags for so long I looked a lot thinner than I had been. The muscles I'd built up in WASP were smaller, but thanks to the tireless efforts of dozens of physical therapists none of my muscles had atrophied.

And so Dad told me that I could walk. The muscles in my legs were capable, I just had to block out what the doctors were saying. Psychobabble that left me more angry than I had been to begin with. If all those specialists said I couldn't walk, who the hell was my dad to contradict them? He didn't have a goddamn medical degree.

At that time I'd had no idea how close I'd come to dying. No idea that I'd barely lived at all yet here I was bitching about therapy and my father and my legs and that...I remember looking to the side of the bed. That fucking walker. It stood there silent and threatening, like it would pounce on me at any moment. And I looked it up and down in the dim light of my room like a hunter on safari sizing up my prey.

I was tired of lying around, I realized. I had no idea what was outside my hospital room. Was I at the end of the hall or in the middle? Was I on the third floor or the seventh? Even looking out the window it was hard to gauge the true distance to the ground from a hospital bed. Were there other people in other rooms who'd been in accidents like mine? Who were told they would never walk again? Who were forced to use the dreaded walker if they wanted to stay out of a wheelchair?

God, a wheelchair. The thought hit me line a bullet train. I couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life being pushed around the house by my brothers. With no ability to dress myself or clean myself. I'd gotten used to the sponge baths here, it was true, and I'd even gotten used to the catheter and its pouch. But to be that way for the rest of my life? But dammit, the doctors said I had no choice. I would be useless from the waist, down, for the rest of my days.

Father said differently.

Could I really stay out of a wheelchair? Was it...was it really possible?

I kicked a shell in the sand just as the sun hit the Pacific. I stopped and looked off into the distance, remembering hiking myself up into a sitting position. Remembered swinging my legs out over the side of the bed. I looked at my enemy...that walker...and cursed it as I placed my hands on its grips. But I decided then and there that I wouldn't let it beat me. I'd use the beast Father had introduced to me and then when I could walk without it, I'd toss it aside like the useless, worthless ugly thing it was.

Because no way was Gordon Tracy spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. No way in hell.

I felt strong. My arms felt strong. And so I let my body slide off the bed and for a few seconds the flats of my feet hit that cold linoleum. For a few seconds I felt triumphant, felt that I had beaten my withered legs and the walker and the stupid doctors with their clucking tongues. I even felt like I could throw the walker across the room, like I didn't need it at all to walk, that I could do it on my own.

But of course, it wasn't that easy. Yes, for a few seconds, my feet did touch the floor. But then my legs crumpled beneath me and I suddenly found myself slumped on the floor without any idea how I'd gotten there. The walker rattled and fell before me, its wheels spinning as though laughing at my feeble attempt to do what it and my doctors knew I couldn't.

Dad was there in an instant, and the nurses appeared. They took the walker away, they got me back into bed with those stupid plastic bootie things on my feet that pump up and pump down to keep you from getting blood clots, they say. I remember being horrified at my failure. Why hadn't I just been able to walk? I'd given in to the dreaded walker, why hadn't it worked? My father had lied to me. The doctors had been right all along. Why had I even tried? Why?

"Son," my father said after the nurses went away, that same look on his face, "you have to start out small and with help. Rome wasn't built in a day."

I was so angry and embarrassed I couldn't even respond. He left me all alone that day, and I contemplated my life as it had been and as it was now. I was still loaded up with painkillers, still getting antibiotics, still tied to IV poles and stuck in that bed. But I had felt the floor beneath my feet for the first time in I had no idea how long. And it made me want more.

That had been the beginning of my willingness to try. To do what the physical therapists and doctors said I couldn't. To allow my father to hold my hand or arm as I struggled to come back from death. Because later on he told me that's what I'd done: come back from death. I also found out years later from Scott that he'd never seen our father so frightened in all his life as when he'd gotten the call about me being in the accident. The doctor had said, "We don't expect him to live through the next twelve hours," and Scott said Dad's reply had been, "The hell he won't!"