Page 9 of The Calendar of New Beginnings
She finally met his gaze, and he saw the shine of tears in her eyes. Very un-Lucy-like.
“Bad. They medevac’d me to a hospital in South Africa. As you can tell, I’m still recovering my strength, but I’m mostly well. Dammit! I didn’t want to worry you. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
“That would be like not noticing my son had grown horns. I’m trained to notice these things. And you haven’t fully recovered.”
“I thought I could tough it out,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut for a brief moment. “Bluff my way through the homecoming. I couldn’t wait any longer. Classes start next week, and I wanted time to acclimate.”
More questions were surfacing. “Have you been in South Africa this whole time?”
“Yes.”
From her monosyllabic response, he braced himself to extract the details from her. “Tell me about your injuries.”
She blew out a breath. “It will only worry you more, and there’s nothing you can do anyway.”
“I’m already sick to my stomach,” he said more harshly than he meant. “More information will make me feel better. It’s the doctor in me. Don’t make me beg you.”
She flinched at his sincerity and let out a thready breath like she was gathering herself to face some grueling challenge. “I caught some shrapnel…in the back. The wounds still itch like crazy, but they’re healing pretty well.”
So, she’d been stitched up. Good Lord. But he could feel the weight of the other shoe about to drop. “What else?”
Her whole frame trembled. “They’re worried about my right eye. When I landed after the blast, I hit my righttemple on the SUV we’d come in. I have something called traumatic optic neuropathy.”
Oh, shit.
“Andy,” she whispered, her sad, vulnerable eyes meeting his. “They’re not sure I’ll regain my full visual acuity or my color vision. I mean, my vision improved a lot in the week I spent in the hospital. I went from twenty-four hundred to twenty-fifty, which is what my vision is now. At first red and black looked the same to me, but I can make out colors better now. It’s just hard to tell between shades within a color palette.”
His heart twisted at the bravery she was trying to inject into her voice. “Oh, Lucy.”
“They said time will tell, but Andy…there’s nothing they can do. Nothing! Can you believe that? No glasses or contact lenses. The only thing that will help is if my brain gets used to combining the two different images from my eyes, and the worst thing is that I can’t simply close my bad eye whenever I want to see correctly. It’ll only make this whole brain integration thing take longer if the vision in my right eye doesn’t return to twenty-twenty.”
“Wait!” he said, his mind spinning. “I don’t know enough about this condition to understand why they can’t correct it.” The moment he got home, he’d research the crap out of this thing.
“My doctors could explain it better, but they basically explained it like this. The retina is the camera. Har-de-har-har. Ironic, huh?”
He couldn’t even crack a smile.
“The optic nerve is the cable between the nerve and the brain, which renders the retina’s images, so to speak. Since my nerve is damaged, it’s like the cable connecting the camera and the renderer has been unplugged. Myvision isn’t correctible like for people who are far- or near-sighted.”
His stomach sank. Nerve damage was the worst kind. “They can’t operate?”
“No. And there are no eye drops to fix things. That’s what makes this so hard. There’snothingthey can do. It will either return to normal or it won’t.”
“But you said it’s already improved,” he said, trying to hold onto some thread of hope.
When she bent over like she’d been kicked in the guts, the only thing he knew to do was grip her hands harder.
“Not enough for someone like me,” she whispered. “I’m a right-eye dominant photographer. How am I supposed to take award-winning photos of people when I can’t see through my Leica? How am I supposed to show the horrors of battle or the beauty of a sunset after a massacre when I can’t make out the contrast of the colors?”
Oh, how he wished he had an answer for her. But he didn’t. He wasn’t sure how she was supposed to move forward. Photography was her life. If she couldn’t see properly…
“What am I going to do if I can’t travel anymore and take pictures?” she asked, rocking in place. “It’s who I am.”
The enormity of her return home finally hit him, and he leaned forward until he could press their temples together. “You took the teaching job at Emmits?—”
“The doctors say that if my vision is going to fully return, it’ll happen within the next three months. I’ll know right about when classes finish,” she finished harshly. “The weird thing is my visual acuity could return, but not my color vision or vice versa. The eye is so weird and complex. I had no idea. According to my doctors, it doesn’t help that I’m a photographer and a Type A personality. Apparently,this whole brain reconciliation thing is simpler for easygoing people who have less stressful careers.”
Andy had always thought the human body was nature’s most amazing marvel. But with Kim, he’d seen what could happen when things went badly.
