by Jason Mott
As the animal trembled gently in her lap, Ava did not need the woman to tell her what was wrong with it. Its right front leg was broken. The animal kept the leg pulled close to its body and tried not to lie down in her lap, even though it seemed very tired and in need of sleep. Ava gently stroked the animal, which licked her face and trembled just a little bit less.
“Do you need anything else before we get started?” the woman asked, turning from the cameras back to Ava.
Ava thought for a moment, still looking down at the small dog with the broken leg. “I don’t suppose so,” she said.
The woman nodded and left the room without any reaction to being interrupted. She seemed eager to leave, eager to get things under way. And then Ava was alone. There was only the sound of the refrigerator running in the other room. The sound of the small dog huffing gently in her lap. It shifted its position every few seconds, almost like a cat, as it tried to find a way of sitting that reduced the pain in its broken leg. Now and again it whined softly and Ava would stroke it and shush it like a child.
The moments came and filled the room, one by one.
Somewhere in the house someone cleared their throat. Ava figured it was one of the doctors. She had almost forgotten that they were there, waiting for her like ghosts. She imagined them pressed against the walls, listening, watching through computer monitors—their breaths held, their mouths wet with anticipation, all of them hoping for something they could not quite name.
“Okay,” she said softly.
She wondered about herself as much as everyone else did, she realized now.
Gently, she took the dog’s paw between her hands. The animal flinched, but did not draw away. “This won’t hurt,” Ava said. “At least, I don’t think it will.” She smiled. The dog lowered its snout and licked the back of her hand.
Ava closed her eyes and squeezed gently on the animal’s leg. She breathed in and out slowly and, in her mind, the dog appeared. It was just as scruffy and rough-looking as the real thing. She saw the animal’s leg and she focused on the thought of the animal’s leg not being injured. She built a type of dream in her mind. She saw the animal uninjured, tail wagging, able to bounce around playfully. She thought more and more of the animal’s leg until it was the only thing she could see in the dream in her mind. She wanted the dog to be healthy, to be happy and to not be hurt.
Then the dog was gone and, in its place, just as it had been before, there came another memory of her mother.
* * *
Waking was like pulling herself out of quicksand. Ava’s eyes opened slowly. They were heavy, heavier than she had ever remembered them being. She saw only a dimness. She lifted her arm—which felt soft and slow to respond—and she rubbed her eyes, trying to remove what must have been gauze or cloth draped across her eyes. Try as she might, she could only see shades of unfocused light and blurry shapes.
“I can’t see,” Ava said. Her voice cracked. Her heart was like a small bird, trying to escape the cage of her chest.
Someone squeezed her hand. “Stay calm,” a voice said.
“Dad?”
“Yes,” Macon answered. And then Ava felt the weight of his body press down on the bed beside her. “I’m here, kiddo. You’re in the hospital. In Asheville. How do you feel?”
“I can’t see,” Ava said again. Her heart had not stopped racing. She blinked over and over again. She reached up and rubbed her eyes with her hands—as if that might change the state of her blindness—until Macon had to take her hands away from her face. He shushed her.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.” Ava could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
“I’m here, too,” Carmen said. And then Ava felt Carmen gently ease herself down onto the opposite side of the bed. Carmen clasped Ava’s hand and squeezed it. “We’re both here,” Carmen said.
“You can’t see anything at all?” Macon asked.
“Is it still just darkness?” Carmen said.
“I can’t see,” Ava repeated. Her breaths were fast and shallow, as though she had run too far too quickly, as though there were not enough air in the room to sustain her. “Dad, why can’t I see? What’s going on? I don’t understand. I can’t see anything!”
Then there was a gentle kiss applied to her forehead. A rough, heavy palm stroked her brow. All Ava could make out were shadows and light. “Deep breaths,” Macon whispered. “Just focus on the sound of my voice if you need to. Take deep breaths. It’s going to be okay.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know,” Macon replied, and his voice wavered. “But I promise it’s going to be okay.”
“Just relax,” Carmen said.
“Why can’t I see? Why can’t I see?”
She rattled off the sentence like an incantation. And her father gave back an oath of his own. “I promise this will get better,” he said, again and again, as if he could speak between the moments of her fear, as if he could balance out what she was feeling. “I promise, I promise, I promise.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Carmen said again. She squeezed Ava’s hand more tightly. “What do you see, Ava?”
“What?” Ava eventually replied, choking back tears. She could tell by Carmen’s tone that it was not the first time she had asked the question. But it was the first time Ava heard it.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing! I don’t see anything,” she said. “Just light. Just bright light.” She was still crying, still angry that the woman holding her hand at this moment was not her mother, and never would be. “I can’t see anything,” Ava said.
There was only blurry brightness before Ava’s eyes. And then the light fluctuated, as did the darkness, like something passing back and forth before a flashlight.
“Did you see that?” Carmen asked. “Did you see a change in the light just then?”
“I didn’t see anything!” Ava yelled. “Just shadows! I can’t see anything!” She snatched her hand away from Carmen. Ava’s tears stopped, replaced by anger and bitterness.
Then there was the sound of Carmen laughing. It was a high, proud laugh. And then Macon was laughing, as well, and the fear that had been in his voice was less than it had been.
“What?” Ava said. “What’s so funny?”
“You’re doing better,” Carmen said. She kissed Ava’s hand. “You’re doing better! You couldn’t see any changes in light before. The doctors said that, if you got better, that’s how it would start—with changes in light. You’re getting better.” Her voice was bubbling with a joy that, in spite of the many grudges Ava held against Carmen, the child was comforted by.
“I don’t understand,” Ava said.
“It’s okay,” Macon said softly. He sat up on the bed, still holding Ava’s hand. “What’s the last thing you remember, kiddo?”
Ava thought for a moment. The racing of her heart was beginning to slow. “I remember the dog,” she said.
“Okay,” Macon said. “Anything else?”
“He’s fine, by the way,” Carmen added. “The dog. You really did heal his leg. You really did it!”
“You’ve been in and out of consciousness for the past few days,” Macon said. “This is the third time you’ve woken up. The doctors said you might not remember. It was like watching someone in a fever dream—speaking and responding to questions, but you know they’re too sick to really understand.” He sighed. “Scared the hell out of us, kid.”
“You woke up screaming the past two times,” Carmen said. Her tone was almost cheerful, as if delivering a death letter in a gift envelope. “You woke up screaming that you couldn’t see anything and calling for help.” Ava could hear the smile on Carmen’s face. “You said it was nothing but whiteness.”
“But now, there are shadows, too,” Macon added, a hint of cheerfulness in his voice, as well. “Which means you’re on the mend.”
“The doctors said that maybe that would happen,” Carmen added. “They said that you might ge
t better, that maybe your body had had some type of overload, or something—they’re not really sure what’s going on—and that maybe you’d get better all on your own with enough time.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” Ava said. She focused on her vision. There was still darkness, but the light she could see was like having bandages over her eyes. There were shapes that she could almost see, and the more she focused on them, the more they seemed to become more than simply a binary of light and dark, but a composite of angle and gradations.
“You were only conscious for a few moments. But we knew you’d be okay.”
“Wash came by while you were sleeping,” Carmen said. “He sat and read to you for a while. He seemed pretty sure that you’d wake up if he read to you.”
“Where is he?”
“His father took him home,” Carmen replied.
“We’ll get him down here now that you’re awake,” Macon said. He squeezed Ava’s hand with a hint of finality. “I’m going to go let the doctors know you’re up. Okay, kiddo?”
“Yeah,” Ava said.
“And I’ll get word to Wash, too.”
“Okay,” Ava said.
He kissed her on the forehead once more. Then he stood and, after lingering for a moment, left the room. Then there was only Ava and Carmen together.
“You thirsty?” Carmen asked. “I imagine you’ve got to be.”
“Yes,” Ava said. She closed her eyes. There was an instinct within her to rest them. Maybe, she thought, the next time she opened them she would be able to see.
Carmen carefully rose from the bed and waddled over to where the nurses had brought in a pitcher of water and a Styrofoam cup. “I knew you would start to get better,” she said. “I’m not saying that nothing bad can ever happen to anyone—I know better than that—but I knew that you’d be okay. You’re a kid who can chew glass.” She pressed a button on the side of Ava’s bed and it tilted upward. “Here,” she said, pressing the cup up to Ava’s lips.
Ava drank slowly. Now that she was no longer thinking about her loss of vision, she realized how dry and sharp her throat felt. More than that, she began to understand just how bad the rest of her body felt. Everything was sore and almost no part of her seemed as if it wanted to work. It was like a blanket of stones had been placed over her.
“More?” Carmen asked as Ava finished the cup.
“No,” Ava said. “I mean, no, thank you.”
“It’s not quite so bad, is it?” Carmen asked, placing the cup back on the small food stand that had been wheeled into the room.
“It’s good,” Ava said.
“I mean, this,” Carmen replied. “You and me. This.”
Ava inhaled and held the breath. She thought of all the different ways she could reply. She thought of the snide remarks, the cold acquiescence, all the ways she usually protested Carmen’s having married her father, come into her life. But the breath in her lungs was still uncertain, still laced with fear over her blindness and the pain racking her body and the general confusion of her world.
But, within that breath, there was the fact that she did not want to be alone. The fact that, in spite of everything she had said and done to Carmen, the woman had never resisted, never become angry, never fought back. She only endured the girl’s attacks, one after the other, and did not leave, did not submit, did not become angry or resentful. She behaved like a mother.
Ava did not answer, which, in its own way, was a type of admission that, even in the worst of wars, there can be moments when both sides are willing to have a moment of peace.
* * *
Macon was proud of the security the hospital was managing. It was much better than it had been the first time around, but he hoped this wouldn’t be frequent enough that they might yet improve. The entire floor where Ava was held was guarded by policemen stationed at the elevators and stairwells. Everyone had to have ID just to get out of the elevators, regardless of how much the families of other people on the floor disapproved of it.
It was all necessary, especially now. The doctors had done everything they’d promised to protect Ava, and now that the experiment was over, they took the video and the dog and studied them both, finding that everything they were skeptical to believe—the fact that the girl did, in fact, have the ability to heal injuries—all of it was true. And no sooner than they’d finished analyzing the data did they place the video online, and let the fire spread as quickly and wildly as it wanted.
“Macon? Macon?” a voice called. It was Dr. Eldrich. “You got a second?” He took Macon by the arm and led him into a small, empty office at the far end of the floor. “I wanted to talk to you about Ava. About how the experiment went.”
When they were inside the office Eldrich closed the door. Macon sat at a small desk littered with papers and notes. There was a photograph of a smiling woman and child on the far corner. “What is it?”
There was an excitement in Eldrich’s eyes. “As you know, your daughter healed the subject, the dog. Fully and completely healed its broken leg.”
“That’s what you’ve been telling me for days now,” Macon said.
“Well, we’ve been able to do more in-depth tests,” Eldrich said. “It’s very exciting, really. She healed it better than healed actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t go into too much of the details, but the short version of it is that there’s no scar tissue. Normally, when a broken bone heals, there’s a mark left. You can always tell, through X-rays or autopsy, that it’s been broken. Well, that’s not the case here.” His hands began to move as he spoke. He made imaginary bones and broke them and put them back together again. “It’s really, really amazing.”
Macon thought for a moment. He got the impression that he should be more interested in all of this, more fascinated by it the way Eldrich was, but he wasn’t. “What about Ava? What happened to her? The whole reason I agreed to do any of this was because you said that it would help you find out more about what’s going on with her body, why she’s cold and tired all the time. I want to know what this is doing to my daughter.”
The excitement in Eldrich waned. “Well,” he began, “we’ve got a few theories on that.”
Eldrich paused. He almost spoke, then stopped himself. Then he sighed and said, “Honestly, we don’t know much. All we know is what’s happening to her after she does these...things, whatever we want to call them. Her red and white blood cells are dropping dramatically. This latest effect, the blindness, we honestly don’t know what caused that. From everything we’ve been able to test, she should be fine. We can’t really spot anything physically that’s causing her to go blind. But, again, her blood isn’t normal right now, so the baseline we would normally use to find out about her eyes is, well, skewed.”
“But she’s getting better,” Macon said. “She just woke up. She can see light now.”
“Really?” Eldrich said, his eyes going wide. “That’s terrific. We’d hoped that might happen.”
“So you can’t tell me much of anything, can you?” Macon asked.
Eldrich paused. “I can’t tell you the things you would want me to tell you,” he said. “I don’t know the why of any of this. I don’t know the how. Hell, I’m even having a hard time telling you the what.”
“Would it offend you terribly if I told you that you’re giving me a headache the size of Russia? That wouldn’t upset you, would it?” Macon rubbed his temples. “Is there a point here? Anywhere on the horizon?”
“I’m sorry,” Eldrich said quickly. “It’s just so exciting. During the autopsy—”
“Autopsy?” Macon interrupted. “What autopsy?”
“The dog’s,” Eldrich said. “It’s dead.”
At last, there was silence.
“What are you talking about?” Macon asked after a moment.
“Heartworms.”
“Wait...what? I thought it had a broken leg?”
“It did,” Eldrich said. His voice
was solid and calm now that he was again doing what he knew very well how to do: talk about science and research and not about people and daughters and feelings. “It had a very bad fracture, which—”
“Which Ava fixed,” Macon interrupted, almost yelling. He stood and walked closer to Eldrich with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Very suddenly, he was the sheriff again. “Ava fixed that. She healed it. You told me that as soon as it happened.”
“Yes, she did,” Eldrich answered, his voice beginning to waver again.
“So what the hell are you talking about the dog’s dead?” Macon poked the man in the chest with a finger. “Did you kill it?”
“What?”
“Did you all kill it? Wanted to dissect it, maybe? Try to see what happened from the inside out.”
“You’ve been watching a lot of television, haven’t you?” Eldrich quipped.
“Answer the question,” Macon demanded. “Why is the dog dead?”
“Heartworms,” Eldrich said again. Then, before Macon could interrupt, he continued. “It had heartworms the entire time. I promise you. Had them the whole time.” He held up his hands to keep Macon from speaking. “Yes, the animal had a broken leg, but that was just one of its problems. It also had heartworms. Well beyond the point of medicine doing anything for it. It was only a matter of time before the animal died. That was part of the reason we chose it for the experiment.”
Macon’s jaw clenched. “Okay,” he said slowly, finally beginning to believe Eldrich’s version of things. “But what about Ava—what Ava did?”
“Yes,” Eldrich replied. “She fixed its leg, but not the heartworms.”
Finally, Macon took a step back from Eldrich. His head was swimming with questions. There was an image of the world—this new world in which his family lived—and the image was beginning to crack at its foundation.
“I don’t understand,” Macon said, even though he was beginning to understand perfectly well.
“Neither do we,” Eldrich replied. “But it does explain the situation with Wash, doesn’t it?”
