Breathing Room

by Marsha Hayles

  Pearl paused just long enough so we could all appreciate that she got a period while the rest of us didn’t. I pulled the sheet up to my shoulders, embarrassed by my own lack of progress in the turning-into-a-woman department.

  Dena couldn’t keep quiet. “I count living with you as my monthly curse!”

  “If it’s true,” said Beverly, “then I’m happy for her. They make a lovely couple.”

  “Oh yes, it is true,” Pearl said, just as the bell rang to start the Cure Hour.

  Beverly was right: they would make a lovely couple. But somehow other thoughts kept creeping into my mind.

  All my life, I’d heard people call my own parents “a lovely couple.” I always figured it meant my mother was pretty and my father was handsome. But now I thought about the word couple. Being part of a couple was different from being part of a family.

  Sometimes I wished Father would see how difficult Mother could be, how she wasn’t always lovely. But he didn’t. When my father walked in the door after work, he kissed me on the head and said, “Evening, Puddlejump.” But he wasn’t really home until his eyes fell on my mother, and she smiled and said his name so it sounded like music. Why did they have to be a couple first, before we could be a family?

  And now I worried Nurse Gunderson might leave us to be part of a couple too.

  I thought about what Abe once said after we caught our parents kissing: “Grown-ups make about as much sense as a goat wearing glasses.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Numbers

  “DO YOU EVER see numbers, Evvy?” Sarah asked as we sat side by side in wheelchairs, waiting our turn to get weighed. We were looking out the window at the oak trees, their October leaves turning from red to brown.

  I could feel my ears start to redden. “I hoped I wasn’t that obvious.”

  “Obvious about what, Evvy?” Sarah asked, tilting her head. Her cheeks were flushed, but her lips looked pale.

  “You know, peeking at my weight when anyone writes it down.”

  “Oh, we all do that,” she said. “No, I mean when you have a fever. Do you ever see numbers?”

  “Nope. Not numbers. I see waves and lots of water.”

  “Hmm, waves,” Sarah said. She swayed slightly, as if being washed over by one. “I see numbers, Evvy. Streams of numbers. When the fever begins, they come faster and faster, millions and millions of numbers, and they all race through me like—”

  “Like electricity?”

  “That’s it!” she said. “Exactly!”

  Even with a fever, Sarah watched and reacted to things I said—like she was reading me, not just skimming along.

  A clattering, jingling noise from out in the hallway quieted us both. Miss Wanda opened the door, and my stomach tightened. “Oh look, it’s my two sweet apples,” she said, dragging in the scales and wedging them between us. She reached as if to give my cheek a pinch. “Such sweet apples, but still so rotten at the core.”

  Was that true? Were we rotting away inside?

  I wished Dena were here to snap back at Miss Wanda. But Dena, Pearl, and Beverly, who were allowed to be up attending classes again, had gone down the hall to use the more reliable scales. Sarah and I were still on room restriction, so the scales came to us—clanking and complaining the whole way and, sadly, bringing Miss Wanda along. She signaled for an orderly to come weigh us, then left, saying, “Bye-bye, little apples.”

  All TB patients hated getting weighed. If you didn’t gain weight, you felt like the germs were jumping up and down inside your lungs, knowing they were winning.

  If you did gain weight, you got privileges. Three additional pounds for me meant I got to start feeding myself and reading for an hour a day. A few more today and I might get to use the bathroom toilet instead of a bedpan. These scales measured our success—and our failure.

  Sarah sucked in air—as if that could add more weight—and was lifted onto the scale. I felt my eyes stealing a quick look. Sarah was losing, not gaining. My news was better: I’d gained a pound. Not enough to earn my next privilege, but good all the same.

  Still, I hated feeling like this was a competition. “You must be doing better, Sarah, or else Dr. Keith wouldn’t let you get mail.”

  She coughed, then wiped her mouth on a tissue. “Maybe he knows that getting letters from my parents isn’t much of a privilege.”

  I shot Sarah a smile. We’d joked before about how dull letters from our parents could be. But she didn’t smile back. Instead she hunched forward, small and too quiet.

  I tried to ignore the angry chatter of the scales as they left our room.

  But I couldn’t ignore Sarah. I couldn’t be sure I was getting better, but I was pretty sure Sarah was getting worse.

  CHAPTER 20

  Discharged

  PEARL STARTED jabbering as soon as Nurse Marshall stepped out of the room. Not to me or to Sarah but back and forth to Beverly and Dena.

  “It probably doesn’t have anything to do with us,” I heard Dena tell Pearl.

  “But I saw it, Dena. In her hands. I just know it has to be mine!” Pearl’s cheeks flushed with anticipation.

  Beverly sat up in bed. “I say we all settle down. No need to get excited yet.” But I could tell Beverly was stirred up too.

  “Is there news?” Sarah asked in her raspy, waking-up voice.

  Dena grumbled. “Who knows? Pearl thinks she saw a discharge order on Nurse Marshall’s morning clipboard.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “One of us might be sprung out of this joint,” Dena answered. “Discharged.”

  Sarah and I exchanged glances. I knew that even with my recent progress it couldn’t be me, and Sarah—well, not Sarah either. That left Pearl, Beverly, and Dena—if Pearl really had seen the form.

  “Well, of course, it’s my turn,” Pearl announced. “I follow the rules, I have a positive attitude, and I even pinned my hair up last night. I must have a sixth sense about such things.” Pearl raced to take out the bobby pins. “I guess I’ll be surprising my brother instead of him surprising me!”

  “If TB played fair and we took turns,” Dena told her, “I’d have been out of here a long time ago. Four years I’ve been waiting.”

  Four years! Could I last that long? Could Sarah?

  Pearl tipped her head forward to loosen more curls at the nape of her neck. “Really, Dena, it’s not like this is some dance marathon, and the winner is the person who lasts the longest.”

  “You wanna bet?” Dena snorted.

  Pearl brushed out her hair, as if that could rid the room of snarls and doubts at once. “Why, I could be home in time for October Homecoming!” she said with increasing excitement. “Of course, I’d need new clothes to wear. A dress—no, a suit would be better. Something smart. A wool plaid maybe. And new shoes. Muriel will know just the thing—”

  “Quit adding an imaginary wardrobe to your imaginary discharge form,” Dena said.

  Pearl fluffed her curls with the palm of her hand. “I didn’t imagine that discharge order. You’ll see—and soon. Nurse Marshall will be back in a few minutes.”

  We all got quiet, as if Nurse Marshall were standing at our beds already.

  We waited with ferocious attention to every footstep in the corridor, to every conversation overheard outside the door, to every move made by a staff member in our room. None of us asked Nurse Marshall about the discharge, as if that might put a jinx on things. We couldn’t ask Nurse Gunderson either. She hadn’t been to our room in weeks, though it felt like months, since we all missed her. Dena figured they’d rotated her to another ward, or maybe let her take a vacation before the first snow arrived.

  By the time lights were out for the night, Pearl was in tears. Everyone but Dena tried to console her, but even Dena was worn out and stopped challenging Pearl about the discharge form. I felt like we’d all been invited to a special party that got canceled at the last minute.

  CHAPTER 21

  Looking Back

&
nbsp; THE NEXT MORNING, when I woke up, I found that I’d tugged all the sheets and blankets loose from my bed. They draped to the floor like sails untied from their rigging.

  Why hadn’t Nurse Marshall come in to fix my bedding? And where was everybody? The other beds were unmade—and empty. Could they all have been discharged?

  Father liked to say, “If you run around like a chicken with its head cut off, you’ll end up in hot soup!” Right now the soup was feeling plenty warm. Think logically, Evvy. Like Sarah would. Dena, Pearl, and Beverly must be off at class. Sarah must begetting a fluoroscope. See? All perfectly logical. But what about the unmade beds?

  Then Dena and Pearl walked in together, not speaking a word, not looking at me.

  “Where’s Beverly?” I asked.

  Dena hung up her robe. “She’s gone.”

  “Home?” I said, then remembered the double meaning of that word at Loon Lake. “You mean, discharged?”

  “Yep, discharged.” Dena slipped her legs back between the sheets with the speed a hunter might use to slide his knife back into its sheath.

  I sat up. “But I didn’t—didn’t get the chance to say good-bye.”

  “Join the club,” Dena said. “Pearl was right about the discharge order. It just took a while for Beverly’s father to get here. And now they’ve flown this coop!”

  Pearl didn’t say a word. I expected her to rant and rave or at least pick a fight with Dena. This quiet version of Pearl scared me more than the one who pitched a hissy fit.

  Dena, on the other hand, wanted to talk. “We were just starting math when Dr. Tollerud came and ordered Beverly to the main office. We all saw he had the discharge order. Beverly asked if she could say her good-byes. I told her just to go and don’t look back. But not Beverly—she didn’t move.”

  My eyes kept skating over Beverly’s empty bed, each time expecting to see her round face smiling at me.

  “What about her clothes?” I asked. “She can’t go home dressed in Loon Lake pajamas!”

  “The do-gooders in the Ladies Auxiliary make lots of dresses—for us to wear when we leave or in our coffins,” Dena said.

  My heart knotted. “What about her other things—the stuff in her drawer?”

  Dena pointed to Beverly’s now-empty bed and table. “It’s cleaned out already. The nurses were too busy doing that to change our sheets.”

  “I guess I slept through it all,” I said, and wiped my eyes on the corner of my sheet. Was I crying because I would miss Beverly, or because I was jealous?

  “Fevers will do that to you,” Dena told me. “Good thing you slept. You didn’t have to watch them scrub down everything Beverly ever breathed on.” Dena stared up at the ceiling, her voice ricocheting around the room. “I just hope they don’t kill her back on the farm. Seven kids. Beverly will end up taking care of them all.”

  Our goal had always been to leave Loon Lake, as if just being released could guarantee that we’d never be sick another day of our lives.

  “Where’s Sarah?” I asked, trying to sound calm. “She missed saying good-bye to Beverly too.”

  “Getting a pneumo,” Dena said with a glance in Pearl’s direction. “That is, if you can trust anything Miss Wanda says.”

  I’d heard Dena’s description of a pneumo. Dr. Tollerud stuck a big needle in between her ribs to push air into the space around her lungs. She’d said that if he hit an artery and air got into her brain, she’d go blind or die. What if something bad like that happened to Sarah?

  “Hey,” said Dena, “being a gas patient isn’t so bad. She’ll have to drink some rotten medicine before every meal from now on, but since when has medicine ever tasted good?”

  I waited for a reaction from Pearl. She didn’t get a discharge or a pneumo today—and she’d wanted both so badly. I felt sorry for her—for us all, really. When Pearl didn’t explode, I decided she was a better actress than most of those Hollywood stars she read about in her magazines.

  Dena fixed her eyes on me until she had my attention. “Sarah will be sore for a couple of days.” Dena cocked her head in Pearl’s direction, still holding me in her sights. “Give her some time. She’ll get over it.”

  After that, no one talked. Not a single word, as if Beverly had taken our voices with her when she left Loon Lake.

  NURSE MARSHALL wheeled Sarah into the room late in the day and shifted her off the gurney and back onto her bed. Sarah didn’t open her eyes or signal me. Her limp body—curled up on its side—looked like a question mark.

  I studied her sleeping face, as if my eyes—like an X-ray—could tell what was going on inside her lungs. Would the pnuemo help her or not? I didn’t know. I wished the answer were as simple as looking up a word in a dictionary.

  Later that night, as I thought about all I wanted to tell Sarah, I remembered something Dena had said earlier. Now I needed to know one other thing about Beverly’s departure.

  “Dena,” I asked, trying to whisper loudly enough for her to hear but not so loudly as to wake Sarah. “Did Beverly look back? You know, when she was leaving and you told her to go on and not look back?”

  Dena didn’t answer at first. When she did finally speak, her voice echoed as if coming from a dark cave, not just from across our room. “Yeah, she looked back. When I go, it’s gonna be a clean, surgical cut. No looking back for me. I’ll be outta here fast. But not Beverly. She should have been laughing at us and her own good luck, but that girl was crying—crying all the way out of this rotten place.”

  CHAPTER 22

  A Brook

  THE HOT WATER BOTTLE bobbed between my feet as I moved it around, hoping to find a new warm spot.

  October 25 had finally arrived. That was the day we were allowed to have hot water bottles. Dena and Pearl were off to class and didn’t get to enjoy this luxury, but Sarah and I both sighed with pleasure. Oh, to have warm toes again.

  Of course, the rest of our bodies remained cold. Windows were kept wide-open almost all the time—the chilly air was supposed to be good for our lungs. Some days were warmer than others, but I almost never woke up now without my teeth chattering.

  Sarah grabbed some tissues, then settled back against her pillow. Sometimes, just before our chats, she made a little clicking sound with her tongue to stop the back of her throat from itching. I waited for her to finish. “What were you dreaming about last night, Sarah?”

  “I don’t remember. Why? Was I talking in my sleep?”

  “Yeah, but it didn’t make sense. Something about a brook in Illinois?”

  “A brook?” Sarah said. But before I could respond her face changed, as if someone had pulled a curtain around her thoughts. “I have a secret, Evvy,” she said, speaking so softly I had to lean my head over the edge of my bed to hear. “I promised my parents I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “I’ve never told you any of Abe’s secrets. And he has some real doozies. I promise never to tell yours either.”

  Sarah hesitated, then her face softened. “I was saying a prayer, asking for God’s help. It starts with the Hebrew words Baruch atah adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’ olam’. Maybe you heard ‘brook’ and ‘Illinois’ in that.”

  “I think I did,” I said, hearing her say the strange words again. “Your secret is that you speak Hebrew?”

  “No, Evvy,” she said, fighting back a smile. “My secret is that I’m Jewish. My real name is Sarah Meier, not Sarah Morgan.”

  I’d never known a Jewish person before. “Why does it have to be a secret?”

  “Because it’s not a good time to be Jewish. People think it’s okay to blame Jews for everything. Even in America. Even here in Minnesota. Especially if you have TB. My father found a place for me at the Jewish sanatorium in Denver, but my mother didn’t want me to be so far away. We were afraid if we told the truth, Loon Lake wouldn’t take me. The doctor in St. Paul helped us change my name on the records.”

  “But no one here would hurt you if they knew you were Jewish.” As soon as I said it, I rea
lized someone like Miss Wanda might. I thought for a moment, aware of the extra burden Sarah had been carrying since she arrived. I spoke with more caution. “I promise to keep it a secret, Sarah.”

  Her eyes flooded me with trust. “I know you will.”

  But I could see she was still disappointed in herself, and I had an idea about how to make her feel better. “Could you maybe teach me something about being Jewish? I mean, when no one else is in the room.”

  She turned her head, her eyes brightening again. “Lesson one, Evvy. Jesus was Jewish.”

  “He was?” Had I managed to daydream through every important lesson in Sunday school? “I guess I’ve got a lot to learn.”

  Sarah smiled. “And you can tell me more about having a twin brother.”

  I liked the idea of us trying on each other’s lives.

  The fact that we now shared a secret, an important secret, seemed to hover a moment, then settle like a blanket over both of us.

  I reached my hand out. She did the same. Inches separated our fingertips, but it didn’t feel that way at all.

  CHAPTER 23

  Cold News

  AT LONG LAST Pearl’s day with her brother, Edmund, arrived. We all watched as Pearl got dressed in street clothes, her thick hair brushed into waves of curls, her eyes brightened with mascara loaned to her by an older girl. For once, one of us didn’t look like a sick patient. Pearl beamed at our attention and promised to bring us all little treats on her return.

  Just hours after she left, the weather turned cold. Snow started coming down in a flurry and filling the space between the buildings like flour pouring into a canister.

  I tried to make my eyes focus on the book I was reading, A Rainbow Fills My Sky. The Loon Lake Library had loaned it to me now that I’d earned reading privileges. But the brave and plucky girl with TB in the story just made me want to empty my sputum cup into a bowl of beef stew.