The Glass City [#Wattys2016]

Part 3

    Today is not a good day.  We've been having more and more of those lately.  Cass stays in bed for most of the day, coughing up a storm.  It's starting to remind me of the final days with my mother, how sick she was before she passed.  I push those thoughts out of my mind and put on a smile for Cass's sake.  There are times when she is only a bit hoarse, and there are times when she can barely speak.  I must've refilled her water glass fifty times, but I'm happy to do it, if it keeps down the swelling in her throat.
I hear a pounding on the door- it must be the doctor.
"Stay here," I say to Cass, and she nods weakly.  Today is the worst I've ever seen her.  It's as if the light, the happiness, that makes Cass who she is has evaporated.  I rush down the stairs and open the door.  A man stands there, looking like something from a storybook.  He wears a white lab coat and a monocle is resting on his left eye.  He holds a worn leather briefcase in his left hand, and his name tag reads 'Dr. Bart'.
"Hello," he says, "you must be," he looks down at a slip of paper, "Catherine?"  I nod.
"This way," I say, and I lead him up the stairs.  He walks briskly behind me, the soles of his shoes tapping on the floor.  I open the door to Cass's room and pull up a chair for the doctor to sit on.
"Can you sit up for me?" He asks her, and she pushes herself up slowly and rests her back against the cracked wooden headboard.  Her arms are so thin. She's been skipping a few meals a week because stuff will get stuck in her throat.
The doctor helps her sit up so that her legs hang off of the bed.  He opens his briefcase and takes out an object that he holds to her chest.  "I'm just going to listen to your heartbeat," he says, and we are silent for a moment, until he puts the object away and scrawls something on his clipboard.  Cass breaks the silence with a cough.  He grabs a penlight and has Cass open her mouth, and he shines it down her throat, then shakes his head and writes something else.  I can't see what he's writing from this angle, but I wish I could.
"Can you tell me what symptoms she's had recently?"  He asks me.  I help Cass lay back down as I tell the doctor everything, from the coughing to the pain in her throat to the weakness that she's felt.  He scrawls down what I tell him, and at the end of it all, he leads me outside and closes Cass's door behind him.  We sit at the tea table down the hall, and he pulls out a shiny silver piece of metal with a small button on it.  He pushes the button, and a transparent holograph of Cass pops up, so we can see the inside of her body.
He points to her throat.  "As you can see here, Cassidy's throat is very inflamed, making it hard for her to swallow, which also may be contributing to some of her lingering cough." I nod.  He then points to her lungs.  "This redness here, in the airways to her lungs, isn't good.  This is the main culprit of her cough, and it is caused by the pollution."  I had figured as much.  "But the worst part is her lungs," he says.  "The bad air has rotted them away, which is why they are dark in some areas, and there are holes down here."
"So, how do we fix it?" I ask.  He stays silent.  "We can fix it, right?"
Dr. Bart takes a deep breath.  "You can fix it.  They have medicine in the Glass City, but nothing that any of us outside the bubble can afford."
"What happens if she doesn't get medicine?" I ask tentatively.
The doctor shakes his head, and that is when I understand.  I hear the doctor talking, telling me that she only has two weeks left at best, but one thought echoes in my head.  If Cass doesn't get medicine from the city, then she will have the same fate as our mother.
Cass is dying.