by Rose Lerner
* * *
Exhausted, Helen lay down in her bed and closed her burning eyes. She felt like she was scattered in pieces around her bedroom. Across the earth. And the thought of picking up those pieces and trying to put together a version of herself that could function, one she could recognize in some way, made her exhausted.
Scared.
More scared even than she’d been, talking to the sheriff. And that had been terrifying. As much as everyone tried to reassure her, part of her believed—having lived without any power for so long—that she would be in trouble for killing Park. Defending herself or not.
Over the months with Park she’d been conditioned to believe that he was worth more dead than she was alive. And she knew how false it was, but that did nothing to stop the fear.
And now he was dead and she was alive, and she had the arduous task of deciding her own worth.
Someone knocked at her door, and she knew before he said her name that it was James.
“Helen?”
The force of her relief seemed inappropriate. Seemed oddly terrifying. Do not, she told herself, disallowing the fizzy sensation of happiness.
What had seemed a comfort in the thick of her sickness now seemed…worrisome.
Was she replacing one need and habit for another? The doctor for morphine? And that look on his face that he could barely hide, was she allowing his regard to determine how she regarded herself?
“Come in,” she said.
The handsome doctor was mussed, in his shirtsleeves with several days’ growth of beard on his face. His wrists were bare and they were… well, they were something. Strong and real. A little bony, dusted with hair, tapering down to his competent hands.
She looked away, pretending great interest in the hem of her bed sheets. The even stitches a woman had put there, who knew how long ago.
“I thought it went well with the sheriff,” he said, leaning against the doorframe.
“Well in that I’m not being taken off to jail, I would have to agree.”
“There was little chance of that,” he said.
Easy for you to believe.
“You seem flushed. Are you feeling all right?”
Her mind was full of heavy things she couldn’t organize into clear thoughts. And there was real temptation in letting James take care of her for as long as he would allow.
And he would allow a very long time. She knew this in her bones without him ever saying it.
But sooner or later she needed to get on with her life.
She just didn’t know how to do that.
“I knew it was too soon to talk to the sheriff,” he muttered and stepped forward. “You are just barely out of the fever. Sitting there answering-”
“I’m fine,” she told him.
But still, he touched her forehead, confirming her feverless state himself.
His hand was replaced quickly by the cool sweep of a damp cloth. She sighed at the sensation. This was the beginning of his exam. She had, over the past five days, grown used to his touch. The warm sandpaper feel of his fingers against her wrist as he took her pulse. The weight of his body on the edge of her bed and the way she would allow her own body to bonelessly roll toward him so her hip would press against his. A small, electrical thrill through her otherwise empty body.
What seemed like hundreds of times in the last days she’d turned to the sound his voice, a smile on her face. Her heart rising to his presence.
The bed dipped under his weight as he sat on the edge, and she rolled toward him and then shifted away before the heat of him could register.
Stiff as a board, she lay there as he lifted her wrist in his fingers. He glanced sideways at her.
“You seem very tense.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Is it Charles?”
Oh. Charles. Everything was supposed to go back to Charles.
“You could talk to a priest in town. Father-”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“Then someone else?”
“I know you want me to feel something about killing Charles. But I don’t. I just…” She couldn’t even force herself to say she was sorry. Or that she knew it was wrong.
“All I feel is relief,” she said. “Relief that he’s gone and relief that I’m not in trouble.”
She stared at the ceiling over his shoulder and refused to be anything but what she was. She had forced herself to pretend so much over the last years of her life. There would be no more pretending.
“I feel the same way,” he said, and she nearly allowed her body to roll toward him she was so shocked. “Is it such a surprise?” he asked. “Moreover, I’m glad it was you that did it—how about that for shocking. I’m glad you’re free and that you’re healthy and whole and that your life is your own again. I’m-” He stopped and she had to look away.
It was either look away or she would kiss him, like she did in the store room at Delilah’s. Moved by his kindness and his wrists, she’d throw herself into his arms.
She could feel him watching her, waiting for her reaction. Waiting, perhaps, for her to throw herself in his arms. So she gave him nothing, in fear of giving him all the wrong things.
After a moment he continued his exam, and she packed and put away her reaction. Her feelings. Until they were deep inside and she barely felt them. Barely felt him, warm and solid beside her.
Because she did not know what else to do.
He opened his pocket watch as he measured her pulse. There were other ministrations, all of which she accepted, shifting and breathing and sticking out her tongue when he asked. He even poked at her teeth.
“I believe you’ve come through this unscathed,” he said as he stood back up. “Physically, in any case.”
“Was there fear I would not?” she asked. “Come out unscathed?”
“Delilah told me stories of soldiers having heart attacks and losing vision and teeth as they came out of the mania.”
“Well.” She ran her tongue over her teeth. “I’m glad to be intact.”
His smile somehow made her smile. This was a vicious cycle they could turn in all day—smiling at each other.
This connection filled her with a strange tension, a miraculous awareness. Uncomfortable and cumbersome. But it was fleeting, as all things were these days. Here and then gone as if her body was not capable of holding onto a feeling for very long.
As if the morphine leaving her body had taken giant pieces with her.
“I feel broken,” she whispered.
“I remember that feeling,” he said. “It will pass.”
“How long did it last for you?”
He made a sort of coughing, choking noise in his throat and shook his head. The good doctor actually blushed.
And she knew, without him saying it, that the answer had something to do with her. And she didn’t want him to say those words.
Please , she thought. Please do not give me these things. I don’t know how to hold them. I will accept it because it’s easy without ever knowing if it’s real.
“I really…would like to rest now,” she said, curtailing any declaration he might make.
The tension between them changed. Turned cold and at wrong angles. And she was sorry. She was. But she could not manage his feelings as well as her own. Not like this. Not now. Perhaps…not ever.
He stood, his demeanor all doctor. As if she were simply a patient in a bed.
It was a relief and a torment.
“I’ll have Annie and Elizabeth send up some lunch.”
He walked out the door, leaving her alone. Leaving her wrung out against the sweaty sheets. She put a hand against her chest, to feel under the fragile armor of her skin and bones, the beat of her heart.
I survived, she thought.
Now what?
* * *
James told himself he was relieved. That he’d felt the hot buzz of a bullet mere inches from his body. He’d been about to reveal himself. About to change everyt
hing between him and Helen.
And she’d somehow known, and rebuked him without ever actually rebuking him. Undoubtedly an old Charleston ballroom trick.
She warned you of this, he reminded himself, walking down the steps.
If you imagine some future, you must know …I do not know what is left of me after all this. If I can ever feel.
Those had been her very words.
He found Annie and Elizabeth in the kitchen. Annie was feeding Elizabeth’s baby, and Elizabeth was putting the kettle on the back of the stove.
Elizabeth and her husband had moved west after emancipation, but her husband had left her and the baby in Denver while he sought his fortune in silver in the mountains south of Denver.
Annie rented her the rooms and paid her to help with the boarding house. Elizabeth also took in sewing.
He remembered with great shame how he’d behaved when she’d moved in. Claiming he didn’t like babies.
But this baby, with her black curls matted down on one side from where she slept. Her face full of applesauce and mischief.
Who could not like such a baby?
They were talking merrily of Christmas Eve preparations. Stockings and gifts.
The air smelled like coffee and applesauce and a household waking up.
I need to move on, he realized quite suddenly. This is not my household and it never will be.
“How is Helen?” Annie asked, turning away from the baby for a moment. The baby took the opportunity to grab the edge of Annie’s glasses with gummy hands.
Annie laughed, and Elizabeth stepped forward to untangle them. James felt his heart dip into grief.
This is not my home.
Like my parents’ home before this, I do not belong in the places I most want to be.
“Exhausted after the interview with the sheriff,” James said. “But otherwise healthy. She would like some lunch.”
“We can do that,” Annie said.
“You should sleep,” Elizabeth said to him. “In a bed. For a day or so.”
James smiled, or thought he smiled, but he was so tired and strange he couldn’t be sure. “I will. I leave Helen to your care for a while.”
Listless, he wandered out of the kitchen and down the hall to see what remained of his practice. In the wildness of the last five days he hadn’t looked around. He’d slept in Helen’s room in a rocking chair, or on the settee in his rooms.
In his favorite exam room—the one with the window and the rocking chair in the corner—it was as if he’d never left. The table. The stack of blankets. The washstand with the soap he preferred. He slid open the top drawer of the three-drawer dresser by the door—there were his needles. The Russian holder. The bone saws.
He slid the drawer shut.
It should not have been so surprising to see all of his equipment there and in perfect condition, as if he hadn’t been gone for a month.
Annie, after all, had been taking care of it.
His private rooms on the other side of the hallway were in the same pristine shape as his exam room.
“She thought you were going to come back,” Steven said from behind him, and James was stretched so thin he jumped at the sound of the man’s voice.
“Sorry,” Steven said with a grin, revealing he wasn’t sorry at all. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You look like you need a week of sleep.”
“I do.”
James looked through the open doorway of his den to the bedroom. He could see his bed, still made up with his own bedding. The quilt his sister had pressed into his arms after the war, before he went back to work at Massachusetts General. After the war. Before the chloroform.
“I told Annie I wasn’t coming back,” James said.
“And yet, here you are.”
“I won’t be staying long.” He was trying the words out, seeing how they felt in his mouth. How they survived outside in the cold air of the world. “Once Helen is on her feet, I’ll be leaving.”
“Where are you going?” Steven leaned against the door frame. Sunlight caught the blond stubble on his chin and cheeks, giving his face a strange halo. He too looked tired—the whole house had been shaken up by the events of the last week.
“San Francisco, perhaps.”
Steven made a noncommittal sound low in his throat.
“Are you going to pretend that having me gone does not make you happy?”
“No. Not for a minute.” Steven’s smile was wolfish. He glanced behind him as the stairs creaked over his head. Annie and Elizabeth taking water up to Helen. “By all means head west and start fresh, if that’s what you think is best. But I will tell you this. Alone is nothing but alone. It’s not better, it’s not worse, it’s not redemption, it’s not punishment. It’s not holy. It’s just…alone.”
That night he heard Helen pacing the floor of her room. He tracked her progress, lying in his bed, staring at his ceiling. She walked from the far wall to the exact spot by the door where she’d killed Charles. She stood there a moment and then turned and walked back, the floor creaking as she went.
Lying there, he wished he could do something for her. But she’d made her feelings clear. There was nothing she wanted from him.
But still, he stayed awake with her. One floor away.
And alone felt very much alone.
Chapter 16
* * *
Two days passed and James did not come to visit. Annie asked the medical questions, and Elizabeth and the baby kept Helen company.
And Helen should have expected this, and yet still it stung. It made her lethargic and awful, and oddly she craved the laudanum in a way she hadn’t since waking up lucid the other morning.
At noon there was a knock on the door and she ignored it, feigning sleep.
“Helen?” It was Annie, and Helen flipped over on her back, sighing at the ceiling. More Christmas preparations, undoubtedly. It had been a stream of stocking making and popcorn stringing.
“Kyle has delivered your trunks. Well, yours and Park’s. There are quite a few.”
She pushed aside the blankets and scrambled up and out of bed.
Her trunks. Park’s trunks.
And they were downstairs.
She flung open the door, startling poor Annie.
“Would you like help getting dressed?”
She was in her dressing robe, well past noon, but she could not be bothered to care.
“No,” she said. “Show me to the trunks.”
There were five in total, all in the front parlor as well as Kyle and James, who both looked up when she came in.
“Ma’am,” Kyle said, dipping his hat. Something she’d never seen him do. Ever. He must still feel bad for standing outside her door with a shotgun.
Served him right. She gave him her haughtiest look.
Beside the fire were her trunk and four others, as well as a saddlebag and Charles’s carpetbag.
“Thank you,” she said.
She crossed the room, aware with every step that James was not watching her. Instead he stared at the fire as if it were telling him secrets.
She got down on her knees in front of Park’s largest trunk and, with shaking hands, lifted the lid.
“A girl at the hotel packed up all his clothing,” Kyle said, but she barely heard him. She pushed all Park’s fine garments—not well packed—onto the floor. His gloves. A watch case.
“What are you looking for?” Annie asked. “Maybe I can help.”
“I know it’s here,” Helen murmured, nearly at the bottom of the trunk. If it wasn’t in this one, it was in one of the others. Just as she was about to move on, her fingers brushed the hard edge of a framed tintype.
She sat back on her heels with a cry, clutching its familiar shape to her chest. “Found it,” she said.
“What is it?” James asked, and for the moment she forgot about her fear and her weakness.
All she knew, looking at him, was that no one outside the woman in the picture had ever cared for her m
ore.
Or known her better.
He’d clearly slept. And bathed. His cheeks were pink and his hair smooth. He wore a smart forest-green suit and black boots that shone.
“My mother,” Helen answered. “Look.”
She held it out to him with shaking fingers.
He took the picture (his wrists revealed as he reached for it—oh, those wrists) and smiled, his kind smile, his lovely human smile. The smile that made her want to curl up in his lap. “You look just like her,” he said.
He handed the photograph back and Helen kept it clutched to her chest.
“What about the rest of these things?” James asked, looking around at the chests.
“Burn it.”
“Hold on a second,” Kyle said. “Some of the boys could use pants and the like. Park’s stuff might fit.”
Helen laughed. “Yes, give them to the boys. Perfect.”
Kyle gathered the fine clothing, wadding it up in a ball in his arms.
“This is my trunk,” she said, pushing it over to him. “You can give the gowns to the girls. And the jewels. All of it. Give them all of it.”
“Jewels?” James said. “You need money.”
“They’re paste.”
“That’s still worth money. So are the gowns. Charles’s clothes. You can sell all of it.” He sat down on the chair in front of the dark fireplace, as close as he could to her. “I know you want to shed the past like a skin, I do. But these things can make your future easier.”
“He’s right. You should keep this stuff,” Kyle said, trying to unroll the clothes bunched up in his arms.
“No,” she said. “Keep them. Seeing those boys in Charles’s fine clothes is worth more than any price I might make on their sale. The same with my Northern Spy costumes. But I’ll go through the rest of the trunks. Send whatever clothing might be suitable back to you at Delilah’s.”
Kyle said his goodbyes and left. Steven and Annie did too, so it was just James and Helen left with the trunks.
“I can stay and help,” he said. “Or leave if that’s what you’d prefer.”
His kindness made her ache. It made her feel clumsy and cruel.
I don’t know how to want you and not need you. Or need you and not want you. I don’t know how to do any of this.
