The Pace

by Shelena Shorts

  I saw myself knocking on Mrs. Wilson’s door. As soon as she opened the door and saw me in my nurse’s uniform, she took hold of my arms and pleaded with me. “You know where he is, don’t you? Please, please tell me he’s all right.”

  I could see the trepidation pouring out of her, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer her. Instead, I offered, “I can take you to him.” That was all I managed to say, and it was enough to send his mother quickly snatching her coat. She followed me, heavy on my heels, back to Dr. Thomas’ house.

  By the time we arrived, Dr. Thomas had covered Weston with a blanket up to his neck, so his mother couldn’t see the blood pooling under his skin in various places. He had also re-wrapped the wounds to his neck and face, but we could still see the blood seeping through. When I walked her into the room, she broke out into sobs.

  “No!” she cried. She rested her head gently on his chest and then she knew. She knew why he was covered. She peeled back the blanket slowly and saw the bruises on his elbows, wrists, and torso. They were spreading into a horrible array of hues all over him. “What happened? What happened to him?” She was shaking. “Please somebody tell me!” she cried.

  At the sight of Mrs. Wilson’s agony, I took a step forward and instinctively hugged her. She sobbed in my arms. I softly tried to explain the accident.

  “What? A dog? All of this for a dog?” She dropped to her knees. “What was he doing out walking? Where was he going?” I remembered the box we’d taken from his pocket and retrieved it, hoping it would provide an answer for her.

  “Mrs. Wilson, I think he was buying this,” I informed her, handing over the box. She slowly pulled back the top, and at the sight of the bracelet, she broke into hysterics. She stood up and zeroed in on Dr. Thomas, who was standing in the back corner.

  “Doctor, you have to help him. He needs blood. You have blood, right? I can give him mine. He needs it!”

  Dr. Thomas rested his hand on her shoulder. “Amelia here, has already given him some of her blood. His internal bleeding is too severe. I’m sorry.”

  She was determined, pleading, and unfazed. “No, you can’t just let him die. You’re a doctor. Please, you can’t just let him die!”

  “I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do.” His shoulders drooped, and I saw his eyes were tearing up. He had watched so many patients die that year, and this incident was taking its toll on him.

  “Don’t tell me that!” she snapped. “Please doctor, I’ve already had one son die from this, and that’s what his doctors told me. Please don’t tell me that. Weston is all I have now. I have no one else. Please.”

  “Mrs. Wilson, more blood will not help him.”

  She cut him off. “Then give him something else. You have to have something. Anything. Please. I can’t live if he dies like this. Please help him.”

  I started to flinch at the startling memory, and Wes steadied me. “Sophie, what’s the matter?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to tell him about the images that were flashing before me, because my images were much more detailed than what he was saying. I was afraid to tell him how bad the scene was, because I feared it would cause him to hold back, and I wanted him to tell me everything he knew. Instead, I took my palm and placed it on his cheek. “Nothing,” I said. “What happened after I brought your mother back?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I smiled. He settled back down onto the pillow and started rubbing my hair.

  “After you brought my mother back, I could hear her pleading with Dr. Thomas to save my life. I was in and out of consciousness, but I could hear that she was frantic. Dr. Thomas eventually realized I was going to die regardless, and if he did nothing, my mother would never forgive him. He explained to her that he’d been working on an experimental serum that had been unsuccessful, and she insisted he try it anyway.

  “Dr. Thomas agreed to perform the procedure that evening. But, before he started, he insisted that my mother wait outside, given the complexity and risk of making a mistake. Once she was out of the room, he put wrist and ankle restraints on me and strapped me to the bed.” As I concentrated, Wes’ voice slowly started to fade again, and it was replaced by even more frightening, clear images.

  In my mind, I saw Dr. Thomas injecting the serum into Wes’ arm. I saw the blood making its way through the vein. I could see Wes’ muscles tighten. Dr. Thomas kept filling the vein with so much blood, and I was concerned. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It’s taking it with ease. The serum is flowing freely. I’m not forcing it,” he said.

  He kept emptying the blood into his arm until Wes’ eyes snapped open, and he started jerking his arms. It looked like he was going to tear the leather restraints, he was pulling so hard.

  Eventually both arms, followed by his legs, began convulsing, and he shouted for us to stop. I closed my eyes and turned away. The tears started spilling over. I couldn’t handle it. I went to leave, but Dr. Thomas called out to me.

  “Amelia, look!”

  I turned, but remained distant.

  He called again. “Amelia, get over here. Look at this!”

  I walked over to him, slowly, flinching with every one of Wes’ shouts of agony. His arms and legs were still fighting to free themselves from the restraints. I almost turned away again, but then I saw what Dr. Thomas was pointing out. The bruises on the arm, where Dr. Thomas initiated the serum, began to recede toward the vein.

  “Do you see that, Amelia?”

  I nodded.

  He was bewildered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  It was amazing to watch the bruises begin to get smaller and smaller, but the shouting was ear-piercing. It wasn’t worth the pain. “Dr. Thomas, he’s in pain, make it stop,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “I can’t watch it. I won’t stand here and wait for it to reach the heart.”

  “Amelia, please. I don’t want this any more than you do, but his mother insisted. Now, stay. You can’t leave a patient.”

  He was right. As much internal sadness as I was feeling, I couldn’t leave him. He hadn’t asked for this. I took a deep breath and refocused. He was still convulsing, and the only thing I could do was talk to him. “Weston,” I said in his ear. He stopped hollering and clenched his jaw in response to my voice. “Dr. Thomas has given you special blood to make you better. It’s the only way to save you. I know it hurts, but it’s the only way.” He started breathing heavily to hold back more screams. I stroked his forehead with my hand and kept talking to him. “Your mother is downstairs. She begged Dr. Thomas to save you, and this is the only way he can. You have to hang on. The new blood is working its way through your body.”

  He started shaking his head. “Make it stop, make it stop.”

  I rested my cheek beside his. “I can’t make it stop, but I promise you, it will be over soon. Your bruises are already fading. It’s fixing you. You’ll be better soon.”

  He was still shaking, and our heads started to rock slowly in unison. I didn’t leave him. I wanted him to know that someone was there with him. After a while, I tried to stand to go get his mother and he grunted a clear, “No! Don’t…leave…me.”

  “I want to get your mother for you,” I murmured.

  He was panting. “No, please…don’t let….her see…me like…this.”

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  Dr. Thomas was assessing Weston like a mad scientist. He was checking his fingers, his toes, every inch of him, and taking notes.

  “Incredible,” he observed. I didn’t see anything incredible with the torture Wes was enduring. “I can see the blood traveling through the veins. It’s amazing,” he said.

  I closed my eyes to ignore the momentary optimism and focused on keeping close to Wes’ face so he could feel my presence. Wes’ transfusion was worse than the other patients’ had been. With them, I remembered the pain only lasting about ten minutes, and then there were a few hours of s
ilence before the screaming picked up again. With Wes, it was a constant pain and fighting the restraints for three whole hours. Even when that stopped, he started shivering uncontrollably.

  “What’s happening, doctor?” I asked.

  He looked just as perplexed as I did. “I don’t know,” he reported. “This is odd.” He was feeling his pulse. “His pulse is slowing down, but this is remarkable. The bruises are gone.” He looked around, assessing Wes’ needs. “Get him some more blankets.”

  I hurried out and came back with several blankets. Wes was cold and needed several layers just to manage the chills.

  Wes abruptly interrupted my trance with a light nudge. “Sophie, I think we should pick this up later.”

  “What? Why?” I asked, realizing I was breathing hard.

  “You’re getting all worked up, and you seem distant. I don’t want to frighten you.”

  I turned toward him and nestled closer. “No, I’m okay. I think I was just remembering. Please. Tell me more.” He remained quiet for a few moments and during that time, my mind was blank. I couldn’t picture anything. I was eager for him to start talking again. “Tell me what happened after I brought you the blankets.”

  He pulled his head back. “I didn’t say you brought me blankets. I’m not there yet. How did you know that?” His eyes were fixed on me in the darkness.

  “I told you. I think I’m remembering some things. Now, please keep talking.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Now tell me what happened next.”

  “Sophie, this is a really big deal, if you’re remembering this.”

  “I know, but I can’t see anything else. It’s all gone. I need you to keep going.”

  He studied me for a few more minutes and then started reciting his memory, but I could tell he was assessing my every expression.

  “By the second day, I was kept warm with the help of the blankets. Dr. Thomas had also moved me into his study because there was a large fireplace in there. I was made comfortable enough for my mother to visit.” He paused to check for my reaction. I gave him nothing other than an indication that I was listening attentively, so he continued.

  “Dr. Thomas was ecstatic that I had made it past the first twenty-four hours, and so was my mother.” He started to taper off in deep thought.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He gave me a gentle squeeze. “Nothing. That’s the story. That’s how I was made into what I am.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, knowing there was more.

  “That’s all they told me.”

  He was avoiding something, and I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.

  “Wes, you have to tell me everything. We can’t have any more secrets.”

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “I want to know it all. What happened to you after that? What happened to Amelia? How did we fall in love?”

  He laughed gently. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I loved you the very first time I saw you.”

  “Well, I want to know everything. You have to tell me the rest. All of it,” I urged.

  He took another deep breath and began again. “Well, when I woke up, the room was spinning, and it got worse with every day that passed. The only way I could function was to keep my eyes closed. You ended up tying a blindfold around my eyes to make it easier for me. Dr. Thomas was convinced that it would pass as I recovered. Neither he nor my mother noticed my true transformation at first, but you did.

  “You were actually the one to figure out that my temperature was off. Dr. Thomas would put me in front of the fire and within minutes, you could tell I was getting too hot. Dr. Thomas first attributed it to a fever caused by something internal, and you brought it to his attention that it was my surroundings that were making me hot or cold. That’s when he started suspecting the cold-blood was changing me.

  “You also recognized that my time perception was off. I couldn’t see you, but I could feel you with me all the time. One day, I apparently kept thanking you because it seemed like you were constantly giving me things. You would try to give me food or drink, and I insisted that you’d already given it to me. That’s when you knew something wasn’t right.

  “You had Dr. Thomas look into my sanity. It was then that we realized I was seeing days go by in minutes. He immediately stopped his research on the cold-blood and filled my mother in on what was happening to me. Neither of them knew what was going on, and she agreed to let him keep me in his care to monitor me.”

  He began to taper off again, and I could tell he was growing hesitant to continue. I started rubbing his arm in hopes of encouraging him. “What happened next?” I asked.

  “Next, is when my mother caught the Spanish Influenza. I wasn’t even able to say goodbye to her. All I remember is that you brought in a letter from her that told me how much she loved me, and that was it. She wouldn’t even come near me, because she was afraid I would catch it from her. The worst part was that it happened so fast. I couldn’t even tell her I loved her because the whole sickness was a blur to me. It was over before I knew it began. I was going to lose my sanity altogether, but…”

  “But what?” I asked.

  “You saved me again. After that, I wouldn’t eat or drink. I just kept my eyes closed and blocked everything out. After awhile, you started reading Whitman poetry to me. Your voice was like a song in my ear. I focused on nothing else, and eventually I was able to slow down your voice. That’s the first time I realized I could stop the blur if I concentrated hard enough. The sound of your voice became the only thing I looked forward to. It kept me sane for a while.”

  “What do you mean ‘for a while’?”

  He started to get tense. “I went insane anyway. Dr. Thomas brought me a letter from you, in what felt like minutes after you had been reading to me one day. You wrote that you were happy that I was saved and that it was the greatest accomplishment you’d ever had. You thanked me for my graciousness, and you asked me to always remember to do what is right, because the transformation worked on me for a reason. And you signed it, ‘Love, Amelia.’”

  “Why did that make you crazy?”

  “Because I knew it meant you were sick, too. You had caught what my mother had and you, also, stayed away so I wouldn’t get sick. I called for you and tried my best to focus, but the next thing I knew, Dr. Thomas told me you had died. The news sent me into a delirium. Sophie, you spent a year and a half taking care of me, and I wasn’t coherent enough to reciprocate the least bit of courtesy to you when you were sick.”

  “Wes, do you know how many people died from that epidemic? It was bound to happen, and it would’ve happened to you, too, if you hadn’t been kept away. Then where would we be now?”

  “Sophie, I don’t get sick. I’m immune to everything that I know of.”

  I started to feel a sense of his withdrawing from me, and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to change the subject.

  “Well, the point is that I’m here now, right?”

  He pulled me up against his chest and kissed my head tenderly. We lay there in the darkness for a while, and then I became curious.

  “What am I, some sort of reincarnation?”

  “I’ve asked myself that many times. But I don’t know. I haven’t encountered anyone else from the past. I don’t understand it.”

  “Then how did you know for sure that I was Amelia?”

  He answered with ease. “Sophie, let’s just say I went away and you stayed the same age for thirty years. Then let’s say you saw me again, and I was roughly the same age as I am now. Wouldn’t you know for sure if it was me?”

  I thought about it for a second. “I would never forget you.”

  “Exactly. I would know you anywhere.”

  “So then, I must be reincarnated. Why do you think I keep coming back and not remembering?”

  He started rubbing my hair again, and I was glad to feel him relax a little. “Well, you seem to be remembering some things
.”

  “Yes, but only when you give me something to picture.”

  “Well, I’ve read a lot of books on people who think they’ve lived before, and the only thing I gather is those people believe their life’s purpose was not completed. They believe they’ve returned to finish something they were meant to do, and the actual memories are not what’s important—it’s their purpose that is.”

  I pondered that idea. What could I have been meant to do? How could I even know that if I couldn’t even remember what I was doing in the first place? I tried to think really hard about what my purpose could be. I was never good at figuring it out in my current life, never mind one I didn’t remember. I lay there thinking about everything I did that made me feel as if I’d accomplished something.

  I had won a spelling bee in the third grade. I’d won an art show in the ninth grade. I passed my driver’s test on the first try. I had been on the honor roll for the last two years. Those were trivial things. I had to think deeper. What had I done that made me feel like I made a difference?

  Every answer I came up with led back to Wes. The pier, trusting him, and just being with him. It all led back to him, and when I compared it to Amelia, it also led back to him. She was the only one who had helped him when he needed it. If it hadn’t been for her taking him to Dr. Thomas, he would’ve died.

  The only significant common denominator between my accomplishments and hers was Wes. I sat up in complete understanding.

  “You,” I whispered.

  “What about me?” he said, sitting up as well.

  “It’s you. I’m here for you. Think about it. You, technically, aren’t supposed to be here, but you are. And maybe you need me to come back for you.”

  “What are you saying, Sophie?”

  I shifted closer to him. “You said you loved me two times prior. The first time, you said I saved your life. When was the second time?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “It was a few years after Dr. Thomas died.”

  “What were you doing? Were you hurt?”