by Gen LaGreca
“I’m afraid not. Try not to worry. ’Bye, David.”
She hung up, leaving him to frown at the dead phone.
He was leaning against the brick balcony of Nicole’s brownstone apartment, where he and Mrs. Trimbell had gone with a private detective, searching for clues to the dancer’s whereabouts. The late afternoon sun was seeping between the leaves of a tree, dappling his body in lights and shadows as he resumed reading a report that he had been given by the detective. It was a background check that the investigator had run on a child named Cathleen Hughes. The investigator discovered that this child had run away at thirteen to become Nicole Hudson. That was how David learned about his patient’s past—the abandonment by her father, the disappearance of her mother, her entry into foster care, the revolving door of faceless families, the countless episodes of running away, and the only statement from the child herself in the whole of the dry document: a persistent plea to be near Madame Maximova’s School of Ballet. He lingered on the pages in silent tribute to the little swallow that had weathered many storms to reach its lofty perch.
David was waiting outside when a car turned onto Nicole’s block, a tree-lined street with a row of brownstones on the West Side near the theater district. The vehicle, which bore an emblem reading “Reliable Car Service,” stopped before him.
“Watch your head getting out,” said David, opening the back door. He placed a protective hand over the head of the turban-clad beauty who smiled softly, almost sadly, on hearing his voice.
After escorting Nicole to the safety of the sidewalk, he approached the driver’s window.
“How much do we owe you?” he asked the well-dressed young man.
“That’s already taken care of.”
“Where did you pick her up?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t give out that information.”
In his line of work David had learned never to make the same mistake twice. If Nicole were to vanish again, he wanted to be prepared. He flashed a hundred-dollar bill at the driver.
“Maybe you can make an exception this time for someone who’s trying to help her.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Ms. Hudson’s a regular customer. We used to drive her to the theater all the time. You’ll have to ask her.”
The young man smiled cordially and pulled away, never looking twice at the bill in David’s hand. The driver had scruples, which David did not appreciate! He walked to Nicole, squeezing her hands tightly against his chest in an expression of his immense relief at seeing her.
“Everyone going into your hospital room knew not to tell you the news. Who told you?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Someone on the hospital staff?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Someone from the theater?”
“David, please stop.”
“Promise—swear to me!—you’ll never pull that stunt again. Promise you’ll talk to me first if you hear something frightening and give me a chance to explain.”
“Promise you’ll tell me the news as it happens, David.”
“Don’t let the news frighten you, Nicole. I’m not down yet. This is only the first round.”
Tears swelled in the still-vibrant blue eyes dominating her face. “I can’t believe this is happening! When I was a kid, a lot of things I didn’t like were thrust upon me, and I was powerless to fight them. A nun named Sister Luke said that when I grew up, I would be in charge and could do as I pleased. I lived for the day when Sister Luke’s words would come to pass.” An inner pain furrowed her sublime face. “What do they want from us, David? Why can’t they leave us alone?”
“If I knew the answer, I would understand my father—and all the others like him.”
He curled her hand around his arm and walked a half step in front of her, past the gate of her brownstone, up the front steps, and to her third-floor apartment. She felt a heightened awareness of his body, as if he were leading her in a dance. When he walked, she walked. When he turned, she turned. He narrated the leisurely trip for her as they progressed:
“The sun is to the left of the garden. It’s casting a long shadow of leaves and flowers over our path. We’re stepping on the rosebush now.” She laughed. He stopped walking. With the reflexes of a dancer, she stopped, too, instantly and gracefully. “We’re at the steps, Nicole.” He climbed up, and she rose effortlessly with him. “The sky is turning a deeper blue. The sun is reflecting off the tall buildings to the right, making their windows sparkle like hot metal. On the left, a few wispy clouds near the horizon are already tinted pink. It’s going to be a pretty sunset.”
She listened with a child’s enchantment to the description that was a painting, and the world she could not see had never looked lovelier.
He escorted her into the neat, attractive apartment on the upper floor of the brownstone, explaining how he and Mrs. Trimbell had moved furniture out of the center of the rooms to prevent her from tripping. She touched things to get her bearings as they walked through the living room, dining area, ballet studio, master bedroom, and guest room.
After the tour, he faced her in the living room. “Mrs. Trimbell went for groceries. When she returns, I’d like to see you eat a big dinner.”
She nodded, knowing she needed food. “Thank you, David . . .”—she put her hands to her heart—“more than I can say. I’m sorry I worried you.” Her eyes had somehow hit the spot where his were, as if she were seeing him.
“I’m sorry you were frightened.”
They stood facing each other for a silent stretch that seemed strangely comfortable to both of them.
“I want you to rest now,” he said finally.
Tiring easily on her first day out of the hospital, she welcomed his guidance to the couch and limply sank into it. With dusk approaching, he turned on the lamp on the end table next to her. The large, translucent globe was on a dimmer switch. It came on faintly at first, then grew in intensity as he continued turning the knob. Nicole moved her head to the light.
He looked at her curiously. She stared intently at the globe from a foot away. He kneeled beside her and soundlessly turned the dimmer switch down until the light faded. Then he turned it up again, slowly. As the light reached full intensity, she cried, “I see light! David, I see light!”
He dimmed the light again.
“It’s gone now,” she said.
He raised the light once more.
“It’s back!” She stared excitedly at the globe, her voice trembling. “You told me I would recover some of my sight before the scar tissue grew to obstruct it again. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?” The globe cast a golden glow over a childlike face of sheer delight. “The nerves are growing! The experiment’s working!”
He gazed into her eyes with the excitement of Louis Pasteur at a moment of discovery. The thrill on his face swept away the anguish of the day and week. Finally, he found a voice that trembled as hers did.
“Hell, yes, Nicole! The experiment’s working!”
* * * * *
In the weeks that followed, David tried to keep busy in his lonely office. He read medical journals, wrote notes for research papers, and attended to the animals hidden in his lab, the five cats that would receive the second surgery to repair their optic nerves prior to Nicole’s operation.
He searched for a backup plan for performing Nicole’s second surgery, should CareFree maintain its prohibition, but nothing materialized. He continued his efforts to become licensed in another state or country in time for the operation, but to no avail. The rejections of the licensing officials formed an impenetrable wall:
“We require a clean history of regulatory compliance. A doctor who breaks the law in one state is a poor risk in another.”
“We check for legal cases pending or judgments against a doctor. We don’t license those with a questionable record.”
“Fill out the forms, and we’ll let you know in six months. . . . No, I’m afraid we can’t speed up the process.” N
icole’s second surgery had to be done in three months.
He explained his case to influential medical leaders, hoping to find one individual who would help. The answer he heard repeatedly was along the lines of “Unfortunately, Dr. Lang, there are considerations other than a distinguished clinical record, which you have, that make us unable to help you.”
During those weeks following Nicole’s surgery, David and his lawyer prepared for the hearing to repeal his suspension and to permit Nicole’s treatment. CareFree set a date for the case in mid-September; however, the agency failed to name an administrator to hear it. Meanwhile, Governor Malcolm Burrow was conducting a search to find a suitable running mate, declaring that he would make a decision in the coming weeks: “I will choose a candidate of the highest integrity and character, someone impervious to personal gain, someone who will work for the public interest.”
Sitting in his office, his hands idle, David tried to ignore the sound of turning pages amplified in the silence, the empty examining room beyond the door, and the unoccupied chairs in the waiting room. He tried to avoid looking at the hospital outside his window, where doctors in white coats walked briskly along the grounds, nurses attended patients, and ambulances whizzed by. He was in the midst of plenty, but his horn was empty. He could find no substance to fill the huge crater that had formed in his life. He covered his eyes to block the vision of the man who had ripped the OR from him and left in its place an empty pit.
* * * * *
A half-mile from David’s office, another lonely figure fought a quiet battle with despair. Life to Nicole felt like a bare stage. Gone was her beloved theater and busy career. Gone were the continuous, refreshing visual delights that sweetened her existence—the joy of reading a book, seeing a garden, watching the sun sparkle on the buildings, perceiving her own appearance in a mirror, preparing a colorful salad. Gone, too, was the visual excitement of movement—of a bird flying, a child running, a tree swaying, a car passing. Gone was her ability to observe other people, to know their appearance, to root them to a specific location, to observe the facial expressions and body gestures that had enriched her communications. Her lively universe of sights, colors, objects, and motions had vanished, leaving a vast emptiness.
Then there were the endless, maddening inconveniences that magnified her helplessness. She could not write a check, read her mail, compose a letter, count money, shop, eat, or dress without assistance. There were the untold frustrations of trying to walk across a room without stumbling, the disorientation of moving about in the unknown. Her cathedral of reality had shattered into a few disembodied fragments within the immediate range of her touch. Her awareness of whole objects existing in a whole world crumbled, and with it, her proud sense of efficacy in that world.
There was the financial strain of losing her job. And the disruptions in her sleep caused by the inability to distinguish night from day. Gone was her glorious confidence in facing the world. In its place crept a pervasive anxiety about a barrage of mysterious sounds and objects. The unknown was the frightening, and her entire new world was unknown. To be awake was to be anxious.
After a life of relying on her own inner resources, Nicole felt the crushing loss of her privacy and independence. She who had opened the huge gate of achievement now needed assistance finding the bathroom door. The result was, inevitably, depression. Gone was the radiant face, the easy laughter, the childlike exuberance that colored her manner. Nicole mechanically received Mrs. Trimbell’s guidance on eating, dressing, arranging household items, walking with a cane. Without excuses, complaints, or anger, the bewildered dancer practiced the simplest tasks, such as eating with a knife and fork. She tried, fumbled, and repeated the same actions countless times. Mrs. Trimbell patiently attempted to bring order and self-respect to the chaos and indignity of Nicole’s new condition, while her student developed an austere acceptance of her predicament.
Cheerlessly, Nicole entered her studio, a bare room with a hardwood floor, wall of mirror and ballet barre, where she spent hours each day practicing. She was supposed to dance holding the barre. When she disregarded her doctor’s instructions and ventured into the center of the room, every turn left her disoriented, discouraged, helpless.
There were, however, two sources of light in the dark chamber of her existence, two people whose glowing presence burned through her stoical indifference and rekindled her capacity for pleasure—her doctor and the Phantom.
David made an arrangement with Mrs. Trimbell in which he visited Nicole once a week, allowing the teacher time off. When he first appeared at her door, Nicole protested what she described as baby-sitting.
“I’m perfectly fine being by myself, David.”
“I’m not,” he replied.
“Do you mean that I need company, or that you do?”
“Both. I mean that I’m here because I want to be. Because I didn’t come to monitor you clinically, you’re of course free to throw me out.”
“And if I don’t, then it means you’re here because I want you to be.”
“That’s right,” he said, smiling.
“Then come,” she said, finding his arm and drawing him in, “and tell me what the world looks like today.”
Each time he visited, David chronicled the surroundings from the balcony of her apartment or from a nearby park they visited, lifting the gray clouds of Nicole’s internal landscape and filling the scene with color. He spoke lavishly, as if giving words to the sights before them was as much a need for him as it was for her.
“The city looks as if a stage crew backlighted it tonight,” he said one evening at dusk. He leaned against the brick border of her balcony. She stood beside him, her hand resting gently on his as he pointed to the sights. “The skyscrapers are dark gray columns silhouetted against a royal blue sky. Many lights from the windows dot the tall steel frames, defining them in the darkening sky. The buildings look serene and solid, like something you can count on. There’s a point of light above the city, too, the first evening star in a cloudless sky.”
“Where is it?”
“Right there,” he pointed above them, with her hand over his.
She leaned her head back, drinking in the beauty of the world she saw through his eyes.
* * * * *
One day while they walked home from the park, to Nicole’s delight, a thundercloud burst in a brief but violent summer storm. They took shelter under the canopy of a building.
“I like the rain. When it hits things, I’m aware of them,” she said. “I hear the low, rumbling sound of the rain beating against the awning over our heads. And the rain has a higher pitch where it strikes the roofs of the cars,” she observed with a childlike fascination. “I can hear the car wheels hissing against the wet pavement, and more drops seem to be landing on something to my left, maybe a windowsill.”
“It is a windowsill. You have a good ear for the music of the rain, Nicole.”
With the air suddenly cooled, he removed a light jacket that he wore and wrapped it around her. He held her in the warmth of his arm as she shivered in a thin blouse and shorts. Sprouts of blond hair barely covered her scalp, and a few freckles dotted her suntanned face, giving her a boyish, childlike look that pleased him.
“The sky is angry today,” he said. “It’s dense with ominous black clouds that have swallowed the tops of the buildings in fog. The city is dwarfed, robbed of its towering presence. And the sky also stripped the color away. Everything, from the buildings to the people to the pavement, is different shades of gray. The sky, which is vapor, wants to swallow the steel, glass, and flesh that is the city.”
She detected a tinge of bitterness. “David, that’s something the Phantom would say.”
“And what would you tell him?”
“I’d say that the city won’t let anything swallow it, certainly not something as wishy-washy as the sky. I’d tell the Phantom that the city will prevail. Don’t you think it will, David?”
She was shivering more now
. Her enchantment with the rain had vanished, and the question she asked left a troubled look on her face. Instantly regretting his remarks, David tried to dismiss the gray clouds that were creeping into his thoughts—the upcoming hearing, the idle hands restless to work, the innocent life before him for whose sake he must prevail.
“You bet, Nicole,” he said, his arm tightening around her in a reassuring squeeze. “The city will prevail.”
Ignoring the forced cheerfulness in the voice whose shadings were becoming familiar to her, she told herself that he believed his words, and that she did, too.
When they returned to her apartment, David read Nicole a play from her voluminous collection of classical dramas.
“I love reading, and I love literature,” she said of her library, which could rival any English professor’s.
Afterward, she played music for him. The lighthearted spirit of her selections made him think of his work. He described the history and problems of nerve repair, speaking as if she, too, were a doctor, sparing no technical terms. Interrupting only to have him define the words she did not understand, Nicole listened with interest, her quick mind grasping everything.
Mrs. Trimbell returned to find David lying on the couch, talking about nerve regeneration. Nicole sat on an area rug facing him, her long legs stretched in a split with her elbows resting before her, a pose that only a ballerina could find comfortable. The two greeted Mrs. Trimbell absently, surprised to see her, unaware that an entire day had passed. Then they continued their conversation. Mrs. Trimbell soon became accustomed to feeling invisible.
* * * * *
The Flower Phantom made his presence felt during the six weeks between Nicole’s homecoming and the hearing. His table occupied a prominent place in the living room. It held the dried remains of his flower arrangements. Nicole continued her search for the letter he had sent to her in the hospital, the one that was missing, but to no avail. The Phantom quickly obliged by sending another, along with a porcelain vase filled with fragrant white jasmine. Every week, a new arrangement followed, which served as the centerpiece on the dining-room table. David read the new letters as Nicole inhaled the scents of the luscious bouquets.
