The Trial (Part 4)

She called the clinic the next morning and said she would finish.

A new box arrived, 41 again, with a smaller amount in it. By the end of the second week the three-in-the-morning thing had stopped. The rest of it didn’t. She got through a whole Saturday in April, and the Sunday after it, and in May she repainted the shelves in her hallway on a weekday evening, which she hadn’t done in three years.

The end of the experiment was not dramatic. She handed back her booklet and the empty box, a nurse took blood for the last time and gave her a paper cup of orange juice, and a man in the waiting room asked her whether the machine sold coffee.

The results came in September. Omar read them to her with the door open and people walking past outside. In the car she had practiced two faces, one for good news and one for bad, and in the end she used neither.

“You were in the drug half,” he said. “I can tell you that now.”

Of the thirty people who had taken it, twenty-two were sleeping and working better by the end. Nine had reported the fast heart at night, and almost all of those nine had been on the larger amount. The drug helps people with her kind of disease, the report said, when the amount is small and the tests are regular.

“The next trial starts at the lower amount,” Omar said. “That’s because of nine booklets. Yours is one of them.”

Nadia still gets tired. Some weeks are bad, and she knows now that some weeks always will be.

But on the Thursday after the letter came, she started work at nine, and at two o’clock she was carrying trays of tomato plants out to the front tables in the sun. She only noticed the time because a customer stopped and asked her what it was.