Two Wars and a Wedding, page 24
“In the middle of the night?” It was a perfectly natural question. It wasn’t as though Holt was trying to keep her talking, just so he could keep looking at her, at the way her hair exploded in wisps around her face, at the way she swished back and forth where she stood, as though keeping still were too much effort, at the bright spots of color on her cheeks.
“It’s hardly the middle of the night. It’s”—Nurse Hayes consulted the watch pinned to her breast—“four seventeen. They can only land the boats between three and six in the morning because of the tides. They figured that out after we came over and nearly wound up as matchsticks on the rocks. Going out to the boat isn’t such a problem; you can go out there pretty much as you please, but coming back here is another matter entirely.” Nurse Hayes bent over to retrieve her lantern, talking all the while. “I’ll just go see what’s come in, shall I? Private Clark still needs that ice on his eyes and we’re down to a fragment of a fragment.”
Holt pressed his eyes shut, wishing he’d been asleep when she made her rounds, wishing he hadn’t turned his head, wishing he could go back to yesterday.
“Nurse Hayes?” He wasn’t sure if saying something would make it better or worse, but he had to try. She paused, turning toward him, poised for a speedy exit. Holt didn’t know what to say, so all he said was “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Nurse Hayes bared her teeth at him in something like a smile. “Nothing to be sorry about. Except for getting yourself wounded in the first place. Do try not to do that again.”
“Not much chance of it flat on a cot, is there?” Holt nodded at the figure who’d just entered the tent by the flap nearest his bed. “Looks like your relief is here.”
“But Kit’s not supposed to take over until—” Nurse Hayes turned and went very, very white. “Ava?”
The lantern swung wildly as Nurse Hayes swayed on her feet. Holt tried to scramble up to grab her and wound up flopping back flat against his pillow, prone and useless.
“Stop that,” said Nurse Hayes, in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. “You’ll rip your stitches.”
But she wasn’t looking at Holt. She was staring over him, at the woman who had just come in.
“Hello, Betsy,” the new nurse said, in a voice that spoke of chowder and the bean and the cod, where the Lowells spoke only to Cabots and the Cabots spoke only to God.
Nurse Hayes lifted the lantern so it shone directly at her, illuminating a strong-featured face with a wide, thin-lipped mouth and a pair of the most emphatic eyebrows Holt had ever seen. Her uniform, with the white band on the arm, was pristine and crisply ironed, her dark hair pulled close back beneath her cap. This new nurse was taller than Nurse Hayes by several inches, but wiry, in a way that made her seem shorter than she was, while Nurse Hayes’s constant motion always made such small considerations as inches seem an irrelevancy.
Nurse Hayes gawked, the lantern trembling in her hand. “But you’re—how did you—I’m not hallucinating you, am I? Or dreaming? I might just be dreaming I’m on my rounds and none of this is actually real. I hope I’m not feverish. We don’t have enough staff left for me to be feverish.”
“You’re not dreaming—or feverish,” said Holt roughly. “I see her too.”
The other woman glanced down at him, taking in his various bandages with a clinical eye. “Who is this?”
“Holt. Private Holt. You might know him as Hold ’Em Holt. Scourge of the bandits of the West. Never mind,” said Nurse Hayes, never taking her eyes off the other woman. “Ava—you’re not meant to be here. You shouldn’t be here. I came to try to save you from all this. There’s malaria—and possibly yellow fever—and goodness only knows what else. You didn’t need to do this. I never meant—well, maybe I did mean—but . . .”
Holt had never seen Nurse Hayes at a loss like this. Not when she was haranguing him on the verandah of the Tampa Bay Hotel. Not with wounded coming in by the wagonload.
“You did. You meant it. And I’m here.” The newcomer spoke in a low, quick voice, so as not to wake the patients. “I got your last letter, Betsy.”
Nurse Hayes went very still. She didn’t say anything. She appeared to be incapable of speech. “I—Ava . . .”
Holt didn’t like the way she looked, not at all. “Maybe you should sit down,” he said brusquely.
“No. No. I’m fine.” Nurse Hayes gave a little shake, like someone coming out of cold water. She didn’t look fine; she looked like someone had punched her in the gut. She looked down at Holt and then back at the new nurse. “Not here. I need—I need to finish my rounds.”
Her voice was steady enough, but next to her, Holt could see the way she was shaking, shaking and trying to hide it.
“I’ll let you get on with it,” said the other woman brusquely. “When did you become so responsible?”
“After you left.” Nurse Hayes’s face wobbled for a moment before she composed herself. “I’ll meet you on the hospital steps.”
Holt waited a moment, letting her compose herself, before asking, in what he hoped was a casual tone, “Who was that?”
“My oldest friend.”
Holt wanted to say that, even in his limited experience of friendship, friends didn’t treat friends like that, they didn’t mock them like that—but what did he know? He’d never had a friend he hadn’t driven away. The closest he’d ever come to one was Paul, and that under false pretenses.
“Why did you say you weren’t finished?” Holt asked bluntly.
“Because I don’t know what to say.” Holt always thought of Nurse Hayes as formidable, but she looked very young: young and shaken and vulnerable. “We parted so badly. . . . I made such mistakes.”
“Well, you’re both here now,” Holt said.
“Yes. We are.” That thought didn’t seem to bring her much comfort. She scrubbed a hand over her eyes and then turned to Holt with a shadow of her old sass. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
There was something so gallant about it, about that unconvincing attempt. Holt felt something clench uncomfortably in the region of his chest.
“If you say so.” For all her bravado, she looked so forlorn. Holt found himself possessed of an entirely impractical urge to slay dragons for her. But he was stuck on this cot, so all he could do was say, “And—don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”
Siboney, Cuba
July 9, 1898
It was probably, Betsy realized, a bad thing if her patients were trying to reassure her.
Not patients. One patient. A patient she’d kissed. Accidentally. Sort of. Mostly. She couldn’t think about that now. There was no room in her head for it. Betsy’s brain felt like a beehive, everything buzzing all at once. She was too tired to think. She felt like she’d been stripped bare and spun around in circles.
And there was Ava, sitting on the steps of the hospital.
Betsy sat down next to her, drawing her knees up to her chest. The view from the porch was beautiful: the jagged peaks of the distant mountains, the moonlight on the sea. One would never know that away up there past the roofs of the hospital tents, up among the distant hills, men were fighting and dying, every step of every trail steeped with the blood of the wounded.
“I can’t believe you’re here.”
“Neither can I,” said Ava drily. “They refused us permission to land, you know—the army. No nurses needed at the front, they said.”
“No nurses needed?” Betsy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They were all worn thin. “Yes, you can see we’re just twiddling our thumbs, nothing to do here. I’ve only been on shift for eighteen hours.”
“They sent us on to Tampa. There’s a place called Picnic Island, where they’ve put typhoid patients.”
“Typhoid?” Betsy could feel every muscle in her body tighten. Her vision blurred, fragmenting into red spots. Of all her nightmares, Ava, exposing herself to typhoid, falling ill, dying. “But—typhoid—Ava . . .”
Ava eyed her curiously. “It’s work that needs to be done. But there were plenty there to do it—and you were here. So when I heard that Barton’s ship was in port, I got them to take me along with the dried beans.”
That was enough to shake Betsy out of her private panic. “You stowed away? You?”
“I didn’t stow away; I asked the captain nicely,” said Ava primly.
“I wanted to spare you all this.”
“I know,” said Ava. “You said that in your letter. What I could make out. What were you writing with, a quill?”
“A pen with a broken nib.” They hadn’t been allowed to have pens at the place she was then. Betsy was meant to avoid any exertion, mental or physical, but particularly mental. Total rest, that was the rule. No papers. No letters. But Betsy had managed to find them all the same. Because they didn’t seem to understand that the silence was worse than anything else; in the silence, there was too much time to think. And remember. And mourn.
Betsy wrapped her arms around herself, around the emptiness where there had once been another someone, her throat clogged with all the things she couldn’t say, all the things she wasn’t ready to explain, not to Ava, not now.
“You didn’t have to try to take my place,” said Ava.
Betsy fought the tears back down, finding her voice with difficulty. “You wouldn’t have signed up if I hadn’t taunted you into it.”
Ava looked at her levelly. “I wouldn’t have signed up if I hadn’t wanted to sign up.”
“But if you knew—if you had any idea—”
“Yes, yes,” said Ava, without heat. “Do me the courtesy of believing I know my own mind as well as you know yours.”
Betsy gave a hiccupping laugh. “I don’t know my mind at all anymore.”
“Ha,” said Ava. She was quiet for a moment before asking, “Was it really as bad as all that?”
“Worse.” There was a hole inside Betsy. It was like Holt’s wound, a festering abscess, only this one couldn’t be drained; it pulsed there beneath the skin, a constant pain that could be dulled only by pretending it wasn’t there. But it was. Always. “I had no idea. You were right about all of it.”
“You were right too.” Ava kept her eyes trained on the surf, not looking at Betsy. Her back was painfully straight. “I got back to Concord—and I just couldn’t make myself settle. I made myself miserable. I made everyone around me miserable too. My cousin finally told me she was sick of having my face sour her porridge, and at that rate she’d rather someone a little less acute and a little more obliging.”
Betsy had forgotten what a good mimic Ava could be. She used to have Betsy in stitches parodying the other girls in their boardinghouse. It had been a long time since they’d laughed together like that. A long time since everything.
“What did you do?” she asked hoarsely.
Ava quirked a dark brow. “I found another cousin to tend to her. If there’s one thing with which I’m well-endowed, it’s an embarrassment of relations.”
Betsy stared down at the stained fabric of her apron, like a blotted copybook, all her mistakes written on her for anyone to see. “I didn’t mean to make you lose your position.”
“I made me lose my position,” said Ava firmly. “I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I wasn’t suited to it. You were right about that too. So I went home—and when I heard that the DAR was paying women to train as nurses and come to Cuba . . .”
Betsy risked a wobbly grin. “They must not have been able to teach you much. You’d done the course already.”
“There’s always something to learn,” said Ava, sounding entirely like her old self again.
Betsy blinked hard. “I thought I’d ruined everything forever.”
“It wasn’t you. Well, it wasn’t all you. I was jealous,” Ava said gruffly. “And guilty.”
“Guilty? For taking the ticket?”
“No. About your father.” Ava sat up a little straighter, with the air of one determined to make a clean breast. “That night he took us to dinner in Northampton. There was a rattle in his breathing I didn’t like. I should have said something. I knew I should say something. But I was afraid he wouldn’t take me seriously. Or that I was wrong. What did I know? I wasn’t even a medical student, just a girl who liked to tag along on her father’s house calls. So I didn’t say anything. And he died.”
“But—” It wasn’t Ava’s fault; it was Betsy’s.
Ava clasped her hands together in her lap, the knuckles very white. “You were supposed to have gone to Greece with your father. You’d been planning it for as long as I’d known you. If I’d said something that night in Northampton—”
“I killed him,” Betsy blurted out. That’s what Alex had told her. She’d killed their father just like she’d killed their mother. She ruined everything she touched. Thoughtless, careless, selfish. “It wasn’t you. I killed him by dragging him out to Northampton in the dead of winter.”
Ava turned and stared at her, her dark brows drawing together. “He had pneumonia. It was already in his lungs by the time he took the train to Northampton. I heard it.” Ava’s face was as stern and unwavering as a mask from a Greek tragedy. “His death is on my conscience, not yours. In Greece—how could I accept your charity? I could barely look at you.”
Betsy couldn’t make sense of it, of any of it. She felt as though the world had flipped on its head. “I didn’t know.”
“I was jealous too. I was jealous of you and jealous of your new friends. That just made the guilt worse,” Ava added, with clinical detachment. “I thought you’d hate me if you knew I could have saved your father and didn’t. And even if you didn’t hate me, you’d be bored of me.”
“How could I ever be bored of you? No one takes me to bits and puts me back together again the way you do.” Betsy looked at Ava, biting hard on her lower lip. “I thought you were appalled by me.”
“I was,” said Ava honestly. “But also jealous. And guilty.”
They sat there together in silence, their shoulders touching, letting themselves lean into each other as the darkness of the sky lightened into dawn. Ava didn’t hug. Ava never hugged. But it was enough.
“I don’t want you to die.”
“I don’t want me to die either,” said Ava briskly, standing up. “And I don’t intend to. Not now, at any rate. Come. We came here to work, not paint watercolors of pretty prospects.”
Betsy tugged at Ava’s skirt. “But the fevers . . .”
“Betsy.” Ava squatted back down again. “I was in and out of my father’s surgery before I could toddle. I’ve had every disease you can name and then some—including typhoid. Why do you think I was never sick at Smith? It’s not just because I wrapped up warmly.”
“You won’t need to wrap up warmly here.” Betsy let Ava pull her up. “Well, except at night. It does get cold at night.”
“How many patients do you have?” Ava asked, all brisk and businesslike.
But that was Ava. Having once said something, she would never admit to it again. What was done was done. And there were patients to be cared for. Betsy led Ava down the steps toward the tents. “We had nearly five hundred in our care a week ago, but about half that now.”
“You’ve discharged them?”
“Some. Some didn’t make it.” Too many. Betsy forced herself to focus on the matter at hand. “We have a hospital building, two tent wards, and a surgery tent. We keep the sickest men in the hospital—they’re less exposed to the elements there—and the milder cases in the tents. Oh, this is one of our surgeons.” Betsy accosted Dr. Stringfellow as he charged down the well-worn path from the hospital to the surgery tent, smelling strongly of coffee. “He’s on loan to us from the army. We borrowed him and just never gave him back. Dr. Stringfellow, this is Nurse Saltonstall.”
“Very well, good,” said Dr. Stringfellow, trying to navigate around them.
Ava planted herself firmly in the doctor’s path. “Dr. Lawrence Stringfellow? I read your article in the Lancet. The one on the case of the anteverted wandering liver.”
“It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story,” said Betsy brightly. “The Case of the Wandering Liver.”
Neither of them paid any attention to her. Dr. Stringfellow had stopped and was looking at Ava with the attention he usually only afforded particularly interesting injuries.
“It was a very strange case,” said Dr. Stringfellow modestly.
“Was it?” demanded Ava. “Was it, really? If one were to afford women’s health the attention we afford other branches of medicine . . .”
“You believe this is purely a female condition?”
Ava set her chin in a way Betsy knew well. “The woman had suffered a stillbirth at full term. Surely that must play some role.”
Dr. Stringfellow looked distinctly intrigued but also skeptical. “Yes, twenty-three years before.”
“As you yourself pointed out, she had been suffering from an inguinal hernia for roughly that same period of time. If one assumes . . .” Ava rattled off a spate of technicalities in something that vaguely resembled Latin.
Dr. Stringfellow, however, appeared to be utterly electrified by each and every multisyllabic incomprehensibility. He countered with gobbledygook of his own. It was like watching a sport for which one didn’t understand any of the rules.
At some point, Dr. Stringfellow had offered Ava his arm. At some point, she had taken it. They wandered together into the surgery tent, arguing fiercely and gazing into one another’s eyes.
A coup de foudre, that’s what the French called it.
That’s what Charles would have called it.
Betsy let out her breath, feeling distinctly wobbly. She needed to lie down. She had been on shift for over eighteen hours.
In Lamia, she had worked twenty-four hours at a time.
In Lamia, where she had seen Charles again . . .
Chapter Twenty
Dear Ava,
Did you think I’d given up hope? It’s not that I’ve given up writing at you—I will keep on writing at you, you know, until you write me back—it’s just that I’ve been so busy. I’ve lost track of what post I’m on. We set up a Red Cross hospital in a place called Lamia back in May. It’s a beautiful town, right on the Aegean, with crumbling Venetian walls on a hilltop and the cafés bustling with officers and attachés and international newspapermen. I even met an American attaché who had come all the way over from Vienna so as not to miss the excitement.
