Free Termination Man: a novel by Edward Trimnell Page B

Come on in. Have a seat in my visitor’s chair.” She indicated a wood-framed, vinyl-padded chair beside the door of her closet. I remembered the day this chair had been brought in. It was shortly after the shooting; and her precarious condition had prompted us to rotate vigils at the foot of her bed. I had done my turns along with Mom and Dad.
    “So how are you doing?” I asked.
    “Great,” she said. This was Laurie’s standard response to general inquiries about her condition.
    Taking my seat in the familiar chair, I had a look at the equally familiar surroundings. Laurie’s room was set up as a sort of in-house hospital room. Her bed had been modified so that she could easily lift herself in and out of it using only her arms. The bathroom was just down the hall, but she also kept a bedpan tucked discreetly in the shadows beneath the bed. The surface of the nightstand was covered with the pill bottles of her numerous prescriptions. Because she was confined to a wheelchair, Laurie was especially susceptible to respiratory system infections. This was one of the many secondary health risks associated with her spinal injury.
    I was always a little taken aback by the state of Laurie’s room, perhaps because I could remember the way it used to be. When we were both kids, the little room had contained the typical trappings of an active, popular teenaged girl: Trophies won in sports and academic competitions. Posters of the latest rock stars and baby-faced teen heartthrobs. And there was usually a gift or some sort of memento associated with whomever she was dating at the time: a framed photograph, a guy’s letter jacket, sometimes a gold locket or a corsage from a recent school dance.
    Now, though, the trophies had been cleared away. I had never discussed the matter with her; but I think that these were too painful reminders of how far she had fallen. The posters were gone, too: She knew that these would have been childish and more than a little pathetic in the room of a thirty-seven year-old woman. And of course the young men were gone, too. There were no more gifts and photos.  
    “I’ve got a new job,” she said. “I’m working at a call center downtown. It’s like a sales position. I call people from a marketing research list who might be interested in refinancing their homes,” she said. “I like it. It gets me out of the house, it’s work I can do sitting down, and I’m apparently good at it. I think I’m going to be eligible for a sales award this month.”
    “That’s excellent,” I said, trying to share Laurie’s enthusiasm for what was essentially a mind-numbing, entry-level telemarketing position. It had been years since I would have had to consider a job like that.
    She went on to tell me about the disabled services bus that took her to and from work each day. Then she told me about Maria, a Mexican-American woman with whom she had struck up a friendship.
    “I’ve got complete use of my upper body,” Laurie said. “I’m lucky, really—at least compared to Maria. Maria was shot, too, just like me—but she can barely use her arms. She uses a special voice-activated program to interact with the computer that dials the phone numbers.”
    She told me more about Maria, and how the twenty-something woman had found herself in the wrong place and time when a drive-by shooting took place in her El Paso neighborhood near the Mexican border. “Maria’s got relatives up here,” Laurie explained. “And I think that she wanted to make a fresh start far away from El Paso. I can understand that.”
    “Do you ever think about getting away from here?” I asked.
    “Me? Oh, no—that’s not what I meant. Here is different. Maria lived in a crime-ridden neighborhood. I’ve got Mom and Dad, and all my old friends from the neighborhood—those who are still around, that is.”
    Laurie didn’t need to tell me that by this point in her life, most of her old friends would have moved away from this