Free The Nakeds by Lisa Glatt Page B

her, he’d work harder to fix her daughter’s problems.
    He took a little wheel with several dull spikes sticking out of it and rolled the wheel up and down Hannah’s calf and ankle, asking if she could feel it. He rolled the wheel on her foot, the bottom first, trying to tickle her, but got no response. Then he tried the top of her foot—again, nothing. He asked Hannah to wiggle her toes, which was something she couldn’t do the whole time she was in the hospital, but she could do it now, and she did.
    “Good girl,” Nina said, as if Hannah had done the dishes or made her bed without being asked.
    The doctor wore bifocals with thick black frames. He was jowly, his skin ruddy and wrinkled. The one oily strand of gray hair he had left was combed back over his bare scalp. “Can you move those toes up?” he said.
    Hannah tried.
    She tried again.
    When they wouldn’t move up, she moved them down.
    “Move them up, not down. ‘Up,’ I said.”
    Nina squeezed her daughter’s hand. She willed her daughter’s toes to move up, not down, and nothing. Hannah tried again and again. Nina could see it on her face, how Hannah concentrated and focused—and still, nothing, not the slightest quiver. The doctor might as well have asked her to fly around the room or read his mind or bend a fork without touching it.
    Dr. Bell looked disappointed and Nina felt afraid, biting her bottom lip. “Try once more, baby,” she said.
    “I can’t. They won’t move. They’re stupid.”
    “Toes can’t be stupid. People can be stupid,” Dr. Bell said. “And you’re certainly not stupid, Hannah. You’ve been injured,” he said gently.
    Two new rolls of plaster were smoking in the sink behind his head.
    It was only Hannah’s second cast, but Nina already knew the steps: first the gauze, then the cotton, then the plaster—she wished he’d hurry up.
    Nina was mostly concerned with Hannah walking again, of course, and by not asking about aesthetics, what the leg would eventually look like, she could make her own prognosis. Certainly the atrophy was to be expected and was temporary. Of course Hannah’s leg would plump right up once the last cast was removed. Her ankle, though, alarmed Nina—it was sunken and the foot itself was twisted inward, like a pigeon’s.
    “The toes are stupid,” Hannah said again, her voice sharp. She was angry, not only at her mother and Dr. Bell, but at her toes, talking about them as if they weren’t quite hers. Her fingers and other limbs behaved, responded to her internal orders, and her left leg, by comparison, was becoming her bad leg, the leg that wouldn’t listen.
    It was a bum leg.
    It was a peg leg.
    It was something separate from the rest of her, yet very much attached.
    The three of them stared at her stubborn toes. “Move them up, not down,” he had said. It was there on Nina’s face, how important his request was, how everything depended on this one seemingly simple thing Hannah could not do.
    “You can’t move them up?” Nina’s voice cracked.
    Hannah shook her head, trying not to cry.
    “It’ll come back to you, I’m sure. These things take time. We just need to be patient.” Nina left her daughter’s side then and went to the corner of the room where she’d left her purse. She searched inside it for a minute with both hands, then popped something into her mouth. “An aspirin,” she told Dr. Bell, who was looking at her.
    He nodded.
    “For my headache,” she added, returning to Hannah’s side.
    Dr. Bell told them that this second cast was a special cast, one he hoped would straighten out Hannah’s foot. “Let’s get this on you, shall we?” He slapped his hands on his big knees and stood up. “Let’s get this going.”
    He started with the gauze, wrapping it around and around Hannah’s leg, her calf, her ankle, her foot, leaving her useless toes free. She was leaning back on her elbows, watching him.
    “It’s a lot like polio,” the doctor said, finishing with