The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page B

building raised more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Traveling across the country, he’d seen the materials used in houses get older and older. Here, in Ontario, the farther east you went, the grayer and rougher the stone got. Miss MacDonald’s sister lived in a house that in the city would have been an estate for a barrister. Here it was common. He cast his eyes around the stale-smelling home. A framed sampler hung on the wall over the piano, a shibboleth. It meant that, in that town, the family went back generations. The television was on, but it was muted. On it, a woman in an apron stirred a white paste in a bowl.
    The girl was waiting in her bedroom, still in her nightdress. She looked at him with black-ringed eyes, inured completely to the appearance of doctors and specialists who came to the house to study her, or saw her in their offices, syringes ready for filling with her blood; machines primed to take pictures of her insides; and their hands, always their clasping, palpating, compressing hands. “Are you going to stick me, Mister?” she said.
    “With a needle, you mean?”
    “Which arm?” She offered to him the insides of her elbows. Her skin was pitifully white, her veins a pale blue beneath her skin.
    “I don’t need any of your blood, Rose. I just want to talk to you. Maybe look at your tongue and your eyes.”
    “Cooperate with this nice man,” said her mother from the doorway. “He’s agreed to take time out of his busy day to have a look at you.”
    Rose nodded, resigned, and lowered the sleeves of her nightdress. She sat back down on the edge of her bed. “I probably have a great big stinking brain tumor,” she said.
    “
Rose . . . 
”
    “Did a doctor tell you this?” asked Simon.
    “No, he told Terry
something,
” said the child, looking at her mother. “She won’t tell me—”
    “You’re going to be fine, honey,” said Terry Batten.
    “—but I know. My head is like a computer that someone has smashed with a rock.”
    He looked back to the doorway, where both women stood watching them. He smiled at the mother. “I very much doubt that,” he said. “Would you be comfortable being alone in your room with me, Rose? Without your mother or your aunt?”
    “Alone?” said Terry. “I’m not sure if I—”
    “I don’t care, Terry,” said the girl. Neither woman reacted to this odd familiarity.
    “We can bring you some hot water, Doctor. If you think you’ll need any.”
    “I’m not a doctor,” he said, turning sharply to Grace in the door. “I told you that.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I want hot water, but not scalding.”
    The two women closed the door. He heard them walk to the top of the stairs and start down. He returned his attention to the child. “You fall down,” he said.
    “One doctor told me I’d be safest in bed, but I fall out of bed too.”
    “Of course you do,” he said. He took one of her little hands in his and ran his fingertips over the thin veins on the inside of her wrist. “Tell me, Rose, what happens before you have an attack? Do you see light? Do you smell or hear anything?”
    “I sometimes smell something.”
    “Hmm,” said Simon. He held her chin and gentled her mouth open. “What is the smell?”
    “Scrangle eggs.”
    He released her jaw. “Do you like scrambled eggs, Rose?”
    “Not anymore.”
    He laughed, soothingly. “Do you like tea?”
    “I’m only eight. I don’t drink tea.”
    “Perhaps today you will.”
    He looked at the girl’s eyes. The eyes of children were usually clear, as if made of polished glass. Rose’s brown eyes looked pale; the irises had the aspect of a watercolor painting that had been tainted with a drop of fluid after drying. They were runny.
    Grace knocked on the door and he opened it, taking a tray from her. She glanced anxiously at her niece, but Simon stepped in front of her to block her view. He listened again to her footfalls in the corridor. “Think of your body as a garden,” he