With Every Breath (8 page)

“I’ll get these plates served right away,” Bridget said, her voice charming as she pushed the cart away. “Please help yourself to some ginger cookies. I brought them for everyone.”

Kate waited until Bridget was gone before swiveling a glare at Trevor. “I thought you didn’t flirt with the help.”

“I was just being polite. I remember how hard it is to be a stranger in a new country.” Trevor grabbed a lab coat from the hook and headed toward their office.

The comment made her feel even lower. No one had been very nice to Trevor when he arrived at their school. Not that he made it easy, but she always felt a little bad about the way people teased him for his accent. In hindsight, she wished she’d made a stronger effort to befriend him.

Why had she been so irrational about Bridget Kelly? Kate had no claim to Trevor. They had developed a friendship since she began working here, but she had no business interfering if he wanted to flirt with a pretty girl.

Nathan had been gone for four years, and the loneliness was getting harder to bear. She had loved him, mourned him, and would always cherish the memories of their two years together. But she didn’t want to be a widow for the rest of her life.

She glowered down the hall at Trevor’s stiff back as he strode into their office.

It would be a terrible idea. Unthinkable. Trevor was forbidden fruit, and she mustn’t let herself think of him as anything else.

* * * *

It was late in the day when Trevor noticed the broken spirometer on the floor. He went into the darkened supply closet to reach for another box of cotton swabs when he heard the crunching of glass beneath his shoe. Fumbling for the chain, he tugged on the single light bulb to show the apparatus he used for measuring lung capacity broken on the floor.

“Nurse Ackerman, do you know who has been in the supply closet today?”

She didn’t. Nor did any of the orderlies or female attendants he questioned. None of the patients had a key to the closet, so they were surely blameless.

With his entire staff lined up outside the supply closet, Trevor scanned their faces. “Look, accidents happen,” he said tersely. “No one is in danger of having their pay docked, but I need to know when equipment has been damaged. If a patient was in distress and I didn’t have ready access to the proper equipment, it could be a dangerous situation. I don’t want any more such occurrences,” he warned.

But this wasn’t the first time. An expensive set of scalpels had disappeared from the clinic. He thought he must have misplaced them and they would soon surface, but they never did. And last week he sensed someone had been in his office during the overnight hours. His chair was at an odd angle, and something simply seemed off. It could have been the janitorial staff, but the vague feeling of unease remained.

He stayed late that night to change the lock on the front of the clinic. It was going to incense the hospital’s superintendent, but Trevor was paying good money for the use of this floor, and
security was important. He squatted on the floor and tried for the third time to wriggle the new lock into place.

“Blast it,” he muttered as the pliers slipped off the bolt cylinder, and the new lock mechanism clattered to the floor. He yanked his hand away and sucked on the drop of blood where the pliers nipped him. One would think a man who could remove an appendix and stitch a patient back together ought to be able to replace a door lock.

He glanced behind him. Two female attendants giggled in the corner as they pretended not to watch him make a fool of himself. It was embarrassing, but he wasn’t going to let an audience dissuade him from changing the lock. He was fairly certain someone had been prowling in his supply closet, and he was going to put a stop to it.

Changing the lock took longer than expected, and the sun had gone down by the time Trevor arrived at the southeast side of town. He headed straight for the seediest part of the riverside, where the dank scent of rotting wood permeated the air. Most respectable people had fled the streets by this time of night, but there were plenty of sailors, troublemakers, and prostitutes loitering along the wharves. He scanned the crowds, looking for a distinctive wiry frame.

Oskar found him first. “
Gibt es die verrückt
doctor.”
There’s the crazy
doctor
. Oskar’s voice cut through the cackling of two women arguing over a coil of discarded rope. Trevor strode toward Oskar, answering in the same language.

“Hello, my crazy friend.” The stench coming off Oskar was unbelievable, like he had been sleeping in a cask used to marinate fish. “Do you still have a place to live?” Trevor asked.

Oskar nodded. “A room above the cannery. You?”

“A room above the railroad station,” Trevor replied.

One of the tragedies of tuberculosis was that as victims be
came too sick to keep working, many lost the ability to pay rent or get decent food. Unless there was family willing to take them in, they found themselves on the street, where their condition deteriorated even faster. Oskar’s luck was unlikely to hold much longer. He was getting too sick to keep working, and when that happened, he would probably be sleeping on the streets.

“Here, you will be in need of this,” Trevor said as he passed a bottle of his serum into Oskar’s hand, who slipped it into his pocket before any of the others loitering along the docks could see. These transactions were no one’s business, and it would only cause trouble for Oskar if people learned why they met.

“Have you seen anyone new I should know about?” Trevor asked.

Oskar unscrewed the bottle and took a swig, his face twisting in distaste as he got the oil down. “There is a new whore working a few blocks down. Curly hair. Bad teeth.”

Trevor nodded and set off in the direction Oskar pointed, scanning the crowds as he went. Even in the dim light, he was good at spotting the kinds of people he searched for. The hollowed-out cheekbones and sunken eyes. The ghostly translucent skin that stretched across prominent bones. There were thousands of consumptives in the city, and most of them had nowhere to go.

It didn’t take long to spot the woman Oskar mentioned. The way she leaned against a lamppost could be mistaken for a suggestive pose, but Trevor knew the look of exhaustion on her sickly white skin.

When he approached her, she tried to stand a little straighter as she reached out to stroke his shoulder. He covered her hand with his own.

“I just want to talk.”

She winked and laughed. “Okay, one of those,” she said. Her
laugh held a distinctive rattle in her lungs. Her clothing looked clean, so in all likelihood she still had a place to sleep.

“Do you have any children?” Trevor asked.

“Heavens, no. I’m only eighteen.”

She looked forty, but Trevor supposed she might still be in her twenties. Tuberculosis tended to age a person.

“If you do have children, it is important not to cough around them. The sickness in your lungs can be spread. Sleep with the windows open.”

The woman pushed away from the lamppost and pressed her body against him. “I said I don’t have children.” Her laugh was throaty, and her hands roamed his back. Trevor turned his face to the side, wishing for a mask, but there was no way he could earn the trust of these people if he pulled a mask out before speaking with them. He managed to disengage from the woman’s wandering hands, then reached into his coat for another bottle of serum.

“This is a medicine that may help you. It doesn’t taste good, but you won’t be so hungry after you take a swig. Once in the morning and once at night.”

She looked at it skeptically, the cloudy yellow oil glowing in the gaslight. This woman had no reason to trust strangers. It was impossible to know what had driven her to the streets, but she was a human being who had pain in her lungs and little kindness in her life. He knew that but for the grace of God he might have been in a situation as desperate as hers, and he would do his best for her.

Trevor pressed the bottle into her palm, holding her wasted hand and looking deep into her eyes. He told her honestly that he could not promise the medicine would cure her lungs, but it would improve her overall health.

“Is it going to cost me anything?”

He shook his head. “I’ll be by every few weeks with more. What is your child’s name?”

“Luke,” she admitted. “Just like the saint.”

He gave her a sad smile. “Drink the oil and sleep with your windows open,” he said softly. “Do it for Saint Luke. He deserves it.”

5

K
ate grew to love her job more with each passing week, but as spring turned into summer, more hostile stories appeared in local newspapers about Trevor’s clinic. Two articles spoke of the dangers of having so many consumptives housed in a densely populated section of the city, while the third suggested Trevor was swindling patients of their life savings.

The charge made Kate fume. She still wasn’t precisely sure where Trevor got the money to fund the clinic, but it wasn’t from the patients. Trevor didn’t charge them a dime to live there, and all of them had been destitute when they were accepted into the study. It was frustrating watching him become a punching bag in the newspapers, but every time she suggested he go on the offensive, he merely glowered at her.

“I have the backing of the surgeon general,” he snapped. “No muckraking journalist can get me out of this hospital.”

Which was a good thing, because Kate loved her new job, even when Trevor was a bottomless well of frustration.

As the weeks slipped by, she completely ignored his advice not to befriend the patients. Never had she seen people so desper
ate for simple human companionship until she began working at the clinic.

One afternoon she was twenty minutes late turning in her statistical report because she had been tempted into helping Ethel Gordon share in her infant granddaughter’s baptism. Ethel was too sick to attend the church ceremony, but her daughter desperately wanted Ethel to see her only grandchild dressed in the family’s antique baptismal gown. A group of the healthier patients gathered in the sitting area, everyone dutifully wearing their masks, to see the little baby dressed in yards of white cotton embellished with handmade lace. The mother held the baby up from behind the nurses’ counter, waving the chubby little fist at the assembled patients on the other side of the room.

It was one of the most moving things Kate had experienced in years, yet it made her late getting her report in to Trevor. Trevor was sitting at his desk when she rushed the report over to him.

“Why is this late?” he demanded.

Kate slid into her desk chair. “Because it was biologically impossible to tear myself away from the sight of that precious infant,” she said. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the sitting area. If you could have seen the way Ethel’s face lit up, even you would have been moved. When we got that baby into the baptismal gown, she looked as sweet and precious as a little princess.”

“No baby is a princess. I heard the squalling from down the hall. I would appreciate it if you tried harder to rein in your overwrought, womanly emotions.” He turned back to reading a medical journal.

“These overwrought, womanly hands are going to strangle you if the hectoring from your side of the office doesn’t stop.”

Despite Trevor’s quirks, it was actually pretty fun working with him. The sheer challenge of calculating huge sets of data and extrapolating the results was so gratifying. Every day she
held her breath, hoping to see the numbers turn in a way that would indicate the bacillus was declining, or at least holding steady. Ephraim Montgomery’s numbers got worse every day, but most of the others were holding their own. Hannah Wexler was actually showing
improvement
in her blood.

“You are not to breathe a word about that to her,” Trevor warned. “She is a terminal patient, and telling her about the improvement in her blood will not cure the disease in her lungs; it will only raise her hopes. This is a stay of execution, not a cure.”

Kate was getting used to Trevor’s blunt language and refused to let his severity upset her. He still referred to patients by their numbers rather than their names, continually warning Kate against her chatting with them.

She ignored him. She noticed that a group of about ten patients gathered in the sitting area each day before dinner to read aloud from a novel. Most of the patients became breathless after reading only a few minutes, so the book was passed among the handful who could read, with long breaks while the readers caught their breath.

“Would you mind if I read to them?” Kate asked Trevor one day as he studied slides under the microscope. “I don’t mind staying after my shift to read a little each day.”

“They’re patients, not friends, Kate.”

She lifted her chin. “And I think it would do these
patients
good to have someone read to them, rather than add stress to their already diminished lung capacity.”

“Suit yourself.”

The first day she approached the group, one of the older gentlemen waved a finger at her. “You can’t sit with us until you mask up,” he said.

His name was Leonard Wilkes, and he had been a sailor in the Merchant Marine until his illness was discovered and he
was put off the ship at an island in Bermuda. It took almost two months for his coughing to go into remission so he could fake health and board another ship home. He was forty-three but looked sixty.

Kate dutifully donned her mask, then picked up a battered copy of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Most of the patients walked to the sitting area on their own steam, while Ephraim Montgomery had to be helped into a wheelchair pushed by one of the nurses. Sometimes he slumped over in the middle of her reading. The first time he did so, she looked over to Leonard.

“Should I wake him up?” she whispered.

Leonard shook his head. “It happens. Just keep reading.”

The other patients agreed, so Kate continued. As time went on, she got to understand more about the patients who chose to gather for the reading group. It was hard for people to be confined in a sick ward, and gathering with others for a story gave them an hour to escape into the worlds created by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. A favorite of the group was any book by Mark Twain.