Chapter 11 #2
None of it was dramatic. All of it mattered to the people sitting across from her, most of whom hadn't had anybody qualified to ask these questions since the world stopped working.
Late in the afternoon, a Hollow woman named Carol Ashby came in heavily pregnant, moving slow and careful with one hand pressed low against her back.
Rebecca's whole manner shifted — not frightened, just focused, the way David got before a hard decision.
She asked her history plainly. When her last cycle had been, best Carol could remember. Whether this was her first pregnancy. Any bleeding, headaches, swelling, changes in how the baby moved, contractions, any sign of her water breaking.
Rebecca checked her blood pressure, examined the swelling in her ankles, pressed careful hands against her abdomen to judge the baby's position and size. She listened with the stethoscope, low and patient, moving it until she found what she was listening for.
Everything about it looked ordinary. The danger, as far as Rebecca could tell, wasn't in the pregnancy itself. It was in how little anybody had prepared for what came next.
"What's your plan when labor starts?" Rebecca asked.
Carol didn't have much of one beyond sending her husband to fetch Karen.
"Karen may not be here," Rebecca said, and that landed the way it needed to, given where Karen was.
Rebecca walked her through what she needed instead — somebody who knew the early signs of labor and wouldn't panic, clean linens set aside ahead of time, clean water and soap ready, a fast way to reach Rebecca, with somebody assigned in advance to make the ride.
Grace asked, once Carol had gone home to think it over, "How many babies have you delivered?"
"Enough that I don't want to improvise one in the dark," Rebecca said, which Grace took for the honest number it was standing in for.
Grace started building the plan before Rebecca had even finished putting her equipment away — who lived closest to Carol, who could ride fastest if it came to that, making sure the husband knew exactly where Karen's house stood, lining up two women who'd helped with births before to be ready if Rebecca couldn't get there in time.
Rebecca watched her work. "Do you do this with everything?"
"Mostly."
"And you're not the mayor."
"Don't start."
The next morning people were already waiting before Rebecca had finished her coffee.
She set out Karen's equipment herself this time, without being asked, and requested a notebook and pencil from Grace to start keeping simple records — name, age, the reason for the visit, blood pressure where it mattered, a note for follow-up.
The beginning of a medical record for the Hollow, simple notes on who needed watching and why.
Grace noticed her handwriting firm up as the morning went on, steadier with each page than it had been on the first. She didn't say anything about it. Some things spoke well enough on their own.
Somewhere in the middle of the second day, talk turned to Cal and Martha's place, twenty miles off, and the dozen or so people who lived and worked the land out there.
"Who's taking care of them medically?" Rebecca asked.
"Nobody, mostly," Grace admitted. Karen hadn't made the trip regularly, not with everything closer to home needing her more urgently.
"When did anybody with training last see them?"
Grace thought about it. "Fall, probably. Maybe longer."
Rebecca didn't like that answer, especially after two days of seeing how much had gone untreated right here at the Hollow, where at least Karen had been checking in through the winter.
She asked about the elderly there, the children, whether anybody was pregnant, what injuries and chronic troubles Grace knew of.
Grace didn't have every answer.
"We should go," Rebecca said.
"You can barely ride across the Hollow."
"Today, no." Rebecca considered it. "Give me two more days here. Then I think I can manage twenty miles if we take it slow."
Grace resisted at first, worried more about Rebecca's strength than the logistics of the trip itself.
Rebecca made the case reasonably. Rest tomorrow. Ride the morning after, easy pace, breaks as needed. Stay the night at Cal's. Ride home the following day. No forty-mile push in a single stretch, nothing that risked undoing more than a week of recovery in one bad afternoon.
Grace accepted the shape of it once she'd heard the whole plan.
She wanted Cal and Martha warned besides — that medical help now existed at the Hollow, though she had no interest in that news traveling further than trusted places just yet.
Rebecca agreed without needing convincing.
She understood the caution as well as Grace did.
Back at the Turner house, Grace explained the trip to Luke, who answered before she'd finished the sentence.
"I can handle Ben and Matthew."
"I know."
He looked like that settled it. It didn't.
"Walter's staying at the house while I'm gone," Grace said.
"I'm sixteen."
"I know how old you are."
"Dad leaves me on watch."
"That's why Walter's staying," Grace said. "Your job is the barricade and the watch schedule. Not minding two little brothers every hour I'm gone on top of it."
Luke didn't argue further, though Grace could see him turning it over, trying to decide whether this was a demotion or simply Grace being sensible about spreading one sixteen-year-old thin.
Walter arrived a little later, pack over one shoulder. "Heard I'm moving in."
"For one night," Grace said.
"That's how it started last time."
Grace packed efficiently the evening before they left — food for two days, water, bedrolls, the rifles and sidearms they always carried, and Rebecca's small kit: stethoscope, the manual blood-pressure cuff, thermometer, what gauze and antiseptic Karen's house could spare without leaving the Hollow bare, the new notebook, clean cloth folded tight to save space.
She chose two of the Hollow's steadier riding horses for the trip, neither one anything special, both reliable enough for twenty miles of spring roads.
Rebecca could ride, that much Grace already knew, but barely more than a week removed from near-death and worn down badly from her ordeal, the ride would cost her more than it would Grace.
She planned for frequent stops before Rebecca had to ask for them.
They left before full light, Luke already up and moving around, with Billy Jean due to join him later that morning. Walter had Ben and Matthew covered at the house.
"You know Dad doesn't give me this many instructions," Luke said, watching Grace check the saddle bags one more time.
"Your father isn't your mother."
Walter caught her eye. "Go. I've got them."
Grace believed him. She'd believed him since the day he first asked whether he could stay.
Rebecca mounted carefully, favoring muscles that clearly argued with her about the idea. She didn't look afraid of the horse. Just uncertain of her own body's cooperation.
"You sure?" Grace asked.
"Ask me again in twenty miles."
They rode.
The road held soft in the low spots where spring hadn't finished drying it out, and Grace kept the pace easy, watching Rebecca more than she let on.
They stopped twice in the first two hours, longer than Grace would have stopped alone, and Rebecca didn't complain once, though her jaw tightened a little more each time she swung back up into the saddle.
Past the second stop, Rebecca asked about the country they were riding through — whose land this had been, who worked it now, what the Hollow knew about the families scattered along the way.
Grace answered what she could, naming a farm here and there, a family who'd made it through and one who hadn't.
"You know everybody out here," Rebecca said.
"Not everybody. Enough to know who's worth stopping for if we needed to."
"Is that a skill you had before, or one you picked up?"
Grace thought about that honestly. "Bit of both. I always paid attention to people. Just used to matter less what I did with it."
They talked to pass the miles after that. Rebecca asked how the Hollow had come together in the first place, and Grace gave her enough of the answer to satisfy the question without turning it into the whole history of the past months.
"You make it sound accidental," Rebecca said.
"Most useful things around here were," Grace said, and meant it.
They reached Cal and Martha's place in the early afternoon, five hours out from the Hollow with the breaks included, both of them saddle-sore and glad to see the farmhouse come into view past the last stand of trees.
Martha spotted Grace first, then the stranger riding beside her, and came across the yard wiping her hands on her apron the way she always did.
"This is Rebecca Hale," Grace said. "She's a doctor."
Martha stopped dead. Looked Rebecca over properly this time.
"You should've led with that."
Cal came over from the barn, and Grace watched word start spreading through the yard the same way it had spread through the Hollow two days earlier, one person telling the next before Grace had said much of anything at all.
"We can stay the night, if you've got room," Grace said. "Rebecca wants time enough to see whoever needs her without rushing it, and neither of us is riding twenty miles home the same day she works a full one here."
"Room we've got," Martha said. Not fancy room, Grace guessed from the look of the place, but a floor and a roof counted for plenty these days.
Grace offered food, labor, anything fair in trade for the hospitality.
Martha waved it off entirely. "You brought a doctor twenty miles. We'll find you somewhere to sleep."
Cal's farm turned into a second clinic within the hour, the same pattern as Karen's kitchen playing out again with new faces — ordinary neglected concerns, nothing dramatic, people relieved simply to have somebody qualified ask the right questions.