“Nothing seems to be wrong.”
The doctor checks his clipboard again, but the motion is stiff, clearly more to prove that he is doing his job than to actually consult whatever data are printed on the shiny cardboard.
The woman looks out the window. Outside, the sky is as clear and blue as glass, one of the last sunny days before winter. Already the cold is seeping into the air like a stain, filling the world with breezes that will turn to wind that will turn to snow.
“You said your symptoms were …” Again, he consults his clipboard, making sure to push his glasses up his nose as he does so. He is a tall, reedy man, younger than the woman but old enough that a faint sliver of pale skin shines through his thinning hair. “Fatigue, headaches, insomnia, agitation, and body aches. But no runny nose, swelling, fever, nausea, yes?”
He looks up at her with the look of someone who feels they have better things to do than what they are currently doing. The woman wonders if he even believes her at all, or simply thinks she is going through menopause but doesn’t want to admit it.
“I’m not going through menopause,” she says. The doctor’s eyebrows raise. “I would know,” she adds.
She is definitely not going through menopause. The symptoms that have plagued her for the last week in a half are a more particular sort. They come upon her almost like an itch, a faint thrumming through her body of wrongness, somewhere between discomfort and pain. She finds herself staring up at the ceiling in the middle of the night, unsure when she woke up, listening to her husband’s motor-like snoring beside her and tracing the cracks on the wall. She will be talking to one of her girlfriends and suddenly feel the strangest sensation spreading like a windshield crack from her core to the tips of her limbs; thoughts in a different voice than hers will come into her head and she will suddenly need to sit down for a bit. Her bones will ache while she is driving to pick her daughter up from school and as much as she rubs at her sore skin, it does not stop.
The doctor clears his throat, but it comes out as more like a sigh. “Yes. Well.” The woman wonders if he thinks she is crazy now, too. “I can prescribe you prophylactic penicillin, in case there is some infection. You can take Tylenol for any pain, but I suggest going home, getting some rest, and making sure you’re drinking water throughout the day. You can call or schedule another appointment if you feel worse.”
The woman blows out a breath through her teeth and nods. Her gaze drifts to the window again, but is instead drawn to a small, frail brown spider. The doctor does not notice it, and yet it is still there, creeping up the wood with thin, trembling legs like it might fall any minute. The woman has never really been afraid of spiders, and some unknown part of her urges her to either help it or kill it; but she does not want to look like more of an imbecile in front of the doctor and so she ignores it like the rest of the world seems to be doing.
She leaves the doctor’s office in a rush, hurrying to make it home before her husband. It makes her feel foolish; it’s silly, really, to keep something like this from him, and she could just say she was out running errands. But she doesn’t like to lie to him, or to anyone, and the experience was already invalidating.
*
She has started dinner by the time he walks through the door. She knows he likes it like that, coming home to smells wafting through the kitchen. Her mother, before she died, had a lot to say, and one of them was the danger of a frowning man. Keep him smiling, she’d whisper in her low, throaty voice, whipped raw from the cancer. As long as he is smiling, your marriage will be strong. To her mother, the worst thing for a woman was an unhappy husband. Divorce was utterly out of the question. The woman privately thinks that her mother was conservative in her ideas of marriage, but the prospect of divorcing her husband still fills her head with shame.
The only time she truly considered it was when she found out he was having an affair. But it was only for a minute. The affair was partly her fault, anyway. She’d been disconnected and lacking in their relationship and hadn’t shown him enough attention. She’d never confronted him about it, just thrown the pair of low-waist denim jeans into the dumpster and started the cleaning for the day. She put her efforts into making the house tidier than ever, asking him about his work, and making some of his favorite meals. Eventually his too-long errands and hastily-apologized-for habits of getting stuck in traffic had stopped. His smile returned. Life went on.
He kisses her cheek from behind as he walks in, leaving a cold, sticky feeling on her face she wills herself not to wipe away. He smiles at her. She smiles back. “What’s for dinner?” he asks.
“Pot pie,” she says.
His brows quirk together, a mark on the lighthearted expression of a man with a good job and a good wife and a good house and little else to care about in the world. “I thought you said you’d make my favorite tonight.”
“Your favorite?” She is sure he said nothing of the sort. The roast chicken is painstaking and requires her to spend an hour toiling over the oven, and she was already getting sweaty and tired from normal-day tasks. Pot pie is easy, and she was looking forward to having the extra time while it cooked to take her shoes off. Plus, pot pie is one of his favorites, too.
“It’s fine, darling,” he says, the furrow smoothing. “I just haven’t had a taste much for the pie these days. Last time, you overcooked the carrots into mush.” He smiles, again, but this time it doesn’t meet his eyes.
She studies his face, the way his lips curve downwards slightly, like the waistband of denim jeans.
“I think there’s a chicken in the fridge,” she says.
His smile curves back the way it should. “Thank you, darling.” He kisses her cheek again, the other side this time, and is gone in the next moment, going to prop his feet up on the couch.
There is a sharp ache on her cheekbone, suddenly, as she watches him go, and she has to set down the knife and take a moment to prod at the spot, as one does, to feel the pain. The skin feels hard and smooth, and where his lips were, cool as ice.
She scrubs a hand over her face and dumps the chopped carrots into the compost.
*
Her daughter has always had hair down to her waist, fine and strawberry-blond like her husband. She has her father’s eyes and her grandmother’s jaw. The woman watches her run across the playground shrieking with laughter and wonders if anyone walking by would think she was her daughter.
The woman has always considered herself to be an okay mother. Not the best, not amazing, but she never shouted or spanked, and she is certainly better at it then her own mother. She is somewhere around average at motherhood, like she is at most things in life. It has proven to work out alright. She has a good life. A nice life. An average life.
Her mother would tell her to be grateful, but then again, her mother is dead now. The woman frowns. One should not think about one’s mother like that.
The phone rings, and she fishes it from her pocket, keeping an eye on her daughter rather than looking down at the caller ID.
Which is why she is startled when it is her brother’s voice that plays in her ear. “Hey, sis.”
She grasps blindly for her composure, staying silent until she can pull out the heaviness from her voice. “Mateo. What’s wrong?”
Something must be wrong, for otherwise her brother would not call her. He was always the older brother that pinched, that pulled, that snapped, and so she kept away from him as best she could for most of their childhood. She hadn’t seen him since their mother’s funeral. Maybe if she’d talked to him when they were kids, he would have learned how to apologize for being mean and they would be something akin to friends now. But she doubts he even knows the hair color of her daughter. Maybe he’s forgotten her name, too, if he’s spiraling again like he usually does after getting out of rehab.
“I’m in a bad spot.” The voice is gravelly over the phone, and there’s enough background noise she thinks he must be on the street somewhere. “I … I’m real close to being evicted. I just need a little for gas … just so I can make it to work these next couple weeks. Just a little.”
Her hands clench around the phone. He has asked this before, many times before, but she knows whatever she gives him for gas he will squander and be broke again by the next week. People like her brother were born with spongy skin and hollow hearts. She’s stopped feeling sorry for him a while ago, once she realized his addiction wasn’t the result of his pain or grief or something in need of healing, but rather the destructive tendencies that he had been born with. Even as a child he’d been the first to reach his hand into the flames to see what would happen.
She never reached out to touch them. She was scared of getting burned, but more than that, it didn’t feel like her place. And look where they were now, anyway. She was much better off than her brother and his burned fingertips. She’d rather be cold than ash.
But he is her brother, too, and she knows she can’t turn him away.
“I’ll do better, this time, I promise,” he says, and she opens her mouth if only to stop him from talking.
“How much?”
She can hear the relief on his face. “Only a hundred. Maybe one-fifty.”
Where the phone touches her ear, she suddenly feels stiff, like a windowpane in a storm.
Her silence is answer enough. “Thank you,” her brother says, his voice lighter now. “This will be the last one. No more.”
She wonders if he will say I love you. She waits a moment for it.
“I promise,” he says instead.
She hangs up and touches her fingertips to her ear. The lobe is cold and smooth to the touch. Across the playground, her daughter is laughing, her daughter who looks nothing like her.
*
The woman knows she is not beautiful. She was born with her father’s angular jaw, a bit too square and sturdy for a woman. Her parents’ friends always said she looked like her brother, but they never meant it in a nice way; they looked at her like they expected her to sprout stubble at any moment. Still, she has never considered herself ugly, walking that hollow line between the two that is paved with expensive makeup products and skin pinched between two fingers in front of the mirror. She has long since grown too old to be insecure.
However, it’s hard not to think about it when she is with her friends, who are all noticeably younger, noticeably prettier, and noticeably aware of that discrepancy. They’ve remained in touch throughout the years—her, Jenny, Masha, and Kate, whom she knew from college—tackling marriages, pregnancies, the like. Somewhere along the way she became numb to their comments about how her husband spent a bit too much time with his secretary, how she had put on one (or was it two) pounds since they’d last seen her, how their kids were captains of the swim team and winners of the district’s spelling bee and her daughters were second place for class president one year, wasn’t that right? The woman just assumed that middle-aged women were like that, turning their lives into contests and jokes that she ended up being the brunt of. She knew how to take it, laugh it off, and move on. They meant well.
It is hard not to dread their lunch dates just a little bit, though. She thought of making an excuse again last week when Kate sent a message to the group chat saying how long it had been, but she’d missed out on the last one and she didn’t want them to think she was drifting. Because then she’d think she was drifting, and then she would be, and she’d have to wonder if they were even going to miss her. She and Kate had been friends for over a decade, didn’t that mean something?
She’s the last one there, and strangely whatever conversation the three of them are having stills and she sets down her purse. But Kate is immediately up to hug her and kiss her cheeks and gush over how long it’s been (again), and she decides that they probably weren’t talking about her anyways and even if they were, Kate at least seems to be past it now, and that’s good enough for her.
They sit and chat like they always do. The woman always feels self-conscious bringing her up her daughter and her daughter’s accomplishments. It feels like she’s showboating her children like medals on a wall. But if she doesn’t, the others will feel awkward for so easily sharing their children’s lives, and her silence will tense up the air like when she sometimes says the wrong thing. So the woman racks her brain for everything noteworthy her daughter has done since they’ve last seen each other, and when it’s her turn, she goes all out.
“And on top of perfect grades in all her classes, her teacher emailed me last weekend to recommend her for the advanced placement program,” the woman says, feeling a quick flush of pride. Jenny smiles, but it fits her face oddly, because she says she doesn’t smile with her eyes anymore to prevent the crow’s feet. The woman privately thinks it makes her face seem like it’s about to fall off, and if we don’t smile anyways what’s the point of having a face people want to look at, but she does not say these things out loud because she knows the others have stopped smiling with their eyes, too.
“Well, our coach spoke to me in person,” Masha says, waving her hand. “She was pretty excited to be able to share with me the news face-to-face: she thinks the twins could become professional soccer players if they keep up their training. Apparently, they’re the most talented on the team, despite being the youngest.”
The woman isn’t sure what that has to do with her daughter’s grades, but what comes out of her mouth is, “That’s great, Masha. Really great.” The word great turned sour in her mouth at least ten minutes ago.
“May I take your order?” A pretty woman steps up wearing an apron tied delicately around her waist. The woman wonders if her own stomach is twice the size of the waitress’s. There’s no way that’s natural, right? And what a nose.
Jenny, Masha, and Kate all order salads. The woman takes one last glance at the menu before making up her mind. “I’d like the hamburger, please.”
Kate stares at her. “Really?”
The woman stares back, surprised. Was the salad thing some secret agreement made in the group chat that she missed? She wonders if it would be weird to quickly scroll through her phone.
Jenny gives her that thin-lipped smile. “That burger’s the highest-calorie thing on the menu.”
“We’re getting salads,” Masha adds, as if the woman has missed this part. Jenny’s eyes flicker over the woman’s body. Her eyes gleam with realization. This is why her friend has been gaining so much weight recently! She doesn’t eat rabbit food like the rest of us.
The waitress gives her a small smile. “The Caesar salad is really good.”
The woman hates croutons. She tries to smile back. “I don’t really—”
She feels Kate’s fingers curling around her elbow, soft and delicate and startlingly painful. Her manicured nails tap against the skin leaving little white grooves that turn red and then disappear. “Honey,” she says, voice low, that saccharine smile painted on her lips. “Are you sure you’re thinking of the long-term here? Indulging is lovely, but only once in a while.”
The woman blinks at her, uncomprehending. A decade ago she and Kate snuck out of their dorm rooms in the middle of the night with a stolen bottle of vodka clutched under their coats. They sat on the rooftop and got drunk and talked about boys and laughed their heads off. The woman doesn’t think she could pick that Kate out of a lineup with the real Kate in it.
It’s been so long since she’s had a burger. But they’re all looking at her like that, like she’s not one of them, like they’re going to whisper and start conversing again when she gets up to go to the bathroom and stop when she sits back down.
The woman smiles up at the waitress, careful not to let the smile meet her eyes. She doesn’t want crow’s feet, after all. “I’ll have the Caesar, thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” the waitress says, and takes their menus with her perfect button nose and walks off with her tiny little waist.
“There we go,” says Kate, like the woman has just been told by her coach that she could play professionally one day if she keeps at it. Her grip loosens on the woman’s arm, but strangely the pain from her nails is gone; now it just feels cold.
The woman looks down and yelps. Her forearm, especially around the five divots imprinted into her skin, is as cold and clear as ice.
Her friends startle. “What the hell was that for?” glares Jenny, Jenny who never curses. The woman does not care. She runs her good hand over the skin, the glacial smoothness unlike skin. Her forearm is completely transparent. She can see the table beneath it. She must be hallucinating.
She remembers her cheekbones after her husband kissed them. Her ear after she hung up with her brother. The woman fumbles for her purse, hands shaking as she pulls out her compact. She avoids looking in window reflections, mirrors, anything of the sort, knowing it just makes her feel bad, but now…
Her chest heaves as she stares at her face, which is now imprinted by two kiss-shaped marks, on either cheek, pale blue and transparent. Her ear is the same.
“I—I have to go,” the woman blurts, standing, her napkin falling to the floor. She shoves her sleeve down, not wanting the others to see, even though she knows she’s made a fool of herself and they won’t invite her back, not even Kate whom she went to college with. She’ll move on; she always does.
*
The doctor stares at her, bafflement chasing skepticism on his face. “I beg your pardon?”
She stares at him in return, breath coming in shallow gasps, her hands trembling as she holds them up, baring her palms to him like she has pressed them against an invisible wall. “Look!”
Even to her eyes, they are ghastly. The transparency has spread from her forearm to both her hands, her skin losing feeling without her noticing. Through her palms, she can see his face, a bit distorted but otherwise clear.
They are glass. It is as wondrous as it is terrifying.
Through her hands, she sees the doctor’s brow furrow. “I’m not sure what you want me to see here, miss.”
Her hands slowly lower, dismay curdling in her throat. If only her mother could see her now! “You don’t see it,” she says quietly. She wasn’t sure why she’d expected him to. Of course no one would see this.
On the windowsill, the spider is still there. The woman stares at it, captivated. You see it, don’t you, she asks the spider. Of course, it answers. Her glass hands crack into fists.
The doctor eyes her quizzically, then consults his clipboard. “I … you know what, on further reflection, I think something more than penicillin should be in order.”
She looks up slowly, meeting his gaze. She can no longer feel her heart beating. She holds up her hands again, this time facing them towards herself. Her glass palms no longer have lines like ordinary hands do. But then a crack appears, thin and soundless as a spiderweb. As she watches, more start to appear, fissures erupting over her transparent skin, bigger now, deeper, pulsing through the clear pale blue with lines, converging into webs that creak and crack and dislodge little shards. The shards tinkle to the floor with sounds that remind the woman of anger, fear, desire, and a newfound strength in refusing to hide; more shards fall, and their sound becomes deafening.
The doctor’s eyes narrow. “What—”
It is too late. She shatters.
