Page 5 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

“Yes, I was paying attention, no, I did not understand why we had to come and see a new doctor,” said Nadya. “I like the woman who gives me the shots. She always lets me have a sweet when she’s done. A suck-pop. I enjoy the suck-pops.”

“I don’t even know where to begin with that,” said Pansy, and turned to Carl. “You handle her. I’ll be in the car.”

Then she stomped away, and Carl was alone with his daughter, who looked up at him with despairing confusion in her eyes. He knelt down, to be more on a level.

“All right, pumpkin, you know how most little girls your age have two arms?”

“Yes,” said Nadya, surprised. Of course she knew that. She paid attention to people, she owned several dolls, and she would have noticed long since if one and a half had somehow become the standard number of arms. “I don’t because the doctor says my mother was probably exposed to something teratogenic while she was pregnant with me, and it’s a miracle that everything else about me is as perfect as it is.”

“Can’t remember ‘lollipop,’ but can say ‘teratogenic,’” murmured Carl, who did that fairly frequently, making comments like she couldn’t understand him if he kept his voice low. Nadya didn’t mind, though. It was better than Pansy, who rolled her eyes and stomped away, not explaining herself at all.

It was as if she thought that teaching a child English and eliminating as much of her accent as possible was like pressing the reset button on their upbringing and culture, and could transform Nadya into an American child overnight.

“Yes,” said Nadya, uncertainly.

Carl seemed to remember that she was there. He smiled encouragingly and said, “Well, we know the other children can be cruel.”

How could they know that? They had never been to her school during classes, never seen the way the children interact. Unless the assumption was that all American children will be cruel, that they somehow can’t help themselves, which seemed unfair. Some of the children she went to school with had to be taught not to abuse those smaller than themselves, but they were all quick studies, and she had seen little cruelty from the children themselves. She blinked at him in slow bewilderment, waiting for him to start making sense.

“We wanted to make sure you’d be comfortable, and we wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible, so you wouldn’t have to wait too long.” He paused, apparently waiting for her to catch on and get excited, then sighed a little and said, “We’ve bought you a new arm.”

Nadya blinked again, slow and deliberate. “But I have an arm,” she said, and raised her left hand toward him, palm outward and fingers spread, so he could see the whole thing.

“This is what’s called a prosthetic arm,” he said. “It goes over your right arm, so it will be the same length as your left. You’ll have a hand, too, although you won’t be able to use it.”

“Protez?” asked Nadya, and was suddenly glad that Pansy had already stalked away. Her accent might have been wiped into obscurity when she spoke English, but when she spoke Russian, even short words, it came rushing right back like the tide. She swallowed, forcing her tongue back to American patterns, and said, “I am fine. I do not need a protez—a, ah, prosthetic—arm. I am happy as I am.”

“But you can’t be,” Carl insisted. “You must want to be a whole little girl.”

Nadya paused. Why did she have to want that? She did perfectly well with one hand and one stump that she could use for gripping things when necessary; the world rarelydemanded more of her than that. The things she couldn’t do for herself were few and far between, and most of them were things she could live without. She didn’t need to polish her own nails when it was easy enough to convince the other girls to do it for her, and the hand she had was more than steady enough to let her reciprocate. She could play tetherball and kickball, and she got to sit out dodgeball, which didn’t look like it would be all that much funanyway.So there was nothing she could think of, really, that would be easier or better with two hands, especially when one of them wouldn’t even work.

“I do not,” she said, politely. “Thank you, though. I’m happy precisely as I am.”

Carl looked at her sadly.

ONE WEEK LATER,they were back in the doctor’s office, Pansy and Carl watching as the doctor strapped Nadya’s new prosthetic onto her right arm. He talked very slowly and carefully as he did, explaining how she could put it on and take it off by herself, how it would probably be easier, at first, if she slid it through her sleeves before putting her shirts on in the morning, and that she shouldn’t get it wet, but that she’d get used to it soon enough.

“After a little while, you’ll wonder how you could ever have gotten along without it,” he said jovially, and Nadya offered him a polite smile and didn’t contradict him. Contradicting adults so often ended badly. She hadn’t gotten her ice cream after their last visit to his office, and if the prosthetic arm was an inescapable future, she at least wanted it to be an inescapable future with ice cream.

She couldn’t feel the arm, of course, and she couldn’t movethe hand, but there was a simple lever of sorts inside the attachment point, which she could control by flexing her stump. So she raised her arm and flexed her stump, and watched with wide eyes as the unfamiliar arm swung forward, bending at the elbow to form a perfect angle. She unflexed and the arm straightened again.

“As you get older, we’ll be able to fit you with more advanced models,” said the doctor. “You’ll also develop the muscles that allow you to manipulate the arm by doing it, and that will make those advanced models easier for you to use. Everything feeds into everything else, after all.”

Nadya lowered her new arm and nodded at him gravely.

Then, again, it was time for Carl and Pansy to talk about her like she wasn’t there, voices bright and rapid, the doctor answering technical questions she couldn’t even begin to understand. Normally, when the three of them walked together, they walked with her in the middle, where passersby couldn’t see and possibly comment on her missing arm. Today, as they walked to the elevators, Pansy made sure she was at the outside, her new right arm facing toward the world.

Nadya had never felt so much like a trinket or a prize. She ducked her head and did her best to keep up, almost walking into the elevator door.

“Honestly, Nadya, watch where you’re going!” said Pansy. “If you give yourself a bloody nose, we won’t be able to go for ice cream before dinner.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nadya softly.

“And keep your head up. People will think we beat you.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nadya, and adjusted her posture, head up, shoulders down, trying to look like she liked this, like she was completely confident and comfortable and content. The new prosthetic itched and chafed where it rubbed against herskin; even all the talcum and lotion in the world couldn’t change the fact that she had never intentionally strapped anything to her arm before, never seen herself as lesser because she only had one hand, never seen the need to transform into something more. This was not her choice. This was her body, but it was not her decision, and that alone made it very heavy, and difficult to carry.

They went out to the car as a family, Nadya buckling herself into the back seat after bending her new arm carefully up, out of the way. She supposed she could see why many people would think of this as a good thing, especially people who had misplaced the arms they started out with: it was somewhat nice to have an even weight on both sides of her body, keeping her right shoulder from drifting upward as she walked (a habit which had caused more than one matron to comment on how she would develop a hunch if she wasn’t careful). And having a second hand to lay across the strap did make it easier to click the buckle home.

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