Wickett's Remedy (29 page)

The doctor’s voice was quiet and urgent now. Along with the rest of the room Lydia found herself leaning
forward. No chair creaked and no toe tapped. No one dared risk missing a word.

“While our discoveries here will not bring the dead back to us or erase the suffering of the thousands now chained to influenza’s yoke, we will prevent future deaths, future suffering. One day, our children will not know the word ‘flu’ and we will explain it is a disease long extinct. Through vigilance, sound method, and cooperation we will triumph. Remember: in our pursuit no task, no matter how seemingly trivial, is insignificant. Every observation, no matter how seemingly slight, may be the one to yield the crucial insight. Together we will function as one mind, striving with the noblest of purpose.”

The doctor paused in order to sweep his eyes across the faces assembled before him. Lydia was certain he had, for a brief moment, looked at her. Having completed his circuit of the room, he cast his eyes downward before continuing, his voice now humble.

“The volunteers arrive tomorrow. I ask that you treat them with utmost respect. Fully apprised of the risks involved, they have selflessly given themselves to this cause and it is by this that they ought to be judged. Remember: we all make mistakes—mistakes in judgment, mistakes in action. At a time such as now, with our nation at war, these mistakes carry more weight than they might in peacetime. Whatever your politics away from Gallups, whatever feelings you might harbor toward these men, here on the island I ask you to keep them in check—for here, we serve a higher cause. Remember: no matter what their previous actions, these men by volunteering have professed their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to serve
the greater good. And so, I thank you. For though it is the duty of those in the medical profession to ease malady at personal risk, the risk involved here is great and it is unambiguous. Many good doctors and nurses across the country and the world have already fallen to this epidemic, and I fear it is a sacrifice that will continue. I hope and pray we shall all be spared this ultimate sacrifice but I recognize and honor the willingness of every person in this room to place himself directly in the epidemic’s path. Our efforts will not go unnoticed nor will they go unrewarded. The future will be transformed by what we are about to do. Gentlemen—and ladies—that future begins tomorrow.”

The room broke into applause. Dr. Gold shook hands with everyone in the room. His grip was firm, his palm cool—and when he looked at Lydia she did not perceive dismissal but avidity. Not until he departed the room did she realize she understood no more about the study than she had before.

My Dear Boy—

Very late at night, it gets so quiet that I feel I am the only geezer left alive in this place. I have learned not to check the time. If I start looking at the clock, then I cannot stop. Before these dreams started their rotten habit of waking me up, I never saw a minute hand move. Now if I am not careful I end up watching the damn thing trace a full circle while my brain shows old home movies.

Remember when I took you to the boat show? Your mother wanted me to take you to the circus, but once you saw all those beautiful boats you quit bawling pretty quick. Do you remember what you did when I asked you which one you liked best? Without batting an eyelash, you pointed at the Chris Craft Triple and said, “That one, Father.” And when we came home with it, the look on your mother’s face was worth ten times the cash I had paid! God she
loved that boat. That is why I know it must have been an accident. Because when it happened she was with the two things she loved most in the world.

I can always tell it is morning when I hear the medicine cart go rattling past my door. That sound means I can get out of bed and pretend I am just starting my day.

Your Loving Father

L
ydia’s first night on Gallups was interminable. Spurred by the unfamiliar room and her unaccustomed solitude, her mind reviewed in excruciating detail her actions since Michael’s death. She was struck by the folly of the blind, determined thrust that had brought her to the island. Lying on a small, narrow mattress in a draughty room meant for four, Lydia’s desire to prevent others from dying as her brother had died faded to gray insignificance beside the crime of deserting her family, a callous act that more than justified her current solitary confinement. There was nothing here to counteract night’s dramatic powers. She could not turn to the deep, even rhythm of another’s slow breathing for comfort, nor to familiar sights outside her window; and so the night seethed with strange sounds, amplified by the emptiness of her room. The wind rattled doors and moaned. The surf crashing on the beach sounded like the thrashings of a drowning woman, and every so often something somewhere screeched in such a way as to raise the hairs along the back of her neck. Twice she put her ear to the wall separating her room from Cynthia Foley’s,
straining to catch the sound of her neighbor, but the nurse was as self-contained asleep as she was awake.

As the night stretched longer, Lydia’s thoughts turned to the island’s anonymous graveyard. Though she considered herself neither morbid nor superstitious, insomnia’s power to amplify vague notions allied lying on her back with Michael in his coffin and then with the forgotten tenants of Gallups’ lonely graves. She wondered how many of Gallups’ dead had left family behind, fatal illness condemning them to permanent isolation and exile. When exhaustion finally overpowered unease, she collapsed into a dead sleep for two hours before reveille. Bleary-eyed and lead-limbed, she began her first morning on Gallups.

The island air proved tonic. Southie’s piers reeked of dead fish and rotting wood; Castle Point smelled of brine, doughnuts, and fried clams—but on Gallups the scents of human habitation had been winnowed by the air’s passage over the ocean. It was the scent of new beginnings. As she left her barrack, the breeze combined with the morning sun and the memory of Dr. Gold’s dinnertime speech to lessen the severity of the previous night’s indictments.

The volunteers were expected later that morning. Lydia found Nurse Foley at the hospital, straightening pristine bed corners and recounting stacks of clean linens.

“Oh good, now we can begin,” the nurse declared on Lydia’s arrival. Foley was as meticulously dressed as she had been the day before—her uniform blindingly white, her cap pinned to her head with taxidermic precision. “Before the subjects arrive, I hope to show you how to make the daily log entries that I will expect you
to maintain for the duration of the study. The rest you’ll just have to learn as you go.”

The medical logbook, with its various columns, was not much different than the Remedy accounts. In place of supplies and sales, Lydia would track temperatures and pulse rates. Pleased with her pupil’s quick mastery, the nurse progressed to basic principles of patient care, but every few minutes Foley turned her head toward the windows that faced the water.

“The boat is on its way,” she finally said, interrupting her own enumeration of the merits of thorough hand washing. From the ward window, Lydia saw a cluster of medical staff posting lookout from the compound’s fence. A smudge was visible on the northeastern horizon. When the smudge resolved into a boat with a definite heading, the morning’s lesson was abandoned. Along with the others, Lydia and Nurse Foley headed toward the dock.

Gallups was no less foreign than it had been yesterday but—as Lydia traced in reverse the path she had taken just the day before—her arrival felt much more distant. Trailing Foley, she passed the barracks and the flagpole with its two flags; she walked through the gate and past the rabbits’ meadow. By the time she reached the dock, the boat was close enough to expose the barnacles stubbling its hull. The ferry was larger than yesterday’s, with an enclosed cabin rather than an open deck. Lydia pictured a floating sick ward lined with rows of stretchers. She did not notice the bars bolted to the windows until the cabin door opened.

The sight of the volunteers was preceded by a metallic clanking sound Lydia associated with invalids and stretchers. But the men who emerged from the
ship’s cabin were not lying down: clad in rough, gray uniforms, they walked upright in synchronized, shuffling steps, their motion hampered by shackles at their wrists. Lydia’s first thought was that the ferry had intercepted a German U-boat on its way to Gallups and that these were captured Germans. Then it occurred to her that the reverse might have happened, and that by some horrible twist of fate she had become a prisoner of war. But no one else betrayed alarm at the appearance of the shackled men, and now Dr. Gold was shaking the hand of a uniformed officer—the only one not in chains.

“Dr. Gold,” the officer began. “Do you accept charge of these prisoners?”

“Officer Clancey, I accept these men into my care,” Dr. Gold affirmed.

“I hereby grant transfer of custody to you.” A cheer among the handcuffed men was squelched as the officer spun to face them.

“Under the terms previously presented, to which you have voluntarily submitted yourselves, I hereby declare you provisionally restored to service. You will be expected to conduct yourselves accordingly. Any infraction, however small, will be viewed as a dereliction of utmost gravity. There will be no second chances. Is that understood?”

“Yes sir!” thirty voices answered.

“Officers, release these men.”

Only now did Lydia see the uniformed MPs standing at the end of each row. They went from man to man, freeing each from the heavy chain to which he was tethered.

Thirty handcuffs were unlocked. Thirty men appeared instantly taller.

“Excuse me,” Lydia whispered to Nurse Foley. “Aren’t these men supposed to be ill?”

The nurse raised one eyebrow, her expression suggesting Lydia had said something funny. “I should hope not!” She smiled, returning her attention to the recent arrivals. “You can’t very well study transmission after the fact!”

Lydia reconsidered each word of Foley’s response. “You mean to tell me that they’re perfectly healthy?” she gasped. Foley, intent on watching the disembarkation, merely nodded.

The wind was fierce at the dock but Gallups’ new arrivals gave no indication of the cold. Had Lydia not seen them chained moments before she would not have taken them for prisoners. They were all cleanshaven, with shorter, blunter versions of crew cuts that drew attention to each head’s weakest feature—a lumpy skull, a weak chin, a crooked nose. In handcuffs the men had seemed threatening; unbound, their appearance produced the opposite effect.

“Are they really criminals?” Lydia asked.

“Don’t sound so impressed,” Foley muttered. “They’re cowards, mostly. Or at least they were until they met Dr. Gold.”

The debarking men were close enough that Lydia could have brushed her hand against their passing sleeves. Until now she had only ever encountered convicts in the newspaper, in which case they were invariably escapees considered armed and dangerous. She was trying to reconcile her past associations with the
present situation when one of the men turned toward her.

“I’ve died and gone to Heaven.” He spoke in a Galway accent no different from the B Street greengrocer’s. Lydia gasped. She would not have been more disconcerted if one of Gallups’ gravestones had spoken her name.

“Mind your manners.” Lydia thought she was being chastised, but the nurse was addressing the debarkee. The prisoner shrugged and continued forward, and soon Lydia lost sight of him.