She said, Where?
For a moment I was stumped, and then I nodded at the empty cot on the right, the one that had been Delia Garrett’s, with sheets and blankets that Bridie had smoothed with me only this morning.
But…I’m not having a baby.
The fact was I couldn’t bear to send her off downstairs to Admitting, where she might have to hang around for hours. Delay could be dangerous if this was a bad case, which odds were it wasn’t, but just to be on the safe side…making do, desperate times, the higher duty of care. (Who was I arguing with?)
I told her, It doesn’t matter. Here, put this on—
I found her a starched nightdress on the shelf. Can you manage?
A loud sneeze drowned out Bridie’s answer. Sorry!
Punished for sneezing at mass, I remembered.
She turned her back modestly and started unbuttoning.
I found her a clean handkerchief, slid a thermometer under her tongue, and began a chart as if she were any new patient. Bridie Sweeney. Age twenty-two (approx.). So many details I didn’t know. It galled me to give her address as the motherhouse of Sister Luke’s order. Admitting physician—blank. I tried to remember when I’d put the thermometer in her mouth—could one minute have passed yet? Time was moving so peculiarly. I bent and touched Bridie’s jaw. Open up?
Her dry lips parted, releasing the thermometer; her lip clung to the glass as I lifted it out, and a bit of skin tore, releasing a bubble of blood.
I dabbed the glass and read it: 102.6. High, but actually not particularly high for this flu, all things considered, I told myself.
I hurried out the door. I pushed past nurses and doctors and shuffling patients in the passage. I leaned into Women’s Fever, and because I couldn’t for the life of me remember the ward sister’s name, I called, Nurse? Nurse?
The small nun didn’t like that form of address. What is it, Nurse Power?
My runner’s not well, I said in a high, falsely casual voice. Could you spare someone to fetch a doctor right away?
I didn’t say for what patient; I couldn’t admit that I’d put a volunteer helper into a bed when she hadn’t even been admitted.
The nun sighed and said, Very well.
I bit back the word Now.
When I got back to my ward, Bridie was under the covers already, her clothes folded on the chair.
(I realised she’d grown up knowing she’d be beaten if she dawdled.)
I was in no state to be in charge of this ward, given that I was so frightened I could hardly breathe, but it wasn’t as if there was anyone else. Needs must. I propped Bridie up on two pillows. I fetched four sulphur-reeking blankets from the press. I made up a hot whiskey, very strong. Bridie’s respirations were just a little fast, and her pulse was only slightly high. I wrote down all the figures, trying to think scientifically. No cough, at least.
Bridie shifted between the sheets. She asked, But what if a real patient needs the bed?
Shush, now, you’re as real as any. High time you had a rest after all the racing around for me you’ve been doing. Enjoy a little kip.
My tone was incongruously playful.
I added, You must be sleepy after sitting up all night on the roof.
Bridie’s chapped smile was radiant.
I twisted around suddenly. Mrs. O’Rahilly, I wonder, would you mind if I moved you to the far bed to make a little more room here?
Mary O’Rahilly blinked. Certainly.
(Whenever I leaned over Bridie, I thought I was doing a good job of keeping the panic from showing on my face—the panic but not the love. I couldn’t bear anyone to see the way I was looking at her.)
So I helped Mary O’Rahilly out of her sheets and into the cot by the wall. I did spare a thought for the two babies. I pushed Eunice’s crib between her mother’s cot and the emptied middle one, to move her away from Bridie’s sneezes. Then I shoved Barnabas’s crib alongside it, but too hard, so both babies were slightly shaken, and Eunice sent up a whimper.
I was busy trying to remember, if I’d ever been told, whether a faster onset of the flu necessarily meant a worse case. Might Bridie blaze through the thing and be back on her feet and laughing in a few days?
To keep off the chill, I draped a cashmere shawl around her head and neck.
Her teeth were chattering. Lovely!
I laid the blankets over her and tucked them around her narrow, shaking frame.
She joked, I might get too hot now.
It’s good to sweat it out, I told her. More water?
I hurried to pour a glass.
Bridie sneezed five times in a row into her handkerchief. Sorry—
I cut her off. You don’t have to be sorry for anything.
I flung her handkerchief in the laundry basket and gave her another. Was I imagining it or was the colour spreading towards her porcelain ears? And rather more like mahogany now? Red to brown to—
Drink your whiskey, Bridie.
She gulped her drink. Spluttered.
I scolded fondly, Little sips!
She gasped. I thought it would taste nicer than it does.
I could hear the effort in her voice, the precariousness of breath. I said, You know, I don’t think you’re getting quite enough air, so your heart’s beating faster to try and make up for that. Let me just pop this behind you…
I grabbed a wedge-shaped bedrest and pushed it between her and the wall, then put a pillow in front of that. Lie back now.
Against the pillowcase, her hair stood out like the setting sun. She let out a ragged breath.
I took hold of her fingers. I whispered, Really, whatever possessed you to lie about having had this already?
Creakily: I could tell you needed another pair of hands.
She strained for the next breath.
I wanted to help, she said. Help you.
But you’d met me only half a minute before.
Bridie grinned. If I’d admitted I hadn’t had it yet—
(Panting now.)
—you might have sent me away. There was work to do, work for two.
I found I couldn’t speak.
Bridie wheezed, Don’t fuss, now.
(As if she were the nurse.)
No need to fret. I’ll get through this.
If I was hearing her right. She breathed the words so lightly, I had to stoop right down with my ear to her mouth.
Her tone was odd. Elated, that was it. I’d once attended a talk by an alpinist who reported having experienced a euphoria in the upper peaks, where the air was thin. While on the mountain, he hadn’t recognised it as a symptom of anything, or perhaps he’d been too caught up in the adventure to care.
I took her temperature again. It had jumped to 104 now.
That’s not Bridie Sweeney?
The voice behind me was Dr. Lynn’s.
I kept my eyes on the chart as I summarised the case at top speed.
The doctor interrupted before I finished. But she should be in Women’s Fever—
Please, Doctor. Don’t move her.
She tutted, already putting the stethoscope down the back of Bridie’s nightdress. Deep breath for me, dear?
I could hear the awful rasping from where I stood. I said, She has no cough—isn’t that good?
Dr. Lynn didn’t answer. She was turning Bridie’s hands over; they were puffy, I saw now, and not just from the chilblains. She murmured, Edema—fluid leaking into the tissues.
How had I not spotted that?
I made myself ask, What about her—
I couldn’t get out the syllables of cyanosis.
—her cheeks?
Dr. Lynn nodded gravely. Well, if you stay nice and quiet, she told Bridie, with a bit of luck…I’ve seen it go back to pink.
How often had the doctor seen that, though, compared with the number of cases in which the stain had deepened? Red to brown to blue to—
Stop it, I told myself. All Bridie needed was a bit of luck, and who deserved it more?
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Dr. Lynn took hold of Bridie’s chin. Open up for me a minute?
Bridie gaped, showing the dark tongue of a hanged woman.
The doctor didn’t comment. She turned to me and said, You’re doing all you can, Nurse Power. Keep up the whiskey. Now I’m afraid I’m needed in Women’s Surgical.
But—
I promise I’ll be back, she told me on her way out.
For something to do, I took Bridie’s temperature’s again; it was 106. Could that be right? Pearls of sweat standing out on her face, appearing faster than I could wipe them away.
Stay nice and quiet like the doctor said, I murmured. Don’t try to talk, and you’ll get better all the faster.
I dabbed iced cloths on her magenta cheeks, her forehead, the nape of her neck. It occurred to me that Bridie wasn’t coughing because she couldn’t; she was being choked by her own rising fluids. Drowning from the inside.
Hours rolled by like one long, impossible moment. Every now and then, moving like an automaton, I made myself perform one of my other duties. I gave Mary O’Rahilly a bedpan when she ventured to ask; I checked her binder, changed her pad. Barnabas woke and cried a little. I changed his nappy and made up another bottle for him. But all the while, all I knew was Bridie.
Her cheeks were nut brown all the way to her ears; you couldn’t call it any shade of red, and her breath was a rapid, wet grinding. She couldn’t hold her whiskey cup anymore, so I knelt on the bed beside her and held it to her cracked lips. She took sips between her raking breaths. She sneezed five times in a row, and suddenly the handkerchief was smeared with red.
I stared at the linen. One broken capillary, one of thousands, millions in her resilient young body. Blood meant nothing. Birthing women often thrashed about in puddles of the stuff and were perfectly well the next day.
I think I need the—
What, Bridie?
No words came out.
I guessed. A bedpan, is it?
A tear slid out of her left eye.
I checked, and she’d wet the bed. Don’t worry your head, it happens all the time. I’ll have you dry in two ticks.
I tilted Bridie’s light, limp frame at just the right moment to roll the dry sheet on at the left side and the wet one off at the right. I undid the tapes of her nightdress—glimpsing her pale flanks and what looked like an old scar—and got a clean one on her.
I asked her, Can you see me all right? Am I blurry?
She didn’t answer.
Her temperature was down to 105. My voice soared with relief: Your fever’s breaking.
Bridie gaped like a fish. I wasn’t sure she’d grasped what I’d said.
I checked her pulse; it was still fast and the force felt low to me. I had to stop her going into shock, so I ran to make up a pint of saline. I filled our largest metal syringe, willing my hands steady.
Even in her confusion, Bridie quailed at the sight of the needle.
I told her, It’s only salt water, like the sea.
(Had doctors made visits to her so-called home? Had Bridie ever had an injection in her life?)
She whispered, You’re putting the sea into me?
I ordered myself not to hurt her, got the needle into the vein on the first try.
I watched; I waited.
Still one hundred per cent alive, I repeated in my head, even if her lips were turning a beautiful shade of lavender, almost violet, and her swollen eyelids so smoky, shadowy, like Mary Pickford’s on the silver screen.
The saline didn’t seem to be working; her blood pressure was still dropping.
When ought purple be considered blue? Red to brown to blue to black. What exactly had Dr. Lynn said about the blue cases, their chances of pulling through?
Bridie gasped something.
I thought it might have been Sing. You want me to sing?
Maybe she was delirious. Maybe it wasn’t even me she was addressing. Anyway, she couldn’t answer, because all her effort was bent on that next breath.
I would run to Women’s Surgical and drag Dr. Lynn back with me.
Bridie, I’ll only be gone a minute.
Did she even hear?
I fled the room. Turned left, went down the passage very fast.
Back the other way, there was some commotion. It didn’t matter.
But then it got louder and I looked around and saw Dr. Lynn coming down the stairs in an apron with a trace of red on the bib, each arm in the custody of a helmeted constable. How clumsily the trio descended; the men were holding her too firmly and she was briefly lifted off her feet.
Dr. Lynn!
The doctor stared through the knot of gawkers that stood between us. She had the most baffling expression—mingled frustration, regret, sorrow, even (I thought) laughter at the absurdity of the situation. I realised she couldn’t help me, and she couldn’t help Bridie, because her time was up.
The men in blue steered the doctor around a corner, out of sight.
When I stumbled back into the ward, Bridie was the colour of a dirty penny. Her eyes were wide with what looked like terror.
I gripped her damp hand. You’ll be grand, I swore to her.
One of the babies started crying and I thought Mary O’Rahilly might be too, but I didn’t turn my head from Bridie. Her wheezes were laboured and shallow, almost too fast to count. Her face was dusty blue.
I waited.
I watched.
The bone man was in the room. I could hear him rattling, snickering.
But Bridie’s powers of endurance were extraordinary, weren’t they? She was younger and tougher than me, she’d gloated. Deprivation and humiliation had been this girl’s meat and drink; she’d swallowed them down and turned them to strength, mirth, beauty. Surely she could survive this day as she had all the other ones?
It was only a path through the woods, I told myself. Tangled and faint and looping but a path just the same, and didn’t every path have an end? Like the forested hills around Dublin where we’d walk one day, Bridie and I, joking about how scared I’d been when she got the flu. She’d come home and meet Tim and his magpie. She’d lie beside me in my bed. There’d be all the time in the world. We’d take a ship to Australia someday and walk in the perfume-clouded Blue Mountains. I pictured us strolling through eucalyptus groves, entertained by the exuberant flutter of strange birds.
A little red froth leaked out the side of her mouth.
I wiped it away.
In my mind’s eye, the track through the woods was getting dimmer as the branches closed overhead. More of a tunnel now.
I thought of running in search of another doctor to inject Bridie with something, anything. But all stimulants would do was buy her a few more minutes of pain—wasn’t that what Dr. Lynn had told me?
The tunnel straightened. The two of us knew right well where it was going.
Bridie whooped and coughed up dark blood all down her neck.
I held her in my arms as crimson bubbled from her nose. I couldn’t find a pulse in her skinny wrist. Her skin was clammy now, losing all the heat it had hoarded.
I did nothing, only crouched there counting her fluttering sips of air—fifty-three in a minute. How fast could a person breathe? As light as the wings of a moth; as loud as a tree being sawn down. I kept count, totting up Bridie’s breaths until the small, noiseless one that I realised, a few seconds later, must have been her last.
My eyes were dry, burning. I turned them towards the floor. It was Bridie who’d mopped it earlier; I tried to find her silvery track.
Nurse Power, please. Get hold of yourself.
Groyne; when had the orderly come in?
His tone was oddly kind. Stand up now, would you?
I dragged myself to my feet; I was daubed with blood from bib to hem. I let go of Bridie’s hand and set it down on her ribs.
Groyne’s face caved in. Ah, not the Sweeney girl.
Mary O’Rahilly was sobbing behind me.
The orderly was gone without another wo
rd.
I began with Bridie’s fingers. I wiped them clean, then lavished balm on the irritated red skin on the backs. Traced the raised circle left by ringworm—the faint marking of an ancient fort on a hill. I moved the cloth down her arms, the smooth one and the rippling, burnt one.
A pot of soup, she’d told me on the first day.
How naïve of me to have assumed that it was an accident. Much more likely that at some point in Bridie’s penitential upbringing, an adult had thrown scalding soup at her.
In came Dr. MacAuliffe.
I barely said a word.
He listened for a nonexistent pulse. He lifted Bridie’s right eyelid and shone his torch in to confirm that the pupil didn’t contract.
It was the faulty paperwork that threw him. You’re telling me she was never actually admitted to this hospital?
I said, She worked here for three days. Tirelessly. For nothing.
It must have been my tone that shut MacAuliffe up. Under Cause of death, he scribbled, Influenza.
Then he was gone and I carried on.
There were few stretches of Bridie’s body left unmarked; preparing it for burial was like finding chapter after chapter of a horrifying book. When I peeled off her second stocking, I noticed a toe at an odd angle—an old break left unset. On her ribs, snaking around from her back, an ugly red line; it had healed in the end, as most things did. I bent down and kissed the scar.
From her cot, Mary O’Rahilly spoke up shakily. Nurse Power, can I please go home? This place—
It was a healthy instinct, the desire to grab her baby and escape. I said, without turning my head, Just a few more days, Mrs. O’Rahilly.
I found a starched nightdress to put on Bridie. Laid her limbs straight, put her hands together, interlocked her fingers.
Groyne and O’Shea came in with the stretcher and set it along the empty middle bed.
I couldn’t look as they lifted Bridie onto it. I couldn’t not look.
I got a clean sheet and covered her up.
Groyne put his hand on my shoulder, making me twitch. We’ll take care of her now, Nurse Power.
Silence filled up the ward again once they were gone.
At some point Barnabas started crying. The noise abated. I looked and saw that Mary O’Rahilly was rocking him in her arms, shushing him.
The Pull of the Stars Page 24
