"Fran, I'm just asking. None of us know what it is. There isn't a doctor in the house. How do you feel? Do you feel all right?"
"Fine, just sleepy." But she wasn't. Not anymore. Another groan floated over from the other side of the camp, as if Mark were accusing her of feeling well while he did not.
Harold said, "Glen thinks it might be his appendix."
"What? "
Harold only grinned sickly and nodded.
Fran got up and walked across to where the others were gathered. Harold trailed her like an unhappy shadow.
"We've got to help him," Perion said. She spoke mechanically, as if she had said it many times before. Her eyes went from one of them to the next relentlessly, eyes so full of terror and helplessness that Frannie once again felt accused. Her thoughts went selfishly to the baby she was carrying and she tried to push the thoughts away. Inappropriate or not, they wouldn't go. Get away from him, part of her screamed at the rest of her. You get away from him right now, he might be catching. She looked at Glen, who was pale and old-looking in the steady glow of the Coleman lantern.
"Harold says you think it's his appendix?" she asked.
"I don't know," Glen said, sounding upset and scared. "He's got the symptoms, certainly; he's feverish, his belly is hard and swelled, painful to touch - "
"We've got to help him," Perion said again, and burst into tears.
Glen touched Mark's belly and Mark's eyes, which had been half-lidded and glazed, opened wide. He screamed. Glen jerked his hand away as if he had put it on a hot stove and looked from Stu to Harold and then back to Stu again with barely concealed panic. "What would you two gentlemen suggest?"
Harold stood with his throat working convulsively, as if something was stuck in there, and choking him. At last he blurted, "Give him some aspirin."
Perion, who had been gazing down at Mark through her tears, now whirled to look at Harold. "Aspirin?" she asked. Her tone was one of furious astonishment. "Aspirin? " This time she shrieked it. "Is that the best you can do with all your big-talk smartassery? Aspirin? "
Harold stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at her miserably, accepting the rebuke.
Stu said very quietly, "But Harold's right, Perion. For now, aspirin's just about the best we can do. What time is it?"
"You don't know what to do!" she screamed at them. "Why don't you just admit it?"
"It's quarter of three," Frannie said.
"What if he dies?" Peri pushed a sheaf of dark auburn hair away from her face, which was puffed from crying.
"Leave them alone, Peri," Mark said in a dull, tired voice. It startled them all. "They'll do what they can. If it goes on hurting as bad as this, I think I'd father be dead anyway. Give me some aspirin. Anything."
"I'll get it," Harold said, eager to be away. "There's some in my knapsack. Extra Strength Excedrin," he added, as if hoping for their approval, and then he went for it nearly scuttling in his hurry.
"We've got to help him," Perion said, returning to her old scripture.
Stu drew Glen and Frannie off to one side.
"Any ideas on what to do about this?" he asked them quietly. "I don't have any, I can tell you. She was mad at Harold, but his aspirin idea was just about twice as good as any I've had."
"She's upset, that's all," Fran said.
Glen sighed. "Maybe it's just his bowels. Too much roughage. Maybe he'll have a good movement and it'll clear up."
Frannie was shaking her head. "I don't think that's it. He wouldn't be running a fever if it was his bowels. And I don't think his belly would have swelled up that way, either." It had almost looked as if a tumor had swelled up there overnight. It made her feel ill to think about it. She could not remember when (except for when she was dreaming the dreams) she had been so badly frightened. What was it Harold had said? There's no doctor in the house. How true it was. How horribly true. God, it was all coming at her at once, crashing down all around her. How horribly alone they were. How horribly far out on the wire they were, and somebody had forgotten the safety net. She looked from Glen's strained face to Stu's. She saw deep concern in both of them, but no answers in either of them.
Behind them, Mark screamed again, and Perion echoed his cry as if she felt his pain. In a way, Frannie supposed that she did.
"What are we going to do?" Frannie asked helplessly.
She was thinking of the baby, and over and over again the question which dinned its way into her mind was: What if it has to be cesarean? What if it has to be cesarean? What if -
Behind her, Mark screamed again like some horrible prophet, and she hated him.
They looked at each other in the trembling dark.
From Fran Goldsmith's Diary
July 6, 1990