Chapter 27 Eliana
ELIANA
AN HOUR EARLIER
rest·ing: /?restiNG/: verb
I watch Bastian’s Range Rover peel out of the Olympus parking lot like the hounds of hell themselves are chasing him.
Frank clears his throat behind me. “I’m in trouble, huh?”
I turn to face him. The man looks genuinely awful. I swear his hair has thinned in the last ten minutes alone, and angry crows are stamping their feet all over the creases in the corners of his eyes.
I swallow back the more realistic answer, which is, Uh, yeah. You’re pretty much fucked. Frank doesn’t need to hear that right now.
“It’ll be fine,” I say instead, touching his elbow for reassurance. “He’ll cool down.”
“I really didn’t mean to—”
“I know,” I interrupt. “Look, Frank, here’s what you need to do: Get me a complete list of every issue we’re talking about right now. Don’t sugarcoat anything, but don’t catastrophize, either. Just facts.”
Frank gulps and nods, looking slightly less like he’s about to have a coronary.
“And then we’ll fix it,” I continue. “If you do, Bastian will move on. He doesn’t hold grudges against people who own their mistakes and solve problems.”
He slaps some color into his cheeks and sighs.
“I’ll do my best. They don’t tell you about these things when you’re first getting into my business, you know.
It gets dark faster than you’d ever suspect.
” He stares off into the distance for a weirdly long time, like he’s seeing ghosts out there.
Then he shakes his head. “Anyway, that’s for me to worry about, not you.
Seeing as how Mr. Hale just jetted off, if you’d like, I could give you a ride back? ”
“No.” That sounded way ruder than I intended, so I add, “I mean, no thanks. I’ll walk. I need to clear my head anyway.”
“It’s three miles.”
“That’s why the Big Man Upstairs gave us legs, right?”
Frank still looks queasy, but he nods. “Alrighty then. Suit yourself. I’ll get that report over to you as soon as I can.”
The February air bites at my face as I start walking. I pull Bastian’s borrowed pullover tighter around myself, breathing in the faint aroma of his cologne still clinging to the fabric.
This wintergreen scent is killing me.
Don’t think about it, I command myself. Better yet, don’t think about him at all.
But that’s like telling yourself not to think about elephants. The second you say it, boom—elephants everywhere.
By the time I get to the office, I’m too cold to think about anything at all. That’s good news for my sanity, bad news for the impending frostbite in my toes and the tip of my nose.
I’ll take it, though.
In other good news, Bastian is nowhere to be seen. Patricia says he hasn’t been back, so he must’ve gone somewhere else.
Or is he avoiding me? He’s probably avoiding me. I’m halfway between devastated and grateful. Devastated because I’m still squirmy on the inside after the Great Elevator Debacle, and grateful because it’s best for everyone involved if we never speak of that again.
Frank’s email is waiting for me, like he promised. I warm myself up and then get to cataloging the various issues. It’s grim, to say the least. Widespread systemic issues that are gonna be a nightmare and a half to solve.
What I don’t understand is how all this happened to begin with.
I know these systems. I approved these systems. I talked to everyone from the engineers on the eighteenth floor to the boots on the ground who are wielding the screwdrivers, and at no point did problems this serious ever get brought up.
As far as I was aware, it’s been relatively smooth sailing for two-plus years.
Did Frank break a mirror and earn seven years’ of bad luck? Have all of Bastian’s many unspoken sins finally come back to haunt him?
Or is something else going on?
Like… is someone sabotaging Project Olympus?
I don’t know and truthfully, I have neither the brainspace nor the level of seniority required to figure it out. I’m not exactly Chicago’s Sherlock Holmes.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t help. For the rest of the afternoon, I’m firing off emails and drafting contingency plans. Hours fly by in the blink of an eye.
If my phone didn’t ring at 4:45, I probably would’ve kept working long into the night.
“Hello? Is this Ms. Hunter?”
“Hi,” I say. “Yes, it is. May I ask who’s speaking?”
“This is Angelica from Dr. Haggerty’s office. We were wondering if you were coming by for your appointment today?”
“Oh, shit!” I jump up and accidentally send my chair and a cup of pens flying. A stack of papers gets knocked off my desk, too. “Yes, yes, I’m so sorry. It’s been a crazy— Just, shit. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. I’m so sorry.”
I hang up and grab all my stuff as fast as I can. I can’t find my little spiral-bound notebook that has a list of questions I wrote down after my last ophthalmology appointment. I could’ve sworn it was in that stack of files I just upended.
But there’s no time to comb through it, so I just shoulder my purse and run like hell.
“So did you just, like, really love eyeballs in med school or something?” I ask as Dr. Haggerty dilates my pupils with his little dropper.
He chuckles as he steps back to examine his handiwork. “Oh, no, nothing like that. It’s just that I failed every other specialty and this was the only one that would take me.” When he sees my jaw drop, he laughs again. “I’m joking, Eliana.”
I mime wiping sweat off my forehead. “Guess you flunked bedside manner, too.”
He laughs again. Dr. Haggerty is like if Santa Claus took up running marathons—white beard, booming laugh, but a trim physique and calves I would kill for.
“You can blame my dad’s side of the family for both things,” he says.
“They’re all eye doctors, which is how I fell into this profession.
And they’re all committed pranksters with bone-dry senses of humor, which is how I fell into this little side gig of stand-up comedy.
Some patients enjoy it more than others. ”
I grin up at him weakly. “If you give me good news today, I’ll laugh louder than you’ve ever heard anyone laugh before. Pinky promise.”
I wish his face didn’t fall when I said that. God, I wish his smile didn’t fade. I wish that merry little twinkle didn’t leave his eye.
“Oh, if only I could, Eliana.” He says it so remorsefully that those few little words all on their own are almost enough to make me cry.
My stomach plummets to approximately the level of my butt. “That doesn’t sound like the beginning of good news.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not.” He settles onto his rolling stool and clasps his hands between his knees. “Eliana, your vision is deteriorating almost exactly on pace with our initial projections.”
I wince and close my eyes. Don’t cry, don’t cry, please don’t—
Dammit. I’m crying.
“You’ve already lost significant peripheral vision. This does confirm our timeline, assuming decline remains steady at this rate.”
According to the morbid little countdown widget I installed on my phone, today was T-minus eighty-three days until the lights go out. Nice to know that my eyesight is punctual, at least.
“I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear,” Dr. Haggerty continues gently.
“But I need you to understand that ‘functional sight’ doesn’t mean you’ll wake up on day ninety completely blind.
It’s a gradual process. You’ll notice more tunnel vision, more difficulty with depth perception, more trouble in low light. ”
I nod mechanically, but I’m not really hearing him anymore. I guess that somehow, without realizing it, I’d started developing this hope that I was going to come in today and be told that they got everything wrong the first time around.
You’re not going blind—you’re actually gaining SuperVision?!
I know that’s dumb. I didn’t say it was a realistic hope. Just that I really felt it.
“—which is why I’m strongly recommending you begin orientation and mobility training immediately,” Dr. Haggerty is saying. “The earlier you start, the better prepared you’ll be when your vision does fail.”
“Orientation and mobility training,” I repeat numbly.
“Learning to navigate with a white cane, developing your other senses, understanding how to move safely through spaces without relying on sight. That sort of thing.” He rests his hands on his thighs.
“I have contacts at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind. They run excellent programs, and I can get you in this week if you’re willing. ”
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “Okay, yeah, sure. I guess that’s for the best. Set it up.”
Dr. Haggerty’s face softens. I can’t handle pity right now, I really can’t. I wish he’d just look away.
He keeps talking for a few minutes longer, but I’m fully checked out now. I just try to offer “Mhmms” in what feels like the correct places. Eventually, he pats me on the shoulder and hands me a pamphlet.
I shuffle out of the exam room, through the lobby, and back out into the street.
I’m not sure why I’m feeling so glum. This isn’t anything I didn’t already know. But the sky is grayer than it was when I first walked in and it seems like all the color has been sucked out of the world.
My lips aren’t buzzing anymore, either. It was overstimulating to the max at first, but I almost miss it now that it’s gone.
When I step out on the street, I look up and down the road. To the left is home. The only things waiting for me there are a bag of Doritos and the unlimited black hole that is Netflix.
To the right is a bus stop that’ll take me to Mom’s.
She texted me this morning asking me to come by some time this week. Amidst all the elevator mayhem, I forgot to respond.
But even though she bums me out so much sometimes, I’m in my feelz enough to long for some motherly love. Not that Georgia Hunter has ever known how to give much of that, but hey, a girl can dream.
Left, home.
Right, Mom’s.
Left, loneliness.
Right, depression.
I’m still debating which way to go when I look up and see a black car parked across the street. It’s shabby and unremarkable—except for the fact that the windows are completely blacked-out. As in, not an ounce of light is getting through those bad boys.
Call it paranoia, but I get the distinct, creepy-crawly feeling that someone in that car is watching me.
I shake my head. This is obviously the result of a cocktail of bad medical news, the emotional whiplash of Bastian’s kiss, my crumbling vision, and maybe some residual stalker fears I picked up from Yasmin’s Brandon dilemma.
“It’s just a car,” I scold myself. “There’s no one in it, and even if there was, they do not give a damn about you.”
But it does decide things for me.
I sigh, shoulder my purse, and start trudging right.
Over the river and through the woods, to Mother’s house we go.