by Lia Habel
I wanted to storm out without another word, to show him just what I thought of his threats. If I didn’t think it would get Bram and the others in trouble, I would have. Much as I hated to admit it, he was in power, and he did have the authority to make life very unhappy for all of us.
I forced myself to stand tall, so as to look down on the man as much as I could. “I’m sorry, sir.” If the God of Sarcasm needed an avatar here on earth, I was up for it.
Wolfe reached into a box near his elbow and pulled out a little brass cigar cutter. “Good. Now, just keep in the back of your brain, Miss Dearly, that if Griswold could, he’d eat it.”
My eyes widened in horror at this idea. When I realized that they had, I despised the bully for catching me off guard, for making me show weakness in front of him.
“Now, you’re dismissed. You obviously don’t want to listen to me, so I’m not going to waste my breath. Let’s see how far you get on your own.”
Before my mouth could run off again, I turned on my heel and marched out. I leapt down the stairs two at a time and angrily punched my way out the swinging doors. Horatio, who had been standing outside, hurried to catch up.
“Are you all right, Miss Dearly?”
“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth.
The crowd outside had dispersed, much like the one in the med hall the previous day. It was obvious they were keeping something from me. I glanced around the busy courtyard, surveyed the dead people still at drill, but Bram was nowhere in sight. Horatio halted beside me, expression concerned.
“I’m going to go eat breakfast,” I said slowly, after counting to three. “I’ll see you sometime afterward, all right?”
“All right, Miss Dearly. I’ll be working in the med wing. Whatever you prefer.”
I would have preferred to see Bram.
Oh, how I longed for prison.
Upon my arrest I thought I’d be taken to New London’s prison, known as Drike’s Island. I had murdered a woman. Instead, they told me I would be held at a local police station until law enforcement officials could “sort things out.” I was in shock and could only nod weakly in response when one of the constables explained it to me.
They’d taken me to the West Herbert Avenue station house. It was a claustrophobic brick building that, given current events, greatly resembled a panicked beehive. Between the constables rushing about and the people coming in to petition for missing loved ones and beg for information, the screens mounted in the waiting area and behind the front desk were inaudible. Their constant flashing only compounded the overall aura of alarm.
The majority of the women in the dank communal cell into which I’d been placed were drunks and loiterers, repeat offenders who either slept their stupor through or curled up and waited to be released. To them it was all routine. I’d not spoken to them. I wanted nothing to do with them. A few of the women were like me—individuals caught up in the rioting. They’d been eager to talk about their stories. I hadn’t been eager to listen. I didn’t want to be part of a world where things like this could happen—I didn’t want to be reminded that I was. I didn’t want to have to think about people fighting for their lives out there on the streets, or how fast the illness might be spreading.
I was terrified of the infected, though no more terrified of them than I was of myself.
Hours passed, and still no one told me what I was being charged with, or when. There was no mention of a bail hearing or anything like that. I wondered if bail would even be required. I knew it would take my parents a while to scrape together the money.
So I tried to be patient. I tried to block everything out. I couldn’t tell how many different policemen there were. I couldn’t tell how many times a guard came to the door and passed around wooden bowls full of mushy boiled vegetables and tin cups full of water. I didn’t eat. I barely drank. Every time a new prisoner was pushed inside, I clamped my arms around my head and squeezed myself into a corner of the dark cell, as far from them and the maddening flashing lights and the angry crowd outside the barred door as I could get.
Before I knew it a full day had gone by, and I was beginning to fear that my parents would simply disown me and leave me at the station. It was a real hot, physical fear, and it grew worse as the hours wore on. The numb haze I had managed to enter abruptly ended. I did things I never imagined I would do, stupid things like drumming my feet in infantile frustration over the lack of a barrier between myself and the people who continued to come and go, always coming and going—it was driving me mad, having nothing to put between them and me. I felt exposed, vulnerable, utterly alone. I wished they would take me to Drike’s, give me my own cell in a mile of cells, and leave me to rot.
By the time the guard shoved the girl with the dishwater hair inside the cell, I was swiftly turning into a wreck.
She was about my age, with a broken nose and no curves to speak of. Her skin was mottled with strange spots of black. She curled up in the fetal position on a bench, coughing.
I knew she had the sickness.
“Officer … Officer?” I said, pressing myself against the rusted bars of the cell. My own voice sounded strange to me. It took a while, but in time one approached—a freckled young man with dirt-colored curls and a port-wine birthmark on his chin.
“Is there a problem?” He spoke loudly but couldn’t disguise his own timidity.
“Please, Officer …” I looked at the girl. I kept staring at her until I was sure he was looking with me. “I think she’s sick. I think she has the illness.” When I returned my eyes to him, he was already walking away. I gripped the bars even more tightly. “Officer, please!”
“Sit down and remain calm!” he barked back at me. His freckles were like stones scattered on a sugar sand beach, he was so pale. I fought back the sob that wanted to rise in my throat.
“Please!” I pleaded, as I never thought I could or would have to. When I realized he wasn’t going to turn around, I slumped back onto the thin, hard wooden bench and let myself cry. Most of my cellmates paid me not a bit of attention. They were probably used to it.
I didn’t want to have to hurt another person. That’s what I kept repeating, in my mind, over and over—they were people, they weren’t monsters or anything silly like that, they were sick people and, oh my God, I had killed that woman, I’d killed her, I’d killed her. Then the world went away again, and I clutched my own body and prayed.
* * *
By noon or so, I wasn’t the only one who was worried. My fellow prisoners slowly gravitated over to sit by me, and together we watched the girl as her condition grew worse. Everyone seemed to instinctively realize what was happening, and no one tried to aid her. A few slid their shawls over their mouths.
“What do we do if she goes ballistic?” a pimpled woman with a deep voice asked. No one replied.
Please, no. Not again.
Eventually one of the loiterers, an old woman wrapped in ratty blankets, stood up and started banging on the bars with a rag-bundled fist. Her voice creaked as she tried to yell over the din of the civilians gathered outside.
“We got a sick girl in here, real sick!”
I watched the girl’s chest rise and fall.
“Why’d you put a sick girl in here, you idjits? She needs t’be in a hospital!”
I watched her chest fall.
“You hear me? Ramirez, I’m talking at’cha! You want us all ta get it? Is that it?”
Her chest didn’t rise.
She was dead.
Thank God. Thank God. I never thought I’d lift thanks to heaven over the fact that someone had died—but the dead couldn’t attack the living. Far better that she was dead, and not by anyone’s hand. Horrible to say it, but far better.
The old woman got into her stride and bellowed, “Sick girl in here!”
“She’s dead,” I said. The woman didn’t hear me, and continued to yell.
The crowd of people gathered in the station took up her cry. Most of them headed for the
street, newly reborn as a screaming, stampeding mob. Those of us in the cell, on the other hand, remained calm. Perhaps it was because we knew we had nowhere to run.
“Morons,” a woman sighed. “They act like girls shy of their pimp’s hand.” The woman sitting beside her laughed nervously.
I slowly slipped off of the bench and took a shaky step toward the girl’s corpse. I had been knotting and worrying my handkerchief in my hands for the last few hours or so; now I placed the wet and grimy thing slowly over her face, as a mark of respect. I suppose it was my way of apologizing for mentally celebrating her passing.
As if by magic, at that moment a gurney sailed through the exodus outside the cell, accompanied by two paramedics and the copper with the birthmark.
I turned around as they opened the squealing door. “I thought you’d left us!”
The cop shook his head, sweat flying from it. “No! The hospitals are swamped.”
“She’s dead. It’s too late.” I looked back over my shoulder at the poor girl.
The handkerchief caved in over her mouth as she sucked in a noisy breath.
I screamed and fell backward onto the bench again, my hands reaching out to catch hold of the bars behind me.
“She’s got it!” I heard one of the paramedics shout. “Get her on there, now!”
The paramedics lifted the girl by the arms and pulled her none too gently up onto the stretcher. My handkerchief slid from her face and landed on the floor. They managed to strap her down by her wrists and ankles before she came to.
She wasn’t dead—far from it. She was snarling, snapping, fighting her bonds as the women about me wailed and uttered prayers.
“Sweet suffering,” the cop whispered.
I stared at the thrashing girl, her frenzied movements tearing her own skin beneath the restraints, rubbing it raw. She’d stopped breathing. I’d been sure of it. I’d seen dead, still bodies at family funerals before—she was dead.
“Pamela!”
I looked to the door. My mother and father were standing there.
The horror before me ceased to have meaning. I fell down on the dirty cement floor as the gurney was pushed past, my chest heaving, my relief so profound it almost hurt.
After I was processed out, my parents wordlessly ushered me from the station to a waiting rented carriage. The streets were mad with people. Not one word had been said to me, not one touch given me other than those necessary to guide me. Their faces were stern and drawn.
The carriage didn’t move after we climbed into it. I sat on one side and my parents sat on the other. They looked at me as one might look at a statue, or a specimen in a museum—some dead thing of interest. Nothing alive.
“I’m sorry,” I offered, my voice thick.
I saw my mother’s eyes shimmer and knew there was some feeling there, something. But my father’s expression remained stony, unreachable. It was so unlike him.
I started to get truly scared.
“Mr. Culham,” my father finally said, “your city-appointed counsel down at the courthouse, said that they’re not going to charge you with anything. That it was self-defense.”
I nodded, and took a sloppy breath.
“After Christmas, we’ll send you to stay with your aunt and uncle in the country for a while. Her baby is due soon and she could use the help. You can live with them until the end of your schooling.”
Tears pooled in my eyes again. “What?”
My mother started crying, and dug a handkerchief out of her reticule. “Oh, God above, Pamela, why? Why did you run out into the street?”
“Mr. Coughlin was hurt!”
“He’s dead now.” My father stretched his fingers out along the knees of his trousers and looked to the window. “Dead. So what good did it do you to disobey your mother, hmm?” He laughed then, in a funny way I didn’t like. “I tried to raise good children.”
“Darling, she’s—”
“I tried to raise good children, religious children!” He was shouting now.
“I didn’t mean to kill anybody!” I cried. “She was attacking me!”
“And so you stabbed her in the head with a parasol?” He banged on the roof of the cab. “You could have just laid her out, knocked her out! Run away! You’re already the talk of the street!”
“I’m sorry!”
“I just … never imagined this. Never.” He slid his hand over his face, and I felt a tear travel down my cheek. Isambard was right. They’d wanted me to do something great, be someone great, rise in the world. Every inch I was ever given had been given to me because I was a good, obedient girl; because they knew I would demure and take only a half-inch instead, of my own volition.
I wasn’t a good girl anymore.
I gathered every scrap of air into my lungs that I could and hiccuped out, “We need to go. All of us.”
My father hit the button that told the driver to start out, and shook his head. “We’ve not been told to evacuate.”
I looked outside. There were people running. Shops were shut down, a light snow drifting past their darkened windows. “Do you need to be told?” I asked. Dad gave me a warning look, and I shut my mouth.
“They’d tell us to go if they needed us to,” my mother said. She didn’t sound like herself; she sounded wispy, like her vocal cords had been replaced by a dry reed. “They’ve actually warned us against leaving the city, because medical care can be so scarce out in the country.”
We rolled along for a few moments before I realized, aloud, “They don’t want us to spread it.”
“Hush up, Pamela,” my father said. “Not one more word about it. We get home, you go straight up to your room, and you stay there. You don’t move until one of us tells you to. The fewer people who know you’re home, the better.”
I bowed my head. We rode in silence.
The street outside our house was desolate. As I stepped down from the carriage, snowflakes dancing about my face, I realized that Christmas Eve was the next day. The street should have been filled with busy, jolly people, even without the addition of the refugees. Instead, it was as empty and forbidding as a graveyard. The windows in the buildings around us were dark, giving the appearance of rows of black, grinning teeth. The clackboards were still.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“The power went off along the street before we came to get you,” my mother said, taking my hand and guiding me up the stairs to the door. She unlocked it and pushed me unceremoniously inside.
The house was shadowy, the only light coming from the lamps in the kitchen. My mother urged me to head that way. My father disappeared down the hall and through the door to the bakery, probably to prepare Christmas orders, if those were even still standing.
Isambard was seated at the kitchen table. He glanced up when we entered and fixed me with a look of such hatred that I almost withered again. He probably thought I’d ruined his chances, too. St. Arcadian’s was now permanently out of his reach.
For the first time, I felt truly sorry for him.
Neither of them spoke to me. My mother prepared me a simple lunch. I ate it slowly, half afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep it down. At some point Isambard thumped up to his room, making a show of leaving me alone at the table. I followed not long after.
The climb to my room was familiar as ever, but I felt somehow alien. I set the oil lamp I’d taken to guide my way on my vanity so the light would be reflected into the room, and moved to open the window. Cold, clean air drifted against my face. I shut my eyes and relished it.
I should take a bath, dress, and sleep. I’d had only snatches of sleep in the cell, moments where I opened my eyes and was unable to account for the last few minutes. Fatigue was making the whole thing worse—leaving me unable to contain my emotions, turning every word and glance from my family into a triple insult.
For in my heart I knew that my parents didn’t hate me. They had loved me enough to take me back in, even if only to offer me shelter. They didn�
�t hate me.
They were afraid of me.
For a moment the good girl within me screamed and raged. We would try harder than ever. We would be obedient, quiet, shame-faced. Perhaps we could escape exile to the country if we tried.
Trying, trying, always trying. Trying was my life. I was guaranteed nothing.
I opened my eyes.
In the stone courtyard below, where our building and the three others about it allowed enough space for a single tree and a few benches to live, I saw movement. I paused, my hand on the frozen sash, to see what was going on.
The back door to the building on the street behind ours opened wide, and a man came out. I recognized him as one of our neighbors, Emanuel Delgado. He was a good man, a fishmonger. He was very pale, though, and moving in what I could only describe as a “top-heavy” fashion. It seemed as if his legs were struggling to keep the rest of him up and in the proper position, and his torso was leaning forward, his shoulders strangely curved. In one hand he clutched a coal scuttle.
He headed for the drain in the middle of the courtyard where we all deposited the ashes from our fires. He did this very slowly and with great care, as if afraid he was going to drop the scuttle. He then turned and with a rolling, unsteady gait walked back to his house.
I curled my fingers around the sash, my other hand sliding up to my throat from my chest. He looked ill.
He has it, too.
But then I started to doubt myself. I was so tired. Was I going to see these things everywhere, these indications of sickness? We weren’t close to the Delgados. Maybe he’d always had that pallor, maybe he always walked in that weird fashion. I’d only ever seen him standing behind his market stall. I didn’t know.
His wife welcomed him back into the house. Did her expression seem unsure? Was she nervous? She was too far away. I couldn’t tell.
I hurriedly shut my window and rested my forehead on the icy glass. I needed to stop thinking about the illness. I needed to stop thinking at all.
