Chapter 7
Imogen came out onto the porch and sat down on the other side of Merrit Crowe, and she did it so casually that the girl did not register it as anything at all.
"How long have you had that," she said.
"Had what?"
"The cough."
Merrit shrugged. "Couple days."
"Two days? Three?"
"Three, maybe."
"Any fever?"
"I don't know."
"Do you feel hot?"
"I feel cold," Merrit said. "It's cold out here."
Imogen put the back of her hand against the girl's forehead in a motion so natural it looked like affection, and Joe watched his wife's face and saw absolutely nothing change on it, which told him everything.
"Come inside," Imogen said. "You'll eat in the kitchen where it's warm."
"Is it six yet?"
"It's five forty. Close enough, and I want you eating a little early tonight anyway."
"Why?"
"Because I'm bossy," Imogen said.
Merrit laughed and coughed again and went inside with Mack padding after her.
Joe did not move off the step.
Imogen stayed where she was.
"How bad," he said.
"I don't know yet."
"Imogen."
"Joe, I have known that child for seven hours and I will not guess out loud on your porch." She rubbed her hands together against the cold. "What I will tell you is that her lungs are clear. Completely clear, I listened twice, front and back, and there's nothing in there."
"That's good."
"That's very good. If she had crackles I'd be telling you something different right now."
"Then what's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," Imogen said. "Yet. She has a cold. Nine year olds get colds. The entire problem is that when a type one diabetic gets a cold, her body dumps stress hormones, and stress hormones drive her blood sugar up,
and her sugar goes up exactly when she's least likely to eat and most likely to be missed."
"And then?"
"And then ketones. And then vomiting. And then it moves fast."
"How fast?"
"From a normal looking kid to an emergency? Twelve hours. Sometimes eight."
Joe sat with that.
"And her father drove her up here and dropped her off with a cold," he said.
"Her father," Imogen said, "brought her up here because of the cold."
Joe turned to look at her.
"He said so?"
"Not in those words. He stood right there where the truck is and handed me a box and said, she's got a little something, I thought you ought to see her while it's little."
"He knew."
"He knew exactly." Imogen's mouth was a thin line.
"Joe, that man has been living with a diabetic child for five years. He knows the sick day problem better than most residents I've worked with. He didn't come here for insulin math. He came because he's got a sick kid and no doctor and he is completely, absolutely terrified."
"And that's real."
"That is the realest thing I have seen in six weeks."
They sat in the cold for a moment.
"What was in the box?" Joe asked.
Imogen laughed, one short breath of it, with no humor in it at all.
"Come look," she said.
The box was on the kitchen table and it was a red plastic toolbox with the tray lifted out.
Joe looked into it and did not say anything for a while.
Ketone test strips, four bottles, sealed. Blood glucose strips, eleven vials, in a plastic bag with desiccant. A spare meter still in its packaging. Three insulin syringes to a sleeve and eleven sleeves.
And under all of that, in a manila envelope, thirty one pages of handwritten log.
Joe pulled them out.
Every page was ruled by hand with a straightedge. Date, time, blood glucose, units given, what she ate, how she felt.
Six weeks of it. Four readings a day, sometimes six. Not one gap.
The handwriting was small and cramped and Joe had seen it two days ago on a sheet of yellow legal paper.
"He's been logging since the lights went out," Imogen said.
"Before that."
"Before that too, probably, but this is what he brought." She took the pages back and squared them. "Joe, this is better documentation than I got from most parents with a phone app and a pharmacy four minutes away."
"Is it useful?"
"It's the most useful object in this house."
Imogen sat down. "With six weeks of readings I can see her patterns. I can see what her body does at four in the morning, which is where most kids get into trouble. I can see that he's been running her slightly high on purpose, which is the right call when you can't get help,
because high is survivable for weeks and low kills you in twenty minutes."
"He figured that out himself?"
"He figured that out himself."
Joe looked at the pages.
"I don't know what to do with this," he said.
"With what?"
"With the fact that he's good at it."
Imogen put her hand flat on the stack.
"I know," she said. "Neither do I. And I have decided I'm not going to try to resolve it tonight, because there's a nine year old in my kitchen with a cough and that's the only problem I'm capable of holding."
Dinner was pork.
Fresh pork, the first fresh meat that had come into that house in eleven days, and the smell of it filled every room and made people who had been careful and grim for two weeks become briefly, stupidly happy.
Bill Tandy fried tenderloin in its own fat. Delores made gravy out of the drippings and the flour that was still in a bucket. There were potatoes from the cellar and rose hips stewed into something that was almost a jam.
Nine people at one table and a tenth chair pulled in for Merrit Crowe.
Zachary sat next to her within four minutes and showed her the lids.
"Four hundred and six," he said. "I counted them twice and got different numbers so I counted them a third time."
"Why do you have four hundred lids?"
"Because you can only use them once. They're the thing we'll run out of first."
Merrit looked at him with genuine interest.
"What happens then?"
"Then we can't can stuff anymore and we have to dry everything or smoke it or bury it in snow."
"Huh," said Merrit. "Nobody tells me any of this stuff."
"Nobody tells you?"
"My dad tells me everything's fine," she said, and speared a potato. "He's been saying everything's fine since the first night. He said it forty times."
Zachary considered this.
"Everything's not fine," he said.
"I know."
"But it's also not as bad as you think. We have a spring."
"What's a spring?"
Joe, from the other end of the table, heard his nine year old son explain gravity fed water to the daughter of Arlan Crowe for eleven straight minutes, and he put his fork down and just listened.
Imogen tested her at seven.
She did it at the table in front of everyone on purpose, and Joe understood why about four seconds into it.
"Everybody's going to learn this," Imogen said. "All of you. Tonight and then again tomorrow until it's boring."
"Why all of us?" said Sylvie.
"Because I could be at the cache. Or asleep. Or dead." Imogen said it without any drama at all. "This house is not going to have a single point of failure and neither is this child."
She pricked the side of Merrit's finger and the girl did not flinch, because nine year olds who have done a thing four times a day for five years do not flinch.
The meter counted down.
"Two eighty four," Imogen read.
The room did not know what that meant.
"That's high," Merrit said.
"That's high. What's your usual around dinner?"
"One fifty something. One eighty if I had a bad day."
"So it's the cold doing it. Exactly like I told you it would." Imogen wrote it in the log. "Okay. Now here's the part everybody watches."
She held up a bottle of ketone strips.
"This," she said, "is the most important object on this table, and I want every adult in this room to know where it lives and what it does."
She had Merrit dip one.
They waited.
The pad turned a faint pink at the edges.
"Trace," Imogen said. "That's a small amount. That's not an emergency. But it's not nothing, and eight hours ago it was negative, so we're moving in the wrong direction."
"What do you do?" Bill asked.
"Fluids and insulin and we check again in three hours. Fluid is the thing people underestimate. She is going to drink until she is sick of drinking."
"I'm already sick of drinking," said Merrit.
"I know. Drink anyway."
"Can it be tea?"
"It can be tea."
Imogen looked around the table.
"The rule is this," she said. "If any of you ever look at her and see a purple strip, that is not a wait and see. That's you coming to find me at a dead run, and if I'm not here it's you waking whoever's nearest and getting fluids into her."
"How do we know it's purple?" said Hazel.
Imogen held up the bottle and turned it so the color chart on the side faced the room.
"Memorize it," she said.
Hazel got up, walked around the table, took the bottle, and looked at the chart for a solid minute.
Then she handed it back and said, "Okay."
Joe went outside at eight to bring in wood and found Pruitt splitting in the dark.
"You've been out here an hour," Joe said.
"Coldest night yet. Figured we'd want it."
Joe stacked. Pruitt split. Neither of them said anything for ten minutes.
Then Pruitt said, "That's Arlan Crowe's kid in there."
"It is."
"Eating our pork."
"She is."
Pruitt set another round on the block.
"My wife had a thing," he said.
Joe went very still, and kept stacking, and did not look up.
"What kind of thing?"
"Lump." Pruitt swung. The round split clean. "Two years ago. She found it in the shower and she didn't tell me for a month."
"Is she."
"She's alive. She's in Nephi with her sister and I haven't heard a word since the fourth of October and I won't till spring."
Pruitt reset. "They cut it out and they burned her for six weeks and they said they got it and she has to get looked at every six months, and the last time anybody looked at her was August."
Joe stood there with a chunk of lodgepole in each hand.
"Pruitt."
"I asked around about the nurse," Pruitt said.
The splitting maul came down again.
"After Stance told me there was one up here," he said. "I asked Crowe, because Crowe knows everything and I worked for him a season and he answers when you ask him a straight question. I asked him if it was true and what kind of nurse and whether she'd know anything about cancer."
"When was that?"
"The eleventh. I rode down to the yard on my own time."