“Why aren’t you with him, Carla?”
She shakes out her hair in a distracted movement. I’m sitting on the cot and Nina is sitting next to me. I don’t know when she climbed up but she seems to have been here for a while. My hands are at either side of my legs, holding on to the edge of the cot because at times I think I might fall off. Nina is in the same position, but she’s resting one of her hands on mine. She looks silently at the floor. I wonder if she is disoriented too. The nurse comes back humming a song, and still humming intermittently she opens some drawers and talks with Carla, who is putting her hair back up in its bun. The nurse wants to know where we are from, and when Carla tells her we’re not from the town, that we’re here on vacation, the nurse stops humming and stares at us, as if with this information she had to start the examination all over again. She’s wearing a necklace with three gold figures: two girls and a boy, the three of them close together, almost on top of each other, squeezed between her enormous breasts.
One of that woman’s children comes to this waiting room every day.
“No need to worry,” she says. She opens up the same drawers again and takes out a blister pack of pills. “You’ve just had a little too much sun. The important thing is to rest: go home, take it easy, and don’t be scared.”
There’s a water fountain just behind her, and she fills two cups of water and hands one to each of us, and she also gives us each a pill. I wonder what they are having Nina take, if it’s the same thing they give me.
“Carla,” I say, and she turns toward me in surprise. “We have to call my husband.”
“Yes,” she says. “Nina and I were already talking about that,” and her condescending tone bothers me, and it bothers me that she doesn’t stand up right away to do the thing that I have finally managed to ask her to do.
“You each take one of these pills every six hours, be sure not to go back out in the sun, and lie down and take a little nap in a dark room,” says the nurse, and she gives the blister pack to Carla.
On top of my hand, Nina’s hand still seems to want to restrain me. It’s a pale and dirty hand. The dew has dried and the lines of mud cross her skin from one side to the other. It’s not dew, I know, but you don’t correct me anymore. I’m so sad, David. David. It scares me when you don’t say anything for so long. Every time you could say something but don’t, I wonder if maybe I’m just talking to myself.
It takes you a while to get back to the car. Carla leads you both by the hand, one on either side. You or Nina stop every few steps, and then the whole group waits. Then, in the car, the gravel keeps Carla gripping the steering wheel in silence. None of the three of you says anything when you drive past the door of the house you left that morning and Mr. Geser’s dogs race across the yard and under the privet hedges to run alongside the car, barking. They are furious, but neither you nor Carla seems to notice them. The sun is already directly overhead, and you can feel the heat rising up from the floor. But nothing important happens, and nothing important is going to happen from here on. And I’m starting to think you’re not going to understand, that going forward with this story doesn’t make any sense.
But things keep happening. Carla parks beside the three poplar trees at her house, and there are many more details you’ll want to hear.
It’s not worth it anymore.
Yes, it is worth it. Carla pushes the button on her seat belt and it whips back into place, and with that whipping noise, my perception of reality comes back clearly. Nina is sleeping in the backseat. She is pale, and even when I say her name a few times she doesn’t wake up. Now that her dress is completely dry I see the haloes of discolored fabric, huge and amorphous, like a big school of jellyfish.
Really, Amanda, there’s no point.
I have an intuition, I have to go on.
“I’m going to carry this precious little thing inside,” says your mother, opening the door to the backseat, putting Nina’s arm over her own shoulder and lifting her out of the car. “And you two are going to take a good nap.”
I have to get out of here, I think. That is all I’m thinking while I see her struggle to close the car door with her foot, and then walk toward her house carrying my daughter. The rescue distance shortens and the rope that connects us pulls me to my feet, too. I follow them without taking my eyes from Nina’s little arm hanging over Carla’s back. There is no grass around Carla’s house, it’s all earth and dust. There’s the entrance to the house in front and a small shed to one side. In the backyard, I can see the fences that must have been for the horses, but there are no animals in sight. I look for you. I’m worried about the possibility of finding you in the house. I want to take Nina and get back into the car. I don’t want to go inside. But I need so badly to sit down, I need so badly to get out of the sun, to drink something cool, and my body goes inside after Nina’s.