35
The feet clad in red shoes moved. Beth saw them turn to the side, and a few moments later, white fingers gripped the edge of the door frame. The ball peen hammer in Trey’s grip made a hesitant bounce on the glass as if he had seen it too.
“That’s him, right?” she asked Trey.
“Those are his shoes,” he said.
Soon the rest of the man appeared, limb by limb, extracting himself from the room by turning over and then pulling his knees up under him, still holding the frame. He came out the way an adult backs out of a tunnel for children, stiff from confinement and unsure of the space behind him. He pushed back into the hallway with his head close to the ground.
Beth pressed herself up to the glass as if her desire to help him would be enough to get him off the floor. She had never been so glad to see a man alive, this complete stranger, nor so afraid that he would die when she was so close to reaching him. She pounded a fist on the window, and he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, then turned his face in her direction, but the morning light from her window glanced off his glasses and she couldn’t see his eyes. She wasn’t sure that she was anything more to him than a shadow beating on the glass.
“Garner!” Trey shouted.
“Where’s Dr. Ransom?” Beth asked.
“Garner!” he repeated. “Can you unlock the door?”
Beth doubted the man could see straight, let alone crawl the marathon that stretched out between them.
“Call 9-1-1,” Beth ordered.
“Cat Ransom is our 9-1-1,” Trey said. “But the sheriff will bring someone.”
“You called the sheriff ? Of course you called the sheriff. That’s exactly what a thinking person would have done.”
Garner put one hand on the wall for balance and straightened up, got his opposite foot out from under him and planted it on the ground, and then froze in this position for long seconds.
“We have to break the glass,” Beth said. “We have to get to him.” She reached for the hammer dangling from Trey’s fingers at his side.
“He’s getting up.”
He was. His muscles found the coordination to push off the wall and floor together. The strength of legs, hips, torso, and arms worked together for a brief and beautiful moment, as Garner slowly, slowly rose to his feet. He was nearly erect when his head came forward, as if it thought his feet were already on the move, and then his chin went to his chest, and his entire body fell into the wall and slid down the face of it. Garner landed hard on his shoulder before rolling onto his back, where he lay still.
It seemed that shock had frozen Trey. Beth grabbed the hammer out of his hands and started beating on the window rather than the door. The vibration of the strikes buzzed like electricity down the hammer’s shaft and caused the bones of her fingers to hum. She wrapped the little hammer in both hands and raised it over her head, bringing it down on the window with all her weight, again and again. She closed her eyes and was overcome by the memory of Herriot leaping through that screen window when she went after Mercy. She saw her dog’s black paws and thick claws cutting through the mesh like butter, and then scrambling over the wall with no command or leash or common sense to stop her. Beth went after her grandfather with the same recklessness.
Her hammer seemed to freeze in the glass, and when she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw that the head had gone through it and become trapped in a web of fine cracks.
Trey shed his flannel shirt and shoved his hands back into the sleeves, wrapping the cuffs around his knuckles like makeshift gloves. He stripped her hands off the handle and wrenched the hammer head out of the window, then went after the breach. He was taller than Beth and able to come down on the weakness more forcefully. Beth jerked her face away as chips of glass flew.
Trey got them both into Cat Ransom’s office through the shattered window. There was glass under the window inside the waiting room, and Beth’s cowboy boots ground it deep into the chair cushions as she climbed over them, one hand in Trey’s sturdy grip. A shard bit into her shoulder as he helped her over the sill. But her eyes were on Garner, who looked like another dying man she wouldn’t be able to save.
Somehow she reached him before Trey did, at the precise moment when his entire body shuddered and he vomited against the wall.
Trey turned his head away. “Whoa.”
“It’s good, it’s good,” Beth said, grabbing his shoulder to roll him away from the choking hazard and into fresh air. She got him onto his other side. “Throwing up is almost always a good sign, right? His body’s getting rid of toxins. We have to find out what it is.”
Trey shook his head and talked through his fingers. “The ergot was days ago. Would it keep doing this now?”
Beth didn’t know.
Trey continued, “She could have given him anything. An overdose of something. Or drain cleaner.”
Garner’s heartbeat was slow but even, his airways were clear. Beth used her own sleeves to clean off Garner’s mouth and nose. The physical elements of illness had never bothered her. She’d seen worse in animals—calves wasted by Johne’s disease, cows with prolapsed uteri that had to be reinserted by hand, bulls made lame by foot rot more rank than any manure, horses trapped by barbed wire. It was the helplessness, not the earthiness, that punched her in the gut every time. The desire to help was so easily overwhelmed by ignorance of what to do.
Crouching over Garner now seemed so much like that moment in the crowded, suffocating cab of her father’s truck, while Beth did what her father’s heart couldn’t. But Garner’s heart and lungs were doing their own work, and her hands needed a task. They skimmed over his pallid face and shuddering chest without finding a place to land.
“His breathing is really shallow,” Beth said to Trey. “See what you can find in that room he came out of. If we can find out what the poison is, maybe we can treat it.”
Casting a worried glance at Garner, Trey stepped over him to get to the exam room.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“Cat’s in here.”
“Make her tell you what she’s done.”
“I think she’s . . . it looks like she’s unconscious.”
“Stay with her,” Beth said. “Do you know CPR?”
A drumming sound drew Beth’s attention toward the window she and Trey had just broken. Five square panes stood at attention before the rising sun. At left, on the bottom, the shattered sixth pane gaped. The others were glaringly bright against the dark contrast of the interior, barely blue in the intensifying light. She squinted. There was nothing else to see from her position on the floor except the underside of the balcony and the roofline of an old building across the street.
She realized she had expected to see a person, a savior announcing that he was an EMT with epinephrine in the trunk of his car, and IVs and activated charcoal and heart monitors and anything else needed to reverse what she—no, what Cat Ransom had done. But there was no one. Only her, and death, and knowledge that she could apply to animals, not human beings in the throes of unknown poisons.
The head of the wolf rose before the pane of glass in the center of the row. His front paws struck it as he came up and repeated the thumping sound that had first caught Beth’s attention.
The sight of the beast filled her with peace. She was deeply comforted by the possibility that God had sent the wolf—an endangered species unwanted in his native habitat—to her for a specific purpose.
I will heal him. Beth felt certain the voice that wrapped itself around her was from God, inaudible to Trey or Garner or the doctor. It was not the wolf speaking, like a creature from a fairy tale, though the wild animal was probably closer to God than she was. I will heal him through you.
How? I can’t control this gift.
The answer was whispered into her heart with a voice so full of love that it could do no wounding. My mercy doesn’t exist because of who you are, but because of who I am.
Then why do you need me to do it?
She asked sincerely, without disrespect, and the moment the words passed through her mind she realized that the question was backward. Of course God could heal this dying man without her; God didn’t need her to accomplish his miracles. She was the one who needed him to do it through her. She needed his mercy, his redemption, his reversal of her sin and the consequence that had followed.
“You are about to show me mercy,” she whispered.
I am.
“You didn’t heal my father.” She was putting the puzzle together, not questioning the truth.
Not all death is death, child. I promised him long ago that I would heal this family. The promise is also for you.
She would hold on to that promise tightly.
“What should I do?” she said. Her restless hands finally alighted on her grandfather’s cold fingers. She took one of his hands in both of hers.
Believe me.
“I do.”
As she sat on her knees, Beth clutched her grandfather’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. His palm caught her tears while her forearms entwined his like a vine. His baby-soft skin smelled like fresh soil, like a garden about to sprout new life. Beth’s prayer over him was wordless and open. Hope yielded to trust, doubt converted to belief, fear gave way to anticipation. She clung to Garner’s hand and waited for God to do what he said he would do. She would not leave until he did.
She didn’t notice time. She didn’t notice whether she was comfortable or stiff, or hot or cold, or uttering her emotions aloud. She didn’t pay attention to the room or anything else in the world. Eventually, words from a psalm memorized long ago formed in her mind: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Her grip on Garner’s arm had become damp. It was the tears, she thought, the intensity of her prayers. The sweat of begging. But when she opened her eyes she saw that their arms were red and sticky. The cut on her shoulder had opened up. The wolf’s claw and the knife of glass had cut through her trail-dusty shirt, sliced it open, and created an ooze of red that matched her grandfather’s shoes. Even now it dripped down his elbow and left droplets on his shirt.
At his wrist, her fingers felt his strengthening pulse. The color in his skin was coming up from the sickly yellow of butter beans to the rosy glow of a belly laugh. His breathing deepened and became a lifesaving wind that pushed his boat of life out of dangerous waters and back toward home.
He slept like Adam in God’s garden, before the world ever knew death.
Beth released her grasp of his arm and laid his hand over his heart. He would wake up when he was ready. Perhaps God had a few things to say to him too. The wolf had vanished from the window frame.
She remembered Dr. Ransom, and Trey, and turned to find them.
Trey was standing in the hall behind her, staring. “You’re about to tell me you’re related to Mathilde, aren’t you?”
“What?” She got to her feet.
“It’s actually a who—Miracle Mattie? Never mind. That. Was. Amazing. You should have watched that transformation! I could see him change, like one of those time-lapse films! Is he okay? He looks better. What happened? What did you do?”
She couldn’t think of any answer that would satisfy Trey’s curiosity right now. “Is Dr. Ransom—”
“On the brink of hell.”
“Did you do CPR?”
“She’s breathing. Her heart’s beating. I don’t know what else to do for her. I’m not even sure I’d want to if I knew how. Just being truthful.”
Beth took a step toward the room. Trey stepped in front of her and swept a flyaway curl behind his ear. “It’s ugly, Beth.” He held up an empty gallon-size bag labeled Zigadenus venenosus and pointed to the words. “That translates to English as ‘eat me and you die.’ Meadow death camas. It looks to me like she boiled up some kind of decoction for Garner, then pumped it into his IV bag.”
He pointed to the floor, and Beth noticed a trail of plastic tubing still connected to Garner’s hand, the one she hadn’t been clutching. It trailed along the hall and around the door frame to a floor littered with more plastic tubing, and needles, and a nearly empty bag of some cloudy liquid. Beth stepped over a backboard as she entered the room. On the counter, an electric kettle was tipped over, and a mess of translucent pulp that looked like mashed onions soaked in water.
“Get that out of him.”
“Already did.” Trey held up the detached tube. “So the reduction of death was for Garner. But it looks like our doctor consumed hers raw.”
Beth glanced around for Dr. Ransom but didn’t see her.
“Which is worse?”
“I wouldn’t know. Survival classes just teach you to stay away from the stuff. They don’t tell you how to prepare it for a murder-suicide.”
The bulbs in the hot pot wouldn’t have filled a sandwich bag, let alone the empty gallon-size storage bag hanging from Trey’s fingers.
The room contained medical equipment and monitors that gave it the appearance of a hospital room. Opposite the counter, a hospital bed stood at an odd angle away from the wall. Trey nodded at it, and Beth moved around the foot.
Dr. Ransom lay on her side as if she’d fallen off the bed. She was pressed tightly into the joint where the wall met the floor, her legs unnaturally rigid and jammed at right angles between her hips and the bed. Her shoulders were rolled inward, collapsing her chest, and Beth couldn’t see any movements of breathing. The doctor’s neck was strained upward, tendons pushing against skin, as if her head were trying to escape her body, and her eyes were open, blind but terrified. White bubbles of saliva coated her lips and tongue and left streaks on her cheeks. Beth could see where the doctor’s convulsing had spattered the wall and floor with the terrible poison.
The long, dried stems of the poisonous plant protruded from Dr. Ransom’s frozen fist.
“Stay with Garner,” Beth told Trey as she pushed the hospital bed aside so she had room to kneel and search for a pulse.
“Is she dead?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“You’re not going to do what you did for—”
“It’s not for me to say,” Beth said.
“Well, I think some people deserve what they get.”
Beth pushed damp strands of black hair out of the woman’s terrified eyes. “Mercy’s all about what we don’t deserve.”
“What?”
“Stay with Garner. Just stay with Garner.”