Nyla studies me in confusion, which is already much better than the serious look from before. Maybe I can coax a smile out of her after all?
‘Take a look at her, I want to know how you rate her chances,’ I say, gesturing upward again. ‘I mean, she looks healthy, doesn’t she?’
Hesitantly, she shifts her weight from one foot to the other. I raise my brows in an encouraging way, and finally she looks up at the sky.
‘Do you see her legs? Strong, not a gram of excess fat,’ I continue, without taking my eyes off Nyla. ‘She does a balanced mix of endurance and strength training and makes sure she always gets at least one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight.’
There, the corners of her mouth twitch, the muscles relax. Now she’s smiling.
Nice.
‘Naturally she stays away from drugs and alcohol; instead, she grows her own sprouts and ferments vegetables.’ I can’t help but keep talking.
The way her face brightens, how stunning she is when she smiles, how relaxed she looks—wow.
‘What else do you think she does?’ I ask.
Nyla nibbles on her lower lip. ‘I don’t know.’ She lowers her chin and looks straight at me. For a moment I feel caught out because I’ve been watching her so intently, yet I still invite her to sit with me with a wave of my hand.
After she has sat down, I look up again. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her tilt her head back as well.
‘What else does she do?’ I ask again.
I hear her breathing, for seconds I wait for her answer. ‘She goes to bed at the same time every day and avoids screen time before going to sleep,’ she says quietly.
The cloud changes, growing longer and longer. Earlier, the goat was already barely recognizable; now it becomes even more indistinct.
‘She also has a perfect sleep environment. Dark, cool, exactly fifty percent humidity,’ I add.
‘Mhm,’ Nyla hums absentmindedly. ‘Yes, she does.’
A strange mood settles between us. I wonder if it feels to her too as if we’re no longer talking about the goat in the sky at all.
‘But there are also things she doesn’t have,’ I say experimentally, whereupon Nyla falls silent. Still, I can’t shake the impression that she knows exactly what I’m getting at: fun, zest for life, happiness.
Involuntarily, I look at her. Melancholy dominates her delicate face, and I don’t understand where it comes from. I don’t understand this woman at all, anyway.
‘But she’s healthy,’ she whispers tonelessly.
I follow the movement of her lips, see how they curl slightly, how she tries to lift the corners of her mouth, and also how hard that is for her.
‘Yeah, she’s still got at least two hundred and thirty fun-free years ahead of her,’ I reply. ‘She may miss out on most of life, but at least it’ll be long.’
Instead of smiling like I’d hoped, she shakes her head sadly. I quickly look back up to find another funny detail, but then I see how the cloud is dissolving more and more.
It grows thinner and thinner against the blue of the sky, drifting farther and farther apart until it’s nothing but pale mist.
And now she regrets having spent her whole life worrying only about her health.The words are on the tip of my tongue, but before I can say them, Nyla suddenly gets up from the bench.
‘We should head back to the car,’ she says, and she’s right.
The shift isn’t over yet. Still, I look at her for an unmistakably long moment and sense deep inside me that something else might not be over either: my wish to see her smile.
Chapter Nine
NYLA
After that strange conversation with Jaden in the hospital park, the rest of the shift, thankfully, went by without any difficult calls. But what he said in the park has been on my mind all day. Last night I even dreamed about that cloud goat and saw it in front of me, dissolving relentlessly no matter how hard it tried to fight against it.