The Impossible Girl

by Lydia Kang

  Cora’s eyes welled. Every time she considered that her friends were gone, and gone because of her, she cried. It was too much. Lewis and Annie each placed a warm hand on her shoulder and left her, walking to the shade of some trees behind her.

  Cora stood there for more than an hour. She thought of the first times she’d met each of them at Madame Beck’s, when Audrey was quietly refusing Jacob’s invitation to spend time together; or when Tom had ticked off a list of pies he wished to eat; or when Otto’s tail needed mending and she’d brought it to Leah for repair. Her mind danced with memories, a strange concoction of mirth, pain, and regret. She thought of Ida, Ruby, Randolph, Conall, and William, and regret burnt within her. Her face was wet with apologies.

  The air grew colder, and the sun began to dip below the tree line, sending dappled arrays of light that flickered on her skirt. The Prestons would want to leave soon. She heard their footsteps behind her and felt a hand laid upon her shoulder. The Duke—Lewis, though she might never get used to calling him by his real name—stood beside her.

  “How did you arrange this? You were nearly dead yourself,” Cora asked, wiping her eyes.

  “I didn’t. Today is the first time I’ve been here, like you. He told me where to go.”

  “He? Who’s he?” Cora turned to him, confused.

  “Ask him yourself. He’s been waiting a good week to see you.”

  Lewis motioned to his left, and there between two ash trees stood Theodore Flint. He looked thin, with darkened circles beneath his eyes, and a sallow complexion that begged for sunlight and at least a dozen hearty meals.

  Wordlessly, Lewis left her side, and Theo replaced him. Cora said nothing to him for a while, just stood there. Her hand went unconsciously to her belly.

  “Are you well?” he asked softly.

  “I am. Much better. Thank you for finding the room for me.”

  “Thank Miss Cutter and Dr. Blackwell. They arranged for the nurse and the financials. All my money’s gone.”

  “Gone! What did you spend it on?”

  Theo said nothing, only looked down at the turned earth. “I thought of adding headstones, or an obelisk. I would have gained a debt for it, but then I thought—these things all crumble with time. After you and I pass someday, hopefully when we are very old, no one may ever know that they rested here. And a tree is a living legacy to leave behind instead, don’t you think?”

  Cora said nothing. So, he’d arranged for this. A safe place for their rest, though Cora and her boys had personally ensured that a hundred anomalous but well-to-do New Yorkers had not rested so peacefully. For so long, Cora had thought that it seemed right and fitting that after death, one’s body no longer belonged to anyone, including themselves. Her own body was a commodity, as were those of so many others on this island. The victims of slavery who had fled here for safety and freedom. The dockworkers whose labor was paid in small coin; the Irish kinchin running the streets whose worth was doled out by the number of rags they’d gathered or sugar they’d skimmed off barrels. Worth and bodies, decided everywhere.

  But Cora regretted it. She regretted it all. And she regretted that she had snatched away their modicum of peace, after they had suffered a lifetime of struggle and pain (for even for the wealthy, there was pain to be had).

  “I hear you are leaving for Philadelphia soon,” Theo said, interrupting her thoughts.

  Cora nodded, and blotted her eyes with Lewis’s handkerchief. “I am.”

  “Why won’t you stay here?”

  Cora shook her head very slowly. “I can’t stay here.”

  “You won’t know a soul in that city. I can transfer, you know. To the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.”

  “I thought your career was set in New York.”

  “It seems I have collected a variety of thoughts that have needed amending.”

  For a while, there was nothing to say. Everything in Cora told her to flee. To conceal, to protect, to divert—a useful and comforting trifecta of practices. Finally, after being unable to bear it any longer, she turned and walked toward the edge of the garden.

  “I’m going home. It’s late, and the Prestons have been waiting a long time.”

  “They’ve gone already, Cora. It’s just me.”

  “Very well. I’ll walk.”

  “Wait.” He ran to her side, keeping stride with her. “I have a carriage waiting. And if you don’t want me in it, you can take it alone and I’ll walk back. It should take me all of three hours, but I’m happy to do it. I don’t think you should walk in your condition.”

  She stopped walking. Did he mean what she thought he meant? She looked up at his face, and he seemed almost more terrified than she was.

  “Yes, Cora. I know. Suzette told me.”

  Cora dropped her eyes and stared at the grass. “She had no right.”

  “Well, she didn’t exactly tell me—she sent me a note saying you were doing well, considering your delicate condition. I made an assumption, and you confirmed it.”

  “I see,” Cora said, hugging her shoulders.

  “And I was a stubborn pig about making decisions on our future before we’d even had a proper dinner together.” Theo sighed, and he blinked quickly. “I just wish we could start over. I’ve made ever so many mistakes, Cora.”

  “I need time to think about this, Theo,” Cora said. She was shaking now. Theo raised his arm and ushered her toward one of the passageways out of the botanical garden. There, a small carriage was waiting. She allowed Theo to help her inside. Nestled on the seat was a basket with a corked bottle of Croton water, several apples, a wrapped bundle of small cakes, and a meat pie. Cora was starving. The little thing inside her was a ravenous beast. But she pretended as if she didn’t care. Theo brought from the driver a thick woolen lap blanket. He spread it over Cora’s lap and tucked it in on the side.

  “Take all the time you need,” Theo said. “If you wish to speak to me, you can leave a message with the boardinghouse keeper.”

  He slapped the hindquarters of the horse, and the carriage jerked forward.

  Cora sat facing forward as the carriage drew farther and farther away. Her jaw was chattering, no longer from cold, but from fear. She was a step away from an irreversible decision. Breath drawn, ready to speak.

  She missed Jacob. She wished she could don his clothes again, slip into the crowd, and not be herself for a while. He could make decisions for her, fight for her, drink for her, steer their common future. But Jacob was no longer needed, and she missed him acutely. What would he say? What would he do? The clarity of his mind was a very real thing, and hers had been clouded by sickness and sleep and too long spent in flight, never landing, never taking a breath to actually live.

  Jacob, what do I do? Cora thought.

  But he was silent within her. He’d gone away the moment she had taken those drafts in Suzette’s parlor room, the day she’d claimed her identity and all the nuances of herself.

  The carriage continued to rattle and move forward. She could sense Theo disappearing into the distance behind her. And somehow, she could almost hear Charlotte and her mother, Elizabeth, chiding her from elsewhere on the edges of the wind.

  Stop running, dearest. There is an end to everything, but some endings are very good, indeed.

  Stop.

  Stop.

  “Stop!” Cora cried out to the driver, who pulled on the reins. Cora pushed the blanket off and turned in the open carriage. In the distance, Theo stood there, watching her, his expression unknowable in the dim twilight, but his stance was like that of a man on a precipice, expectant. She stood up in the carriage and hollered as loudly as she could. Louder than her one heart beating, louder than the rising wind, louder than the fear shrinking rapidly within her.

  “Theodore Flint!” she yelled, loud and brash as a man. “I think I love you!”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There is a single rite of passage that physicians have gone through as part of their medical education,
one that stays in their memory forever—Gross Anatomy. I recall the first time we met our cadaver, carefully wrapped in plastic, the air filled with the stench of formaldehyde. I was filled with a confusing array of sensations—awe, intimidation, worry, disgust, fascination, and gratefulness. At the end of our first-year class on gross anatomy, we held a vigil of deeply felt thanks to those who had donated their lives so we could educate ourselves and save others.

  But the study of anatomy has had a rather dark and nefarious history. It was the history of body snatching and resurrectionists that gathered my interest years ago. I soon learned that in order to steal bodies, resurrectionists occasionally employed a lady who would scout out cemeteries during funerals for fresh finds.

  That was when the concept of Cora Lee’s character was born. But many of the details of this book are anything but fictional. The 1788 Doctor’s Riot in New York City—sixty years before this story takes place—occurred as a result of the inhumane objectification and pilfering of graves belonging to the poor, and often disproportionately to blacks. Despite dissuasive statutes and laws that followed, grave robbing continued into the turn of the twentieth century. Today, the majority of cadavers used in medical schools are voluntarily given and, by and large, from white donors.1

  Mort houses, used to rot bodies to prevent stealing, were real. In the UK, there were cages placed over graves. Coffins were created with locks and metal cuffs around cadavers’ necks, to prevent bodies from being pulled out. And let’s not forget those evil gents, William Burke and William Hare, who killed for the sake of selling the bodies to anatomist Robert Knox in 1828, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Their notoriety created a new verb for murdering for the sake of selling dead bodies: burking.

  Picking a time period for this story took some effort. Though grave robbing occurred throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the passage of the landmark Bone Bill in 1854 changed the landscape of grave robbing significantly. Championed by John William Draper (who appears in the book), cofounder and then-president of what is now the New York University School of Medicine, it allowed the unclaimed dead from the city’s Almshouse to be used for anatomic study. It was intended to greatly lessen the frequency of grave robbing, but it also meant that the poor were callously penalized for being poor. As a result of the Bone Bill’s dates, I wanted the story to take place before its passage. For more on the history of the resurrectionist trade, Michael Sappol’s A Traffic of Dead Bodies and Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection, and the Destitute are excellent.

  As for Cora’s double hearts? She was, in fact, the impossible girl, in that she did not have a second heart at all. Her second heart was designed to be an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. In the mid-1800s, it was called a vascular hamartoma. It’s a tangle of blood vessels, in which an artery connects directly to a vein without the normal progression of artery to arteriole to capillary to venule to vein. Symptoms include hearing a murmur, feeling a “thrill” (a pulsatile, vibratory sensation when felt with the hand), and if the vascular hamartoma is large enough, mini strokes, or transient ischemic attacks, two of which Cora suffered in her life. Ones as large as Cora’s are unusual, but do exist, and they are a matter of bad luck, as opposed to being inherited genetically. Today, such a medical problem is more easily discovered and cared for by experienced physicians.

  A few notes on these fictional murders. Paris green was the paint employed as a poison to kill the first victim, Randolph Hitchcock, and was a lovely emerald-green color used throughout the nineteenth century. Also called Scheele’s green and Emerald green, it acquired its other name because of its usefulness in killing rodents in Paris. Arsenic was the element responsible for its deadliness. Paris green was also used as a colorant on wallpapers, and likely sickened a good many people who lived in these beautiful but poisonous surroundings. I hadn’t read of a case where Paris green was actually used as a murder weapon, aside from being used to kill insects and rodents. I suppose there had to be a first! For more on the fascinating history of arsenic, check out John Parascandola’s King of Poisons: A History of Arsenic.

  Strychnine as a murder weapon came to my attention after my cowriting with Nate Pedersen our book Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. I learned that strychnine poisonings had symptoms very similar to tetanus, and knew I’d tuck that away for my next mystery novel. Thanks, Nate!

  And finally, a note on one of the most important characters of the book: the setting. New York in the mid-1800s was a colorful, noisy, stinky place. For a deeper look into life at that time, I highly recommend reading Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, and George Foster’s New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches. The city was abloom with personages who often eclipsed the very backdrop of their world—Afong Moy, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Phineas Taylor Barnum, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Jenny Lind, to name a few. I had to include several on the page, and I tip my stethoscope to Dr. Blackwell, a brave and brilliant pioneer for women in medicine.

  And finally, navigating the language of the notorious Five Points—flash—was a lesson unto itself. For those who wish to perplex and impress their friends, you’ll need The Rogue’s Lexicon, by George Matsell, so you can rake the lingo, drop a gapeseed for a glass, and act a chaffing pickle!2

  * * *

  1 Halperin, Clin Anat. 2007 Jul;20(5):489–95

  2 Translation: Share the language, tell a wonderful story for an hour, and appear to be a talkative, smart fellow!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my husband, Bernie, to my lovely children, to my scamp of a dog, Piper, and to all my extended family and close friends, who encourage me endlessly. To Sarah Fine, enormous hugs for always being there. And to Nate Pedersen and April Tucholke, for never blinking at the bizarre subject matter that pops up on our emails. To Emalee Napier, who keeps me calm and organized all the time—you’re a lifesaver.

  To the wonderful Lake Union authors who have become my colleagues and friends, thank you! And a huge shout-out to the Physician Moms Group on Facebook. It’s quite a thing to have tens of thousands of smart women supporting my stories.

  To Kate Brauning, for her thoughtful words, encouragement, and insight—you rock. And to Eric Myers, my wonderful agent—thank you for never thinking my stories are way too strange! And finally, to Caitlin Alexander and Jodi Warshaw, and my team at Lake Union—you guys are brilliant, and I thank you for making this book a reality!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2012 Chelsea Donoho

  Lydia Kang is a physician and the author of A Beautiful Poison. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated from Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine. She currently lives in the Midwest with her family, where she continues to practice internal medicine. Visit her at www.lydiakang.com.