Homefront Hero (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

O
nce he’d devised the frame of the bed, John took a mattress down to send off to a ward of Red Cross volunteers to see if the ticking could be easily halved. Beds—even poor ones—were a commodity. Ill patients were actually placed on the floor beside near-dying ones to wait for the bed. John had made two attempts before coming up with a successful design, mostly because he couldn’t stomach the thought of finding himself on a floor waiting for someone above him to breathe their last.

He went to see if Leanne was awake, hoping to share all his good news. What he found stole every ounce of optimism.

She’d lapsed into delirium again, weakly thrashing and succumbing to coughs that sounded as if her body was attempting to turn itself inside out.

“Been like that about an hour,” Ida said, not bothering to hide the concern in her voice. “A bit more and I was going to send for you. She calms to your voice, and I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself.”

“How’s her fever?”

She winced as she answered. “Worse.”

“How?” It was a foolish question—the disease seemed to take a unique course with every victim. Madison regularly bemoaned the sheer vacuum of protocol at every doctor’s disposal. No one knew why one patient died within hours while others hung on for days, why one showed symptoms another did not. “She was improving. She ate something. I watched her.”

“Perhaps it’s just a minor setback.” Ida’s eyes betrayed the thin lacquer of optimism she’d applied.

“Surely.” Liars, the pair of them. John peered at Leanne’s too-gray face, willing himself to find some new source of color though he knew he would not. “She’ll improve again, and keep improving.” The ominous black hole in his gut grew deeper as he noticed one of the room’s six beds was now empty. John looked up at Ida, who turned away to some pretended detail. Death had visited the room during the night.

The ghoul would not be allowed to stay. “I’ll stay with her tonight.” He spoke with all the command he could muster, brooking no refusal. If Leanne was going to leave him, he would not miss the goodbye for all the world.

Ida took a breath to argue, but simply shut her mouth again. “She’ll be glad of the company, I’m sure.” She gave the unreadable smile he’d come to call her “nursing mask,” the one he’d heard Leanne describe as a way to keep what she called “unkind news” from worried patients.

A feathery touch on his arm drew his attention, and he turned to see Leanne’s gaze wander in disjointed alarm around the room. “My dear,” he said softly, angling himself down to her level despite the pain it caused him. Ida was right; the sound of his voice seemed to anchor her. Leanne’s gaze found his and held it, if weakly.

She licked her dry, crackled lips, and he held a wet cloth to them for her to drink a few drops. “You should drink.” She obeyed, wincing as she swallowed—many of the patients complained of throats so sore they seemed as if they were on fire. “I know it hurts, but you must.” Dr. Madison had warned him that the most feared enemy was dehydration, even if it did feel like asking patients to swallow knives when they drank. He put the wet cloth to her brow, smoothing back her hair, noticing with horror that strands of Leanne’s beautiful yellow hair fell out easily at his touch.

“John?” His name was not much more than a gasp of breath, and yet it was everything.

“Yes.”

“John?” she said again, soft but less weak.

“Right here.” He took her hand as it seemed to hover off the bed in search of his. Her eyes fell closed for a second at his touch. Her hand felt like bones inside thin paper. Too small, too thin, too lifeless to be Leanne’s vibrant fingers. After an instant she opened them again and found his face, as if she were creeping toward him through the fog of her illness. “I’m right here and I’m not leaving until you waltz out of this hospital on my arm.” A foolish, overdramatic statement.

She knew it, too. Even in her distress, Leanne could see through his facade. It took her a moment to find the energy to speak again, but she wore the vaguest hint of a smile as she did.

“I’m dying, aren’t I?” The words came in simple innocence, childlike in its fearlessness. Or its faithfulness—he couldn’t tell.

“You most certainly are not,” he said sharply, despising and needing the deception at the same time. He wanted to say something else, something confident and hopeful, but couldn’t manage it.

A fit of coughing seemed to snatch away what little energy she had. “So much pain.”

“It will pass.” But would it? Was he selfish enough to wish her lingering if all it meant was more suffering for Leanne? His greedy answer showed him for the faulty man he was, not the hero others thought him to be.

“I’m not afraid.” The clear statement seemed as if it could not possibly come from the frail body beside him.

“That’s because you’re not going to die, so there’s no reason for fear.” Panic lodged a cold finger in John’s spine and began to follow along his ribs, squeezing. He clasped her hand instead.

“No.” She shut her eyes, reaching for words. “Faith.”

“God can’t have you yet.” The petulant demand of a child’s tantrum, but it was how he felt.

“And you should choose?”

He adjusted the flimsy pillow, thinking of all the fine linens he had at home and what he would give to couch her in them at this moment. “You said it yourself, I’m accustomed to getting my way and in no mind to tolerate obstacles.”

“God’s will is no obstacle. He is the only path.”

“Then I shall insist He carve that path back to life and health.”

She made to turn, and he helped her shift to her side, hating the way her thinness now shaved cruel angles into the curves he’d once so admired. She fell asleep for a second, drifting in and out of slumber the way she did lately. John took the moment’s respite to lean against the wall, his head falling back to stare at the ceiling.

You cannot have her,
he declared to Heaven, as if Leanne were ever his to possess in any case. The foolishness of his thoughts did nothing to stem the strength of his feeling.
I’ll not let You take her from me.
Followed, almost instantly, with the more truthful, more disturbing,
I fear what I’ll be if You do
.

He looked down to find her staring at him. “So much fear,” she whispered. It made John wonder if his silent shouts at God had really found their way into spoken words. “There’s no need.”

The tear he saw wind its way down her ashen cheek was his undoing. “Do not leave me, Leanne.”

“You’ll not be alone. Not now.”

John did not want to hear about God’s comfort in loss. He’d heard Leanne give the speech too many times not to know the words nearly by heart, but such belief wasn’t his. Not yet, perhaps not ever. “I’ve not the faith to believe without you beside me.”

She smiled, and he saw the first glimpse of the Leanne he knew under the waxen figure before him. “Silly John. Still thinking faith is something you’ve earned.”

“I sought it. You pointed me toward it.” He was delighted to see her talking, engaging, coming back to him from the brink of wherever she was.

“Yes, but God gives us…” her breath seemed to falter “…our faith.” Another fit of coughing seemed to steal all the progress she’d made toward life, vaulting her back to the limp slip of a thing that seemed to melt into the sheets. John reached out for the bowl and wiped her drained face. Every touch seemed precious, fleeting, and he refused to let his mind caution him that this might be their last time together. She seemed to have left this world already, as if she were more spirit and less solid than even an hour ago. John was somehow sure that if he failed to keep touching her, talking to her, anchoring her to this place, she would slip away to hide from the pain under God’s wings. Colton came by to say that he was needed elsewhere, but John refused. Seeing Leanne’s precarious state, Colton pressed it no further. John would have gone to fists if it had come to it: no duty was more important than the vigil before him.

He was only vaguely aware of the daylight slipping away around him. At some point he must have slept, for he woke to the feeble whisper of her voice in the lightless room. “John? John?”

“Beside you, my love.” There, in the dark, the endearment slipped out of him unchecked. The shadows and disease seemed like beasts waiting to devour this woman who had stolen in to become the center of his heart. John realized he wanted her to know of his feelings, and he was too tired and too anxious to resist the urge. Calling her his love was the truth, after all, for he did love her. “And I do love you, Leanne.” He looked for a response, but she seemed to be slipping away from his very fingertips, as if his next touch of her would pass his hand through her ghostly image to touch an empty bed. “I tried not to, you know. It seemed irrational, painful even, to love you, but in the end I had no defenses to resist. I love you.” He pressed a kiss to her fevered cheek.

She tried to say something, but it left her lips as not much more than a struggling sigh. Had she understood what he’d just said? She seemed to be in so much pain, it almost seemed cruel to wish her awake and aware. Could not God grant her a peaceful end if she must leave him? Must it be in anguish, without the most important words he would ever speak to her? “I love you,” he whispered close to her ear, even while hating the heat of her fever radiating against his face. “Come back to me so I can tell you properly. Stay with us, Leanne, please.”

Her only reply was a thin, wheezing cough. A better man wouldn’t be so greedy for her response, but he could not help himself. John selfishly yearned to see the look in her eyes when she heard he loved her. He craved a life with her too much to surrender her, even to her eternal peace. He didn’t deserve her, knew the rage he felt at God right now made him no partner to a faithful woman like Leanne, but still he wanted her. For a few moments to look into her clear eyes and declare his love, John was sure he would have pulled the lethal fire consuming her onto himself. Despite a chest full of medals and the admiration of so many, John was sure of one truth: Leanne would bring far more good to the world than he ever could.

He would hold her. If she couldn’t recognize his words, surely even in her state she would know the comfort of his arms. As he went to pick her up, it shocked him how light she was, how easily he slipped her delicate body from the bed to rest on his lap as he sat on the floor. Were he whole and healthy, he would carry her outside to the cool air, to the place where they’d sat in each other’s arms and he’d felt the first of his heart slip away. But he wasn’t whole and healthy, he could not walk with her in his arms. He could only offer what broken comfort was possible here and now. He handled her as though she were glass, some mythical vial with only the last drops of elixir left. He fought his urge to enfold her fiercely, to fend off all foes and somehow press his life into her fragile form.

In the distance he heard the ceaseless pounding of the casket crews as if they were banging down the door beside him, demanding entrance into the tiny sanctuary he shared with her.
I cannot let You have her,
he raged silently to the God she’d brought into his life.
I’ve not the faith to let her go
. He felt her heartbeat, light and skittish against his shirt. Her hands were cold, yet her face and chest glistened with fever. Even in the shadows, he could see the influenza’s telltale blue-black imprint, stark and angry against her pale cheeks. Marred and thin as she was, Leanne was still the most beautiful woman God ever created.
Don’t You love her enough to spare her?
He silently shouted the accusation to God through the helpless darkness that seemed to swallow them whole.

The answer came back to him with startling clarity:
Don’t you?

Unbidden, John’s mind threw itself back in time to a stable when he was twelve. He was standing over his beloved mare, Huntress, the animal as bathed in sweat and suffering as Leanne was now. He was pleading the exact same case to his father, who had silently walked to the house and returned with a pistol. John had cried openly to his father that night—something a Gallows was never allowed to do—begging for the animal’s life. He had never forgotten the sound of that pistol as it split the night, how even the sight of Huntress’s final peaceful breaths had not soothed the wound of loss he carried in his chest for weeks. The memory overlaid itself on John’s current pain, cinching around John’s heart until he wanted to weep again, here, now. He had howled the same refusal to let Huntress go then as he had done to God tonight. It had been selfish and wrong then, it was selfish and wrong now.

John knew, then, that the memory was no accident. His father’s words that night were his Holy Father’s words to him tonight. It was not love to plead for more suffering. Leanne was more fit for Heaven than he could ever hope to be. “I don’t know how to let You have her,” he whispered to the darkness, praying as much for himself as for her. He looked into her face, limp against his arm with eyes sweetly closed. “How do I get to ‘Thy will be done’ as You would have me? I’m miles from being that man.”

As the hours passed, the miles became a smaller and smaller distance to travel. Ida came in once, stopped to look at the sight of Leanne gathered against John’s chest there on the floor, and silently let them be as she tended the other patients. As her fever soaked his shirt, as her winces of pain singed his ears and her spasms of coughing shook his own heart, John relinquished inch by inch. Broken, exhausted, perhaps already infected and in his own last days, John laid down what was left of his life. It seemed impossible that he and Leanne would wake tomorrow. Should he wake to find her gone, John felt sure he would stumble through life only as the hollow shell of a man who had loved and lost.