Nothing except God. God made the only sense there was. He was here. She heard His voice, only not in true words. God spoke to her thoughts and breaths, in colors and sensations. All her senses seemed to weave together—sometimes tight and coarse, other times loose and billowy. When the world was tight and coarse, she would feel God beside her, holding, protecting. When the world was loose and billowy, she would feel Him underneath her like the wind under a seagull. The Lord of Time whirled her in and out of time’s grip, the Author of Life pushed and pulled at her breath, the Lamb of God cradled her in her suffering. One set of words kept coming to her, over and over. She knew it to be truth, but couldn’t remember where she’d learned it. In life or in death I belong to Christ.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
John startled awake to a hand on his shoulder, every joint of his body reminding him of the hard floor that had been his bed for two nights. His head turned quickly toward the cot beside him where Leanne lay with her back to him. Was she all right? Had someone woken him to deliver bad news?
The hand squeezed his shoulder in assurance, and John squinted in the sunlight to see Dr. Madison pulling up a metal chair. He looked as tired as John felt.
“She’s still with us,” he whispered, handing John a tin mug of mercilessly strong coffee. “I just checked and her pulse is weak, but steady.”
Hearing their voices Leanne gave a soft moan and shifted a bit, but did not wake. “Even in her sleep,” John said, looking at the too-sharp angle of her shoulder, “she’s in too much pain. She’s barely woken in two days.”
“And you’ve barely slept in two days.” Madison nodded to him over his own cup. “She’ll have my hide if I don’t keep you well enough to celebrate her recovery.” He winced as he swallowed. “This is dreadful. I’m trying to be grateful it’s hot.”
“Thank you.” John gulped down the hot brew with gratitude. Leanne sighed softly. “It’s hard to be grateful for her prolonged pain, but I’m glad she’s still with us.”
“Pain is an odd companion, but try to think of it as the body’s way of fighting to stay alive. They say you never feel a mortal wound, only the one that won’t kill you.”
It was funny how Madison, who had once been the only thing standing in his way, the enemy to be conquered, had become a friend. Unable to sleep, John had talked for an hour to Leanne’s sleeping form in the middle of the night last night about this strange world they now occupied. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” John had said as he wiped Leanne’s hands—still paler by moonlight than their ashen color by day. “Our Dr. Madison, my chief inflictor of therapeutic pain, has become a source of comfort. A friend, if you can believe it.”
He liked talking to her when the room was dark. Sleep eluded him anyway, and he hoped his monologue kept Leanne anchored to this world where he needed her to stay. “I hardly know what to do with this topsy-turvy exchange of blessings and curses. They seem to turn my world upside down and set it to rights all at the same time. If this is the world with your faith, I almost think I’d rather have something more constant and predictable.” He’d fallen asleep fingering the gold cross they’d taken from her neck, now his constant companion in his pocket. It was still in his hand now as he stared bleary-eyed at Madison.
“I have news, John.” Madison had never called him John in all their time together. “Boston has reported a survivor.”
John sat up straight, for this was news indeed. There had been no reports of anything but fatalities from any of the camps. John had stopped watching patients being brought into the hospital, unable to stomach the fear in their eyes. Every person believed the trip through those doors ran only one way. The only variable so far was the rate of death—some died shockingly fast, others lingered cruelly for days. “Someone has lived?”
Madison took off his glasses and pinched his nose. “It is perhaps more accurate to say someone has not died. A single soldier. His fever has resolved. It’s not much, but it’s more than we’ve had to go on before.”
Someone had not died. It was far more than anything they had before. John let his head fall back against the wall, glad to grasp even a thin hope of relief. “Thank God above.”
“I thought you’d want to know.” He managed a weary smile. “I thought it might convince you to actually sleep. I am still your doctor, you know.” Madison drained the tin mug with a groan of displeasure. “I’ll sit with her if you like.”
“You’ll do no such thing from the looks of both of you,” came Ida’s voice from the doorway. “I’ve a mind to ship the both of you off to some pantry and lock the door.” She crossed her arms like a scolding schoolmarm. “When’s the last time either of you ate?”
“I think I just chewed this coffee.” John surprised himself with his first joke in ages. Someone hadn’t died. The hourglass could be turned.
“I thought as much. Besides, I’m going to give Leanne a bit of a bath so you’re to be gentlemen and flee the room. Off with the pair of you.”
“Bacon and eggs,” Madison wished aloud as he rose slowly from his chair. “Four of them, with hash browns and fresh strawberries.” He extended a hand to John, who was still propped up against the wall on the floor.
“Eggs Benedict,” John managed through gritted teeth as his leg—and the rest of him—loudly protested the night’s sleeping quarters. “With perfect toast—” a wince cut through his words “—and orange marmalade. And ham. And real coffee, not whatever that was.” John fetched his cane but left the cup of murky black liquid on the floor. He looked at Ida’s barely amused face. “They’ve a survivor up in Boston, you know. Madison just told me.”
“It’s all over campus already.”
John leaned over Leanne’s discolored face, saddened to see her eyes seemed to have sunk farther into their hollows overnight. She was thinner still, ashen where she wasn’t the harrowing purple that marked this disease. She had quieted overnight—he preferred to think of it that way, simply as a quieting, rather than entertain the notion she was weakening. Still, her brow wrinkled in discomfort, and her body lacked the peaceful ease of true sleep. He smoothed a damp lock of hair off her forehead, saddened to find it still warmer than it should be. “There’s a survivor up in Boston, my dear. Someone can survive. Someone has survived. Stay right here with us where you belong.” He kissed her cheek before pulling his mask back up, then nodded to Ida. “Find her some yarn. She’ll want it for when she wakes up.”
After a breakfast that rivaled any half-edible gruel John had endured in the battle trenches, he ignored the rock settling in his stomach and settled down for a stretch of real sleep. An hour in an actual bed, horizontal, on something that wasn’t a floor, felt like a luxury. After that he was up, shaven and back at work in the small room in one of the adjacent inner quarantine buildings he’d commandeered as his “office.”
Colton walked in halfway through the morning. John hadn’t seen the man in almost a full day, since Travers had fallen ill shortly after Leanne. To see such a hardworking young man laid low was bad enough, but it served to make Colton and John doubly anxious about the state of the contagion.
Colton looked calm enough, so John ventured, “How’s Hank?”
The big man shook his head. “Not good. Fella’s just a whip of a thing, so it’s hit him hard. They got him in the ‘big room.’”
The “big room,” as Colton called it, was a sea of misery on the first floor of the “hospital” dormitory, a vast ward of bodies in various states of the disease. Every time John walked by it he offered up a prayer of thanks that Leanne was tucked away in a ward on the upper floors. He wouldn’t state it now, but to him the “big room” seemed like it smothered its occupants in a sheer mass of death.
“Hank’s a tough fellow,” John offered.
“And your Miss Sample?” The romance between John and Leanne had become common knowledge. It was hard to have any privacy in such close quarters, and the urgency of their world right now wouldn’t allow for much subtlety. John took a nov
el pride in claiming her as “his,” through a look, a quick touch of her hand in public places, the use of endearments. It was an odd thing: John used to pride himself on his ability to woo the most desirable lady in any crowd, often seeking her out for the mere challenge of besting other gentlemen. Now, as his mother would have put it, he “only had eyes for one.”
“She’s still with us,” he quoted Dr. Madison with a deep gratitude. “With plans to stay that way. Boston is reporting a survivor, did you hear?”
Colton smiled. “I did. Camp Devens has just one so far?”
“That’s all I’ve heard, but that’s all I need to hear.” John had shared the news with every ear that would listen, but he knew Colton held Travers as a friend. “Madison’s sent word for more information from the doctors at Devens, but nothing’s come through yet.”
“Maybe there ain’t nothing to tell. Some things just is, you know.” John wasn’t sure if Colton was offering encouragement or kindly caution. The big man didn’t elaborate, just looked at the pile of pipes and mattresses at John’s feet and raised an eyebrow. “What have you got going here?”
Fortified by food, sleep and hopeful news, John was attempting something that felt no less miraculous than Christ’s loaves and fishes. “I’m attempting to see if one bed can somehow be reassembled into two. Or even two into three.”
He pulled apart the mattress he’d unstitched into two layers of batting. “Maybe we can just put these on boards nailed to a pair of desks.” The dormitory mattresses were thin to begin with, but no one was seeking luxury here. “I think we can split the wire mesh up into two, but I’m not sure it will hold.”
“Won’t hold me.” Colton chuckled. “Then again, you could fit some of them boys in each of my pant legs, they’s coming in here so thin.”
John could only agree. Each day the incoming patients looked more ill—and more frightened than the last. “Philadelphia was fool enough to hold a liberty bond parade and they ended up with hundreds of cases. Here, hold this,” he said, pointing to wire mesh he’d just unwoven from a disassembled bed.
“Locking us up tight was the smart thing to do then. Only it don’t feel so smart from the inside, does it? My heart jumps through my mouth every time I cough even just a little.”
John, Colton and every healthy person inside “the line,” as it had come to be called, lived in the same state of watch: Have I caught it? Is this the first sign? The constant vigil had worn John’s mind down to a near numbness, but in sleep, his imagination roused again, in the worst of ways. “I dreamed of being chased by a huge tiger, nipping at my heels while I ran through a jungle.” He began threading a screw through a hole in a pipe.
“A tiger?” Waters chuckled. “Not a little bird?”
News wires reported a day ago that as alarm had been raised in the general public, children had begun jumping rope to a macabre little rhyme:
I had a little bird
Her name was Enza
I opened the window
And In-Flu-Enza
It was amusing and horribly sad at the same time.
“No, a big snarly tiger. You’d think I’d enjoy a dream of running, the way I hobble around.”
Colton picked up one corner of John’s new invention, inspecting the thing. “Did you outrun the tiger in your dream?”
“Woke up in a cold sweat before I could find out.” While the sensation of running should have felt wonderful, John would have gladly passed it over to skip bolting upright out of the nap with his heart pounding.
“Well, then, how’s about we say you outran that nasty tiger and saved your pretty girl, too? Sounds like a mighty fine dream to me when you put it that way.”
John had to smile. “I thought you said some things ‘just is’?”
“Well,” said Colton as he handed the wrench to John to tighten the bolt, “I didn’t say ‘all things.’ Well, now, looky here. This just might work.” John showed him how the two salvaged sides came together to hold a mattress. “You are pretty smart for a war hero, Captain Gallows.”
John smiled at his contraption. “If you can’t outrun the tiger, you’d best outsmart him.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Once he’d devised the frame of the bed, John took a mattress down to send off to a ward of Red Cross volunteers to see if the ticking could be easily halved. Beds—even poor ones—were a commodity. Ill patients were actually placed on the floor beside near-dying ones to wait for the bed. John had made two attempts before coming up with a successful design, mostly because he couldn’t stomach the thought of finding himself on a floor waiting for someone above him to breathe their last.
He went to see if Leanne was awake, hoping to share all his good news. What he found stole every ounce of optimism.
She’d lapsed into delirium again, weakly thrashing and succumbing to coughs that sounded as if her body was attempting to turn itself inside out.
“Been like that about an hour,” Ida said, not bothering to hide the concern in her voice. “A bit more and I was going to send for you. She calms to your voice, and I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself.”
“How’s her fever?”
She winced as she answered. “Worse.”
“How?” It was a foolish question—the disease seemed to take a unique course with every victim. Madison regularly bemoaned the sheer vacuum of protocol at every doctor’s disposal. No one knew why one patient died within hours while others hung on for days, why one showed symptoms another did not. “She was improving. She ate something. I watched her.”
“Perhaps it’s just a minor setback.” Ida’s eyes betrayed the thin lacquer of optimism she’d applied.
“Surely.” Liars, the pair of them. John peered at Leanne’s too-gray face, willing himself to find some new source of color though he knew he would not. “She’ll improve again, and keep improving.” The ominous black hole in his gut grew deeper as he noticed one of the room’s six beds was now empty. John looked up at Ida, who turned away to some pretended detail. Death had visited the room during the night.
The ghoul would not be allowed to stay. “I’ll stay with her tonight.” He spoke with all the command he could muster, brooking no refusal. If Leanne was going to leave him, he would not miss the goodbye for all the world.
Ida took a breath to argue, but simply shut her mouth again. “She’ll be glad of the company, I’m sure.” She gave the unreadable smile he’d come to call her “nursing mask,” the one he’d heard Leanne describe as a way to keep what she called “unkind news” from worried patients.
A feathery touch on his arm drew his attention, and he turned to see Leanne’s gaze wander in disjointed alarm around the room. “My dear,” he said softly, angling himself down to her level despite the pain it caused him. Ida was right; the sound of his voice seemed to anchor her. Leanne’s gaze found his and held it, if weakly.
She licked her dry, crackled lips, and he held a wet cloth to them for her to drink a few drops. “You should drink.” She obeyed, wincing as she swallowed—many of the patients complained of throats so sore they seemed as if they were on fire. “I know it hurts, but you must.” Dr. Madison had warned him that the most feared enemy was dehydration, even if it did feel like asking patients to swallow knives when they drank. He put the wet cloth to her brow, smoothing back her hair, noticing with horror that strands of Leanne’s beautiful yellow hair fell out easily at his touch.
“John?” His name was not much more than a gasp of breath, and yet it was everything.
“Yes.”
“John?” she said again, soft but less weak.
“Right here.” He took her hand as it seemed to hover off the bed in search of his. Her eyes fell closed for a second at his touch. Her hand felt like bones inside thin paper. Too small, too thin, too lifeless to be Leanne’s vibrant fingers. After an instant she opened them again and found his face, as if she were creeping toward him through the fog of her illness. “I’m right here and I’m not leaving until you
waltz out of this hospital on my arm.” A foolish, overdramatic statement.
She knew it, too. Even in her distress, Leanne could see through his facade. It took her a moment to find the energy to speak again, but she wore the vaguest hint of a smile as she did.
“I’m dying, aren’t I?” The words came in simple innocence, childlike in its fearlessness. Or its faithfulness—he couldn’t tell.
“You most certainly are not,” he said sharply, despising and needing the deception at the same time. He wanted to say something else, something confident and hopeful, but couldn’t manage it.
A fit of coughing seemed to snatch away what little energy she had. “So much pain.”
“It will pass.” But would it? Was he selfish enough to wish her lingering if all it meant was more suffering for Leanne? His greedy answer showed him for the faulty man he was, not the hero others thought him to be.
“I’m not afraid.” The clear statement seemed as if it could not possibly come from the frail body beside him.
“That’s because you’re not going to die, so there’s no reason for fear.” Panic lodged a cold finger in John’s spine and began to follow along his ribs, squeezing. He clasped her hand instead.
“No.” She shut her eyes, reaching for words. “Faith.”
“God can’t have you yet.” The petulant demand of a child’s tantrum, but it was how he felt.
“And you should choose?”
He adjusted the flimsy pillow, thinking of all the fine linens he had at home and what he would give to couch her in them at this moment. “You said it yourself, I’m accustomed to getting my way and in no mind to tolerate obstacles.”
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