Page 58 of The Calendar of New Beginnings
She shook her head. “Oh, you’re probably hungry. Feel free to stop and get something. Unless we need to get back right away to pick Danny up from school.”
The tension inside him was rising. “Jane is going to pick him up.”
He’d known better than to ask his mother. She would have asked all sorts of questions about this impromptu trip to Denver, which would make their way back to Ellen. As far as he knew, Lucy still planned to keep her conditionfrom her parents. In fact, he was starting to wonder if she was going to tellhimthe whole story. So far she hadn’t said a word about the appointment.
“I’m going to stop at a café I like and grab a sandwich,” he said, heading in that direction. “Maybe something there will sound appealing to you.”
“I won’t starve if I miss a few meals,” she replied in the most forlorn voice she’d ever used with him. “Trust me. I know what it takes for that to happen.”
Jesus. She was spiraling into serious depression right in front of him. “All right. I don’t know what to say to you now, but why don’t we start with you telling me what Dr. Davidson said?”
“He said he couldn’t see any clinical reason for this sudden fluctuation in my vision,” she said with an edge in her voice. “Apparently, sometimes it’s a patient’sperspectivethat causes them to see fluctuations.”
The ire in her voice could have punctured a tire. “What else?”
She threw out her hands. “He made me feel like I was imagining things. I’m not crazy! I see what I see. And my vision got worse after my fight with my mom. Of course, he gave me this BS song and dance about how important timing is for diagnosis. He might have seen something yesterday, but it wasn’t there today.”
Andy kept his face neutral. He understood what Dr. Davidson was saying. It wasn’t possible to confirm heart palpitations after the fact using an EKG.
“Dr. Davidson did confirm their ‘presumptive’ diagnosis that my optical nerve had been damaged. Yay, right? Today the nerve finally looked white, which showsafter the initial injury.”
A healthy nerve looked golden, Andy knew. “Well, that’s something.”
“Is it?” she railed. “My color vision still sucks. We did those stupid color panels again. Those kimchi hara things.”
“Ishihara?” he asked.
“Whatever. They’re stupid, and I failed. I couldn’t distinguish a red number or letter in a sea of orange dots or a blue one in a bunch of green dots.”
Personally Andy thought the color test was ingenious—the inventors had found a way to keep the brain from making guesses on the colors. “Your color vision can still improve, Lucy.”
“But it hasn’t since the first couple of weeks after my injury! I mean, sure, I can close my right eye and look with my left, but I’m not supposed to. And right now, my brain isn’t accurately computing what it sees when I’m looking with both eyes like a normal person. Maybe it will never adjust. Dammit!” She kicked the glove compartment.
His stomach flipped at her violence. “What else did he say?” he asked as calmly as possible.
“Dr. Davidson said I can still drive. The vision in my left eye is twenty-twenty like it used to be. My right eye is the same twenty-fifty it was when I had my last appointment.”
He knew better than to try and point out that the doctor’s news could have been much worse. It would be like pointing out to someone who’d lost a kidney that they still had one functioning. He didn’t want to be the “you should be grateful” asshole.
“Dr. Davidson said it’s still all a waiting game,” she continued, tracing the window’s edge. “Things could continue to improve. We need more time to see.”
How many times had he told a patient the same thing?
“Don’t take this personally, but sometimes you doctors suck. I don’t know why we even drove all this way. He had nothing useful to say, beyond implying I was a crazy psychosomatic woman. You took a day off for nothing, and I’m sorry.”
“I know it seems like this didn’t produce anything useful,” he said, reaching across the console for her hand, “but you confirmed a diagnosis. That’s huge! And it was smart to check things out.”
She scoffed.
“Lucy, I would take off a week if it were necessary. You’re not alone here. As for doctors sucking, I pretty much thought the same thing about all of Kim’s doctors in the end. Not to mention myself. There are limits to what we can do, and I freaking hate that.”
She curled her fingers around his hand and gripped it suddenly. “I’m sorry. I’m stirring things up for you, and I don’t mean to. And I don’t mean to be angry and pathetic either. I keep trying to tell myself I’m going to be fine, but all I can think about is not being able to take photos like I used to. See the world like I used to. I know I should try to teach myself a new way, but it’s going to take a while. Mostly, I just want to curl into a ball and cry. It’s not fair.”
“So you stay in Dare Valley as long as you need and figure it out,” he said, stopping at a red light. “There are worse places to be. You have me and your family.”
There was a decided sniff in the car. “I don’t feel like I have much of anything right now, but you’re right. I guess I’m going to have to find a new way to think about my mom. I’d be an idiot to fight with one of the few people in my camp.”
“I still think she’ll be easier to deal with if you tell her the truth,” he said, pulling into the parking lot of the café.
