by CE Murphy
Half an hour later she was shivering in a bathtub, her nightgown stuck to her body an’ making the rash look paler than it was. The nurses tried ta keep me out, but Annie whispered, “No, please, let him stay,” and they let me through to kneel beside the tub and hold her hand. It went like that all day, in and outta the cool water, until she was looking like a drowned kitten but still flushed and hot. Somewhere ‘round midnight she fell asleep, except it wasn’t sleep, not properly. I stayed there, holding her hand and keeping my head down, praying and trying not to hear the nurses whispering about comas and fevers.
I figured I’d been awake about twenty-six hours when I finally figured it out, an’ lifted my head to whisper, “It’s the scratches. It ain’t scarlet fever, Annie. It’s that thing that scratched you in the ward. That wasn’t…” It wasn’t an accident, my back-of-head voice finished, even if I didn’t wanna say it out loud. That was an attack, buddy. Wish like hell I’d known that then.
I said, “I do know it now,” aloud, an’ for a second I hoped Annie was gonna give me a look like I’d gone crazy, but her short quick breaths didn’t even change. I leaned in anyway and kissed her hair, murmurin’, “Nothin’, sweetheart. I’m just worrying about you,” like she was sayin’ her part. Like she had ta say her part, because I couldn’t picture my life without her. She was gonna get better, ‘cause I couldn’t live with anything else. What do I do? Whaddo I do? I asked the voice in my head, but the damned thing didn’t answer. I got up an’ went to the window, staring out at the night and tryin’ ta think. I wished Danny was there, even if he only knew about Korean demons. It’d be something, anyway. Something more than doctors and nurses would understand.
Every damned person in that hospital ward had gone into a coma like the one Annie was in. Nobody’d said anything about ‘em having a fever first, but I hadn’t thought to ask about their medical history while I was trying not to get stuck by a monster. It probably didn’t matter, except all of them had been on IVs an’ cooling baths too. If cold didn’t break the fever, then how was I s’posed to help Annie?
I didn’t know if it was me or the voice saying you sweat it out, but the idea came through loud an’ clear.
It was about the dumbest damned thing I could think of. Fevers were already hot, an’ it didn’t seem like raising her body temperature even more could help. But cooling her down sure wasn’t, an’ I remembered all of a sudden how hot the thing in the hospital ward had been. Maybe the cooler it stayed, the longer it lived in somebody, an’ the longer it stayed alive the weaker the body got.
Nothin’ else was working. It was worth a shot. I took Annie off the IV an’ scooped her up. She didn’t weigh nothing, all the water burned outta her by the fever. I bundled her up in my coat an’ all the blankets I could steal from the hospital, an’ drove her home to build a fire in the hearth. I dragged the kitchen table as close as I could get it an’ threw blankets over the table until I’d built us a little cave in the living room, an’ then I crawled inside with Annie. I lay down behind her an’ tucked her against my chest to keep her warm from both sides, and started praying again.
The rash came up bright an’ awful all over as she started warming up. She started shivering harder than she’d done at the hospital, bad enough I wondered right away if I was killing her instead of helping, but I had to do something, an’ the doctors weren’t gonna understand my crazy reasons why. I tried to close my ears to her whimpers, whispering, “It’s okay, darlin’, it’s gonna be fine,” over an’ over again.
Took a long time for her to start sweating, but when she did it came on fast. Her hair went wet under my chin, an’ the shivering turned to shakes and then to thrashing. I put my leg over hers an’ held her tighter, still whisperin’ reassurances and praying I wasn’t killing my wife. I was damned near as tired as she was from holding her down when the thing finally came loose from her, an’ rattled outta her chest in a coughing wheeze.
I’d seen it before at the hospital, but somehow I wasn’t thinking it’d be a living moving thing again. There was a lot less to it than there’d been in the ward, but then it only had Annie, not a ward fulla folks to feed on, an’ it looked weak from the heat. I reached past Annie, slow as I could, an’ picked up the fire iron.
It died from the iron a lot faster than it’d done with the IV pole, an’ what was left drifted up the chimney as smoke. Annie gasped in a deep breath an’ rolled away from the fire with a cry, the sweetest sound I’d ever heard. I knocked the table over, bringing cooler air in, an’ dropped down beside her to haul her into my arms. She was cold an’ clammy and shivering again, but it wasn’t a sick kinda shivering anymore.
After the longest time I picked her up again an’ brought her to the bathroom, filled the tub with warm water an’ got in it with her. There wasn’t hardly enough room for one of us in it, never mind two, but I wasn’t gonna let her go. ‘sides, at least it being small meant I could reach for a cup and fill it from the sink without movin’ much. Annie drank it, still without sayin’ anything, and I got her another, an’ another, until she finally just held it, half full, an’ fell asleep against my chest. Healthy sleep, not the stillness from before. She barely even woke up with me getting us outta the tub and dried off, an’ she was a warm little lump of softness at my side when I crawled into bed with her. We didn’t wake up, either, not til early the next morning, when she whispered, “I’m hungry.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard in a while, doll.” I held on another minute, then kissed her hair. “All right. Bacon an’ eggs or you wanna start small?”
“Porridge? I’ll eat it while you’re frying the bacon. And making the pancakes.”
I grinned real quick. “Anything else I oughta be cooking up?”
“I think that’s enough to start.” She smiled an’ I tried not ta see the blue circles under her eyes, or the weight that had fallen off of her in the past couple days. She looked half burned away, an’ the rash hadn’t faded all the way yet, bright red streaks standing out against awful pale skin.
I pulled her close again and held on a minute, finally whisperin’, “Thanks for staying with me, doll. You had me scared for a while there.”
“Me too. Me too, Gary, but I have to eat before I can talk about it. Before I can even think about it. Okay? Please?”
“Yeah. Yeah, doll.” I kissed her again more fiercely, an’ it turned out hungry an’ weak as she was, there was something she needed more’n food right then. Took a while for me to get out to the kitchen, but I started ferrying food right back into the bedroom. Juice first, trying not to see how fragile she looked holding the cup in both hands and drinking with her eyes closed, an’ then the porridge with lotsa cream and brown sugar while the bacon fried up. Turned out making pancakes wasn’t that hard either, following a recipe from Annie’s cookbook. I only burned a couple. We ate on the bed, balancing plates on our laps an’ knees, just like kids sharing a Sunday morning breakfast with their folks.
I’d never seen Annie pack away so much, or been so glad to see it. Seemed like her color got better with every bite, an’ after about six pancakes, a couple eggs, an’ more bacon pieces than I bothered to count, she sighed an’ put her fork down. “You might have to start doing the cooking, Gary. This is delicious.”
“Hunger makes the best sauce, darlin’.”
She nodded, then closed her eyes a minute, like she was fortifying herself. Then she looked at me, straight an’ clear. “What happened?”
I explained as best as I had it figured out, watching Annie’s face grow more solemn with every word. When I finished, she asked the question she’d done before: “Why me?”
An answer came up from the back of my mind, but I choked it off before it got loose. Because I love you wasn’t any kinda answer that made sense, and hell if I was gonna make either of us start wondering if getting married had been a bad idea. “I don’t know, doll, but if something’s comin’ after you, then we gotta assume it’s gonna come again. I’m thinking maybe
we got lucky that this…poison-demon, whatever you wanna call it, that it was slow and had ta be carried inside of somebody else’s body to get close enough to strike. If it had been quicker, I wouldn’t have gotten there in time.”
A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. It woulda been cute any other day, but worry had claws in my guts. After a minute she got what I was thrusting at, an’ put it in plain words. “Are you suggesting I learn to fight?”
“At least a little bit, sweetheart. I know you’re a nurse to help people, but that thing wasn’t a person. I don’t wanna lose you, Annie. Let me teach you a few things.”
“And what if I get a fright at work and use some of those things on an unsuspecting patient?”
“Annie, you saw that thing. Oily black smoke an’ dead eyes. You really think you’re ever gonna mistake something like that for a patient?”
“You said the starlight demon was a beautiful woman.” She took a breath so deep it shuddered comin’ out, an’ murmured, “It’s hard to believe I’m even saying these things out loud. Gary, this isn’t real. Magic isn’t…real.”
“Ain’t it? Didn’t the saints fight dragons an’ heal people and do miracles? Didn’t Christ? I donno, Annie. Maybe it’s right there under our noses an’ we just don’t believe it. Maybe sometimes it just crops up and bites somebody on the—” I cleared my throat. “Knee. On the knee, hard enough we can’t ignore it. Maybe we just got…bit. An’ maybe it ain’t you, sweetheart. Maybe it’s me. I’m the one your pop thought he could pass his burden on to, an’ the one who killed something outta this world in Korea. Maybe you’re just getting tangled up in…me.”
Her frown came back, but then her mouth pursed like she was trying ta hide a smile. “We could spend the rest of our lives doing this, couldn’t we? Worrying about which one of us it is. Trying to take the blame, or reassure the other, or apologize.”
When she put it like that, it was kinda funny. I spread my hands. “Guess we could, yeah.”
“Maybe we should just put it behind us, then. Maybe if we’re going to keep having…unusual circumstances…crop up in our lives, maybe we should just accept them. Together,” she said with a little emphasis. “Husband and wife. Both of us doing our parts, like God intended.”
“All right, but I’m telling you if we’re gonna be ready to face whatever comes along, God intended for you to learn ta use a gun, Anne Marie Muldoon.”
She said, “Yes, dear,” so nice and sweet that even after a while, when we went back ta sleep, I still had the funny itchy feeling I’d been fleeced.
Truth was, Annie took to shooting more naturally than I had. She didn’t like pistols much, even if she saw their use, but she was a rifle sharpshooter inside’a six months. My Sarge woulda loved her, if he coulda put her on a hill with a scope. She wasn’t afraid of knives, either, though she got grim at the idea of using one. “I know what they do to bodies, Gary,” she said one evening. “I’ve helped stitch people up after knife fights.”
“We ain’t looking to fight people, doll. Not now and not ever.”
Guessed it did the trick, or she found a way not to think about it, because she got good with the knives and then found a fencing teacher. Not the showy stuff they did for sport, but a Spanish fella who followed old swordfighting techniques and taught us both how to kill things with a long blade. “Go to Pamplona,” he told me. “Run with the bulls. Fight in the ring. If you survive, you will be a man.”
“He’s man enough already,” Annie told him, an’ wouldn’t let me go even when I said it sounded kinda exciting. She gave me one of them level looks that dames do, an’ said we could discuss it when I took her to Spain. I graduated college and started playing saxophone gigs and saving up, not so I could run with the bulls, but ‘cause I figured I’d surprise her something fierce on our fifth anniversary. Lotta the gigs started late and ran later, so I got into the habit of making dinner, too, so it was something Annie didn’t have to do when she came off shift herself. Turned out I was a better cook than her, but insteada being upset by it she looked like the cat who stole the canary. Between that an’ her dab hand at fighting, all I could figure was women were mysterious creatures.
Wasn’t long before that Spanish anniversary I was planning when I came home late one night an’ found Annie still up and waiting for me. She’d been crying, though she’d fixed her hair an’ washed her face to try to hide it. I still saw the stains on her cheeks an’ the flush of color that said something was wrong. A hundred ideas came an’ went in a second, most of ‘em revolving around what kinda monster she’d had ta kill. I knelt in front of her. “What is it, doll?”
“I saw a doctor today.”
All the building blocks of my world went out from under me. I thumped down onta my heels, wonderin’ how my hands had got so cold so fast, an’ tried not to sound shaky. “How come?”
“It’s been almost five years, Gary.” Annie’s voice wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard from her, all remote an’ hollow. She wasn’t quite looking at me, but I wasn’t sure she was looking at anything at all, the way her eyes were bruised an’ empty. “We should have had at least one baby by now.”
Hot an’ cold rushed my face, part relief an’ part terror. My heart was hammering loud enough I thought the world could hear it. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it, doll. Guess I figured we had lotsa time.”
“No.” Just one hard word, like she couldn’t make herself say anything more.
Another tremor went through me, shaking down dreams I didn’t hardly know I had. Lil’ boy-shaped dreams, an’ lil’ girl-shaped ones too. Dreams with little faces like Annie’s an’ big broad shoulders like mine, an’ dreams with high laughing voices and stomping hurrying feet. They hardly had shapes to ‘em, those dreams, until they started to fall. Then I could see ‘em all clear as day, toothless grins and white wedding dresses, falling down like rain. And like rain, they hit the earth an’ disappeared into sparkling splashes of nothin’.
There wasn’t anything I could say, sitting there in that ruin. I got on to the couch and pulled Annie into my arms. She didn’t wanna let me, staying stiff and upright, but I held on until inch by awful inch she leaned into me. Not relaxing, and feeling like she might never relax again, but at least I was holding her.
It came out in bits an’ pieces over days, how the doctor said she seemed all right but that it couldn’t be any surprise to a nurse that sometimes a real bad sickness, like a fever, could leave someone unable to have kids. She couldn’t talk about it for more’n a minute without getting stiff and hurting again, an’ all I could do was keep saying I loved her, right up until she threw a mug across the room an’ screamed, “I know you love me! Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’m afraid it’s not enough?” an’ collapsed into tears.
I couldn’t catch her in time, she fell so fast, but I dropped down beside her an’ held her again. She fought like a wildcat, hitting and screaming with a kinda horrible incoherence that made all the sense in the world. She was a nurse, she understood how it could happen to somebody else, but when it was her, when it was her own body betraying her, an’ she wouldn’t let me say it wasn’t, ‘cause to her way of thinking, it was, no matter what all her studies might say, when it was her it was unbearable. An’ what if me loving her wasn’t enough, if she couldn’t give me babies, an’ I kept sayin’ it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, darlin’, I had her, I wasn’t gonna want somebody else, but not even the tears rollin’ down my own face convinced her, not for days an’ weeks, until the worst of the pain had passed. I still caught it on her face some days, though, as the years went on. I’d see it when she was looking at other people’s kids, an’ all I could ever do was hold on an’ never let go.
We had our ups an’ downs over the years, an’ we had our moments of the world turnin’ upside-down, when some kinda magic reared its head again, but the truth was, we never had a worse time than that, not ‘til the doctor told us Annie was dying of emphysema.
&nbs
p; I had a headache start up about then, pounding at the back of my skull like a devil tryin’ ta get out. I was the smoker, not Annie. Didn’t seem fair she’d get the disease instead of me. Her breathing had been bad for a while and I’d cut down, started smoking outside the house insteada in it, but I threw my last pack of cigarettes away that day and wasn’t ever tempted by ‘em again. We sat there in silence, holding hands and listening to the doc tell us about the advancement of the disease an’ treatments, but he had a look that a nurse and her husband knew plenty well. After a few minutes Annie cut him off, saying, “How long, Doctor?” with the same grace as she faced most things.
The fella sighed and looked away, then back again, preparing to give it to her straight. “The truth is, Mrs. Muldoon, I don’t understand how your health has been as good as you claim for the past several years. The advanced stage of the disease suggests you should have been suffering, even bed-ridden, for an extended period of time already. If it was a cancer, perhaps, but—”
“Doctor.”
“What I’m trying to say is that it’s unusually aggressive, Mrs. Muldoon. If our treatments can’t slow the progression, I’m afraid you may have as little as a matter of weeks.”
My headache spiked, making the world go white for a minute. I couldn’t have heard that right, but Annie was talking, her hands real still in her lap and her voice the kinda steady it got when she had to deliver bad news to somebody. “I’ve only been ill a few months. That’s…difficult to accept.”
“I know.” The fella looked as helpless as I’d ever seen anybody, but it had nothing on the panic rising in me. A lifetime of crazy moments came back, from Annie’s Pop to the fever-comas at the hospital all those years ago, from near misses in Tampa and Pamplona to the wonderful, strange months in New Orleans, and one thought came clear in my head: Annie wasn’t sick.
