Ari twisted his upper body and squirmed against the leather restraints holding his wrists to the bedrails of the hospital bed. The itch from the intravenous line in his forearm was unbearable. He coughed loudly, huffing hard to blow a chunk of dried saliva from his windpipe. A thick yellow glob of spit shot out from the tube in his neck and landed on his chest. 

“Damn,” he whispered, but barely a sound came from his mouth. That medical student must have forgotten to replace the cap on my tracheostomy tube, he thought. Without it, all he could do was blow air. 

He grimaced, then turned his head to the side when he heard voices. Several doctors had gathered in the corridor outside the open door to his room.

“How is the guy in bed four?” he heard one ask. It was the chief resident, a senior but still youthful physician with authority.

“He’s got the usual urinary tract infection, and the pills make him restless, so we put him in restraints last night,” another answered. 

“Don’t you believe it’s harsh to tie up a man who can’t move his legs?” The chief resident’s voice was stern, deservedly reprimanding a young intern.

“We were afraid he might hurt himself.”

“The man is a paraplegic,” the chief said, “it’s not like he’s gonna climb out of bed to go anywhere.”

That’s right, Ari thought. I’m not walking to the gun shop for a revolver, at least not yet. He strained to see past the doorway into the corridor. Several nurses in white coats and pale pink lavender uniforms were huddled under the fluorescent lights. They reminded him of a bouquet of Colorado columbines in the alpine sun. 

“It was a busy night,” he heard one of them say. “If he yanked out his urinary catheter, we’ll have to replace it.”

Well, isn’t that a shame, Ari mused. And if I had worn better-fitting ice crampons, I’d still be climbing mountains. Then he noticed how the chief resident saw him staring at them. The man reached across the threshold and pulled the door shut. 

Alone again, Ari closed his eyes and imagined the group of young nurses. He knew their moods from how they walked into his room every morning. If they sauntered in, with their cheeks flushed and acting all cheery-like, he figured they got banged before coming to work. His girlfriend was a nurse, so he knew how they behaved. 

Ari smiled as he pictured Asha’s light brown eyes and long, chestnut hair that fell sometimes like a veil across her forehead. She’s been pretty courageous since the accident, he thought, and we’d been dating no more than a year, before my fall, that is. For months afterwards, she visited him daily to say she loved him, but recently her visits had become less frequent. 

A soft whoosh followed the knock on his door as it opened. 

“What’s up?” his girlfriend asked cheerfully, beaming as she sauntered in, still wearing her nursing scrubs hours after finishing a night shift at another hospital. 

Damn, Ari wondered, how much longer will she stick around now?

Asha put down a bedrail and kissed Ari’s forehead before sitting next to him. “So, you’re in restraints, again!” She laughed. “Have you been flirting with the nurses?”

Ari shook his head no. Then, he felt her fingers digging into the space between his shoulders and the pillow. Moments later, she had the red plastic speaking valve back on his tracheostomy tube. 

“Thank you,” he huffed.

“No need to thank me, babe,” Asha said. “We’re partners. Your mountain’s my mountain, remember?”

Ari almost cried, but he kept his tears from welling up and hoped his eyes had not turned puffy or red. He stretched out his hand and grabbed Asha’s fingers, closing his fist around them tightly. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, then took a deep breath, filling his lungs with her perfume. Perhaps he was wrong to trust his intuition, but he was a climber, and intuition had saved him more than once. It’s dumb mistakes and bad luck that get you, he thought.

“Ari…Babe?” 

Asha’s words seemed to be suspended in midair, and it sounded to Ari as if his girlfriend wanted to tell him something. He wasn’t sure if his imagination was playing tricks on him, but he certainly knew that he didn’t want her to suffer. Life was full of imponderables, and this was just another one of those things. He squeezed her hand again and took a breath before speaking so that his voice would not sound forced. 

“Just say it, Asha. Whatever it is, we’ll be okay.”