Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (17 page)

I don’t tell him that I talk to my mom every day on the phone and that sometimes, I make her talk to me after I’ve gotten in between the covers and that she talks me to sleep.

I don’t tell him that I miss museums, and concerts, and getting tipsy enough at bars that I’ll sneak a drag of a friend’s cigarette, or cool restaurants, or coming back from the bathroom during a movie date with an extra button undone so your date notices and
tries something.

I couldn’t manage the aisles of a dark theater, now. The crush of bodies in a dimly lit bar. The strobe lights at a concert.

C, I can manage.

His words are lit and bright and framed into the square of the laptop screen.

C is hypotheticals and light. Pictures of the world I’ve been missing.

I can fix him on this little slide of a life I’ve made and figure him out, slowly, as the magnification increases, as I catalog the bits and pieces he shows me and think about them in different combinations, or simply label them—C doesn’t take pictures of people. C lives next to a couple who keeps goats right in the middle of the city.

C can make me come just by telling me he will stay online while I touch myself in the dark, by telling me that he’s touching himself thinking of me with my hand between my legs.

He’s right in front of me.

I can see him, as long as neither of us moves and keeps the focus where it is.

I think my best bet is to keep still and let the snow fall, let the days get long again, the light return its hours to me, a few more chances a day to figure out what it is I can comfortably keep in front of me and see.

For me, there isn’t some miracle cure, this is my life, or my disease will progress and my life will change focus again, and I’ll have another new life.

I need C to stay right where he is because for now, I don’t know enough to move from where I am.

My hypothesis is that the light will come back, both outside and inside me.

I’m afraid and angry, but the light is a theory I want to prove.

Until then, I just have to keep the experiment going with as many controls as possible.

One bus, back and forth.

One store.

One man, his words under glass.

After all the doctors, I got assigned one doctor, this crazy-smart woman who actually is an expert in visual-field vision loss and double-majored in anatomy and micro in undergrad so we have sort of a common ground, or at least, she totally gets why I have a mug that says
EAT. SLEEP. MICROBIOLOGY
.

I see her every other week and she has me on really high doses of vitamin A and a supplement called lutein that has been demonstrated to slow the progress of my disease.

I go in, we visit, and she asks about my research, then she measures my visual field, which is mostly done with a big machine I sit down and look into, but Dr. Allen always checks me again, by hand, with a semicircular cardboard meter and string.

Retinitis pigmentosa is an inherited disease where the light-sensitive rods of the retina degenerate, leading to gradual and progressive night blindness, smaller and smaller central visual field, and loss of peripheral vision, until the patient is left with only a very tiny central field of vision and no or limited peripheral vision.

Or has little functional vision left at all.

You don’t know until you get there.

I inherited a recessive gene, so no one my mom or I know in the family has it. Mom even called my dad’s parents, and she hadn’t talked to in years, to ask. My dad died when I was little, but hadn’t been in my life before that. After my mom got pregnant, he became kind of hard to pin down.

My night vision has undergone the most dramatic change, even more so than the degrees of peripheral vision I’ve lost. I might have noticed my changing vision sooner, but I rarely drove at night in Seattle, rarely drove at all since public transit is decent, and at night, the places I was out with my friends were well lit. And yeah, I stumbled around the house in the dark but chalked it up to my natural grace.

That’s where physical therapy comes in, or really, occupational therapy, where
the occupation I’m supposed to learn is “activities of daily living,” in other words “relearn how to do all the stuff you did before, but in more difficult and convoluted ways.”

Which is unfair, I know.

So after Dr. Allen and her measuring, I’m supposed to trudge across the courtyard to see my therapist, who I actually have to see
every
week.

My best friend back home, Neil, broke his femur when he was doing field research on the Ivory Coast, and when he came back and after all the surgeries, he had to do physical therapy for a year. He was grumpy and cranky that entire year, even more so than he was the six months he was in and out of the hospital all the time.

When I asked Neil, after having picked him up from one of his appointments, why he hated physical therapy so much, he said it was because it was a really hard workout where you were reminded every minute of how fucked you were.

Neil is not a poet like my mom, but I think what he was driving at was that there is nothing worse than spending an hour or more a week banging your head against a wall while someone told you that you were “doing a great job!”

This week, Dr. Allen is finishing up with me and she invites me to sit down with her at one of the tables where her bigger instruments are.

“How is it at the lab?” She’s never one to tiptoe around a subject, Dr. Allen.

“Well, fine,” I say, because mostly, it is. “When I came in for this position in the lab I already knew I’d be refining images someone already captured for further study and doing a lot of writing. I won’t be doing new stuff at the bench until March, I think.”

“Remind me what your focus is?”

“Bacterial morphology plasticity.” Microbiology is really good at fancy words.

“It’s been a while since I’ve messed around with a microscope, Jenny, so bring me up to speed.”

“Well, I look at the evolutionary changes in the size and shape of bacterial cells. But I’m really psyched about what I’m doing in March because, someday, it might have clinical application. Basically,
E. coli
, when they’re stressed, become filamentous, which is a change in their shape. Stressed-out
E. coli
are dying, but large filamentous
E. coli
probably have a role in making it easier for other colonies of
E. coli
to live in stressed environments, like the urinary tract of the human body, where the body is busy trying to kill it off.”

“So you’re studying these stressed-out
E. coli
?”

“That’s the simple explanation, but yeah. The women in our family always had trouble with urinary tract infections, so I’ve had it stuck in my head for years that I wanted to do something to help people like my mom and her sisters, and me, actually.”

“What’s the spec for the project?”

“My postdoc’s renewable, and it’s a great lab. I’ll probably be working on this, barring any problems with my design, for five years or more.”

“The bench work? What’s it like?”

“Preparing samples and refining images from the electron microscope.”

Dr. Allen looked down at her digital tablet, but the screen was blank. “You’ve talked to your team.”

I was starting to feel shaky with where she was going with all of this. “About my diagnosis? Yes. They were supportive. I mean, at this point, I can do all the stuff I always do so the gist of it was basically, let us know what you need.”

She looks back up and meets my eyes. “I want you to know that you’re holding. There hasn’t been any significant change in your visual field since your diagnosis. Recessive-gene expression of this disease is kind of unpredictable, as you know. You’ve been working with Evan Carlisle the last three months?”

My occupational therapist.

Who drives me nuts. “Yeah.”

“He’s the best.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Evan told me that you’ve been struggling in therapy.”

Well, that was diplomatic of him. More like, I’ve been totally resistant to therapy. Which has surprised me, actually.

I am kind of a naturally compliant and cheerful person. Evan does not know this.

“A little.”

“He thinks you’re struggling a lot.”

“Okay.”

Dr. Allen leans forward. “Here’s the thing. The harder you work in therapy now, combined with the aggressive interventions I’m ordering for you, the more likely you’ll stave off progression, but that’s not as important as learning to adapt your life as you live
it, and Jenny—”

My cheeks are hot. My nose is burning. “Yeah?”

“You, better than anyone, understand how important adaptation is when you’re evolving. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re evolving; you’re changing. But if you don’t adapt to the change, you’re not going to make it.”

“Change is stressful.”

Dr. Allen laughs. “That’s right. Just ask your
E. coli
.”

“I’ll try harder, I swear.” I will, too. Maybe I’ll get myself a fedora with a little heart patch to wear during therapy.

As a reminder to adapt, like my friend
E. coli
.

“Okay.” Dr. Allen stands up. “Good talk.”

“Okay!” I head to the door of her office to grab my coat off the hook, and on the way, I bark my shin painfully against a stool I had no idea was there. While I’m rubbing it, congratulating myself for not swearing in Dr. Allen’s office, she grabs my coat and holds it open to help me into it.

“Give him a chance,” she says.

“Sure. Absolutely.” I zip up and yank my hat down over my ears.

“Adapt.”

“Got it. Make like an
E. coli
and evolve.” I wave over my shoulder.

The cold air in the courtyard takes my breath away—the light snow is picking up a little, but the wind is, too.

I look straight up into the sky and try to track the journey of a single snowflake as it swoops and spirals toward me, but I keep losing the one that I’ve got in my sights. I look back at the square, one-story brick building on the other side of the courtyard where I’ll spend the next hour adapting.

Then rush home before it’s dark.

I find myself standing in the echoey tiled foyer of the therapy building, and as usual, I do not want to do what Evan wants me to do.

“I could get a blindfold instead.” He’s standing in front of me, his absurdly long arms crossed over his chest, looking at me in some way that is supposed to be stern and serious but is impossible if your eyebrows are always folded in like a basset hound’s and your mouth is always sort of smiling when it’s not and your hair’s always a mess and it all somehow impossibly adds up to a general impression of friendly, laid-back hotness.

What does he need arms that long for, anyway? I guess maybe to go with how big his hands are. His legs are weirdly long, too, how does he even find jeans? Is there a special shelf in the men’s departments where inseams include numbers with ten-power subscripts?

“Jenny?”

“What?” My voice reminds me of the one and only year of my life my mom and I didn’t get along. Jenny at fourteen sounds just like my voice in occupational therapy.

“Are you going to close your eyes?”

“I don’t think so.”

Evan actually closes his eyes, wrinkles them up tight, and brings one of his giant hands up to pinch his forehead. “Did Dr. Allen talk to you?” He keeps his eyes closed.

“Yes.”

“So you get it.” He looks at me, now, unrelenting eye contact meant to appeal to the serious, good girl inside me.

Except, she is not inside me.

She has blown this Popsicle stand because she hates occupational therapy and Evan, by extension.

“Get what?” I have to wince at myself, just a little. Still, I’m impressed with this untapped well of belligerence I seem to have found.

“That what we do here is just as important, probably more important, than vitamin therapy and whatever clinical trials or experimental implants come your way.”

“Actually, the idea of implant things kind of freaks me out.”

As an answer he closes his eyes again.

“It’s just that they’re a little too Geordi La Forge, and if I’m going to be a
Next Generation
character, I’d have to go with Commander Troi. I’d have to figure out how to get my hair to curl like that, but I think I could work Troi’s cosplay pretty hard.”

He opens his eyes, and I swear he doesn’t, he
doesn’t
look me over like he’s imagining me in a skintight Federation uniform, but something, somewhere, maybe something really, really bored in my lower brain
swears
to me that he does.

For some reason known only to that really bored part of my brain, I meet his ridiculously blue eyes again, just after that moment where he didn’t, where he totally did
freaking
not, check me out, and predictably, this bored and messed-up part of my brain decides to dilate every single capillary in my face until I am sure I am the precise shade
of a doomed Federation lackey’s red uniform.

I close my eyes.

“Okay,” Evan says.

Then he goes totally quiet. I wait for him to tell me what to do, he
always
tells me what to do, he tells me what to do until I want to scream.

“Evan?” My voice echoes in the foyer.

For some reason, I don’t open my eyes. He doesn’t tell me to keep them shut, but I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, of course, to mimic the blindness that’s coming for me.

In the quiet, not knowing where he is or what he’s doing, my eyes closed, I feel alone. Because I’m alone, I want to cry.

So for what feels like forever, but is probably not even a minute, I fight tears.

Evan has seen me be stubborn and sarcastic, he’s watched me half-ass a dozen therapies.

Once, I even got revved up into a kind of angry speech.

But he hasn’t seen me cry. Not even once. No one has, not even my mom, who I could barely get rid of after she came out here to visit when I got my diagnosis.

I suck in a breath, as quiet as I can, to chase back the tears and I dig my nails into the heels of my hands.