Chapter 3
Doctor Warren Todd stepped from the last room on the top floor. His shoes shined like little black bugs against the drab checked floor. It was dingy and tinted with brown blood. They scuttled, shells gliding. It was the only thing that Beca could notice- the rest of him was forgettable, a blurred shadow of static that flickered in front of her.
He had brown hair that was combed with shoe polish, smelling of leather, and antiseptic. He wore a white coat that was decidedly the wrong move in a place where blood dripped so cleanly past clenched teeth. There was a cloth, blotted with red, in the front pocket of his embroidered jacket. A stethoscope hung around his neck.
She had shadowed him for an hour now. He worked with a timely method: pressing the metal end of the instrument in three different places on patient's backs. He instructed them to breathe in, listened to the way their lungs cracked and popped like fire before nodding curtly and exiting the room. He gave no answers, he gave no comfort.
His nurse- a stocky woman with straw blonde hair and painted on pink lipstick would scratch her pencil against a chart that was left right at the base of the patient’s bed before they exited and went on to the next one.
He Said, “Three times a day, Miss Mitchell. We check the status of their breathing three times a day. It is a wonder how drastically this illness can eat away at the lungs, fill them with blood.”
“And if they do?”
“Pardon?”
“If they fill with blood. What’s done then?”
He stopped and frowned. His face was red, blossoming against his cheeks and his chest under the scrubs. He was a stocky man and she thought she could make out the beginnings of a tattoo from the war against his breast. The ink was fuzzy around the edges. They were numbers in a gothic type of font.
“They’re moved to the upper floor.”
The man said it with a certain condescending lilt to his voice that she recognized. She had heard it multiple times, under every set of dark words and every Styrofoam cup that was lifted her way. She was no secretary and had to bite back her responses with a smile and a gentle reminder that she, in fact, worked there and would not fetch the morning paper and donuts.
“And what do they do there?”
“That’s not my department.” He shrugged unevenly and picked up another wooden clipboard before entering the next room. She was tasked to shadow him for a full day, to learn the way they did things here but it was a simple process, from what she had seen.
The nurse gave her a look that was akin to pity and it almost infuriated Beca more than the man’s words. She was trying to make niceties, trying to keep the young and dumb reporter just that. But Beca had questions, a lot of them. How were they going to stop this? It was a full facility dedicated to the study and cure of a disease incurable.
No one in the city expected her to come back with anything other than a few quotes about the state of the nation today, about how everyone must wash their hands and avoid drinking out of a glass already rimmed in lip tint. But she had bigger plans, bigger ambitions and it didn’t involve busywork.
“So, you chart their decline, but do not explore ways to slow it?”
He turned to her; fern eyes hard “Not my department. Miss Mitchell, in my experience shadows, are mute.”
Beca clenched her jaw shut and tucked her hands behind her. She watched as the doctor advanced towards a man that sat up shakily. His skin was like wax paper. He was young and was trained as one of Pavlov’s dogs to sit up and lean forward onto his knees, extending his naked back so Doctor Todd could place his stethoscope against his lungs.
His spine was distended, little ribbons of bone sticking up as he took his first two deep breathes. On his third, his chest shuddered, and he let out a wretched cough. It was wet, sounded like a balloon that was letting out water. A smattering of blood pooled in his palm by the third heave, and the nurse rushed to grab an ugly baby blue bucket that matched the walls. He vomited, a mix of saliva and clots that shone black. More beetles.
The radiator decided to fight against the cold now, hissing in a quick exhale. The commotion brought another to the room, heels that clicked, and Beca tried to surmise if whoever was walking with such purpose counted the oblong squares of the tiled floor. She shrunk to an actual shadow by the large windows.
It wasn’t her intention to cross Nurse Beale again so soon after their midnight encounter. She had moved back to her small room in the first half of the bottom ward and crawled under the quilt. She watched the rain against the pane of glass. She hadn’t gone back there because the head nurse had told her to. That would be indicative of compliance and compliant she was not.
Beca was simply tired. Just like she simply chose to be quiet when the woman entered the room and took a quick sweep of the situation. She lingered on Beca for a few moments, dragging her stare up and down, swallowing her comments about the impurity of a woman wearing pants in a sick ward, no less.
“Mister Lindquist” her words were gentler than the reporter had heard before. She approached the man with zero facial covering, running her fingers along his back and easing him against the pillows. “I need you to take a deep breath for me, okay?”
He let out a few more pitiful hacks and nodded rapidly, trying to listen to her grounding words. Nurse Beale did not concern herself with any type of facial protection, instead, she spoke to the man like he was a human. He focused on the way her chest moved up and down, he mimicked her pattern and before long, his gravely inhales were a smooth as they could be.
She took a cloth from the side table and wiped the cherry material from the sides of cracked lips. “Drink some water, Mister Lindquist, and get some rest. No need to exert yourself for a clinical check-up.”
Nurse Beale pushed a strand of sweat-dampened hair from his eyes and placed a cool palm on his forehead before smoothing out her mint green dress and regarding Doctor Warren Todd with a nod. He watched her carefully but did not dare to speak to her as he had spoken to Beca. No man like that had a dying wish.
Instead, he mumbled into the woman to his side. She licked her sloppily applied makeup that was slathered on her lips. “Move him upstairs, nurse.”
She nodded and wrote something else on the clipboard before slapping it back to the metal frame. If Beca were in the bed, tucked under scratchy coverings, she would simply sit up and read the chart herself. But then again, she was nosy, and Mister Lindquist was in no state to do half a sit-up.
“Miss Mitchell, if you could follow me, please?”
Nurse Beale did not wait for a response. With the same vigor as last night, she swept out of the room. If Todd Warren was juvenile enough to whistle, he would be howling like a wolf right about now. Instead, he narrowed his eyes and stifled a smile as she ducked her head and followed the woman.
This time she stayed silent, following her out to the very end of the hallway. There was a large brown door that had been painted over recently, still smelling thick of chemicals. She took a key from her front pocket and twisted it. There was the rolling sound of a lock and the warm welcome of the sun.
Beca hadn’t realized how cold and damp the inside of Evergreen was until she was removed from it. There was a stone balcony that overlooked the courtyard. Yesterday’s storm had choked all the gutters with mud and stray grass. There was a non-descript van pulled up along the back doors of what used to be a cement patio.
Nurse Beale reached into her breast pocket and pulled out a box of Old Gold cigarettes and pulled one out with her teeth. She struck a match on the stone balcony and cupped her hand against the warm wind. She drew in a breath before holding out the box to Beca.
The reporter tentatively took one, eyeing her as smoke billowed past her lips and pooled around her features. She lifted her eyebrows and struck another match, lighting the end with a fluid motion akin to water.
“People say these things can kill you,” Nurse Beale said.
Beca frowned and took a pull. They were oaky and burned her throat but eased her nerves. It was the pure motion of having something burn against the constraints of paper and tobacco. Her exhale was the only thing that filled the space. Nurse Beale watched her carefully.
“If they could kill you, why put that much money into advertising?” She finally replied.
The woman smiled, teeth a stark white “Earlier this century, people believed that if one traveled far enough into the hot springs and drank the water saturated with radium it could cure joint pain.”
Beca leaned the small of her back against the cement railing. She watched paper burn a vibrant orange, exposing tar and tobacco. She flicked its center, watching the ash soak with water at her feet.
“Worked just fine for the common ache until jaws would break off in people’s hands and tongues dissolved in mouths.”
Beca decided to stomp the rest of the cigarette out, but the nurse took another drag of hers “That’s gruesome.”
“My point is Miss Mitchell, science and medicine is a fairly new thing. This… this disease is spreading like wildfire and Evergreen is doing its best to cure what it can’t physically keep up with. Mistakes will be made. Mostly by Doctor Todd, I am sure.”
“You want me to stay on the right side of the story?”
“I’m saying there is no right side. My staff, my nurses, don’t have the time to be caught in a barrage of questions when people like Mister Lindquist is open to trying the radium water.”
“What do they do upstairs?” Beca pressed instead.
The woman let out a long sigh that was clouded in nicotine. She dropped the cigarette off the side of the balcony. Her aim was impeccable, landing in a wet spot by the gutter. It was carried to the edge of the cement and vanished behind the wheel of the van.
“Can I ask why you wanted to become a reporter?”
“To get people the truth that they deserve.”
“That is a reflex of an answer, Miss Mitchell. Now, I am going to ask again. Why did you want to become a reporter?”
She was silenced for a moment, as the wind around them picked up. The leaves on the oak trees were flipped to their underbellies. Her mother used to tell her that it was a sign of another round of rain, thunder, and lightning to come down on them. She could smell it in the air, taste it on her tongue.
“My mother,” Beca started, shoving her hands in the pockets of her pants. Her fingers were growing cold. “She had the impeccable talent to put words on paper, studied but never graduated from a women’s college in Baltimore. She gave it up to raise my brother and I but would fill any parchment up with her words. Her poems. I would find them in little hiding places around the house.”
The nurse's stare softened. Her fire-filled mane of hair curled in the moisture of the atmosphere. When she wasn’t yelling, or threatening her, for that matter- she was quite beautiful and fully captivating. Her eyes were round and blue and full of wonder.
“I studied at the same universities as she did, and I promised her that one day… one day I would get published. Not under the pseudonym of a man but in a direct and concise manner. I don’t deserve to be heard but, she does. She did.” Beca frowned “She passed away a few months back. The same disease that rips through this place like… what was it, Nurse, wildfire?”
She didn’t offer up an apology and Beca didn’t’ expect one. She had shouldered through the funeral and set up her father with enough off-brand beer and tv dinners while she accepted the offer given here. The scream was familiar and cut deep, and for the first time, she was glad to be outside, staring at the edge of the fountain of broken youth.
“I will watch you every second of the day,” she said instead, voice hard. “You may write your article and you may get the information you need but tread carefully, Miss Mitchell. I am not the scariest thing inside the walls of Evergreen.”