The outer waiting area of the ophthalmology department was done up in all red, various shades from pink to burgundy. Our wait for an examination room was, however, brief. The exam room was as one might expect. Posters of eyes and ears covered the walls. A square nurse came in with a clipboard, took Sarah’s blood pressure and temperature. She was talking the whole time, but I cannot remember what she said, if I even knew what she was saying. The nurse looked at the thermometer and nodded the nod of an expert at reading such things. “Let’s try the other arm,” she said about the blood pressure. “The other arm is not the same as that one.”

Sarah didn’t respond but looked at me as if to ask, What the fuck? And though Sarah would never have said that, not in those words, she actually did. “What the fuck?” she said, ironically.

“Sarah,” Meg said. I thought it was a reprimand at first. It wasn’t. “Sarah,” she said again.

My daughter looked strangely into the air in front of her. Her head fell back ever so slightly.

“Zach?” Meg’s voice shot through me.

Sarah was not herself, was not right. I took her hand, felt the small bones under my thumb. I thought it was odd that I was taking time to appreciate her delicate construction. “Bug?”

Sarah’s eyes fluttered and rolled back in her head. For some reason I looked up at a poster of the parts of the eye as if for an answer.

The nurse was to the door quickly. “Dr. Peterson!” she called down the hall. “Emergency in three.” Then, “Calling Dr. Peterson, calling Dr. P., trouble in room three, Dr. P. I rhymed.”

Dr. Peterson was an enormous man, near seven feet tall. He squeezed through the door and gently moved my wife and me out of the way. His giant head hovered over Sarah. “She’s seizing,” he said. So calmly he said it. But it wasn’t his daughter, was it?

And then it was over. Sarah looked at me, disoriented for only a second. I asked her if she was all right. She asked me why I was asking, smiled.

Dr. Peterson stood and bumped his large head on the ceiling. “Whew. An abscene seizure, not obscene, but abscene. But an obscene seizure is something to see, believe you me.”

“You rhymed,” the square nurse said.

“I believe I did,” the doctor said.

I awoke, sweaty and confused. I looked at my watch. I would be only a couple of minutes late for class.

2

There was a bus that transported the gear, but most of the students chose to carpool out to Anza-Borrego, to the Yuha Desert at the south end of the park. It was a two-day field trip that I had made several times. I was in my aged Jeep with Hilary. She had apparently gotten over our last, awkward conversation, but still, there was not a lot of talking during the first part of the long ride. It was near one hundred degrees, and with the soft cover, there was, in fact, no air-conditioning, so we sweated and drank water.