Chapter 31 #2
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 and through 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 shepherd through me, 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 it grace—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 of a 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 I smiled 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 a hospital? If this is supposed to be funny, it’s about as funny as Abbott and Costello on the radio without Costello. ”