She's Not Here

by Mandi Lynn

  “I don’t feel good,” Sam said.

  Avery pulled her chair up and sat by her. It was 4:35pm. She promised herself she’d stay for at least an hour today. Long enough to ease the guilt of not visiting enough.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. She pulled her backpack off. Inside, she had packed away an adult coloring book that Sam loved, but part of her wondered that it may be too advanced forher now. Should she have brought a children’s coloring book just in case?

  Sam looked at her hand on her stomach and lifted it. The stuffed dog that had been pinned in place fell to the floor. Avery picked it up and replaced it.

  “Does your stomach hurt?” she said.

  Sam’s face dropped and her eyes were for the dog. The corner of her lip rose and she lifted for hand to take him.

  “He’s so cute.”

  “Sam,” Avery said. “Does your stomach hurt?”

  Sam lifted her eyes but tucked the dog back into her chest. She frowned.

  “No?” she said, but the words came out as a question.

  “Then what hurts?” Avery asked, but Sam had already let her attention be taken away. She was staring at the bruise on her hand, and although that was the direction of her eyes, Avery could tell her mind was somewhere far off. Not once did Sam blink. Her eyes were open, moving just slightly, but never enough for her to need to turn her head. Her lower lip hung just a bit.

  “Sam?” Avery said.

  “I don’t feel good,” she said. Her head stayed level. She was in a trance, and Avery was terrified to break it. As odd as it was, it was during spells like this Avery recognized Sam the most. With all emotion gone from her face, she could imagine the Sam she used to know.

  Avery waited for Sam to speak.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “But I don’t know what.”

  Avery waited again, for more words to come or for her sister to surface, but she never did. Sam blinked and Avery could tell whatever trance it was, it was about to be broken.

  “Do you remember the campfires we used to have?” Avery asked.

  Sam turned to look at her and smiled. The gesture was real and there was Sam. Bright as day. There was no mistake that she was in the room.

  “We’d roast marshmallows, and they’d fall into the fire,” she said. “We’d never get to eat any because they always fell off.”

  “Yours fell off, mine caught on fire,” Avery said. She laughed, but Sam frowned. She was still there, no matter how dull the spark, Sam was still present and aware. She didn’t close her eyes; she stared straight at the ceiling. Avery followed and saw the plain, pale white tiles.

  “Is that what you look at all day?”

  “I get lost,” Sam said. “It’s been happening a lot these days.”

  “I bet,” Avery said, though the words came out harsher then she intended.

  “I forget it’s there sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam stared but made no move to answer. She was unblinking, and it was this staring that scared Avery. When she looked out into space like that, her body seemed inhabited. She supposed it was like that sometimes with Sam. She was there physically, but her spirit had long floated away. It came back sometimes, but only for fleeting moments that were always too short.

  She never answered, but Avery saw her eyes gloss over. What was she thinking about?

  “Sam?” she said.

  Sam turned and smiled, but it was just her body going through the motions. The switch had been flipped, and she was gone again. It was odd, sometimes, how just by looking, Avery could see if Sam was all there. There was just a stranger laying in the bed smiling back at her, a stuffed dog she called Pup in her hands.

  Chapter 27

  Willow was scrubbing her hands down before she entered the lab for the third time. By now, she could get into the lab without issue. She rushed away with Randy’s badge and returned without anyone ever noticing. She had come back to fix her mistakes after she had dropped the beaker, and now she was ready to continue the next set of steps that would bring her closer to what could cure Sam and possibly anyone else with Alzheimer’s. Her scrubs were fresh, and her hair was tied back and secured with a hairnet. She wore the full scrubs, covering all but her eyes. The schedule said the lab was going to be empty, but since her run-in with Matthew she wanted to keep risk at a minimum. The door to the lab was still locked when she turned the knob.

  The room was cold, and when she flipped the light switch on it glowed. Instruments were lined up perfectly on the counter, and tools were placed on their shelves according to the labels that were scattered on everything imaginable. In the far end of the room was the fridge.

  Willow pulled the door open. She was afraid of so many things. Someone could have taken her test tube, or broken it, or misplaced it. The lab had a system, but she was invading it. Even though she was following all the rules, she knew at any moment someone could catch on and take her vaccine away with it.

  It was still sitting on the shelf when she opened the cabinet door. The test tube was latched onto a holder and a printed label said Riley Rose. Everything was exactly as she had left it.

  She had gone in the day before and begun the vaccine from scratch with leftovers of Sam’s blood that she hadn’t used to make up for the test tube she had dropped.

  She picked up the test tube and began to set up her station. It would be simple again today. Beaker, Bunsen burner, more chemicals—all these things that she had little to no contact with in her position as a nurse.

  She lit the match and turned the knob of the Bunsen burner to release the gas. As soon as she held the match over the tip of the Bunsen burner it caught fire. It burned an uncontrolled orange until she adjusted it to a thin blue. Holding the test tube over the fire, it bubbled and turned the dull purple bright and vibrant. It took only a few seconds for the colors to shift, and soon enough, it was time to take it away from the fire and rest it in the holster. She turned off the Bunsen burner and pushed it away from her work space.

  It was with careful breath that she used an eye-dropper to take samples of purple solution and drop them into the test tube full of clear liquid. One, two, three, four drops and she was done.

  There was nothing spectacular about it. The vaccine neither bubbled nor simmered. She watched as the purple drops spread out through the clear liquid, muting the purple tone until it stood flat and clear with only a small hue of purple. She slid a small jar across the counter. The label read steroid induced glutamine. It was the only part of the solution that wasn’t in the instructions. It was an ingredient the original creator of the mixture had thought of, but never implemented. It’s unstable when used incorrectly, but it helps promote the production of nerve cells. She put two drops into the test tube.

  The recipe didn’t call for mixing; only dropping. The chemicals would react with one another, and that would be that.

  She let the test tube stand for the allotted ten minutes, cooling itself. When the time was up, she used the tongs to grasp the test tube and open the fridge. It felt too simple as she placed the tube into one of the holsters.

  She would come to think of the vaccine all night, wondering what it was doing in the fridge, how the two chemicals were reacting to each other that caused them to manifest a vaccine for a disease that stumped scientists for so long. Another twenty-four hours was all it would take to bring a cure to the surface.

  Willow wasn’t there the next morning when the lab techs were going through the fridge. Every Friday morning, they made it a habit to clean the lab from top to bottom. The goal was to get rid of any residue that may have accumulated on equipment and shelves, but it was also to take inventory and throw out any abandoned specimens.

  It was a team of two that were going through the lab. They were students for the medical school across the street. Julie and Lucas worked together to log everything and scrub each surface they touched. Julie started on the left side of the room and Lucas on the right.

  �
��Hey, Julie, all the samples have to be logged right?” Lucas was at the fridge. He was checking each sample as he moved it to clean the shelf.

  “Yeah,” Julie said. She was elbow deep in samples that were sitting on the shelf, but her notes still read clear.

  “This one has a patient ID, but the lab tech’s name isn’t written on it.”

  Julie put her clipboard down and crossed over to Lucas. He held out the small test tube. The contents were clear with a tint of purple. Nothing floating, no bubbles. Julie took the tube from his hand.

  “Riley Rose,” she said. She looked closer to find a lab tech name on the tube, but there was none. She walked back to her clipboard and lifted the pages.

  “What are you looking for?” Lucas asked.

  “Sometimes when the lab techs reserve the lab, they’ll write down what they’re working on, but I don’t see the patient’s name in here anywhere. I’ll write down the information on the bottle so we can look it up in the system when we get back.”

  Julie found a blank piece of paper at the back of her clipboard and copied the patient’s name off the tube before handing it back to Lucas. He placed it back on the original shelf after he had finished cleaning it, and by the time the two students left, it was like they had never been in the lab in the first place. The only tell was the sharp smell of bleach that hung in the air.

  Willow slipped through the door at the twenty-four-hour mark. As soon as she opened the fridge door, she knew something was off. She tried to remember how the test tube was placed when she had been in the lab previously. Hadn’t she left the label facing out? She looked around the lab and everything seemed a bit off. It was all too neat. The lab was always neat, but now everything seemed perfect, untouched. But the vile, Riley Rose, had been touched.

  Her breath hitched. Could someone know, just by picking it up, that the vile wasn’t supposed to be there? She had placed the false label on it to make it blend in, but she had never checked to see if there was a patient named Riley Rose.

  The vaccine was done. Everything was exactly as it should be. The glass was crystal clear through the tinted sign. It settled into the vial perfectly smooth. All it would take now was a simple application with a syringe.

  The door opened and a lab tech walked in. Willow jumped when he stepped through the door and the tube almost felt out of her hands. She slipped it into her pocket before the man had a chance to see her.

  “Good morning,” he said. He was suited up, but the ID on his scrubs had the medical school’s logo. His name was Lucas.

  Willow stepped away from the fridge and made herself busy by looking through one of the drawers with all the freshly sanitized tools. She listened to Lucas as he made his way across the room and opened the fridge door. His hand settled on the shelf the Riley Rose vile had been resting. Willow tried to ignore the way her blood pressure seemed to sky-rocket.

  “Hey, you didn’t happen to see a vial with the patient’s name, Riley Rose, on it did you?” he asked.

  He still had the fridge door opened when he turned to Willow. Her body went rigid when she heard his words. She wanted to run out of the room, but he didn’t know she had it, not yet at least.

  “No, I’m just checking things for Dr. Florence.” She was thankful for the name once she thought of it. He was the department chair. Odds were Lucas knew who he was, but had never met him officially. There was no way he could fact check her.

  Lucas pursed his lips and turned back to the fridge, moving some test tubes around to see if maybe he had missed the vile.

  “Why?” she asked.

  It was probably the last thing she should be saying. Keep your nose out of it, that was the best way to proceed without anyone finding out what she was doing, but she had to know what he knew about Riley Rose.

  “Well, we did inventory today and came across a vile labeled Riley Rose, but there’s no patient with that name in this hospital.”

  “Maybe another lab tech came and took it already,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe. Or I could have just misread it.” He laughed to himself quietly. “Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Willow tried to let out a gentle laugh herself, but it came out forced.

  “Huh,” he said. He was still looking through the fridge. The vial was still in Willow’s pocket, weighing more by the second. She imagined it was a huge bulk in her scrubs, that at any moment he could look over and see it there and he’d know she was hiding something.

  Lucas was empty handed and confused by the time he left the lab. Willow pulled the vial out of her pocket and saw the name Riley Rose stare back at her. She buried it back in her scrubs and left the room, terrified and excited, all at once.

  Here it was, what could be the cure to Alzheimer’s, and it was in her pocket. Something so powerful and potent, and it could fit in the palm of her hand.

  She could hear Randy as she walked down the hall. He was already in Sam’s room, and he was the first thing she saw as she walked into the room.

  “Look,” Willow said. It was just the two of them and Sam. Sam had the stuffed dog in her hand, cradling it like a baby. Willow pulled the vial out of her pocket and took her husband’s fingers and curled them around it.

  His face was confused at first. He turned it over until he could read the label.

  “Riley Rose?” he said.

  “It’s fake,” she whispered. “That’s the vaccine, that’s what I’ve been working on.”

  His face changed. Confusion turned to terror before he grabbed Willow by the arm and pulled her out of the room.

  “I’ll be back, Sam,” he said, but she never looked up from the stuffed dog.

  “Randy,” Willow said, but he walked in a silent march as they both made their way to his office. He tried to appear normal to anyone passing by. He loosened his grip on Willow’s arms and let his hand wander into hers until their fingers were intertwined. They walked down the hall like that. Anyone watching them would think they were both just taking their lunch break together.

  They reached his office and locked the door behind him.

  “Sit, please,” he said.

  He checked the watch on his wrist and let a breath out.

  “It’s the cure,” Willow said. She had the vile in her hand again. It seemed too small to be so significant, but after years in the medical field, Randy knew otherwise.

  “Don’t say that,” he said.

  “But it is.”

  “You don’t know that. Do you even know if that’s what they had done in the original experiment?”

  Her face dropped and her arms came to rest in her lap. “I had to make a few adjustments.”

  “And just because it worked on mice doesn’t mean it will work on humans. It will need to be modified most likely.”

  “I did modify it,” she said.

  “But you can’t test it first. Willow, do you realize how much testing a single vaccine gets before the thought of using it on humans is entertained?”

  He realized now, just how much trouble they were in. Of course there was no way she could test the vaccine properly, everything about what they were doing was illegal.

  Willow sank into the couch, but the vial was still firm in her grasp. She turned it over in her hands, watching the liquid turn in shift.

  “Willow,” he said. The frustration was there, loud and clear. She looked up, her eyes clear and sharp.

  “Stop,” she said. “Stop treating me like I don’t know. I know what goes into creating a vaccine. I’ve been researching this disease for years. I’ve lived and breathed this disease. I’ve seen my father suffer from it. I’ve seen him die because of it, and now I can feel it! I can feel myself forgetting and losing myself just like I watched my father lose himself.” The words rushed out of her mouth before she had time to stop them. His face was still tight when he looked at her, but he began to soften. He wanted to yell, but he couldn’t. He saw the fever in her eyes, bright and clear. She held each muscle in her body
taut, ready to run.

  “What?” he said. He reached out for her hand, but she pulled it away. His attention made her feel like a child. She couldn’t stand having him look at her like this, like she was broken and needed to be fixed.

  “It will work,” she said.

  “Willow, have you been having issues with your memory?” He tried to think back to their nights at home, whether she wandered or had a hard time with conversations. They were both so tired at the end of the day, he couldn’t think of what they normally talked about over dinner. Dinners were always the finale of the day, the last task you had to complete before going to bed. If she had been showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s, she never let it show.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “The vaccine will work for Sam.” She couldn’t look at Randy. His eyes were probing, like he was scanning her for signs of the disease. She could almost see him tracing backwards in his mind to their past conversations, looking for clues. Had her memory been bad in front of him? She forgot things, but Randy would never think of it as early-onset Alzheimer’s. He would have accounted it to stress.

  At some point, he gave up. “Even if the vaccine does work, it will only prevent the disease from getting worse; it won’t give Sam her memory back.”

  “It’s possible it might.”

  She was contemplative. Her eyes were in a tight line as she looked across the room. The vile was still in her hand. She wasn’t holding it out to him anymore, but now he eyed it with curiosity.

  “What do you mean?” Randy said. He wanted more information, but was afraid to believe any of it. With discoveries such as the one Willow was hoping for, it was easy to jump to false conclusions before the science caught up with reality.

  “The adjustments I made,” Willow said. “They were to add a steroid induced glutamine protein, which reacts with the rest of the ingredients in the vaccine to cause speeded growth in nerve cells. It’s been recreated in some of the same studies the mice were in. I was looking closer into the author of the article, and he had another finding, and that was using the protein to create nerve cell growth. He was going to combine the two experiments—the vaccine and the protein—but the article isn’t published yet.”