Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  Finally I must have fallen asleep without realizing it. I woke sometime later certain someone was standing beside my bed staring at me. No one was there.

  The next day I felt stronger. So much stronger, it surprised Dr. Williams.

  “Well.” He kept tapping my chart.

  “They teach you how to do that in school?” I said, trying not to smile, which hurt my cracked lips. “Bedside Manner 101?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well.” He was doing it again, the tapping. “You’ve really gotten your color back. It’s almost unbelievable.”

  “I’m a quick healer. So when can I go home?”

  “Today, I think. As long as there is no secondary infection.” He tickled the bottom of my foot.

  “Hey!”

  “Can you feel that?”

  “What do you think?”

  Mom came in rubbing her neck.

  “Well, I’m glad somebody is feeling better,” she said. “Your sister is driving me crazy.”

  “When can I see her?” I said.

  “Would you like to look at it?” Dr. Williams interrupted, pointing to my wound as they changed the dressing.

  I sighed. “I saw it last night. Going to be a fun scar.”

  The wound was all purplish and knotted, the skin bunched around the stitching. The clipped ends of the sutures felt like wires. Something had ripped a pretty terrible gash into my upper thigh.

  “You were in surgery for over two hours,” Mom said.

  “Why is it all knotted up like that?”

  “The damage was fairly extensive,” Dr. Williams said. “We had to stretch the skin in places to make it reach. If it had been any worse, you would have required cosmetic reconstruction. But I think it will heal fine. Your regular doctor will remove the sutures in fourteen days.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I basically hate going to the doctor. “I thought you had stitches that just melted away or something. Can’t I just do it myself?”

  The doctor grinned. “Right. We had to repair the femoral artery as well. That was the touchiest part. No worries. A good strong flow was immediately reestablished. You’re my best patient this week, Emma. If all of them were like you—”

  “Thanks.” I was tired of talking about it. I clutched at the hospital gown and looked at Mom. “Where can I get some real clothes?”

  No walking allowed for at least a week without crutches, the doctor told me. Mom threw them in the trunk after some nurses helped me into the backseat from the wheelchair. I was pretty clumsy with them. All the sports I had played, and I’d never been on crutches in my life.

  I couldn’t wait for the fun I’d have back at school. Oh boy. I’d seen what the boys had done with Molly Walton’s crutches when she’d torn up her ankle: taken turns pulling the rubber cushion off the top and putting it down their pants.

  I sat in the backseat of the rented car and kept my seat belt unbuckled so I could sit sideways and stretch out my hurt leg. They had me on painkillers so strong, they were making me nauseous, and still my leg was killing me.

  Manda was banging her head against the back of her car seat, singing a song she had made up on the spot for the occasion.

  “Emma’s got a hurt leg, funny hurt leg, funny old, funny old, funny hurt leg.”

  “Stop bouncing, please,” I said.

  When we pulled out from the overhang, the rain had stopped and sunlight poked my eyes with burning fingers. I threw my arm across my face. “Oh my God. When did it get so bright?”

  “Bright?” my mom said. “It’s been overcast all morning.”

  “It’s really hurting my eyes.”

  “It must be the antibiotics. Funny they didn’t say anything about it—”

  “Do you have your sunglasses?” Without waiting for her to answer, I felt around in her purse and opened the little glasses holder and put them on. “Ah, that’s better. Some.”

  “This looks bright to you?”

  “Please just drive. I’m sick of this place.”

  “Listen who’s back to normal. Touchy, touchy.” She reached and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  “Hey, watch the road. This is a city, you know,” I said. Mom scared me to death in places like Atlanta.

  We got back home in one piece. I had to wear the sunglasses the whole way.

  The next day Dr. Peters upped my seizure medicine and put me through a full EEG schedule and blood work. An EEG is an electroencephalogram, which tests your brain waves. They marked my scalp with a styptic pencil and attached sensors to my head and flashed strobe lights in my eyes and did other tests to see if there was anything abnormal.

  I couldn’t fall asleep for the sleep test, even after staying up all night watching old movies with Manda snoozing on my lap. Dr. Peters did the next-best thing, taped my eyes shut, which always made me completely uncomfortable. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but for some reason having my eyelids taped shut made me feel that way.

  Everything checked out normal. Well, normal for someone with a seizure disorder. Though my eyes were still “extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight.” Dr. Peters’s words, not mine. They sent me to an optometrist for special sunglasses until they could find out what was wrong.

  The sunglasses were a big hit at school. The first person I ran into was a little dope named Robbie Putnam.

  “Nice,” he said. “They give you a stick and a tin cup to go with those?”

  I told him no … or they would already be lodged in a particular part of his anatomy.

  Crutches were a miserable way to travel, robbing me of my one point of high school superiority: my physical grace. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it felt like to be clumsy, a dork. I banged the crutches into doors, spread them too wide or too narrowly, whacked kids in the shins.

  I’m not into dreading, but I genuinely dreaded first-block English. Gretchen sat three desks away. We had gotten a letter from her mother’s lawyer that scared my mom nearly catatonic. Insurance. Lost time away from work. Etc. Whatever credits I had built up in my motherly bank account by nearly bleeding to death in the forest had rapidly been depleted.

  I hobbled into Ms. Rose’s room, trailed by the little sophomore office aide flunky who was toting my books. Luckily, I was early. Gretchen came in, her nose buried in a mass of white bandages, raccoon circles under her eyes. Her tawny lion’s mane hair was restrained in a strangled ponytail.

  Bite the bullet. I struggled over to her desk before the classroom could fill up. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Gretchen. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can say … but I’m sorry. What I did was … it was really … stupid.” I waited for her to say something to ease my fledgling conscience, but she never looked up from her notebook. “I just wanted you to know—”

  “Get away from me,” Gretchen said.

  “What?”

  “I said get. Away. From. Me.”

  I went to my seat, dragging my tail between my legs. When Ms. Rose came in, she tripped over my crutches.

  * * *

  The bus was a complete nightmare. When I finally got home, the apartment had never looked better. The minute I struggled through the door, I threw down the crutches, dropped my backpack, and hopped over to the couch.

  “We’re having cheese sandwiches,” Manda said, bouncing up from Hannah Montana and throwing her arms around my leg. “And lentil soup.”

  “Nice. Is Mom home yet?”

  “It’s Wednesday, Emma.”

  Wednesday. I was losing track of time. Mom worked days for an accountant, but three nights a week she filled in as a waitress at a restaurant called the Blue Onion.

  “Can I wear your glasses?” Manda said.

  “Sure. Are you really watching this?” I changed the channel and dropped my shades in her hand. “Don’t lose them. I’m blind if I go outside without them.”

  We watched TV together until I couldn’t put it off any longer, then I made supper. Manda
sat on the counter next to the griddle, peeling the American cheese slices out of the plastic and putting them on the bread. That was her job.

  After we ate, we watched several more hours of sucky TV. Then I carried Manda piggyback to her bedroom and read to her like I always did. Manda’s all-time favorite was Dr. Seuss. We read about Sneetches who were the best on the beaches until she fell asleep in my arms. I tucked her in bed and watched her while she was sleeping. Her golden hair was spread over the pillow. I wondered how old she would be before she learned about real disappointment. She still had my sunglasses in her hand. I turned her light out and went back up the hall.

  I tried not to notice the calendar where I had been crossing off my seizure-free days with big red Xs. It was too early to even start counting again.

  I loaded the dishwasher—had to start building up that motherly bank account again. I replaced the bandage on my leg, slathering the wound with goopy antiseptic while watching a rotten movie on Lifetime, Television for Battered Women. Ate some stale ice cream I found in the back of the freezer. When Mom came in at eleven, I had turned the TV off and was sitting at the kitchen table making a halfhearted swipe at my homework. She dropped her purse and fell over my backpack.

  “Emma!”

  “What?”

  “Where are you! What’s going on?”

  I came hopping up the hallway. “I’m right here. What are you talking about?”

  “Why are all the lights out?”

  “Huh?”

  I didn’t believe her until she flicked the switch and the sudden light drilled my eyes back into my skull. It was true. I’d been able to see everything. Even colors. In complete darkness.

  “It’s called photophobia,” the eye specialist said a few days later.

  “Fear of photography?”

  He ignored me. “It could be from a corneal abrasion. Or uveitis. Sometimes a retinal detachment. Even a nervous system disorder like meningitis.”

  My mother drew in her breath. “Oh my God.”

  “Do I look sick to you?” I said, glaring at her. “I feel fine. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I mean, it’s not that I’m having trouble seeing. It’s like … I’m seeing too good.”

  “That’s not possible,” the specialist said. I never caught his name. He was an old guy with hair going from gray to white. For some reason his jacket smelled faintly of wet dog when he leaned in close with his little penlight. “Any of the things I mentioned—they would all bring about a decrease in vision. The decrease might be temporary, but—”

  “But she could see,” my mother said. “I turned the lights off and tested her. She could see things across the room that I couldn’t see in my hand. She could tell me details about objects in the pitch dark.”

  “Maybe there was more light than you realized?”

  “Test me, then,” I said.

  He did. The specialist made sure no external light was coming in and held objects before me. I could see them easily. It wasn’t like looking at them in the daylight, no. It wasn’t that they were reflecting light either. It was …

  “They’re giving off their own light,” I said.

  “Emma likes to tease,” Mom said, as if she were talking about somebody Manda’s age.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. I hated people who tease. I liked to tell the blunt truth.

  The specialist’s pen gave off a spectral kind of glow. Everything did.

  “Good guess,” he said, holding the pen up in front of me. He was smirking. In the dark.

  “Okay, want to know what is written on it?” I said. “ ‘Mid-South Medical Supply, Memphis, Tennessee.’ Did you swipe it in Memphis?”

  The specialist frowned. “They give them to us. Sales reps. Wait.” The lights flicked back on, making me wince. “There is no possible way you could be seeing all that in the dark. You must have seen it before. Maybe you don’t remember?”

  I was shading my eyes with my arm, looking down at the floor. “Nope. I didn’t see it before.”

  “Fluorescents hurt too?”

  “Not like sunlight. And only when they first come on.”

  He went to his desk and sat down. “Let’s try this again.” He flicked the lights off, and after a moment I could see him there, frosty hair almost glowing as he slid open the top drawer of the desk and took out a stapler.

  “Now what is—”

  “A stapler,” I said. “Swingline. Beige.” He brought out other things. “A Phillips head screwdriver with a square orange handle. Gray cell phone. A CD, some group called the Carpenters. A book of Liberty Bell stamps.”

  The specialist swore softly. “Excuse me.… It’s just that … Give me a second. Okay, I’m going to turn the lights back on now, Emma. Close your eyes.”

  When my eyes adjusted again, we just sat there looking at each other.

  “And you’re sure it’s not meningitis?” my mother said.

  “Absent any other symptoms, I would say no.” The specialist took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I have never seen anything like this. Never read about it in any of the journals, either. If I even told anyone about this, they wouldn’t believe me.”

  Mom’s voice was shaky. “But what are we supposed to do? We told you about the accident. She’s been this way ever since then.”

  “What is it like?” the specialist said, looking at me. “How bright is it? It must be pretty bright for you to see colors and read things. Colors wash out pretty quickly in dim light.”

  I thought about it. “It’s … hard to describe. When I’ve been in the dark awhile, I almost can’t tell the difference. I forget the lights are off. But when the lights come on, it’s … like a lightning flash in my head until I get used to it. But after I’ve been in the light and go back to the dark, I can tell the difference. It’s dimmer, but … somehow I can still see the details. I told you. It’s like things are giving off their own light.”

  The specialist smiled, but his brow was furrowed at the same time, giving him a pained expression. I didn’t like this. I was starting to get pictures in my head of me stuck in front of hundreds of eye freaks in white coats shining things in my eyes, lecturing. Stretching my eyelids back while I sat on a cold steel table in nothing but one of those backwards hospital gowns.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Mom. “I want to go.”

  Mom looked embarrassed. “But the doctor—he’s not finished, Emma. He wants to run more tests.…”

  The specialist started to speak, but I was already up and moving to the door. I left without ever looking at his face again.

  * * *

  “Why do you always have to be so much trouble about things like this? I get so tired of it,” Mom said.

  I tore into another slice of pepperoni. God, I was so hungry these days. We were sitting at one end of the food court surrounded by moms who were hustling their kids around the play equipment. The tables were about half full. I liked the feeling of anonymity my sunglasses gave me. I could stare at people without them knowing.

  “You think this is my fault, don’t you,” I said, tearing off another bite.

  “Well, I wonder why? It was you who lost your temper. It was you who stole the car. Crashed it in a ditch.” Her voice started to break. “What do you want me to say? And now this.” She waved her arms around. “You’re going blind.”

  “I’m not going blind, Mom. How good can a specialist be who has an office at the mall? It’ll be okay. I bet it’s already starting to go away.”

  “You’re lying. You know I can always tell when you’re lying.”

  “Not possible. I don’t lie.”

  “So why did you just say that?”

  I sighed. “Because I know this is scaring you. I don’t want you to be scared. I’m not scared. I just want my shorts back.” I was tired of wearing jeans. I would wear shorts year-round if I could get away with it. But nobody was seeing that bandage on my leg until the stitches were out. I turned my head away, indicating the
conversation was over.

  I never held things back. But I was holding something back now. Something I had seen when the lights were off and I was watching my mother’s face. Blue. She had been giving off a faint bluish glow in the dark. So had the specialist.

  * * *

  “You’re doing it again,” Manda said, yanking on my arm. “Hey. Emma. Stop, wake up!” She snapped her fingers.

  I was looking at something outside the window, a tree framed by the light. Only I didn’t see it as a tree anymore. It had gone out of focus. Now I saw it as a shape. Saw a light inside it. My mouth was hanging open. My eyes had this comfortable feeling. It felt as if they were getting rounder and rounder, wider and wider, expanding. And the longer I stared, the more comfortable my eyes felt, until that feeling of complete and total comfort spread through my whole body. As if what I was seeing was going so deep inside me, made me feel so good, I could look at that tree that was no longer a tree the rest of my life.

  “Emma!” Manda screamed.

  “Huh?” I blinked. Shook my head. The comfortableness of the tree and the light was gone.

  “You were doing it again.”

  She meant I had had a seizure. If I lost consciousness for a brief little moment of time, say thirty seconds, it was an absence seizure. What doctors used to call a petit mal. Otherwise, it was a simple partial, which is similar, but you’re aware the whole time. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell them apart.

  What I thought of as my “small” seizures were generally pretty mild. When I came out of one, it was like my life had jumped over a minute of time, completely skipped it, before settling back into its groove. Those little blips of time were lost forever.

  Sometimes I had several small seizures a day. Other times I didn’t have any for a week or more. Most of the time I wasn’t aware I was going through it, unless Mom or Manda or somebody else brought it to my attention.

  I took Dilantin, which was supposed to cover the “big” seizures, the tonic-clonics, which it did for the most part, with obvious breakdowns like the soccer tournament. We tried Depakote and then Zarontin for the small ones, but nothing seemed to make them go away completely. And the sleepiness from the extra drugs was wiping me out in school, so we stopped them. Besides, I was lucky that the small ones were generally pretty harmless. Only something about this one didn’t feel quite so benign.