The Wanting by Michael Lavigne Page A

had a little window, like in a prison. I pressed my face to the glass. Her room was all flowers, get-well cards, balloons. It looked like a little party was going on in there, but when I opened the door, it wasn’t flowers I smelled but piss, stale breath, unwashed skin. I almost fell backward into the hall. Still, I let the door close behind me, swinging shut on its hydraulic arm with a great hiss, as if the air were being let out of a tin of coffee.
    Dasha Cohen no longer looked like her photographs. Her mouth was slightly parted, revealing teeth that had been allowed to yellow, and here and there, in the cracks and joints and along the creases of her gums, the color of green tea. I bent over her. The scent of her breath pooled around me, thick, soupy, palpable, almost edible, like strong cheese. Her skin was white as chalk, leprous, yet blotchy, the blood having settled on the underside of her arms and neck. She looked like a two-tone Moskvitch, white and purple. They’d covered her in a thin sheet that did nothing to hide the contours of her rag-doll body—not fleshy and round as I knew she must have once been, but twiggy, skeletal, a girl of straw. Her two legs shot straight out from her hips, but her feet were skewed unnaturally, as if broken, which indeed they might have been. Ifelt I should have been able to read into them some intention, as though she were speaking through her limbs, drawing herself into a pictograph that, had I but the key, would reveal the meaning of all this, of her pain, her loss, her shattered life. Yet her hair, remarkably, was in perfect order; someone had brushed it. In her photo, it had been short, spiky, punkish, like Anyusha’s. Now it was all soft ringlets upon her thin shoulders. Perhaps this made her mother happier.
    But why, why couldn’t they also brush her teeth?
    I set my hand upon her forehead. It was neither cool nor hot. I checked my own just to see: we were the same. Then I let my fingers run along her cheek, her jaw, her lip. Her skin should have been smooth and fat, but it was dry and coarse, almost like salt, and the fine, golden hairs on her lip had become wiry, like an old woman’s. I whispered, “Oh! Dasha!”
    If I thought she would be moved by my tenderness I was wrong. She remained a stone beneath my hand. I leaned even closer. My lips grazed her earlobe, and the pores of her cheek were like moon pits in the corners of my eyes. She seemed to say to me, “Is this why we came here? All this long way? Is this the salvation we were promised?”
    “I’m here to help you,” I whispered.
    “Who can help me now?” she seemed to say.
    Her torpid breath plumed up my nostrils and reeled down my throat. “I have a daughter, she’s only a little younger than you. You two would get along. You could teach each other.”
    But she said, “Look at me. Look at my young body. I’m snapped into pieces like dry crackers.”
    The sun cut through the jalousies and laid a swath of gold across Dasha’s broken chest. “If you wake up right now, I’ll take you home with me, I promise!” I said.
    Overwhelmed, I took hold of her shoulders. I wanted her to know there was a bond between us that nothing could sever. “You’ve seen him, too, haven’t you?” I cried. “That bastard!”
    Just then the door opened.
    “What are you doing here?” It was the nurse.
    My hands went back into my pockets.
    “I’m just visiting,” I said.
    “Poor thing,” she sighed.
    “I was in the same attack.” I pointed to my wounds.
    “Aha,” she said.
    “My doctor said I should come see her,” I explained.
    “But why?”
    “She said it was part of my cure. I really don’t know.”
    I felt the nurse’s hand gently come to rest upon my forearm.
    “Look!” I said.
    “Yes?”
    “She opened her eyes.”
    “No, love, she didn’t.”
    “She did.”
    “It’s an illusion. People often think that. But if it really happened the monitor would register it.”
    “You didn’t see her