“Call me Sylvaine,” the nurse said.
Aimée felt her hand grasped by a a warm one.
“Aimée,” she said.
“Feel free to ask for help. That’s part of my rent package, too.”
Aimée felt shy, but her legs were freezing. That she stood practically naked in full view from the hall hadn’t occurred to her. Yet on second thought, she realized, few inhabitants would know the difference.
“I know you’re tired and I don’t want to impose but . . .” Aimée said. “Mind helping me get dressed? If you get me started, I think I can manage.”
“Organization,” Sylvaine said. “It all comes down to organizing, putting and keeping things in the same place, developing a system that works for you. Makes you independent.”
Aimée liked that idea.
A half hour later Sylvaine and Aimée had arranged LeClerc’s face powder, Chanel red lipstick and lip-liner, and Chanel #5 scent within reachable distance for Aimée and organized her drawer of patterned panty hose, bar of dark chocolate, and cell phone so Aimée could locate them. They’d hung her leather miniskirt over the chair back and angled her boots by the door. Aimée felt thankful René had brought her the essentials on his first visit.
“My mother was blind,” Sylvaine said. “But you’d hardly have known it. At home anyway. She did everything. Even managed homemade foie gras for Noël. As long as someone carved the goose, she said.”
“She sounds amazing,” Aimée said.
A welcome breeze entered the small studio via the window.
“And bullheaded,” Sylvaine said. “She wouldn’t have got far without that strong will of hers. We had our own secret way to communicate. At least, I thought it was secret until I saw some of the deaf-blind people use it too.”
Interested, Aimée asked, “How’s that?”
“We did it for fun. If we were somewhere and she didn’t like something, she’d block print instead of whispering or being rude.”
“Block print?”
“Palm printing . . . it’s simple. You form the words in capitals on someone’s palm or forearm. Like this.”
Aimée felt Sylvaine take her arm. Then Sylvaine’s finger traced lines and curlicues on it.
“It tickles.”
“All the letters are composed of one to three strokes,” Sylvaine said. “A U is a rounded one stroke. The V slants . . . feel the difference?”
Aimée nodded. Sylvaine’s presence dispelled the cold isolation she had felt.
“What did I write?”
“The doctor was . . . no is . . . chunky?”
Sylvaine’s throaty laughter filled the room.
“Do me one more big favor,” Aimée said. René had left her room too soon to give her the information. “Write down on a paper the numbers from this phone’s speed dial on a piece of paper. Then I promise to leave you alone.”
“Pas de problème, but you’ll owe me,” Sylvaine said. “There are three numbers.”
Aimée felt a paper thrust into her hand.
Then a beeping came from somewhere at mid-level where Sylvaine stood. “Oops, I’m being paged,” she said. “Time for my shift.”
Aimée felt guilty. “Sorry that you missed your nap.”
“Rien de tout! Drop by my room, it’s four doors down on the left. We’ll have coffee and talk. I need to interview another patient for my nursing course, someone other than eighty-year-old Madame Slavinksy who falls asleep after three minutes and wakes up thinking we’re in the Warsaw theatre watching a performance of The Threepenny Opera.”
After Sylvaine’s last footsteps echoed down the hallway, it struck Aimée. For a brief time, with Sylvaine, she’d forgotten she was blind. The first time since it had happened since that night.
The phone rang.
“Allô?”
“I’m mad at you, Aimée,” said Martine, her voice husky as usual. “Furious.”
“But why? Won’t Vincent cooperate . . . is he badmouthing me?”
“You didn’t let on. I’m your best friend,” she said. “Tell me it isn’t true? You’re . . . you’re. . . . It’s not permanent, is it?”
“I was going to tell you,” Aimée said. “I didn’t want to ruin your big evening.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I feel terrible. What do you need?”
What she really needed, Martine couldn’t provide.
“Don’t worry,” said Aimée.
“René says Lambert’s the specialist in Paris,” said Martine. “But there’s always Dr. Smoillet in Lyon, who helped my father. Or the eye clinic in Genève.”
Martine’s father had had routine cataract surgery, and the eye clinic in Genève specialized in macular degeneration. Neither was her problem. But she knew Martine wanted to help.
“Martine, I need decent dark glasses,” she said. “Miles Davis chewed on the only pair I have, not that it matters to my vision . . .”
“Say no more, they’re on the way,” she said. “I’ll engage a nurse to help you at my cousin’s apartment. Round the clock care.”
“Whoa Martine, you’re wonderful but I’m learning to help myself. And I need to stay here, they’re still running tests.”
And she wasn’t really sick. Battered, blind and concussed, but that was different. She didn’t need a nurse.
The phone clicked. “Sorry, I have to put you on hold,” said Martine.
By the time Martine came back on the line, Aimée had gotten one of her legs into her black tights.
“This magazine will kill me yet if the typesetters don’t,” she said, sounding frazzled. “The typesetters were on strike, but we took care of that. Now the major account in Bordeaux has ‘problems’ with the concept of our article on the ‘new’ winemakers. Nom de Dieu, I have to go or they’ll pull out of the coming issue. And their five pages of advertising.”
“Can’t Vincent go?”
“These types need the editor to hold their hand. I’ll come by as soon as I get back.”
ABLE TO use the phone now, Aimée felt more confident. It had only taken her three tries to reach René.
“René, any luck finding the software I need?”
“Not too bad,” he said, klaxons honking in the background. “I’m picking up cables near Montgallet Métro.”
He must be on rue Montgallet, a street lined with old storefronts that housed discount computer shops, Aimée thought. One of René’s favorite haunts. Many were run by families from Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India.
“It’s a Diwali sale,” René said. A diesel truck shifted, the sound of gears scraping like the ragged cry of an animal in pain.
“Diwali? The Hindu festival of lights happens in November, René,” she said. “Nice try. It’s still October.”
“A pre-Diwali sale. Rajeev will give us a good price. He’s helping me with setup.”
She wondered if René, her partner, had thoughts about a future with Rajeev, who was a part-time programmer as well as a shop owner. She wouldn’t blame him if he did. She realized she had to help René with Vincent’s hard drive, even if it were the last job they did together. But she couldn’t worry about that now. Or she would give up and fall apart.
“René, did we do a shred analysis of Populax?”
“You mean a scan to see if deleted files were really gone?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Non.”
She detected interest in his voice.
“Exactement,” she said. “Vincent’s stubbornness bothers me. Let’s check the operating system. That should tell us if the file system was freed.”
She heard raised voices in the background. “Then we should see if the OS wrote a special one-character code to the beginning of the directory entry for any file,” René said. Aimée could hear his mounting excitement over the voices in the background. “It would mark any file as deleted. But unless it’s overwritten, the file info is still stored in the directory and the data still exists on the hard drive.”