Attack Decay Sustain Release

"You forgot a washer," Dr. Jenny said. "Goes in front of the nut."

Vivian's forehead creased. It was hard making her hands do minute, controlled efforts. Such a small movement. It was harder doing that than it had been hauling herself around on crutches.

"So," Dr. Jenny said. "Tell me about your band."

Vivian licked her lips as she pulled one of each of the necessary pieces out from the mismatched pile, and proceeded with caution. "I don't know that we're still together. It's kind of up in the air." She kept dropping pieces, and it irritated her to no end.

"How many members did you have?"

"We were a trio. Me, Lucia, and... and Kevin."

"You forgot a washer again," she said, pointing down with the back of her stylus. "One on each side."

Vivian groaned as she took apart her work. "I never used to be forgetful. That wasn't a big issue for me."

"Sometimes it's hard to tell what all's been knocked loose. This task is working a lot of parts of your brain, so try not to be too hard on yourself."

Vivian nodded, and started again.

"Stay calm and work through it, you know? Don't let frustration make the task harder'n it already is." The older woman shifted on her bench seat and smiled down at her tablet. "So, this Kevin. This the same guy that was driving in the accident? Kevin... Van Nuys?"

Vivian nodded, and double checked her work for the fourth time as she felt the nut catch on the threads of the bolt. "I think I got it this time."

Dr. Jenny nodded approvingly.

"I haven't really heard from Lucia since I got back on my feet. Just once, really. I'm not sure what she thinks we should do, and that's assuming I can get back to playing at all."

"Do you want to?"

Vivian frowned at her work. The nut wasn't as tight as it looked like it could go, as she could still see underneath it, but she couldn't grip the pieces tight enough to push any further so she started pulling more pieces out of the pile to assemble another one. "I love writing songs," she said, without looking up. "I hear music in my head all the time."

The older woman smirked. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you just avoided the question."

"I..." Vivian bit her lip and thought about it. "I guess I did. I hadn't... meant to." The feel underneath her fingers was different somehow, and she stared at it.

Dr. Jenny looked up from her tablet and tilted her head. "What are you missing?"

She blinked. "I... I don't know."

"The nut."

"Shit," Vivian said, shaking her head. She grabbed the missing piece and started assembling it through the plywood. "I want to play again, but..." She made a noise in her throat as she focused.

Nearly a minute passed before Dr. Jenny said, "But what?"

"They used to take what I wrote and change it. I would... I don't know, create songs, but because I can't read or write music, I would just have it in my head with some words written on a page. I'd take it to Kevin and Lucia, play the melody and explain it a little, and they would translate that, maybe add in some different instruments. I might have been the writer, but I was also just the bassist. Little by little they always changed them. The key. The pace. Not much, but just enough to make me feel some kind of way about it."

"And which kind of way is that?"

Vivian pursed her lips, and inspected her work closely. "Jealous. Frustrated."

"Frustrated I get," Dr. Jenny said, "but why jealous?"

"Kevin and Lucia had good chemistry."

"Ohh." She narrowed her eyes, and leaned forward over the table. "And Lucia was getting in the way?"

Vivian looked up, making very direct eye contact for a beat, and then looked back down again to start pulling a set of parts from the pile.

"Ohhh."

"We... we all kind of fooled around, especially when we were wasted, or after shows, but that..." She shook her head. "It wasn't what I wanted. I thought that doing that, getting some of her attention, would make it hurt less, but it just made it worse."

"You mean because you fooled around with her too?"

Vivian nodded. "Every time I sobered up it ached, so I'd get high again to stop thinking about her. Before I knew it, I'd wasted three years."

Dr. Jenny nodded solemnly, and pushed no further. Vivian used the quiet to focus on her task. Putting the bolt-washer-washer-nut assemblies together was surprisingly difficult for her. Not harder than employing her fine motor skills to hand-tighten them, but in the same neighborhood.

Another therapist and her patient came in about halfway through, but Vivian paid them no mind. She had to focus on every assembly, from start to finish. At no point did she feel like she got any kind of rhythm going, nor did the task become easier with practice. The floor around her was littered with pieces she'd clumsily dropped. All the pieces were so small, and the hexagonal shape of the nut, and the head of the bolt, did not suit her stiff fingers no matter which way she tried to orient the assembly. Dr. Jenny made a lot of notes as she went, rarely doing more than pointing out when Vivian was making a mistake and letting her figure it out for herself.

By the end of the hour, her fingers hurt, and her hands, wrists and arms were sore. She looked at the clock and thought maybe she'd have enough time to try another one from scratch, but the choice was taken out of her hands.

"Jen," came a voice from behind her.

Dr. Jenny stood up from the bench, smiling broadly, just as someone stepped around the table to hug her.

"You almost ready?"

"Just about done," Dr. Jenny said, gesturing with her hand. "Vivian here has been making some really good progress today." Then, turning back to Vivian, she added, "You should be real proud."

"Oh my god! Vivian!"

Vivian had only barely glanced up before she was suddenly and vigorously being hugged, and she just had time to spot short brown hair and purple scrubs. When her mysterious hugger backed out to arms length, her hands still on Vivian's shoulders, Vivian was only vaguely struck by memory.

"Do you remember me?"

"Yes?" Vivian said, slowly, "...but... um—"

She let go of Vivian's shoulder's and gave a tight little wave. "I'm Delia! I was part of your team at St. Vincent's?"

"Right," Vivian said slowly. She hadn't remembered ever knowing the woman's name before, but she also hadn't retained the names of any of the doctors or nurses she'd seen anywhere, except for Dr. Jenny. It was all such a blur. But then her eyes drifted up and she saw that Delia had a pixie cut, and then the memory got a little stronger. "I remember your hair."

Delia's eyebrows rose, and she turned to give Dr. Jenny a little smirk. "I made an impression!"

"That's half the job right there," Dr. Jenny said, knowingly.

"Are you here to check on me?" Vivian asked, brow furrowing.

Delia laughed, and it was truly a joyful peal.

"I used to work at St. Vincent's," Dr. Jenny said, confidingly. "Delia and I had lunch together pretty much every day. Now we just get together whenever we can."

"This is so cool!" Delia said. "You're still, like, the biggest recovery we'd had in a while, and look at you go!"

Vivian's lips curled.

"Hey," she said suddenly. "Would you like to join us? For lunch, I mean." She turned to Dr. Jenny, but the older woman merely shrugged. Then she looked back at Vivian and said, "That is, if you're free?"

Vivian's stomach had been growling below the radar, and she narrowed her eyes as she stared into the distance. "I took the bus. Darren isn't waiting for me today... and I don't think I have anywhere to be later."

"Great!" Delia looked around and blinked, and then locked onto Vivian's cane. "Woooow."

"I know," Dr. Jenny said.

"Already off the crutches! That's amazing!"

Vivian scooped it up, and then switched hands, like Dr. Jenny had shown her, at the last second. Jen, as she preferred to be called away from the clinic, drove. Jen and Delia had already made plans to get Tex-Mex, which she was fine with.

Vivian had a strange, dissociative moment when they were looking at the menu. For years, she'd ordered burgers everywhere she went, for lunch or dinner, much to the chagrin of her friends, but suddenly it seemed like there were a plethora of options that appealed to her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd wanted to change the plan. In the back of her head, she started wondering how she'd gotten into that pattern in the first place.

"Actually," she said, while the waitress smiled patiently at her, "that salmon and asparagus looks really good. I'd like to try that."

The waitress nodded, took their menus, and slipped away.

"So," Delia said, jumping into the silence, "Jen said you're in a band?" When Vivian nodded, she leaned in and continued in a whisper. "I'm sorry if this is out of line, but, like, how screwed are you? There's no way your stay cost less than fifty grand. Like, even if you have a recording contract, that doesn't give benefits, right?"

"Actually," Jen said, leaning in a little bit, "She's covered, so far. Some of her friends got together and raised some money for her."

Delia gave her a wide-eyed stare that bordered on dubious. "You must have some pretty rich friends."

"No," Vivian said, "but there's a lot of them." At first, she was going to stop there, but the urge to explain built up like an avalanche until she added, "There was a concert. A benefit concert."

"Someone threw a benefit concert for you?"

"Trust me," she said. "I was pretty shocked too."

"And they raised fifty thousand dollars?"

"Seventy-two thousand," Vivian said. "I think, like, nine thousand of that went to help the family of a friend, and then the rest came to me." She shrugged. "It's not enough to live on, but it'll help keep me out of too much debt while I get back on my feet. Hopefully."

"That's incredible!"

Jen leaned back, with a knowing smirk, and occupied herself with her phone.

"So the bands that played. Did you know them?"

"Yeah. Like, the first band, Killcreek, I helped them record. I was in the next studio over when they fired their bassist. I recorded, like, four songs with them that day so that they didn't have to book more time. Studio time is really expensive. I don't know what I saved them, but they were really grateful. The other one I sorta toured with for a little bit after their guy fell off a monitor and hurt himself."

"And you stepped in for the rest of their shows?"

"Well, we'd opened for them that night. They're a way bigger deal than we were. I was already backstage, you know? I was standing right there. When he went down and it was just a sprain, not something serious because they would have stopped playing for that, they kind of looked at me like..." Vivian leaned back and raised her eyebrows. "...and I just... jumped out there. Picked up his instrument, and tried to keep pace."

"Without practicing?"

Vivian gave a sort of mixed nod/shake. "I mean, I knew their set. It wasn't the first time we'd opened for them. Their guitarist and drummer were real good about giving me signals when songs were gonna change pace, or key or whatever, and I just tried to keep up. Their singer is the real show anyway. A few shows a week, for a month. He wasn't super injured. Wasn't too big of a deal. All I had to do was not fuck up too bad."

"And you didn't?"

She shrugged. "It went okay, I think."

Delia leaned back a little, folded her arms across her chest, and smiled. "So you've been paying it forward for a while, and then when the time came they paid it back?"

"Honestly, at the time, I thought I was paying them back, because they'd let us use some of their equipment when some of ours went missing from our van. Amps and pedals and stuff." Vivian was pretty sure it had not actually 'gone missing', but that was a whole other conversation.

"That sucks!"

"Yeah, it was expensive to replace."

"Wow, so, like, people know who you are?"

Vivian nodded, and tried to keep the color from her cheeks. "Our band was more famous than I am. I think that's why they came out."

"Humble too." Delia nodded. She took a sip of her tea and shared a look with Jen that Vivian was unable to follow.

"Her friend," Jen said carefully, "the other bandmate? She put it together."

Delia looked back and forth between them for a moment. "Oh," she said, her enthusiasm suddenly dialed back. "Are you... are you two an item?"

"I don't know." Vivian took the straw wrapper in front of her, flattened it, and tried to fold it in half as many times as she could. It helped to have something to focus on. "Sometimes it seems like maybe, and then..."

Delia sat up a little straighter, and peered over the table. "Are you practicing right now? With your fingers?"

Vivian nodded without looking up.

"You are... really focused on getting better. That's—"

"Impressive," Jen said, cutting in, and after a moment Delia nodded.

It really helped to have the straw wrapper to focus on.

***

"That one is Fluttershy," Ashley said, pointing to the television. "She's really pretty."

Vivian nodded, saying, "I can see that. I like her little butterfly thingy. Is that a tattoo?"

"That's her cutie mark."

"Oooh. Is she your favorite?"

Ashley scooched even closer against her left side, and beamed up at her. "My favorite is her and Rarity, because they're both the beautifulest."

"A favorite is just one," her older sister, Tiffany, said. "They can't all be your favorite."

"Yes they can!"

"What about you?" Vivian, seated in the middle of the couch, turned to her right. "Do you have a favorite?"

"I don't watch Ponies anymore."

"She likes Rainbow Dash!" Ashley said emphatically.

"Well," Vivian said, wrapping an arm around her older niece, "I'm glad you're watching with me now. The last time I watched My Little Pony, they looked a little different. Maybe later, we'll put something else on that you want?"

Tiffany made a non-committal noise, leaned into her side, and hugged her around the middle. "I'm glad you're here, Aunt Vee."

"Yeah!" Not to be outdone, Ashley matched her from the other side, and Vivian endured one of the most vigorous huggings of her life. "You're my favorite babysitter."

"See?" Tiffany said. "You are a baby."

"I'm not a baby!"

"Girls," Vivian said, in a tone she'd heard Carly using. "That's enough."

The hug settled into them more-or-less using Vivian as a pillow while they all watched TV, and Vivian couldn't help but feel like she'd missed some things. They were already so well-spoken. Tiffany was in Kindergarten, and reading. It was happening so fast. They were little ladies, which was mind-blowing for her, and, more than anything, a scary reminder of how much time had vanished up her nose.

Darren and Carly were out to dinner, taking a rare night for themselves, and Vivian was eager to be helping. It was one of the first times since waking up that she felt like she was contributing rather than freeloading off of the generosity of others. In another life, she would have happily soaked up whatever anyone wanted to give her without a second thought. Now there was all this guilt, and sometimes it felt like too much.

"Okay," she said, at the end of the episode. "Need you two to move. I'll be back."

Ashley quickly grabbed a throw pillow for herself. Tiffany, despite her objections to My Little Pony, barely looked up as Vivian pried herself free and ambled through the kitchen. Vivian was able to move around the house mostly cane-free by that point, just placing a hand on the back of a chair here or the corner of a table there, on her way to the bathroom.

Getting on and off the toilet was a bit of a production. Vivian's balance wasn't wonderful. It was one thing when she was standing and moving forward, but up and down was trickier. Only her right leg was really strong enough to support her in a quasi-squat and it certainly wasn't strong enough to do the job solo, so she usually needed to brace herself before her left leg would give out. Given the effort involved, she usually waited until it was a real crisis before going, and this time was no different. Once she sat down, it was a long time until she was ready to get back up again.

"Aunt Vee," came Ashley's up-pitched voice. "It's not working!"

Vivian dried herself, and grabbed the edge of the countertop. "What's not working?"

"It's Netflix," Tiffany added. "It says it can't play back or something?"

"Put it back on," Ashley half-whined.

"Stop being such a baby!"

"I'm not!"

Their bantering was more than an annoyance for Vivian; it was hard to hear. Conflict of any kind, even arguments between characters on TV, had been causing her to have these twinges she couldn't describe, and she hated it. On previous occasions where the two little girls had bickered in front of her, it had taken all of her self-control to stop from snapping at them, and that was a scary problem all on its own. Properly dried and hands washed, Vivian turned for the door intent on stopping the problem at the root...

...and the door wouldn't move. The handle was stuck. Vivian tried not to immediately give up on her weaker left hand, and squeezed tighter, but her fingers simply slid around the smooth metal knob. Her therapists had all preached persistence, so she stuck with it. She grunted, gave the door a shake, and then braced her right hand over the left one. No matter how tight her grip, she couldn't make the handle turn.

"Aunt Vee?"

"What?" Vivian said, aware after the fact that her fear was evident in the tone of her voice.

"Are you okay?"

She gave the door another hard shake, banging it against the frame repeatedly, and switched the places of her hands. Her grip had always been better in her right hand.

Bang-Bang-Bang

"Aunt Vee?"

Now their voices were right on the other side of the door, and Vivian's self-control crashed. Her voice was thick with hysterics as she cried, "I'm stuck!"

"Is it locked?" Tiffany asked, clearly worried. "You have to turn the thing!"

"I am turning the thing!" she screamed. "I'm turning it and it won't move! Why won't it move!"

Bang-Bang-Bang

Out in the hallway, Ashley was crying too, and Tiffany did not sound very composed when she repeated, "You have to turn the thing!"

"I am! I'm turning the—"

"—in the middle, in the middle of the thing, that's like a—"

"—out! Come out! Come out!"

The knob lurched in her hand as one of them tried twisting it from the other side, but it was no use.

"My phone," Vivian said, through the sobs. "Get my phone!"

Two sets of bare feet slapped away down the hardwood floor. Her hands were starting to ache by the time they returned, and her phone slid under the door about one second before she would have just started pounding with her fists. She fell down, sliding against the wall, when she went to go pick up the phone, and it was hard to read the small text on the screen as she scrolled through her contacts.

***

"Are you clear?"

"Yes," Vivian croaked.

The door burst open, showering the room in splinters, and a booted foot was right behind it. Ashley and Tiffany dove in after, and hug-tackled an already-seated Vivian where she huddled. She held them tightly, whispering into their hair that everything was all right, and that she was all right. It hadn't felt that way to her, but she could put on a show if it meant helping the girls stop crying.