3
It was hot. Damp. She couldn't understand why—it was supposed to be a clinic, after all. She tugged on her shirt, which weighed down on her shoulders worse than the backpack she'd lugged every day to school. Sweat-soaked, heavy, the cloth clung to her arms and back in patches that shifted with each movement she made. The nurse, a heavyset woman whose dyed red hair looked like faded crimson yarn, had already walked over to check on her twice. Had asked if she was hot. The girl in the sweatshirt had favored the woman with one look laden with disgust; the nurse, whose insipid face didn't look like it was capable of rational human thought, had caught on with that look surprisingly well. The air conditioner broke down, she'd explained. Our technician's due in next week. Terribly sorry, kiddo, but would you like me to give you another shirt? It's backless, see, like a fancy dress, and polka-dotted as well!
But the girl didn't favor polka-dotted backless dresses, especially not when they were made from cheap paper and recycled after patient usage. No, the girl wanted her sister, who was already missing for over forty-eight minutes. She'd checked the clock. The tall, lithe woman the girl knew to be her sister had walked from the waiting room at exactly eleven-thirteen, and vanished with another nurse (this one unexpectedly thin, like a ragged twig) approximately a minute and a half following that. From the fading click of her sister's high-heeled shoes, the girl knew her sister had been taken into the deeper recesses of the clinic. She couldn't even hear the soft inhale, exhale which she'd come to associate with the sharp black bob and no-shine lipstick that constituted her sister's face. The loud smacking noise of tongue leaving patella, of teeth hitting teeth, overshadowed any further attempt made by the girl to locate her sister. Instead she focused on that noise, isolated it, and tracked it to the heavyset nurse just as a blob of pink material exited the latter's mouth and fell to the bottom of a nearby trashcan with a soft plop. The girl squinted, then lost interest when the nurse turned her face away towards a luminescent blue computer screen.
The girl fidgeted. She squinted again at the screen, but nothing was decipherable at the distance she was away from it. Although she could have sworn that just a few months ago she was able to read the orange Love from Tommy! Post-it note tacked onto the computer screen, but even that was blurry and completely illegible at the present time. Annoyance ensued, facilitated by the dull, throbbing ache that had been accumulating behind her eyeballs for the past few days. The girl blinked, and blinked again, and pressed her palms against the upper bone of her eye sockets. The ache intensified and brought with it a muted roar that suffused through her ears like dye through water. She rocked back and forth and thought about Lourette, who was probably starving to death back at home through her negligence. When she opened her eyes again, the brightness of the light bludgeoned her, brought tears down her cheeks. The heat of the room warped her vision; she thought she could see the individual light waves that radiated from the overhead light. The rays bounced off every surface and returned to her eyes with doubled, tripled intensities which did no good to her present condition. She tilted her head to the side, and the pain relocated to her right ear. The girl thought this was preferable, so she tucked her hands under her cheek and lay down sideways on the bench. Through a slit in her eyelashes, she saw an approaching mass of red and white—the nurse, no doubt revisiting her to prolong her torture. She wrinkled her nose and relaxed her ribcage to stabilize her breathing. Even in, even out. Doubtless the nurse couldn't see through her superior technique.
"Honey, are you not feeling well?"
Even in, even out.
A cool hand pressed against her forehead, and the girl realized with some surprise that she hadn't even comprehended the full scope of the heat enwrapping her body. The hand withdrew, and the soft pads of the nurse's fingers pressed against the girl's wrist. Goodness, muttered the nurse, not quite loudly enough to be called a whisper. But the girl caught it. She caught most things.
"Stella, I think we may have a problem," the nurse said. Her voice amplified and ricocheted off the inner recesses of the girl's exposed left ear, and the child drew her head further into her sweatshirt and brought forth nail-bitten fingers to cover the assaulted organ.
"Open your eyes for me, sweetplum," said the nurse in a rather raucous voice. "I need to see your beautiful eyes."
No, I won't. The girl squeezed her eyelids tighter together. She felt drowsiness overtake her body and weigh her down, press her into the bench until it felt like she was welding into it. Why couldn't the woman understand that she was sleeping?
A girl-bench, a wooden creature, that's what she'd become…
They'd fixed the air conditioner. It blew softly past her earlobe, a corner of her hair lifted by its gentle efforts. A Health magazine lay flipped inside-out like a murder victim a few feet away from her knee, inside pages spilling out unheeded. Some pregnancy magazines were scattered not too far from it, fellow buddies in a field of war. A distended belly peeked out from beneath the lower half of a woman's face. The girl looked at the polished teeth and was reminded of a fence she'd once seen, its pearly whiteness at odds with the dirt it had jutted out of. The lady's lips looked strange, too dark for her skin color, as though they were colored by either cold or blood.
Tick. T-tock. T-ick. Tock. She couldn't establish a rhythm to the ticking of the clock, couldn't quantify and predict when the next noise would occur. The clock's sounds were sometimes amplified by the creak the door made when her sister leaned on it from the outside. The back of her head was squeezed up against it, her arms folded, heel tapping against the ground; it was a pose the girl knew well.
A soft voice suddenly registered on the peripheries of her hearing. It caused goosebumps to rise on the already mottled skin of her legs, for the delicate hairs on her arms to rise until they were perpendicular to her skin. She leaned forward and craned her neck towards the door, eyes focused on the wood with an intensity seldom seen in girls her age. Her tongue hovered in the space between her palates, keeping her from being distracted by the unnecessary sense of taste. Her breath stilled in her throat.
"Hello," Dr. Rie-Lütandy said. His crisp voice, matched well with the brusque arrangement of his clothes, neared her sister at a considerable pace. "I wish I could say 'good day' to you, madam, but I cannot get the words out no matter how hard I try."
The girl scrunched up her nose.
"That's fine." The rustle of fabric and creak of the door indicated her sister's movement. "I don't much care for pleasantries. I'd like the hard facts."
His breath whistled down his windpipe when he inhaled. The noise of the air being sucked down went on and on, far longer than the girl would have predicted possible. "I'm surprised you haven't discovered it yet. It's genetic, should have been one of the first things she was tested for. Why haven't you—"
"The facts, Dr. Lütandy, the facts," her sister said in a cool, controlled voice. The balance of impatience and politeness was near-perfect, and served to spur the doctor further.
"It's Leber's congenital amaurosis."
The girl heard the far-off crying of a child through the ensuing silence.
"An inherited disease, like I said. It… should have revealed itself at birth. Caused by a protein deficit in the retina, it will lead to vision degeneration and…" His voice dropped in volume until even the girl had to lean closer to hear, "…eventual blindness by the age of thirty."
"I see."
The girl opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She couldn't see it. The knowledge didn't fit with her current understanding of the world. It was impossible for her to go blind in the future because she wasn't blind now. Her very character slammed up an iron wall in response to the soft words uttered just outside the vicinity of a normal child's hearing.
The doctor hadn't finished yet. "I believe that your daughter's rare… condition… should have forestalled visual loss, but it won't be able to prevent blindness in the end. It's really something—most children her age with LCA wouldn't have been able to see anything but the slightest hand movements, perhaps the divisions of light from dark—"
"Are there any available treatments?"
"Ah, no, not yet, besides visual aids she could use. Research on the topic is still in the progressive stage."
There was a sudden click, and the door opened with the smooth motion of her sister's arm. "Thank you, Dr. Lütandy. We will finish the paperwork before we leave."
"Good day to you," he said, and smiled slightly at the girl when he saw her. Take care of yourself, said his mouth, and then he was gone. She heard air rush in to fill the space he'd just occupied.
The woman rested one delicate hand on the girl's head. The child looked up at her, eyes wide. Her sister sat down beside her and pressed the child close. The girl transferred her gaze to the knuckles of her own hand. The skin there was surprisingly stretchy—with her fist clenched, she could almost relocate the skin from the top of one knuckle to the next using her other hand. She tried to pull it further, and the skin stretched tight. She wondered how much more pressure she needed to apply to make it break.
"Stop that." The woman separated her hands, patted them into stillness. "You really don't know what's for your own good, do you?"
The girl didn't reply.
Her sister sighed. "Don't think too much about it. It doesn't matter." The arm around the girl's shoulders tightened and drew her closer to the woman. "I will take care of you. Don't think about it, sweet, don't think about it. I will be here for you."
She wished she could believe it.