“Sounds like you know what you’re talking about.”
Cheyenne shrugs. “I’ve been a physical therapist for eight years, and I was an ER nurse for ten years before that. And, yeah, I also know from experience.”
“What experience, if you don’t mind me asking?”
She smiles, and god, that smile of hers is an expression of pure warmth. “Well, I was a dancer. Ballet and contemporary. My mom started me in ballet when I was four, and I was competing with a troupe by the time I was seven. I got into Juilliard. I spent two amazing, glorious years there. Then…god, it was so stupid. I was ice-skating at the Rockefeller Center with my boyfriend, I slipped, and fell. Snapped my ankle. I tripped, and when I hit the ice, my boyfriend’s skate sliced across my Achilles tendon as he tried to get out of the way, so he didn’t land on me.
“I healed fine, and I can run and walk and I’m totally normal, but competitive, professional dance was out. My ankle and the tendon just couldn’t take the strain. I tried. I toughed it out a whole ’nother year, but my advisor eventually was just like, Cheyenne, I think you need to face facts.” She shrugs, but I can tell it’s still hard for her. “I probably could have kept dancing, could have gone easy on myself, taken some time off and rested it longer, maybe joined a troupe and taken it slow. But I was competitive, you know? I had to be the best, and if I couldn’t…well, why bother? So I quit, left New York…eventually had my daughter and studied to be a nurse.”
“You’ve got a daughter, huh?” This is an oddly personal conversation to have with a potential therapist. I’m not at all sure this is how things usually go.
Cheyenne smiles. “Yeah. About your age, off at college.”
I’m not sure where to go with that, so I let a silence hang briefly and then change the subject. “So. Where do we start?”
She takes her feet off the desk, opens a drawer of the filing cabinet, and withdraws a folder, handing me a stack of papers. “Well, with paperwork of course. Fill these out, and I’ll be right back. I need to check on my clients.”
She disappears out the door, and I can’t help appreciating how well she fills out her yoga pants. But then I feel oddly guilty about that thought, considering she mentioned having a daughter my age. But jeez, however old she is, she’s beautiful, and I can’t help noticing it.
I turn my focus to the paperwork. At least physical therapy will be something to look forward to, what with having such a lovely piece of eye candy as my therapist.
* * *
We agree to start with three appointments a week, evenings, seven o’clock. It seems late to me, but Cheyenne claims she works weird hours, especially since a lot of her clients are fitting in their therapy appointments around their own work schedules.
I end up quitting the bar, since there’s no way I can manage a full shift on my feet any time soon, and they can’t exactly hold a position open for me indefinitely. I’ve got enough money put aside that I can afford to take some time off. The biggest enemy at this point, for me, is boredom.
I discover the bus stops not far from my apartment, and it stops near both the library and the gym, so I spend a lot of time at the library, reading. I can settle in a corner with a book and stay there as long as I want, which ends up being from open to close a lot of days. Once it was clear football was over for me, I distanced myself from my former teammates, which wasn’t that hard, honestly. We were football buddies, workout buddies, drinking buddies. None of them knew where I came from, or why I’m in San Antonio alone, so it’s easy to withdraw and retreat back into myself.
Therapy is fucking hard.
For a sweet, warm woman, Cheyenne is a fierce motivator, unrelenting in her determination to push me to my limits, while still managing to be encouraging and unfailingly kind.
But Cheyenne, even though she doesn’t ask me very many personal questions, has a way of drawing things out of me while she works on me. I tell her about growing up as the son of a famous football star, about Mom and her work with people with speech impediments. I even manage to casually mention my best friend Kylie without totally losing it, although the way Cheyenne quickly pushed our conversation past that topic tells me I might have sounded a little too casual.
Slowly, quietly, Cheyenne becomes my only friend. I find myself looking forward to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. We end up sitting on the weight machines after my session, the door to the gym locked, and we talk. She tells me about dancing in New York, how she and her friends would go to Central Park or Bryant Park and dance together, just for the fun of it, and how they’d draw crowds even when they were just goofing around. She tells me about how angry she was when she was faced with the decision to quit dance, how she was so angry for so long, angry at life for taking her dream away.
I understand that, perfectly well. I’m pissed off. I want to hate the motherfucker who drilled my knee. I want to hate life. I want to wallow in self-pity. What the fuck am I going to do? Another season or two in San Antonio and I could’ve gone to the draft, gone pro. My coach told me as much, and I had a few talks with scouts about it. They told me to spend another season or two here, hone my skills, put up more stats, and I’d be in good position.
So now I’ve got useless football stats, a fucked knee, a fucked career. I’ve got three years toward a political science degree, and now I’m wondering what the fuck I thought I was going to ever do with that degree. I didn’t think, that’s the point. It was always football. Just get a degree, Dad insisted. You can still play ball, you can still pursue the pros, he said, but get a degree. You won’t regret it.
Now? Fuck political science. I’m not a goddamn politician. I’m a shitty liar, and I have no patience for self-serving assholes. So, clearly, D.C. or a state capital are out for me.
So now what?
I have no clue.
But Cheyenne encourages me to put all my anger and frustration into therapy, use my anger and my confusion and my doubt and channel it into getting my mobility back. Get walking with crutches again, and then figure out the next step.
In the meantime, I keep the conversations with my parents short and I avoid sharing any details. Dad asks about the season, and I always act like I’ve got to go, trying to avoid his questions as best I can. I can’t lie to him, but I can’t tell him the truth either.
I need to do this on my own.
Why?
Maybe because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch.