Almost Visible by Michelle Sinclair

Author:Michelle Sinclair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baraka Fiction

The gift shop is located on the ground floor of the hospital. She walks through it to get to the cafeteria, and her heart breaks when she sees a couple buying a huge stuffed animal, presumably for a child. Maybe their own child. She stops in the restroom to wipe her eyes.

Laminate cafeteria tables and the salty smell of chicken noodle soup. A smooth, crooning voice on the radio. A woman in a long, caramel-coloured coat talks to a man in a hospital gown. Tess takes the elevator to the second floor. Bright lights attack from above, forming skull-like shadows from everyone’s eyes. She walks past patients in double-occupancy rooms—lying in bed, sitting in straight-backed chairs, staring at walls: a tiny woman she first took for a kid, holding her arm at the wrist and talking to no one; a spaced-out teenager in bright red slippers making her way down the hall; an older woman, jet-black hair in an elegant upsweep, crying.

She tries to make herself small. Her own predictable behaviour feels like an affront.

Tess finds the reception, and asks where to find Mr. Hewitt’s room. The woman behind the counter speaks to her in French. She wears a tight sweater and large earrings, as though she works for a travel agency or something—not in a bleak institutional building. The woman asks if Tess is a family member.

“No.” She’s not sure how to explain. She’s not a friend, not even an acquaintance. “I met him through my volunteer work, and I just wanted to say hello.” The receptionist looks at her for a moment too long, then directs her to the community room at the end of the hall.

It is a large room, with grey carpet and beige sofas. The psychiatry students, nurses, occupational therapists, social workers and orderlies stand out from patients by their clothes and their clear-eyed confidence. Many carry clipboards. Patients, on the other hand, look bleary-eyed, tired, and defeated. Tess wonders if people would be more likely to mistake her for a staff member or a patient. She can’t decide. Coffee burns in the pot, and Tess helps herself to a little Styrofoam cup as she looks around.

She sees him. He’s in conversation with a man, presumably a psychiatrist. The doctor looks the same age as the patient, but his trim goatee, clipboard, and vest contrast with Mr. Hewitt’s paper gown. Mr. Hewitt has paper and pencils in front of him, though he’s not drawing. What would he draw, if he can’t see? Other patients’ paintings are up on the walls—mostly butterflies and rainbows. Tess sits down with her coffee as though waiting for someone, yet close enough to hear their conversation.

“There is a myth, what’s the name? Spirits, fairies, representing the souls of young women who died before their time, often found near bodies of water,” Mr. Hewitt says. He sits very straight in his plastic chair. His gown exposes pale, bony legs and feet encased in brown slippers. His face is gaunt—a jaundiced colour—and his speech is slow, like his large, blinking eyes.

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