Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Maurice holds her in his arms. She does not recognize him at first because his black hair has turned completely white, total soft shocking white. It is shining like an orb around his head. His mustache is still ink black.

“Your hair,” she says.

“What?” he says.

“It’s all white,” she says.

“Really?” he says with a strange smile. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Mira has her own room at the hospital. They wash the bigger face off her smaller face and substitute a white gown with a green diamond pattern on it for her yellow dress. They put her in a beige room in a white bed that grumbles and slides upward with a lever that she can press so that her legs go up, then down, and her head goes up, then down. The machine above her clicks and bleeps softly. They have put her here for “observation” after taking so many X-rays that she loses count. They are most worried about the concussion that she has sustained. They tell her that, except for a hairline fracture to her wrist, she is fine inside.

Her mother sits beside her bed. Ms. Clement arrives with Mr. Feltzer and she comes in and lays her hands on Mira’s shoulders and smiles while Mr. Feltzer stands by the door. A bunch of red flowers arrive, bouncing on their stems, without a card. She knows they’re from Maurice. The nurse puts the flowers in a plastic vase by the bed. The red-hooded things, as ripe and curious as fruit, crane their slender necks to look at Mira in her movable bed.

Her mother laughs when she sees them. “Did your father send those ridiculous things?”

Her father doesn’t notice them at all. He comes in, all rush and concern, pulls the chair right up to her bed, scraping the floor, blocking her view of the flowers. “How’s my princess?” He smiles his distracted smile, kisses her, and ignores her mother, who now hovers by the door.

After everyone leaves, the nurses wheel in a big brown-skinned girl with a gap-toothed smile and frizzy hair sticking up all around her head. The girl talks to Mira about what she likes to watch on TV ( Little House on the Prairie, Sanford and Son, CHiPs ) until Mira can’t keep her eyes open anymore and she sleeps. She is awakened by the sound of squeaky shoes running into the room and the talkative girl is coughing loudly and hard and gagging, as if she has eaten something terrible. But she has not eaten anything. People are running and shouting all around the girl, and then someone wheels in a big silver machine and takes black Ping-Pong paddles and puts them on her chest and flicks a switch and with a thump her body dances but her arms lie still. They wheel that gap-toothed talkative girl out into the hall, with the nurse’s squeaky shoes running alongside her, and the gurney with an IV wire flailing and the silver machine silent.

Somehow Mira sleeps again but the memory of the girl’s singsong voice will not fade, and she wakes every so often and looks over at the green curtain they have pulled across the space between their beds. Her cheeks sting with some secret shame as she eats her morning Jell-O like a good girl, and she thinks about the girl and about how the girl would ask Mira a question but wouldn’t wait for her to answer but would continue talking with a new subject of her own. They pull the curtain back again and the bed is now empty and remade.

When she asks about the girl, the nurse makes a pucker face and says, “It was her heart. No one expected it.” She knows this, then: she will never forget watching the jester kiss Christopher like he was smothering a bird. That this is a world in which a girl can be almost dead, almost crippled, and yet not. A world in which trust is the hardest thing. A world in which she is never safe except when she is leaping with her eyes closed. She thinks of Maurice, of the girl with her flaming tutu. The flowers, now a day old, smell of their watery stems, plant matter, algae.

She closes her eyes.

The nurse catches herself and frowns. “I don’t think I was supposed to tell you.”

When her parents come that morning to pick her up, they come in together, their faces flushed from the cold and talking about the snow that is coming. It is supposed to come tonight or tomorrow. Two feet of snow, they say. They each carry bags of bottled juice, more than she can drink. Mira starts to tell them about the girl who was wheeled in, talked her to sleep, then coughed and would not stop coughing and was wheeled away and never brought back, but she does not finish, she cannot finish.

The day before I leave for New York, I finally drive over to Sioban’s house. It’s been almost a week since I fled from her room. I park across the street in my professor’s car and, in broad daylight, climb the same rickety wooden stairs I climbed that night. It’s been warmer, though, and the steps are swollen and covered with dark stains where the ice has melted. When I get to the top, I don’t even pause. I knock boldly on the door — the sound reverberates in the crisp afternoon air. A student with a backpack walking on the other side of the street turns to look at me. Before I can worry about what will happen if Sioban is not there, the curtain behind the panes moves and Sioban’s long, articulated face peers out. The curtain is replaced, and then the door bursts open. The hot air blast of her smell — sweat and essential oils (rose? patchouli?) surrounds me. I think of Bernie saying “Make it right.” I smile. “Hello,” I say.

Sioban lets me in and then turns away, without saying a thing. She walks back to her desk. I hadn’t even noticed this desk before. It’s tucked in the corner. On it is a large, heavy textbook of graphs and charts, and an open laptop.

“Physics?” I say.

“Actually, neurobiology,” she says, folding herself into the desk chair with her back to me. She crosses her legs underneath her. There is nowhere else for me to sit except on the bed, so I stand.

I realize with dismay that I’m still attracted to her. I take my coat off and fold it over my arm, covering my bandaged hand. “You haven’t been back to class,” I say. “You didn’t do the midterm.”

“You noticed?” she says.

“Sioban,” I say. “We must talk.”

She crosses her arms and turns to look at me. She looks different. Just this morning I was able to get my contacts back in, and it’s strange to have things delineated so sharply. Is it just that I can see again? How complicated it is to really look at a person. The particularities are overwhelming. Her lips look thinner, her skin more uniform. The acne scars on her cheek are small pale puckers, barely noticeable. She wears leggings and a striped boatneck shirt. She’s also wearing glasses, which I have never seen her in before. They are metal and round, the opposite of stylish. Her dark curly hair is actually the only thing that looks the same about her — it’s pulled back into the high ponytail I’m used to. No scarves or jewelry, nothing extraneous. The only exception is a complicated timepiece on her wrist, which looks like a scuba diving watch. The expression neat as a pin comes to mind. A clean, efficient girl, not an artist of any type. Her scientist side?

“Sioban,” I say again, trying to get my bearings. She has gone back to reading. “It’s too late to drop my class. If you don’t complete it, I will have to give you a grade commensurate with that. You don’t want that. Your sponsors don’t want that.”

She is skimming the textbook, highlighting everything she reads.

“I see you are upset,” I say. Even in this clarified, reduced state, how much space in a room she can take up shocks me. I’m starting to sweat now.

She slams down the highlighter. “Upset? Yes, I am upset.” She gives me a ferocious stare. “In your class, with you, I felt like something mattered, for my ideas —my mind. You were so important for me.” She flings her head down on her book. “You just left — you just left. How could you?” I’m shocked to realize she’s crying. “You just left me — alone.” She pauses and wails. “ Naked .”