My name is Elara Voss, and I am seventeen years old, and I have
Lymphangioleiomyomatosis LAM, because the full name is a sentence unto
itself and most people don't have the stamina for it, which is somewhat
ironic given what it does to your lungs.
LAM is a disease of stealth. It builds cysts in your lung tissue slowly,
over years, like a patient architect remodeling a building for purposes the
original designer never intended. It mostly affects women. It mostly affects
women over thirty. I am seventeen, which makes me a statistical anomaly,
which is a polite way of saying that my body decided to be exceptional in
the worst possible direction.
The doctors at St. Agatha's Medical Center in Orvane, Oregon call my
case 'aggressively progressive,' which is a clinical way of saying that my
lungs are losing the argument with themselves faster than they would
prefer. My mother, Dr. Diane Voss, radiologist, calls it a battle. She has
always preferred the war metaphor, my mother perhaps because it gives
her the illusion of strategy, of tactics, of ground that can be won back.
I call it my roommate. My uninvited, rent-free, furniture-rearranging
roommate who arrived two years ago and shows no sign of leaving.
Orvane is a city of about two hundred thousand people in the wet,
green part of Oregon, the part where the rain is so routine it stops feeling
like weather and starts feeling like atmosphere. We moved here four years
ago after my father left not died, just left, which is in some ways harder to
process because it implies choice and my mother accepted the first
radiology position offered to her, which happened to be here.
I have one friend in Orvane, which is probably one more than most
people expect from a girl who spends most of her time at a window with a
book and an oxygen machine. Her name is Priya Anand, and she is the kind
of person who treats all of life's complications with the same brisk
competence she brings to calculus efficiently, with minimal sentimentality,
and with the expectation that a solution exists if you're willing to do the
work.
She arrived at my apartment the morning after the first letter with a
coffee she hadn't asked if I wanted and a look that suggested she had
opinions.
"You could have called me,' she said, reading the letter for the second
time at my kitchen table."
"It arrived after midnight. You have a curfew."
"Curfews are guidelines." She set the letter down. "Someone was in
your apartment, Elara."
"I know."
"That's the part you want to lead with, not the mysterious prophecy
part. Someone was physically in your apartment."
"I know that too."
She looked at me over her coffee cup with the expression she
reserved for what she called my 'excessive composure under crisis,' which
she found both admirable and maddening. 'You're not scared.'
"I'm curious. There's a difference."
"Only you would be curious about a break-in."
"They didn't take anything. They left something. That's not a break-in,
that's a delivery."
Priya made a sound that communicated significant skepticism. She
picked up the letter again and read the last line aloud: 'Promise me you will
stay open.' She put it down. 'It sounds like someone who knows you well.
The stay open part. That's specific to you.'
She was right. It was specific to me. I had a tendency my mother
called it emotional fortification, Priya called it building walls, I called it selfpreservation to close off from things that felt too large or too uncertain. It
was something I had been working on, in therapy, for the better part of a
year. Something only the people closest to me would know.
"Nobody outside this apartment knows about the staying open thing,"
I said slowly."
Priya set down her coffee cup with the careful deliberateness of
someone containing a larger reaction.
"Then whoever wrote this," she said, "knows you better than anyone
should."
✦ ✦ ✦
The second letter arrived three days later, also slipped under my door,
also in the night.
This one had a single instruction:
There is a Tuesday poetry reading at Weatherfield Books. Go this
week. Sit near the back. Order the chamomile tea, not the coffee.
And Elara bring your courage. You're going to need it for what
walks in out of the rain.
E
I showed it to Priya, who read it twice and then said, with the flatness
of someone trying very hard to be rational: 'It could be a prank. An
elaborate one.'
"It knew about the staying open.""
'Maybe someone read your journal.'
"I don't keep a journal.""
She had no answer for that. We sat in silence for a moment, the
Hummingbird doing its work in the background, and I looked out at the oak
tree where Borges was doing something structural with twigs.
"I'm going to the poetry reading," I said."
Priya pressed her lips together. 'Of course you are.' She picked up her
bag. 'I'm coming with you.'
"The letter said""
"The letter can be wrong about one thing.' She gave me the look. 'I'll
sit in a different section. But I'm going.'"
I didn't argue. But I noticed, as she was pulling on her coat, that she
was scared not of the letter, not of whoever wrote it but for me. The fear
was in the set of her shoulders, the slight over-efficiency of her movements.
Priya was afraid of what I might find at Weatherfield Books.
I was afraid too.
But underneath the fear was something I hadn't felt in months: the
electric hum of a story that was not yet finished.
✦ ✦ ✦
I went through the rest of that week in a state of heightened attention
everything slightly brighter, slightly more significant, the way objects look
the morning before something important happens. I read. I watched Borges.
I attended my Tuesday morning appointment with Dr. Kaplan, my
pulmonologist, who went over my recent scans with the careful nonexpression that doctors cultivate when the news requires management.
'The progression is stable this month,' she said, which meant it hadn't
gotten worse, which was the best news available to us in our current
situation.
"That's the same as last month," I said."
"Yes." She paused. "There is a study out of Johns Hopkins I've been
monitoring. I wasn't going to mention it yet because enrollment is still""
"Tell me about it anyway," I said."
She looked at me. 'How did you know I was going to bring that up?'
I had known because E's second letter had a postscript I hadn't shown
Priya: Ask Dr. Kaplan about the Johns Hopkins study. Don't wait for her to
raise it. She won't, not yet, because she doesn't want to give false hope. But
you need to know it exists.
"I just had a feeling," I said."
Dr. Kaplan studied me for a moment with the expression of someone
recalibrating.
'It's a promising study,' she said slowly. 'Early stage. But promising.'
I walked home in the November rain thinking about the word
promising, and about the letter, and about whoever was writing them.
Whatever I had been expecting from Tuesday whatever I had been
steeling myself for, opening myself toward I had not expected what actually
walked in out of the rain at Weatherfield Books.
I had not expected him to be holding a photograph of a woman
who looked exactly like me.