The correct diagnoses kept happening. Not like clockwork, but often enough to make her colleagues alternate between admiration and envy, to make her boss veer between aggression and confidence, and to make news of her “ability” spread through the hospital, gaining her the nicknames “little witch” and “Dr. Crystal Ball.”
Victoria liked it, but she was also disturbed. She felt like her ability came from an irrational place, and had nothing to do with applying deductive methods. Every time she got a diagnosis right—and the conditions she diagnosed weren’t always bad: it was just as common for her to find inoffensive cases that only appeared serious as to realize that a child who seemed to be having an asthma attack actually had heart failure—she felt like her head went dark. A momentary blackout, the reverse of an illumination, and then she just knew, without a doubt. Many nights after that kind of diagnosis she had trouble sleeping, or if she did sleep, she dreamed of the house or Adela. Her dreams about Adela were not horrible, strictly speaking. Her friend would appear in the ER, for example, complaining of phantom pain in her arm. In the dreams she was a woman and looked different, she’d grown up along with Vicky. It couldn’t be a coincidence. She knew the house had taken things from her—above all, her friend, but other things too. She felt like that distance she maintained with her patients was another consequence of the house, a certain empathy she had lost that night in order to fend off a mental collapse like the one Gaspar had suffered, and was still suffering. Maybe the house had given her this ability. Sometimes she thought it was in thanks for having given it Adela. After she made a diagnosis, she had to sleep not just in her usual socks, but also beneath a sheet: without a doubt, that night she would feel Omaira’s dying head under her feet. It wasn’t the only unpleasant memory, but she could manage them all.
It wasn’t just Adela who appeared to her in dreams. She also dreamed about Betty. Sometimes she turned up in the ER like her daughter. Vicky wasn’t afraid of her. Awake, she even wished Betty would reappear in real life. Nothing more had ever been heard from her. The police hadn’t looked for her, they thought she had left voluntarily, but where had she gone? It’s so easy to disappear, thought Vicky. They often received patients in the ER who had no friends, no family, no past. They were found unconscious in the street, sometimes from hunger, sometimes from alcohol, sometimes from some illness. She remembered one woman with a terminal case of cancer that had never been treated. She wasn’t exactly a vagrant. She had left her house, she told Vicky, when she’d been diagnosed with the untreatable disease. That had been at least a year before. The woman wasn’t very clear on time. She was disoriented, with cerebral metastasis. She had simply packed a bag, taken out some money, and left. She didn’t want to say what place she had left or give the name of anyone who could be with her in her final days. She spoke with distance but affection of her children and husband. She said she had been in the newspaper and on TV and that looking at her photograph had made her laugh, because she was another person now: since this bug got in me （she called the cancer a “bug”）， I’ve been a different person. People saw the photo on TV, then looked right at me and didn’t recognize me. That happened, she said, at service stations.
Disappearing was easy. The woman hadn’t given any names. She didn’t have ID. No one thought it necessary to conduct tests that would determine her identity. She was lucid. She didn’t want to be found, and that was her right. Her folks would process their pain as best they could. Vicky hoped that someday Betty would appear too, and she wondered if she would recognize her. Once, when they were chatting on the patio of her childhood home, the dogs playing on the concrete, her mother had admitted that she was also waiting for Betty. And that Hugo, Vicky’s dad, had thought he saw her once as he was closing up the pharmacy. He called out to her, but that woman who looked like Betty had run away. Hugo had been unsettled by a small but ghostly detail: the woman who ran away was barefoot.
Gaspar went to visit Vicky often. He was keeping strange schedules now too. He’d started to work filming quincea?era parties and weddings, and sometimes he came by in the early morning, tired but awake, and they had coffee at the hospital café. Once, she had asked him if he wasn’t disturbed by being in a hospital. Because of your dad. And your own past. I was nervous when so many gay guys started getting sick and you went to visit them, I thought you were going to have an episode. I’m not that obvious, Gaspar had told her. Plus, he added as he spread butter on toast, the times when my dad was in the hospital were nowhere near the worst ones with him.
One of those mornings over breakfast, Vicky had gotten a strange feeling and thought it was the moment to try to diagnose Gaspar and his elusive epilepsy. She didn’t have to do anything special, touch him or hold his hand—she didn’t even need to say anything to the patient if she didn’t want to. She let the blackout come while Gaspar poured milk into his coffee and thanked the waitress with a smile. The certainty never came and, even worse, the blackout didn’t light up again, as always happened. Vicky felt herself losing consciousness, and bright points like fireflies appeared in the darkness: she was about to faint. Gaspar realized it too, because he took her hand on the table and she held on tight like she had in the house, and then the black curtain lifted and she withdrew as though from the edge of a black pit, as if she had peered into a deep lair. Are you okay? Gaspar asked her. I just got a little dizzy, I’m tired, these shifts are murder. Can you order me a grilled cheese? At the hospital’s café you had to order at the counter, and Vicky needed Gaspar to go away for a moment so she could breathe and let her sweat dry, and, especially, so she wouldn’t have to answer any uncomfortable questions. Gaspar had never asked her to use her diagnostic ability on him. It was strange that he hadn’t, but now Vicky understood why. Gaspar always knew a little more, that’s why he’d been able to get them out of the house. You had to respect his silences and evasions. There was always a reason for them. She would only try again if he asked her to.
Those mornings, Gaspar often talked to her about his hallucinations. His neurologist was very prestigious and trustworthy, but Gaspar insisted that certain apparitions were just too vivid and strange; nether the neurologist nor Isabel could convince him they were rare but possible symptoms, normal within his pathology. Vicky recommended a book that she thought might interest him: Epilepsy, by William Gowers, a British neurologist from the end of the nineteenth century. These days it’s only read as a curiosity, she told him, but some of the descriptions are so out there that maybe it will help more than what I or your doctors can say. Vicky was right. Gowers wrote about a woman who could smell forget-me-nots, although, of course, the flower has no smell. A certain Mrs. B. told Gowers that she always heard a voice to her right saying her name, and it wasn’t like a voice in a dream, she said. Nor was it the voice of a man or a woman. After the voice, she suffered convulsions.
Could it be that his father had suffered from the same thing, and that’s why he had collected all those books on the occult and magic? Did he believe he was getting messages from other worlds, when really they were epileptic fits? According to Vicky, it was very possible that in one of his first cardiac surgeries, performed back in the fifties, his father had suffered a cerebral lesion from lack of oxygen. That could be the cause of his hallucinations, if he had them, and he could have thought they were something mystical, a parallel reality. They didn’t call it the sacred disease for nothing.