I fought back the urge to cry as my father threw me in the back of a taxi.
"Take me to the nearest doctor's office," He growled at the man who was driving. "I've had enough to deal with already!"
Daddy was drunk, and I was barely able to think clearly through the haze of my hallucination. As soon as he had stepped foot inside the bathroom, he knew something wasn't right with me. He had heard me talking, yet when I asked him if he heard The Woman's banging on the mirror too, he angrily replied no.
"What woman, brat?! Do you think I'm stupid? I know very well you were just chattering to yourself like a lunatic!!" He had shouted.
After that, my father had dragged me outside the apartment. We stood in the snow until a taxi stopped for us, and now we were on our way to what I assumed was an unfortunate trip to the doctor.
"I can't be the only one seeing this," Daddy kept mumbling over and over on the bumpy way there. "Someone must figure out what is wrong with my worthless child before she drives me mad!"
I sat silently and looked out the window. Maybe watching passing cars and their vibrant lights would take away my panic. I was still shaking head to toe from the fright of The Woman, I didn't understand what she had wanted from me and why she had gone all "bloody" when she was mad. I felt like the past few weeks I had been living out a nightmare. I hoped one of these days Claire would wake me up and I'd be back at home with her, just like how it was before the cliff accident...
The sudden noise of the radio snapped me out of my thoughts. The taxi driver had turned it on casually, and now my father's furious muttering had been drowned out by shouts of, "Utau! Utau!" and, "Kyō no tenki wa odayakana yukidesu."
That was when I felt the car slowing to a stop. We were pulled over on the side of the street in front of a small white and brown building. Daddy threw some money at the driver, thrust the door to the car open, and yanked me into the snow. It took me all my effort not to fall over. After The Woman's creepy mirage in the mirror, I still felt dizzy and in a trance. Between that and my father's drunken slurring, the two of us looked like a pair of lonesome misfits as we stumbled through the cold Japanese landscape.
"RING!" Went the door as Daddy and I slipped inside the clinic. A pretty lady with shiny black hair and tan skin was sitting at a desk inside the waiting room. My father went up to talk to her as I slowly took a seat in one of the metal chairs. I looked around the cold white office, noticing someone I never expected to be there.
"Wren!!" I heard a sweet baby-like voice say. In walked Jín from the hallway beside the desk. Her along with her sister Tora were being ushered out the door by a middle aged Japanese woman, whom I assumed was their mother. I watched as Jín’s older sister made a disgruntled face. She looked down at one of her arms that had a bandaid on it, soothing it vigorously as she whined to herself.
"Oh... H-hi guys. I didn't expect to see you here... why are you, by the way?” I asked shyly.
Jín didn’t answer. She was waving her stout arms around crazily, waddling in little circles around her mother in excitement.
"Mama! Mama! It's the girl from the park I told you about! Sh-she's going to school with us on Monday! And... and she's Norwegian!!" She chattered, a little ball of energetic delight. Her mother looked exasperated, she barely even noticed her daughter while she was talking. Her hair was tangled in a messy bun, and her deep brown eyes were dull and unamused.
"That's nice, Jín..." She mumbled.
Meanwhile, Tora was still griping to herself pathetically.
”If you really want to know, little blonde, we had to get checkups.” She angrily moaned. “That meant getting shots too. Ugh, It’s the only reason why we had to leave the park in the first place!”
I shrugged slightly. Since the second Tora and I had met, I knew she was dramatic. I just didn’t know she would whine about a simple “checkup” so badly. To me, doctor’s offices didn’t scare me. Every time I had to get a shot, there wasn’t much pain involved. It almost felt good to me, like the way it felt the night of my fever panic...
“Well, we’ll see you later!” Jín said as her mother started pushing her out the door. I sat in my chair looking dumbfounded as I waved goodbye to the friends I had barely just greeted. Funny, how they seemed to be everywhere at once. Then my father turned away from the desk and motioned for me to get up. He was standing by someone new this time, a doctor in a white coat.
“Come with us, Wren.” The doctor said, as I assumed Daddy had told him my name.
We walked down the hallway Jín had come from, the doctor opening a door to our right. Inside was a room just like any other in a typical clinic. A bed made of cold metal built into the wall, chairs lined up in a row by the entrance, and a countertop full of objects that my seven year old brain guessed were “doctor-ry things”.
I struggled to lift my small body on to the bed, swinging my legs over the edge. My father took a seat and so did the doctor. I watched as he pulled a pen and paper from his coat pocket, and started to write something quickly.
“So tell me what’s wrong, Wren.” He said.
I gulped. I didn’t want to tell him, I was still confused as to why we were even at a doctor’s office. Yet, a very small part of me knew why. It was because Daddy needed some sort of reassurance that he wasn’t the only one witnessing my psychotic antics. He was slowly catching on to me, like how I talked to “myself” in the mirror, and was getting mentally worse and worse by the day.
"Well,” I started, barely breathing as I struggled to find the right words to say. “Ever since my sister died, my head hasn't been right. I keep seeing and hearing things I feel like I shouldn't, a-and it scares me..."
The doctor didn't look up. He continued to scribble something onto his paper as if he found little seven year old girls hallucinating normal.
"Alright, and how long has this been going on? How did your sister die?" He asked me.
I fearfully turned my head towards my father and looked for any reassurance in his old green eyes. He sat in the chair and raised an eyebrow back at me smugly, as if to say, “This is your problem, brat. Not mine.”
“Um, umm, u-uhh...” I tried desperately to answer the doctor’s question. Every time I tried to speak, it was like the words were wrapping around my tongue and strangling it till I stuttered. That’s when I did a very embarrassing thing, though I couldn’t help it in the moment. I broke into tears. Thinking of how I had killed my sister, I felt more hurt and broken than I ever had before. Daddy combed his hand through his hair like he was mad and stressed. Shaking his head disapprovingly, he opened the door and motioned me out, whispering in a deep threatening tone.
"I'll just deal with this myself, seeing you’re too much of a weakling to get your emotions straight for once. I'll tell him you haven't been feeling well lately or something... Just get outta here, alright? I don't need more of your petty little tears while I have to deal with real world problems. Go back to the waiting room, ya brat!"
I breathed a loud sob as I quickly slid off the metal bed and out of the room. I couldn’t do anything right! Even talking to a doctor was apparently too hard for me, but I couldn’t even think how I was supposed to tell him of my sister’s death without bursting into tears. Ashamed, I walked back into the waiting room and slumped into the chair I had been in earlier. Memories of Claire and her sweet face filled my head, the ones that stood out to me the most making my heart skip a beat. I recalled the time we went bicycling each weekend, and how we would spend hours together playing board games in her room. I remembered how she would cook dinner for me every night and say, “My baby sister deserves the best food in the whole wide world!” after she kissed my head. I was starting to let my eyelids close, thinking of all the wonderful times her and I had had. How I wished more than anything that she was here with me now. Slowly, I leaned my head back in the cold chair of the waiting room. Maybe if I closed my eyes for just a little bit, I could dream of Claire being right here with me, and everything would be okay...
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