Seven

by Rachel Drouillard

I used to type faster than her. Now, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

She types loudly too, punching away at the keys on her compact silver laptop as she asks me questions. “You’re here for neck pain, right?”

“Yeah.” Technically, I suppose. It’s the recent numbness in my hands that really brings me here. My typing speed has gone from 110 words per minute to less than 60. But my doctor seems convinced that numbness and pain are related. I have cervical spondylosis, obvious to radiologists looking at my MRI. My doctor believes that physical therapy may help improve both symptoms. I’m unconvinced, but I have little choice. If I can’t type, I can’t work, and since my sister Jo moved in, I’ve been paying through the nose for food and utilities. At this point, I can’t afford not to try. 

But I do need this woman to keep it moving. Jo is in a hurry. I promised her this wouldn’t take too long. 

Minutes before I needed to leave for this appointment, Jo crashed in the door of our apartment. She gave me a weird look when I glanced up. Granted, I’d assumed a strange posture—hunched over the counter, head in my hands. I held her gaze the best I could, trying to keep my face blank. It didn’t work.

“You good?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I answered automatically.

She tilted her head, squinting. “Right.”

I couldn’t look at her anymore. I swallowed my pride. “Can you drive me to my appointment?”

She let out a big sigh and dropped her backpack on the counter. I winced, imagining the germs her bag had collected throughout the day crawling across the countertops I didn’t have the energy to sanitize. “Can’t. Sorry. My friends are hanging out tonight.”

“When?”

“Why does that matter?”

I sighed, holding my head. “It’s just a quick appointment. Probably less than an hour.”

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I don’t wanna be late, though!”

I pressed my right eyeball deeper into its socket with the heel of my hand, wishing the dimmer switch for the lights wasn’t quite so far out of reach. I looked at her with my other eye. She pouted, her eyebrows rising as we stared at each other. “Do I have to?”

“Jo.” I brought my other hand up to press into the other eye. “Please.”

Neither of us spoke. I peeled my hands away from my face and blinked until my vision cleared. Jo’s expression was different now, softer. Scared. I never let her see me like this. 

She set her jaw and returned to a near-neutral expression. 

“Okay.” She retrieved her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “But you’d better keep it short.”

Relief washed over me. “I don’t know that I have much control over that.”

The physical therapist squints at the screen and types. “Scale of zero to ten. What do you rate your pain?”

I haven’t the slightest idea what number to give her. The pain is normal, to me anyway. Apparently there are people who aren’t in pain every day, which I’m still trying to understand.

The woman looks over her screen, noticing my hesitation. She’s petite, blonde, and fresh-faced. She’s probably younger than me, but she carries herself with more confidence than I’d expect a woman in her mid-twenties to have. I realize I’ve forgotten her name. I look at her name tag and squint, trying to make out the small text. I think it says “Daria.”

“Ten means you have to go to the ER,” Daria clarifies.

I’m still confused. “What does five mean?”

“Hmm.” She chews her bottom lip. “Well, I guess it depends on the person.”

That doesn’t help me at all. 

Daria blinks at me from behind her tortoise-shell glasses, waiting for me to answer. I imagine Jo in the waiting room, tapping her foot while she texts furiously away on her phone, letting her friends know she’ll be late because of me. I really should have driven myself. I’m sure I could have managed.

When I still don’t answer, Daria sighs and stares at the wall behind me, wearing a sort of thinking-face that people display when they want you to know that they’re thinking. It’s a bid for patience, which I’m struggling to offer now, entirely due to my own poor planning. I’m sorry, Jo. “A five would be, like, it’s hard to ignore but it’s possible to if you get really sucked into something that you’re doing.”

“I’ll say three.”

“Three?” She raises an eyebrow. “Your neck disability index is sixty-four percent. Are you sure your pain is that low?”

“Low?” I’ve been misunderstood. “Oh no, it’s quite bad, actually. But I can ignore it if I need to.”

She continues to stare me down. I squirm. “You’ve marked that you’re barely sleeping, you can hardly work, you can’t lift even light weights unless they’re placed conveniently, and your concentration is severely impaired. I’m not sure I’d classify that as ‘ignoring it.’” 

She’s referring to the survey I took online earlier today in preparation for this appointment. I must have filled it out wrong. I didn’t mean to be so dramatic. “I don’t think about it all the time. It just happens.”

“The pain just happens?”

I nod, then wince. I can’t nod anymore, not comfortably.

She raises an eyebrow as she turns to her screen. “I’m gonna put down a seven.”

“Okay.” I don’t understand why she’d ask me to rate my pain only to doubt me in the end, but at least now we can move on. I cross my arms, pressing them into my ribcage to keep them from pulling on my neck. Sometimes I hate having arms. 

“And how would you describe your pain?”

I blink a few times to clear the myodesopsias from my vision. Her question confuses me and I’m having a difficult time articulating that confusion. “Huh?”

“Like, would you say it’s aching? Burning? Shooting? Throbbing?”

I don’t remember what those words mean. There’s pain and a mechanical grinding sound whenever I turn my head. I’m a poorly calibrated machine. That’s all I’ve got. 

After a moment, she sighs. People do that a lot when they talk to me. She’s growing impatient, as am I. I need to know the answer to this question—not just so I can give her a satisfactory answer, but because I need to know. I want Daria to understand.

My eyes scan the tiny room, looking for answers. The doorway is rimmed with wood that creates a sharp edge all around it. “Hang on.” I stand up and squeeze past Daria’s rolling desk. “I just have to check something.”

The first time I slam my elbow into the wall, I don’t hit it hard enough. I try again, to no avail.

My arms are too weak for this—they give way too easily. Frustrated, I draw my leg back and aim, slamming my kneecap into the doorway.

Pain shoots through my knee and up, freezing my hip in place. Hissing, I clutch my injured leg and brace against the wall. I’ll be limping for the rest of the day, but my little experiment confirmed what I thought it would: this is exactly what my neck pain felt like. I look up at Daria, who stares back at me in shock. “It feels like that.”

Her mouth hangs open an inch. She blinks and shakes her head, returning to neutral. “Okay. I’m gonna say throbbing then?”

Throbbing. That was the word I used to use for my headaches as a child. No one ever believed me then. “Yeah. Throbbing.” 

I limp back to the hard plastic chair I’d been sitting in. It’s the only thing in this room that isn’t in grayscale. Its stark orange stands out against the dark gray wall, looking absurd. I ease myself into the absurd little chair, feeling a small rush of relief. Daria understands me. Or, at least, she’s trying to.

A man with a shirt that matches Daria’s hovers in the doorway. “Everything okay?” he mouths to her, as if I can’t see him.

Daria answers out loud. “Everything’s fine.” 

The man watches her for a long moment, prying. I know his type. He’s looking for an opportunity to rescue her, and she’s having none of it. Another image of Jo tapping her foot in the waiting room flashes through my head. My heart pounding, I speak up. “Hey…I’m so sorry…can we keep going?”

Both Daria and the guy turn their eyes on me. His gaze feels threatening, making me shrink against the wall. But it shifts in a second to an expression of pity and he smiles, flashing a long strip of his too-red gums. “Dana’s one of our best here,” he says in a patronizing tone. “You’re in good hands.”

Dana? I read her name tag wrong, apparently. I’m glad I haven’t tried to address her by name. “Thanks.” I try to flash him a hint of disdain, but his expression remains unchanged. It must not have worked.

Dana makes an effort to recover as Dickhead retreats. I feel a twinge of embarrassment for my dramatic display, but it’s outweighed by my irritation with the man. She shakes her head. “Would you say that pain is a similar intensity?”

“Depends.” I rub my bruised knee as it settles into an ache. I’ve relearned two words today—throb and ache. I have them both in my arsenal now. “Sometimes it is.”

“But most of the time not?”

I shrug one shoulder, moving it maybe an inch. I can’t shrug completely anymore, but such modifications do nothing to obscure the message.

Dana persists. “How often does it get that bad?”

“A fair bit.”

“Every day?”

“Most.”

I find the look on her face strange. She’s not typing. “It’s pretty bad, then.”

We need to move on. We’re spending too much time on this. “I suppose so.”

She’s still looking at me with…sympathy, I decide. That’s nice of her. I feel guilty for my impatience.

She pats the treatment table. “Come on up.”

I obey, struggling with my weak arms to pull myself up. She flinches when I initially wobble but holds back, letting me complete the task on my own. With difficulty, I turn until my legs dangle off the edge of the table. Their weight pulls at my spine. Dana gives me a list of commands, pressing on my neck and shoulders while I try to complete each task. She pushes and pulls at my arms, testing my resistance. I fail every test. Finally, she motions toward the edge of the table. “Lie down. I’m gonna work on your neck a little.”

I lie with my face up, watching the purple tentacles of phosphenes snaking over my corneas. The lights that were too bright just a minute ago dim as she palpates the back of my neck. Her fingers dig in between my vertebrae, moving around slightly as electric shocks spread out over my upper body. I’m starting to overheat.

“You okay?” I hear her ask, distantly.

“Yup.” Just gotta get through this.

She keeps going. I’m shaking, pressure in my chest building as she continues to press her fingers against the small muscles in my neck. I don’t know what she’s trying to accomplish, but I can’t imagine it’s working. In my head echoes only a single word, my own name: Leah, Leah, Leah…

“Leah!”

My whole body jolts. Dana’s face hovers above me, upside down. She’s not touching me anymore. Tears trail down my temples. I open my mouth to answer her, but it’s too dry. I’m breathless. My lungs feel empty no matter how full I stuff them with air. They’ve sprung a leak.

I swallow and try again. “What?”

I feel a puff of hot air against my face as she exhales. A sigh of relief. “Are you okay?”

I shrug, the movement creating a temporary increase in pain. I open and close my fists to coax feeling back into my hands.

“God.” She lets out a little extra air with each word. “I thought you were gonna pass out on me.”

“I’m all right,” I attempt to reassure her. The leak in my lungs is narrowing. Air stays in a little longer now.

She shakes the tension out of her hands. Though they’re far above me and have no chance of hitting me, I flinch. 

She puts her arms behind her back. “Sorry. Wow, I guess I need to be more careful.”

I feel bad for her. She looks shocked and a little guilty. I should have warned her that any touch would hurt like that. It’s not unexpected. But she didn’t mean to hurt me. She presses her lips together—body-language experts call that a mouth-shrug, I recall, from a time in my life I binge-watched body-language content trying to understand the people around me. I know all the tips and tricks and can spot a lie from a mile away now, but such knowledge has brought me no closer to understanding what people actually think and express. I have no idea what Dana’s mouth-shrug means, other than uncertainty, and I already know she feels uncertain. No new information. Still, I feel bad for worrying her.

She tries again to work on my neck, more tentatively this time. She barely touches me, but still my body flails, arching my back to pull me away from her hands. “I’m sorry,” I sputter out, willing myself to remain still.

She offers a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. Your neck is just really sensitive, that’s all. Let me try your shoulders.”

That goes better. I’m still trembling, but I manage not to flinch. She pinches my shoulders in a few places, moving her hands lightly up the sides. She pauses as they reach the space behind my ears. “How are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m all right.” I feel silly saying it. My vision is still blurring out periodically, pain overwhelming my senses. It’s becoming clear to me that I am the furthest thing from “all right,” and Dana knows it too.

She goes back to my shoulders, trying to loosen the muscles. It’s painful, but not quite unbearable. She settles into a rhythm. “What do you do for work?” she asks. 

I hope the friendly conversation doesn’t slow her down. My phone has buzzed in my pocket a few times already, and I know the texts are from Jo since she’s the only person who texts me. Still, it would be rude not to engage. “Software development.”

“Oh, nice! Do you work from home?”

“Yeah.” It’s the nicest thing about my job. I can wake up, make my French-pressed coffee, pour it into my favorite mug, and sit on my recliner, the only comfortable chair in the world, a wearable heating pack snapped over my shoulders and turned up to the highest setting. If I worked in an office, I’d have had to quit months ago.

“That has to be nice.”

“It really is.” My vision is starting to clear. My body is more relaxed now. My eyes trace the lines formed in plaster on the ceiling. Music is playing in the other room and it’s slightly muted here, but still, every song is immediately recognizable—they’re all songs that played on pop radio in the mid-2010’s, when I was in college. I tap on my leg with the fingers of my left hand, playing the notes. It’s one habit that I’ve kept over the years, my only real connection with my past life. “I used to play the violin, you know,” I volunteer. 

“Really?” Dana says, distracted.

“Yeah. Went to Juilliard and everything.” I haven’t talked about this in a long time. The only person in my life who knows that is Jo. And now Dana. It’s something to talk about, at least.

“Oh, wow.” She’s not distracted anymore. “So were you, like, a concert violinist?”

“I was on track to be.” I take a shaky breath, the memories flooding back. I remember auditioning for Juilliard on my new violin, a gift from my parents to replace the cheap student violin I’d been playing since middle school. How overjoyed I was to find out I’d been accepted. I remember the years of busking in the streets of New York after dropping out, playing covers of popular songs with a loop pedal at my feet. Though I manage to suppress the most painful memories, it still hurts to remember all those that surround them. I’m starting to regret bringing it up. “I dropped out halfway through my junior year.”

“Oh.” She sounds disappointed.

I squeeze my eyes shut as Dana works on a particularly stubborn knot in my left shoulder. Breathe. “It’s okay, though. Really toxic environment.”

“I can imagine.” She moves her hands a little higher on my shoulders, approaching my neck. I tense, preparing for the worst. “Do you still play?”

“God, no.” Through sharp anticipatory breaths, I force myself to think of anything but the areas of my neck she’s pressing on, trying to get the muscles to release. I imagine the layer of dust that’s collected on my violin case as it sits on a high shelf in my closet, one I can no longer even reach. “I haven’t played in years.”

“Hmm.” Her attention is back on my painful neck. Her hands seem to negotiate with it—Don’t flinch, let me in—as I hold my breath. Blood rushes in my ears. The pulse point under my jawline begins to throb as the ceiling light above me blurs into a bright yellow haze. “It’s probably pretty hard to play right now, with what you’ve got going on here.”

She’s right. It happened slowly—over time, I just started playing less and less. I could only play for ten minutes at a time before the pain forced me to put the violin back in its case. Ten minutes is barely long enough for a warm-up, much less a real practice session. Slowly, those ten-minute sessions became increasingly infrequent until one day I woke up and realized I hadn’t played in over a year. I’ve become a “former violinist,” a title I swore I’d never adopt. But how can I still call myself a violinist when I haven’t played in years?

My phone starts vibrating in my pocket. I’ve ignored a few notifications throughout the session, but it’s really blowing up now. “Sorry, I need to—” I don’t finish my sentence before pulling my phone out of my pocket. Jo Martin—11 messages. The most recent one is just “Girl.”

I groan as I open the app. I text her back. “Soon. Sorry”

She leaves me on read.

I drop my phone face-down on my stomach and stare up at the ceiling. I’m a little annoyed with her, but I feel more guilty than annoyed. I really hadn’t meant to inconvenience her like this. It seemed like such a little thing when I asked—driving me to one appointment on a bad pain day—but now, I realize how much I’ve asked her for. I swore I’d never do this. I don’t want to be like our mom. 

“Everything okay?” Dana asks.

“Yeah.” I sigh, trying to push away the dark cloud in my mind. “My sister is just getting a little impatient.”

“Did she drive you here?”

“Mm hmm.” I exhale through my nose. “She’s supposed to hang out with her friends tonight and I’m making her late.”

“Ah. Well, then we should probably speed things up a little here.” She replaces her hands, pushing her fingers into the side of my neck. Air rushes in through my teeth. She lets off a little. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

She settles back into her rhythm. “So—violin…”

“Yeah.”

“Would you ever want to play again?”

Against my will, my mind conjures the muscle memory of tucking the instrument beneath my chin and raising the bow over the strings, of quick staccato strokes of Wieniawski’s “Polonaise Brillante in A Major.” The memory hurts. I raise my hand carefully and nestle it between the table and the base of my skull. I don’t want to play again if it feels like that.

“I don’t know,” I say, my voice hollow.

She nods and pats my shoulder. “You can sit up when you’re ready. Take your time, though.”

It’s a whole process: rolling to my side, easing my legs off the table, bracing my neck with one hand as I press against the table with the other to slowly rise and unfurl my spine. She gives me a moment once I’m seated to acclimate before she instructs me through a series of stretches, observing my form carefully. I perform them as well as I can, taking occasional breaks to shudder. “Don’t overdo it,” she reminds me once, which I ignore. All of this is overdoing it. Leaving home is overdoing it. 

“Do you have any questions?”

I don’t. After a moment, she smiles. “Okay! Then I’ll see you here…Thursday, at the same time, if that works?”

“Sure.” There is no possible conflict. Work would be over by then, and all I usually do by this time of night is lie on the couch and ignore the TV I turn on in the background, staring instead at the ugly designs on the linoleum floor as they fade out and grow fuzzy.

She taps a few keys on her laptop, then closes it. “All right! I’ll see you then.”

I lift a single finger, a little wave, as I prepare to slink away. She smiles and waves back. 

Jo sits in a chair in the waiting room, scrolling on her phone with her headphones on. When she sees me, she jumps up and pulls her headphones down around her neck. “Finally,” she says. “You were in there for over an hour.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sighs loudly and gathers her things. “You’re done, right?”

“Yeah.”

She taps at her phone a few times and stands up, stretching her arms above her head. “Let’s go, then.”

She strides ahead of me on her long legs, pausing just long enough at the door to keep it from slamming in my face. I struggle to hold it long enough to pass through it. By the time I step outside, she’s almost to the car, clicking the unlock button on the fob twice to make it chirp. She waits until I’m almost there before opening the driver’s-side door and slipping into the seat.

I reach for the handle of the passenger door and hiss as a jolt of pain snakes down my arm. I can’t open it. My knees feel like water. I let my body sag against the side of the car as I breathe—in through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the mouth, out through the mouth, air leaking out through clenched teeth. The world spins as it always does, but now I can see and feel how the ground whirls beneath me at hundreds of miles per hour and yet somehow I remain standing. 

Jo’s door slams. She’s in front of me now, one hand hovering over my arm. She doesn’t quite touch me. That’s one boundary she won’t cross.

She waits while I come to my senses, then shoos me backward to let her open the door. I’m still leaning on the car, my legs shaking. I bend my liquid knees and duck, slipping into the seat and pulling my legs in with the help of my arm. 

I glance into the rearview mirror to see Jo’s pale hand hovering just an inch over my shoulder. I watch as she curls her fingers and retracts her hand through the crack on the door. She closes it too lightly, jerks it back open, and slams it. She turns away, but she leaves her hand on the frame until she’s out of reach.

---

Rachel Drouillard is a fiction writer originally from Michigan. Her work explores themes of trauma, resilience, dysfunctional family structures, religious deconstruction, and the bittersweet space between hope and acceptance. Her work has appeared under her maiden name in JMWW and is forthcoming in American Book Review. She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with her husband Brodie.