Nightingale (19 page)

But Bertha had pulled her into her arms and fed her a rare rationed-sugar sandwich, and Esther found her tucked into their attic bed with the quilt up to her chin when she arrived home from her shift.

One more week until her notice came due. Dr. O'Grady had said nothing to her about her resignation.

“Please, Esther. I know I get violent—but I don't mean it. It's just… not easy.” Linus shivered and she pulled the covers up to his chest.

“I know.”

“It's like I'm trapped and…” He closed his eyes, swallowed. “It's better when you're here.”

She knew all the screaming to break free.

“I have to go back to work.”

His jaw tightened. “Of course you do.” His chest rose, fell. His lips tightened into a grim line. “Of course you do.”

She left his door open as she eased out into the hall. The phone at the nurses' desk jangled and she checked her watch as she sprinted for it.

Four a.m. She picked up the phone. “Roosevelt Hospital.”

“We have a patient from the camp—he's been badly beaten.”

She didn't recognize the voice. “What camp?”

The pause on the other end told her the truth.

“Bring him in. I'll get the doctor on call.” She flipped open the book at the desk, ran her finger down the sheet. Dr. O'Grady.

O'Grady. She drew in a breath. But a wounded man was a wounded man. And O'Grady simply didn't know the prisoners like she did. Okay, one prisoner. But if the rest of the Germans were like Peter…

Of course she reeled Dr. O'Grady from a sound sleep. “We have a trauma on the way in, Doctor.”

He might have said something, although she lost the coherency in the fumble of the phone as he hung up.

She opened the trauma ward, prepped the trauma room, checking the IV tray, stocking saline solution, antiseptic, prepared a suture tray.

The military burst in through the back door, carrying the victim on a wool blanket, four guards wearing T-shirts and cotton pants. Blood saturated the shirt of the biggest man.

“Put the patient on the table.”

They lifted him and he groaned. She turned and held in a gasp. Blood dripped down his face from a gash on his eyebrow, his eyes swollen nearly shut. His arm hung at a cruel angle—his shoulder clearly dislocated, and his torso—they'd ripped his shirt from his body—mottled with bruises—the outline of boots. Worse, one of his ribs had cracked and clawed through his skin, blood running over his body and pooling onto the sheet.

Her gaze arrested, however, on the opened gash along his side.

Stitches hung like coils in his skin, the rip of the nearly healed wound jagged and raw.

No.

Please
…

She made herself look at his face, trace out of it the high aristocratic cheekbones, those lips that could turn in a kind smile.

No. She clawed at her voice, found it webbed inside her. “What happened to this man?”

“We're not sure. He may have been trying to escape. His fellow Nazis found him—stopped him.”

He's not a Nazi.
The words pooled in her mouth, threatened to spill out.

“Patch him up, nurse.”

She wasn't sure where to start—please, Dr. O'Grady, get here soon. So much blood—

“Soldier, can you hear me?”

His one eye opened, and something twitched on his face.
Yes, Peter, it's me
. She gritted her teeth when he coughed and red, frothy blood bubbled around his mouth.

Breathing—she listened for sounds, found them only on one side. The broken ribs may have perforated a lung. Then she removed her stethoscope from his chest and just listened to the rattle of blood in his airway. She checked his carotid pulse. Rapid and thready.

“Help me move him. I need to check for profuse bleeding.” The bigger guard stepped up, helped turn him to check for a puncture—perhaps a stab wound?—in the back. Nothing but a purpling bruise along his lower back. She'd have to check for internal bleeding.

She checked his skin, found it clammy and cool.

Detaching the sphygmomanometer from the wall, she wrapped it around his upper arm. Peter's breathing seemed labored. Surely that lung was collapsed, the air building up pressure in his chest.

“What can I do?” Caroline appeared, moving in front of the burly guard.

“You have to call Dr. O'Grady again. This man has a pneumothorax and is going into shock.” She knew from the look on the guard's face that he didn't understand. “His lung has collapsed!” Caroline's expression tightened. She glanced at the guards then back at Esther. “Dr. O'Grady's not coming.”

Esther stilled, listening to the heart sounds.

She let the air drain, pulled off her stethoscope. “What?”

“He left.”

For a second, the world seemed to narrow, a piercing wail from far away the only thing in her ears, then below her, blinking up at her, Peter's damaged eyes. “He left? But he's on call.”

Caroline cut her voice lower. “He's a POW. Remember what I said about—”

“So he's going to let him die?” She probably raised her voice a little too high. Still, in the glaring light of the trauma room, the tone seemed appropriate.

Caroline shrugged. “I can call someone else.”

No. God—she couldn't. “Please. Call Dr. Sullivan.”

In the meantime, she'd have to do what she could to keep Peter alive.

Because no, she couldn't say good-bye, not yet.

Not to him.

Not to herself.

“Let's get him on oxygen…”

They'd strapped him to the bed.

Peter wasn't going to escape. Oh, how Esther wanted to scream that—the man could barely move. A sling strapped his right arm to his body—his shoulder had been dislocated, the three ribs beneath it fractured. And a truth embedded deep inside her told her that something about the report from the guards—and the other prisoners—didn't sit quite right. Peter, escape?

And, even as the accusation gnawed at her, she'd told herself it had nothing to do with her. He wouldn't escape for her, would he?

She ignored the sweet, forbidden swirl of emotions churned by that thought.

Still, as Esther buckled on the leather straps, securing Peter's left wrist to the bed—per Dr. O'Grady's terse orders when he'd shown up for his shift—the truth chewed at her insides, brittle and sharp.

Peter was a prisoner. Of war. The
enemy
.

However, watching him sleep the last two nights, his dark blond hair soft and catching the barest hint of dawn as it fell over the bandage around his head, his face stripped of expression, his bare chest rising and falling under the bandages around his torso—no, he didn't bear any resemblance to an enemy.

In fact, she had this insane, terrible urge to curl up beside him.

Not that anyone would know. Dr. O'Grady sequestered him in
a private room, although the guards had talked him out of demanding an armed man at the door. After all, they only had a flimsy snow fence penning in the remaining able-bodied 136 prisoners down at the marsh. And with Peter strapped to the bed, he wasn't going anywhere.

Even if he had
—supposedly—
tried to escape.

She glanced at the clock as she sat up in the chair, rubbing her hands down her arms, humming softly. Three-fifty-five. Five more stolen moments—then she'd return to her desk, do another walk through the wards, then sit by Linus's bed until he awoke.

She hoped Linus wouldn't have another nightmare. She'd begun to fear his sleep. And in the daytime, well, the demons that ran through his mind in the dark roamed his face in the haunted wells under his eyes. He sometimes—too often—stared at her without seeing her. And not once had he asked for Sadie.

Not that she'd bring Sadie in to him. After all, it was a hospital, and she was too young to visit the infirm. Still, the lack of Sadie in Linus's thoughts nagged at Esther.

If he wanted Esther, surely that meant he wanted his daughter too?

Peter stirred, a groan, then a breath that drew deep, caught. A wince crossed his face.

“Shh… Don't move. Go back to sleep.” She said it so softly, he couldn't possibly have heard it, yet his eyes opened.

She stilled, struck with the urge to run. Instead she allowed herself a smile, one that she didn't have to fabricate.

He blinked at her, as if shifting her image from his dreams to reality. Then he, too, smiled. And something about it heated her clear through. Oh, he had devastation in his smile. And his voice, low and caressing her bones. “I knew an angel was camped by my bed at night.”

She wanted to roll her eyes, but, well, the line charmed her.

“Is that a blush, nurse?”

“I think you need to go back to sleep, soldier.”

“I am sleeping. This is my dream, and I'm in charge.” But he said it with a smile. “You are so beautiful, you know that?” Then he reached out to her, his wrist jangling against the bed frame. His smile fell. “Oops, I forgot.”

“I'm sorry. The doctor said—”

“I know what he said. That other nurse told me I nearly died. If it hadn't been for you, I might have. How did you know how to apply an occlusive dressing? My lung would have collapsed if it weren't for you.”

What nurse told him? Caroline, probably, who checked in on him while Esther sat with Linus. She couldn't scrub from her memory Caroline's expression as they wheeled Peter out of surgery to repair his damaged lung, and into the recovery room. She'd met Esther at the door, grabbed her by the exhausted arms, stared her down, and said, “This is him, isn't it?”

Rosemary had brushed past them, on duty as a scrub nurse, and had shot her a look that turned Esther's response to bile. She swallowed it down and nodded.

But the horror of having both Linus and Peter in the same hospital, separated by about ten steps in the corridor, followed her home even as she curled up to Sadie, drawing her petite body into the well of her embrace.

She had to let Peter go. Had to tell him about Linus and Sadie. Had to tell him good-bye.

She had breathed into Sadie's soft skin, the fragrance of her hot sleep like perfume. It would be best this way.

But no words came. Even as she sat next to him in the hollow moments of the night, nothing came.

Nothing but the urge to uncuff him and run with him somewhere, anywhere, Sadie skipping between them.

“Who did this to you, Peter?” She watched him work circulation back into his fingers—the ones half-hidden by his bandage, the others in the cuffs.

Peter shook his head. “It doesn't matter.”

“It matters—they beat you nearly within an inch of your life. They should be punished.”

“And then what? They clamp down on the camp? They move us away from Roosevelt, maybe to Fort McCoy?”

His words scraped away any last vestiges of fantasy she harbored. Yes, they could move them, and she might never see him again.

Worse, he might be beaten again, and this time left to die on the trauma room table. She didn't even know how to begin thanking Dr. Sullivan for tromping in, sleep in the creases around his eyes, willing to save Peter's life.

She wanted to be able to save lives. To do surgery, close damaged lungs, stitch up lacerations of the kidneys, removed damaged spleens. She wanted to be the one to decide whether to show up in the middle of the night, and to command the respect of nurses—instead of being silenced to stand on the sidelines, forbidden to speak unless spoken to.

“I nearly died seeing you so hurt,” she said, her voice so shallow she might not have spoken. But oh, despite the ache in saying that, it felt like the lancing of a wound. She breathed out, put her hand to her mouth, blinking back the prick of her eyes.

“Sort of how I feel watching you sit there, so much pain in your eyes, it hurts worse than breathing in and out.” His face softened, something so kind she had to look away. “What is it, Esther? What is it that kept
you from writing to me, kept you from coming to see me, but that drives you to my bedside in the darkness of the past two nights?”

She closed her eyes.
I'm engaged. I have a daughter. I shouldn't be here.
The words clogged in her throat. She shook her head.

The chain on his bed rattled, and she opened her eyes to see him reaching for her through the shackles.

Oh, she shouldn't… But, almost without her permission, her hand found his. He wrapped his around hers, folded his fingers between hers, held on.

They fit well. And warmth shot up her arm into her body. He tightened his hold even as she cupped her hand over her forehead, bent her head, and wept.