"Are you sure you have to go downstairs?"
He nods. "This is not a conversation I want to have lying down. I want to be sitting up so I can look at the boys. If they're that upset—I need to talk to them."
He swings his legs off the bed, wincing when he sees his ankle. It's grossly swollen and discolored—there's no way he can wear the brace. "Are you sure it's not broken?"
Linda nods and hands him his crutches. "They took three X-Rays, babe. It's not; you just sprained it—quite impressively."
"I thought they did an MRI last time?"
Linda kisses the top of his head. "That was before you had enough hardware for our kitchen put in your ankle. You can't have an MRI with metal in you, Danny. That would be—very, very bad. You don't want to know…how."
He nods, and does a once-over of the floor to make sure there's nothing on the carpet that he could possibly slip or trip on.
Linda pulls her left hand from behind her back. "This is going on before you go anywhere, mister."
He groans. "Not the gait belt, Linda! I already feel 95; that's gonna make me feel 105."
"It's a safety measure, babe, so I can steady you if you start to topple. Please. The boys have determined they're going down backwards in front of you—you don't wanna fall and knock them down, do you?"
He shakes his head, and motions to her to put the stupid gait belt on. That's the one downside to being married to a nurse—she's always pulling out random medical equipment, and none of it is ever fun.
"How are you feeling? No dizziness or anything from the pain meds?"
He shakes his head. "If my pain level weren't 3, I'd think I hadn't taken anything."
She nods approvingly, and he heaves himself to his feet.
Her hand steadying him with the gait belt, actually feels nice.
"I'm sorry, Dad," Sean says quietly when Danny is finally stretched out on the couch, his ankle elevated and iced. "If I hadn't been goofing around…"
"Stop that, Sean. This wasn't your fault."
"But…"
He holds up his hand. "Sean, if anyone is to blame, it's me for letting you two play with my exercise bands. And I should have looked where I was stepping before I put my foot down—you'd think I'd have learned that by now. This wasn't your fault."
"I tried to take it away from him; that's how it snapped and went flying," Jack says, his eyes on the floor. "I'm sorry."
He sighs. "It's not your fault, Jack—or Sean's. Right, Linda?" he says, looking at his wife for confirmation.
She nods, her face pinched with worry and lack of sleep. "Right. It's no one's fault. Accidents happen. You two boys need to do some chores, after goofing around all morning while Dad and I were asleep. Go on, get outta here."
They hug him tightly, and disappear, Sean to collect the trash and Jack to vacuum.
The next week drags by. He stays home from Mass and family dinner, because now he is a little nauseous from the pain meds and it seems safer to stay home.
By some miracle, he convinces Doc that he is not physically up to a session—even when Doc offers to come to the house—and gets it postponed a week. Score for him!
It's Wednesday, and Linda is double-checking everything on the boys' back-to-school lists. He isn't sure why school starts on a Thursday this year, but…that's why the people on the school board make the big bucks.
"If we help you with your exercises, can we stay home from school?" Sean asks, moving his green pawn on the Parcheesi board.
"No. I don't even know if I'll get the AOK to start PT again tomorrow. Besides, you've spent the whole summer with me; you must be dying to get out of here and see your friends."
"Not really; we've seen them all summer."
Jack makes eye contact with him. "Dad, we haven't spent the whole summer with you," he says, and then breaks eye contact to look at the game board, visibly calculating his next move. "There was the beach with grandpa, and sports stuff, and SAT tutoring for me and pre-SAT for Sean, and…you wouldn't even let us come home from the beach early when you got hurt."
"I was sorta out of my head with pain and a bad reaction to the pain meds, that week."
"You didn't shuffle us off to Grandpa's and Aunt Erin's all the time when you were depressed and suicidal two years ago; you…talked to us," Jack says, and starts to move his red pawn, then stops and counts spaces again before putting it back in the "home" space. "Why have you been trying to get rid of us all summer?"
He flinches at the memory. He still hates that they had had to witness that, at 13 and 11. He would have sent them to his dad's for that entire time period if he could have… He wants to run, but for starters he's physically uncapable of that right now, and this is one of those conversations Doc had warned him would probably come up when they were older.
He sighs. "I…wasn't trying to get rid of you. Neither Mom nor I were. It's just…I don't want you seeing me in pain."
"We saw you fall last week…you almost passed out from pain, Dad," Sean says.
"I'm sorry you had to see that."
Jack moves a pawn, bumping Sean's off a space, and eliciting a groan from his brother. "Why was us seeing you in pain worse than us knowing you were depressed?"
That sounds like a question his shrink should be asking him, not his almost-16-year-old son. "I don't know, Jack. I'm sorry."
He rolls the dice, moving his last pawn into home and winning the game, and grabs his crutches. "I promise, we'll hang out this weekend," he says, and gets himself to his feet.
Yes, he's running away from an important conversation with his sons, but he's tired and hurting and he just wants to sleep.