The night of Thanksgiving, Claire tries to climb onto her mother’s lap. Grace lifts her up and senses the fever in the child’s limbs even before she touches her forehead.
“Mother, come feel Claire.”
Her mother, dish towel over her wrist, puts the back of her hand to the child’s forehead. Grace notes her mother’s widening eyes. “She’s spiking a fever,” Marjorie says. “Let’s get her to bed.”
“On the sofa for now,” Grace insists. “I want to be able to watch her.”
Gladys appears with a roll of ice chips wrapped in a dish towel. “Put this on her forehead.”
“Mother, do you have any aspirin?”
“Yes, I might. Upstairs in my handbag.”
“She’s shivering.”
“Cover her with blankets so she can sweat it out.”
Grace thinks the instructions wrong, that her daughter’s temperature should be brought down, but her mother has had so much more experience than she with sick children that she does as her mother suggests. Evelyn agrees. Quilts are found to cover Claire.
Grace sits beside her daughter holding ice chips to her forehead. What infection has Claire picked up and where? She tries to recall all the places she has recently been with her. To the police station to deliver a photograph of Gene her mother had in an album. To Shaw’s for tins of pumpkin pie filling, and then to bring a pie to Matt and Joan.
Claire begins to shake, and Grace instinctively tries to hold her still. She watches with a mother’s horror as her daughter stiffens and goes limp with a froth of white on her lips. “Ohmylordwhatwasthat?”
“She’s had a seizure,” Gladys says. “This is serious.”
With one swift movement, Grace scoops up Claire, praying that the child won’t have another seizure en route. “We’ve got to get her to a doctor.”
With the overhead light on and Claire in a fetal position in the front seat, Grace reads the address of Dr. Franklin’s clinic and her mother’s hastily scrawled instructions as to how to get there. She drives through familiar wasteland and makes the turn onto Route 1. After several minutes, she sees a car coming to an intersection, downshifts, and presses on the brakes. Grace’s car slides into a slow skid. Helpless, Grace puts a hand on Claire, pushing her into the seat, and steers as best she can with her left hand, which is no help at all because the steering doesn’t seem to be working. Black ice. Grace spins across the highway, the other vehicle missing her by inches and honking, either in recognition of Grace’s harrowing near miss, or in anger at the almost accident.
She straightens the car and continues on, never letting the speedometer rise over 15. Because the dark is impenetrable, she has to stop and face the signposts with her headlights. After half an hour, she spots the road she’s looking for and follows that for a mile. She reaches the end and parks close to a Quonset hut, with only one other car in the parking lot. She gathers Claire and runs with her to the front door. After several loud bangs, a tall man in a white coat opens it.
“My daughter’s had a seizure.”
“I’m Dr. Lighthart.” He takes Claire in his arms and feels her forehead. Without a word, he walks with her to a room beyond the receptionist’s empty desk. Grace has to run to keep up with him. He lays Claire on a gurney, strips away the blankets, raises her pajama shirt, examines her, then listens to her heart. He checks her back, looks at her tongue, and sticks a thermometer in her mouth. “Try to hold this here,” he says.
“Where’s Dr. Franklin?” she asks.
“He retired after the fire. I’ve taken over.”
A clean sheet is put on the gurney. Claire’s body is limp.
“We need to get the temperature down fast,” he says, removing the thermometer from Claire’s mouth and glancing at it. “Have you given her anything?”
“One aspirin.”
“We’ll cover her with cold towels. Then, if necessary, we’ll put her in an ice bath. She won’t like any of it, so be prepared. You’d best get her clothes off.”
For the first time, he glances up at Grace.
“You,” he says, puzzled.
“You!” she says, astonished.
Grace holds a bared wrist under the water until the temperature is as low as it will go. She remembers her legs buried in the muck of low tide, the way the doctor and Matthew thought she might be dead. She raised her head then, but couldn’t move her arms, and the men had to slip the children out from under her grip.
“When we found you,” Dr. Lighthart says, “the high tide of the night before had taken most of the belongings of the families that had come to the water’s edge, but here and there, the items were sloshing back in with the new tide. We’d been collecting people who’d been told to evacuate. I remember that I was watching the gas gauge on the dashboard of the truck. It was below empty according to the dial. We talked about how you would have to be our last rescue until we found a gas station that hadn’t burned down. Later, after we had you in the truck, I was worried we wouldn’t make it to the hospital.”
“But you did, and thank you.”
Grace wonders if the belongings sloshing in the ocean on the new tide had returned to be reunited with their kin.
Claire looks as though she has been wrapped in a shroud. Death. Grace’s knees weaken.
“She needs the ice bath now,” the doctor insists. “I’ll get the ice. As soon as the towels feel warm, unwrap her.”
“What do you think she has?” Grace asks, frantic.
“Scarlet fever most likely, though it could be meningitis or polio. She’ll need an antibiotic.”
Polio.
When the doctor returns to the room, he sets a blue rubber tub layered with ice under the tap, filling it half full. “This is going to wake her up. What’s her name?”
“Claire. Claire Holland.”
“Age?”
“Two and a bit.”
“And what’s your name? I don’t think I ever knew.”
“Grace.”
He picks up the child and slowly lowers her into the ice bath. Claire wakes with a shudder. At first she whimpers, and then she screams.
“Hold her there,” he says. “I’m going to prepare an injection.”
“Of what?”
“Penicillin. In case there’s a bacterial infection. We won’t know until morning when symptoms begin to present themselves.”
“Isn’t a seizure a symptom?”
“It’s a result of high fever. Not the disease itself. Is your daughter allergic to penicillin?”
“I don’t know. She’s never had it.”
Grace fights to keep the slippery Claire in the tub. The fight goes against every instinct in her body.
After Dr. Lighthart has prepared the injection, he says, “Let’s do this over here.”
Grace lifts her daughter up and dries her with a towel, thinking, This must be torture for Claire. The child is silent, relieved to be out of the bath.
“Put her on her side facing you. Keep talking to her.”
Grace holds Claire’s face and croons soothing words, but she doesn’t miss the flash of the needle as it goes in. After a split second, Claire shrieks.
“That’s good,” the doctor says. “Listlessness isn’t.”
Grace wraps Claire in a dry towel and holds her close. The feeling of momentary relief is intense.
Grace follows the doctor into a small room in which there are two cribs. He lowers the slats on the side of one of them. “I’m going to cover her with only a light sheet. I’ll be across the hall in my office. If there’s a problem, just yell and I’ll hear you. If you think she’s too hot, if you spot a rash, if she seizes, if she vomits, if she starts to bark like a dog, anything you don’t like, you come and get me.”
Grace nods. She understands that he won’t tell her that everything will be all right, because both he and she know that might not be the truth.