“You’re going. Come on.Come on.”
Together we hurried across the parking lot. The low winter sky was a seamless white from horizon to horizon, as blind as the eye of some merciless carved-stone god last worshipped five thousand years ago. The day had gotten colder since we’d come out of Bramley Hall.
When we stepped into the hospital lobby, Lynette took my gloved hand and held tightly to it as we got Gertie’s room number from the woman at the information desk. She continued to hold my hand all the way to the third floor, letting go only when we stepped out of theelevator. I thought she would halt, but she stayed at my side as we followed the main hall, reading the room numbers.
Franklin came out of 332 looking ghastly, as though he’d stared into the Pit and the Pit had stared back. He seemed not to recognize us for a moment. His voice was tortured, as if he hated not just the words he spoke but also hated himself for speaking them. “There’s nothing to be done. It’s over.”
Thirty-One
Gertie didn’t like to ask for help. When she’d been a toddler and trying to dress herself, she didn’t want to be shown which was her left shoe and which was her right. She struggled with footwear morning after morning until she understood how the subtle curve of the shoe matched that of the foot. When it came to such mysterious implements as forks and difficult garments as zippered jackets, she wanted to be shown just three times, often only twice, and then be left to solve the problem herself over days or weeks. As a result of her insistence on self-sufficiency, she mastered the challenges of the toddler years faster than either her sister or brother. She was still a preschooler when she expressed contempt for crybabies. If she sustained a minor cut, she washed it herself, swabbed it with iodine, and applied a Band-Aid. If later one of her parents noticed the bandage, Gertie explained her failure to involve them by saying, “It wasn’t even a boo-boo. It was just a so-so.” She put great value on self-sufficiency and physical stoicism, which in nearly all cases contribute to a better and happier life. Once in a while, however, bad luck has its way, bad luck and tragedy.
Tuesday afternoon, Gertie had come down with what seemed to be a cold. She went to her room, put on her pajamas, and got intobed with a selection of magazines. She had no elevated temperature yet. Her mother placed a large carafe of orange juice in an ice bucket at bedside and a box of Kleenex on the nightstand. In the event that Gertie developed a sore throat, Loretta had tucked a bag of honey-lemon lozenges in a nightstand drawer. She had wanted to sit for a while with her daughter, but Gertie said, “It’s a silly cold caused by a stupid virus. I’m smarter than any virus. I’ll be over this in no time. You have work to do, Momma. You and Daddy have to keep us in diamonds and furs.” When Loretta dryly noted Gertie possessed no diamonds or furs, the girl said, “But if I wanted them, I could have them one day. I could talk Daddy into it. When youcan’thave what you want, you want it more. That’s when the big trouble starts.” Loretta assured her that Franklin was no more likely to buy her diamonds and furs than he was to buy her an elephant. If she wanted diamonds and furs, she’d have to work very hard or marry a husband foolish enough to spoil her. “No problem,” Gertie declared. “One day when you see a woman wearing a white ermine coat and an ermine hat and fifty pounds of diamonds, walking her elephant, you’ll know who she is.”
The decline was slow. By dinner, Gertie still had an appetite but wanted only chicken noodle soup followed by ice cream. Chef Lattuada brought the soup and half an hour later homemade chocolate-cherry ice cream. When Loretta and Franklin came to say good night, Gertie had already fallen asleep. Rather than wake her to take her temperature, Loretta pressed a hand to the girl’s forehead. If she felt the slightest bit warmer than normal, it was not enough to be called a fever. Later it would be determined Gertie woke in the night with a nosebleed, an annoyance that bothered her two or three times a year. She got out of bed, went into her bathroom, and used a wad of medical cotton to plug her left nostril, which was the source of the flow. She most likely sat up in bed for a while, head tilted forward, before lying down to sleep once more. The cotton stopped the bleeding, but it also preventednasal discharge from escaping the left nostril until she removed it just before she had a light breakfast in bed at nine o’clock the next morning. A thermometer revealed a one-degree fever, nothing to be concerned about, though no one could know that the events of the night just past all but ensured a mortal crisis.
As the day progressed, Gertie suffered a headache that came and went, watery eyes, congestion she could not fully relieve without risking another nosebleed, chills, and mild fatigue—nothing that suggested a condition worse than the common cold. Her appetite improved from breakfast to lunch but declined during the afternoon because she’d developed a sore throat. She was being treated with aspirin, which relieved the headache, and was drinking a lot of fluids. At bedtime, her father helped her ease into dreams by providing a shot of Scotch in a cup of milk. Loretta looked in on her twice before midnight, but the girl seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
The decline was slow—but then fast. Gertie wasn’t battling a mere common-cold virus. She had a sinus infection caused by a strain of staphylococcal bacteria. The damaged blood vessel in her nose was small; nevertheless, it provided bacteria access to her circulatory system. Staph can produce toxins leading to septicemia, also called “blood poisoning.” When Loretta checked on her daughter shortly before six o’clock Thursday morning, the girl was sweating and yet shaking from chills. Her fever had risen to 104 degrees. Her heart raced. She gasped for breath. She was mentally confused and too weak to get out of bed. By the time the ambulance transported her to the hospital, her fever had reach 105 degrees, and her blood pressure had fallen to 80 over 50. The medical team administered intravenous fluids to maintain her blood pressure at 90 over 60, intravenous penicillin and other antibiotics to combat the infection, and oxygen to raise her blood oxygen level. The urgent purpose was to prevent septicemia from becoming septic shock, which leads to death in more than 60 percent of the cases andsometimes leaves survivors with severe disabilities. Within an hour of Gertie’s admission to the hospital, it was determined she was already in septic shock. By the time Lynette and I arrived, in spite of the aggressive treatment the girl was receiving, her temperature had risen to 106. Although her blood pressure mostly remained stubbornly at 80 over 50, sometimes it dipped to the mid 70s over high 40s. Widespread blood clotting had perhaps begun, and kidney failure might be imminent.
Franklin always seemed to be a man who could handle any trouble that came his way. No difficulty, no disappointment, no setback, no threat could disrupt his calm nature or long diminish the optimism that was as much a part of him as his love of making movies. This Franklin before Lynette and me was not the one I knew. He was a gray shade of pale. The architecture of his face, previously so pleasing, seemed to have undergone a shift in its substructure. Horror and grief robbed him of handsomeness. He appeared tormented, insecure, too lost to be the leading man of any motion picture, which once he could have been. If our Gertie was alive, even with her vital organs fast failing, there was hope. I carried that hope like a mystical light in a mysterious vessel, lacking understanding of it but certain of its power. I wasn’t confident, however, that I could penetrate Franklin’s anguish, convince him of what could be done, and quickly gain his cooperation. I asked Lynette to stay with him, and I went into room 332, a two-bed unit with only one patient.
In a white hospital gown under a white sheet, Gertie looked no less white than her bedclothes, eyes closed and deathly still. At the sight of her, my heart mispaced itself, chasing each incomplete beat with the premature start of another so that I could feel the hard palpitations of the extrasystolic rhythm knocking in my breast. A nurse was in attendance on one side of the bed. Loretta held fast to the railing on the other side, eyes fixed on her daughter, lips moving as if she must be silently reciting a prayer. I went to her and gripped her left hand, whichwas clenched around the bed rail. Though she was unable to speak, her eyes were such pools of misery that no words were necessary to convey her pain and fear.
I spoke softly, presuming that the nurse must be too busy to eavesdrop. “This is important. I didn’t tell you at the time, when it happened. I didn’t want to seem like even more of a freak. Willy Maxwell didn’t just try to poison Rafael. He succeeded. I found the dog almost dead. I held him. I held him and ... you saw. I don’t know why or how I did it, but I did.” In Loretta’s anguish, she was not clear-minded enough to understand me at once. To encourage her, I drew from memory the opening sentence of a classic novel and invested it with an urgency the author never intended. “‘Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.’ That’s how it starts. It ends like this.” After rapidly reciting the last fifty-one words of Chapter Twenty-Four, I said, “If you want every word ofThe Wizard of Oz, I’ve got them. You know I’ve got them. And so much more. If that, then why not Rafael? And if Rafael, why not Gertie?”
Loretta was a screenwriter, a fine storyteller. She believed in a world of possibilities. An innocent character could be sent to prison for killing her lover and find herself sharing a cell with the real murderer. The same character might instead win the lottery with a ticket that a sudden breeze blew in her face. Or she could discover that a street-corner Santa, ringing a bell for donations, was the real deal, doing a little were-you-good-or-were-you-bad research. However, though she knew that I was weirdly gifted, too much was at stake here for her to accept at once that real life could be as strange as anything in a work of fiction. She said, “Honey, if that’s what happened with Rafael, maybe it was a one-time thing. Maybe it was just for dogs. What if you try with Gertie—and you can’t?” I understood her worry. When hope is gone, daring to hope again only to be disappointed makes the loss doubly painful.
“Mother,” I whispered, using that sacred word for the first time with her, for the first time with anyone. “Mother, let’s do this. Let’s do this together.”
After she searched my eyes, after I met her stare with more confidence than I felt, she kissed my brow. “If it’s not like Rafael, it won’t be your fault. Never your fault.”
With that, she knew what needed to be done. The nurse—Teresa—must not be present, and Franklin needed to join us. If some new treatment existed that might be tried or if Gertie were responding to her current care, Teresa might have been reluctant to leave the girl unattended in critical condition. But when Loretta requested private time for family prayer, Teresa responded with sympathy. She said she could be summoned with the call button. She stepped out of the room and sent Franklin in to join us.
I called him Father and asked him to trust me, and although he appeared as bewildered as he was grief-stricken, he said of course he trusted me. “Lynette should be here, too,” I told them. “She’s got to be. Not just because she’s going to be property manager or anything like that. She’s lived a long time with sorrow since Libby died. Nothing can lift that from her. But maybe, just maybe, this will make it a little less heavy to bear. She dearly loves Gertie. I’m sure she can be trusted with secrets. She knows what matters and what doesn’t—and trust matters.”
The four of us gathered around the bed. I put down the railing to have better access to my sister. Climbing onto the bed to lie beside her would have been awkward, and I could not have drawn her against me without disturbing the intravenous line, the oxygen tube, and the lead from the EKG monitor. There was no reason to suppose that I had to fold her in my arms as I had done with Rafael. I could put one hand on a hand of hers, my other hand on her head. Perhaps that would be enough contact. When Rafael’s affliction had passed out of him andthrough me, my physical reaction had been such that I would have fallen if I’d been standing. I asked Franklin to stand behind me and provide support if I required it.
A short while ago, I had raced away from Bramley Hall with an urgent sense of purpose and arrived at the hospital with the firm conviction that I could do for dear Gertie what I’d done for Rafael. More accurately, I believed that what had been done for the shepherdthroughme, by some power I could neither name nor understand, would now be done through me for my sister. As I leaned against the bed and placed my hands on her, a cold shadow of doubt fell over me. A nervous flutter passed through my chest and stomach. If a clock had been within my line of sight, I would not have been surprised to see its mechanism frozen by the intensity of my sudden irresolution. Who was I, after all, to assume I possessed the power to raise anyone from near death to health and life? Who was I but a carnival freak, long exhibited nearly naked on a stage, mocked and cursed, to whom normal people responded with horror and disgust and sometimes pity? Luck had lifted me—or call itgrace—from the mire of a sordid life into an Eden of plenty and respectability, but I had done nothing to earn or facilitate this elevation. I was clothed and fashionable in my own way, but I was still a freak. I attended dinner parties with the rich and famous, but I was no less a freak than I had been in the Museum of the Strange. At the Bram, my walk-in closet featured a full-length three-way mirror that revealed to me always and only the same thing. I was a kind of chimera as in the ancient myths, a human head with a human face, and otherwise a deformed composite that no one could explain. Who was I to save a girl when I could not save myself? There at sweet Gertie’s bedside, I was shaken by a waking nightmare inspired by doubt:From the shores of death, my sister returns to life with shocking suddenness, erupting off the mattress, the body of a child with the head ofa rabid dog, foaming at the mouth, eyes red and pitiless, full of the terrible rage that is love turned to hatred, all because I don’t know what I’m doing.
Just as I thought failure was inevitable, a calm settled on me, and the shadow of doubt faded with the waking nightmare. Gertie’s fever became mine, beads of perspiration bursting across my brow and streaming down my face. Her headache came with the fever, wave after wave of pain seeking a shore on which to break. I became aware of the patterns of blood vessels throughout my body, arteries carrying poisoned blood away from the heart into narrower arterioles and into capillaries, tiny venules carrying poisoned blood into veins and back to the heart. The stench of toxins. The nauseating taste of bile. My heart, which had been racing, abruptly slowed and my blood pressure fell to match Gertie’s, fell and kept falling. My vision began to fade; everything before me fractured into shapes composed of fewer and fewer pieces. I passed out and collapsed backward into Franklin’s arms.
Later they told me that I was unconscious less than a minute. Franklin lifted me, turned, and put me on the vacant bed. Loretta and Lynette hurried to me. Franklin said they should summon the nurse, but Loretta saw problems with that, awkward questions that would have to be answered. Fortunately, they hesitated. I had only fainted. I rose toward the sound of my name and opened my eyes and saw their faces hovering over me. I was weak and a bit disoriented, in a peculiar state of mind, part of me still wandering through the book from which I had quoted to Loretta. Harking back to Chapter Eight of that story, I said, “‘They carried the sleeping girl to a pretty spot beside the river, far enough from the poppy field to prevent her breathing any more of the poison of the flowers, and here they laid her gently on the soft grass and waited for the fresh breeze to waken her.’”
As you might expect, my companions stared at me as if I had called into question my sanity, Lynette frowning with even greater bafflement and concern than the other two. Their worry evaporated not because Ismiled and said, “End Chapter Eight,” but because their attention was drawn to the success of our effort when, in the first bed, Gertie sat up and said, “Hey, why am I tangled up here? Where am I? In ahospital? If this is supposed to be funny, it’s about as funny as Abbott and Costello on the radio without Costello.”
Thirty-Two
The doctors didn’t want to admit their diagnosis could have been so wrong. They couldn’t believe a child as apparently ill as Gertrude could so suddenly return to good health. Yet Gertie stood now before them, out of her hospital gown and back in her pajamas, her vital signs normal, her usual ebullient self. Her parents and I and Lynette worked hard to quell whatever suspicion might evolve in the wake of the girl’s recovery. We pretended bafflement even as we celebrated what had occurred. We pressed for explanations after the doctors insisted they had none. We worried aloud that septic shock, once cured like this, might return. The physicians explained that septic shock simply could not be cured as quickly as Gertie seemed to have been cured, but once cured it didn’t just come back like a temporarily interrupted sneezing fit. We mispronounced the names of illnesses and generally portrayed ourselves as medical ignoramuses, which is what they wanted to believe we were. When their amazement at Gertie’s recovery occupied them less than frustration with our silly questions, Loretta distracted them further from consideration of our role in this event by saying she believed in miracles and that this was for sure a miracle. She asked the doctors if they believed in miracles. They said no, but the nurses saidyes, which annoyed the doctors. By the time that Franklin paid the bill, the physicians were eager to put the whole episode behind them. They were grateful no one spoke of legal action due to a misdiagnosis.
Although baffled by events, Gertie was excited to be taken home by her friend Lynette. She’d never been in a DeSoto before. And to satisfy the urge to snack while driving, Lynette kept a bag of Frito corn chips in the car, a recently marketed treat that Chef Lattuada had not yet added to the pantry at the Bram.
I rode in the Cadillac with Loretta and Franklin so that we could decide how to manage the revelation of my gift. We quickly agreed there would be no revelation.
“If the children know what I can do, we won’t be able to go on as we were. We won’t ever be the same with one another, equal and growing up together. I don’t want to lose that. I treasure that.”
Franklin’s astonishment affected his driving. Several times, when he realized he was half on the shoulder of the highway, he pulled onto the pavement with a warning to himself—“Whoa, whoa, whoa” or “Watch it, watch out.” He glanced at the rearview mirror, in which my face was framed. “You’ve known since that day with Rafael and the poisoned meat?”
“I suspected. I was pretty sure. I couldn’t be certain.”
