Chaney gazed steadily at Carlyle’s black physician’s bag as the two men passed and went on in the house.
Serena sat on the bed edge. Her face was pale, and her slow, shallow breaths were such as one might use while holding something incredibly fragile or incredibly dangerous. Serena’s peignoir lay open, the dark-blue silk rippling back to reveal her waxing belly.
“Lie down on your back,” Carlyle said, and took a stethoscope from his bag. The doctor pressed the instrument to Serena’s stomach and listened a few moments.
“All is well, madam.”
The doctor smiled at Serena.
“It is normal for women to be susceptible to minor, sometimes even nonexistent pains, especially when with child. What you are feeling is probably a mild gastrointestinal upset, or to put it less delicately, excessive gas.”
“Mrs. Pemberton is no hypochondriac,” Pemberton said as Serena slowly raised herself to a sitting position.
“I do not mean to imply such,” Dr. Carlyle said. “The mind is its own place, as the poet tells us. What one feels one feels. Therein it has its own peculiar reality.”
Pemberton watched Carlyle flatten his hand as if preparing to pat his patient on the shoulder, but the doctor wisely reconsidered and let the hand remain by his side.
“I can assure you that she will be better by morning,” Dr. Carlyle said when they stepped back out on the porch.
“Is there anything that will help until then?” Pemberton asked. He nodded at Chaney, who still waited on the steps. “Chaney can go to the commissary, to town if necessary.”
“Yes,” Dr. Carlyle said, then turned to Chaney. “Go to the commissary and fetch your mistress a bag of peppermints. I find they do wonders when my stomach is sour.”
THE NEXT MORNING Pemberton awoke to find his wife sitting up with the covers at her feet, Serena’s open left hand pressed between her legs. When he asked what was wrong, Serena could not speak. Instead, she raised the hand as if making a vow, her fingers and palm slick with blood. He lifted Serena into his arms and carried her out the door. The train was about to make an early run to the sawmill and men had collected around the tracks. Pemberton yelled at several loitering workers to uncouple all the cars but for the coach. Mud holes pocked the ground but Pemberton stumbled right through them as men scurried to uncouple cars and the fireman frantically shoveled coal. Campbell had come from the office and helped get Serena into the coach and lay her across a seat. Pemberton told the highlander to call the hospital and have a doctor and ambulance waiting at the depot, then to drive Pemberton’s Packard to the hospital. Campbell left and Pemberton and Serena were alone amidst the shouts of workers and the Shay engine’s gathering racket.
Pemberton sat on the seat edge and pressed a towel against Serena’s groin to try to stanch the bleeding. Serena’s eyes were closed, her face fading to the pallor of marble as the engineer put the reverser into forward. The tumbler shaft turned and set the position of the steam valves. The engineer knocked off the brakes and opened up the throttle. Pemberton listened to the train make its gradations toward motion, steam entering the throttle valve into the admission pipes and into the cylinders before the push of the pistons against the rod, and the rod turning the crankshaft and then the line shaft turning through the universal joints and the pinion gears meshing with the bull gears. Only then the wheels ever so slowly coming alive.
Pemberton opened his eyes and looked out the window and it was as if the train were crossing the bottom of a deep clear lake, everything slowed by the density of water — Campbell entered the office to call the hospital, workers came out of the dining hall to watch the engine and lead car pull away. Chaney emerged from the stable, his half arm flopping uselessly as he ran after the train.
By the time the train pulled into the depot, the towel was saturated. Serena had not made a sound the whole way, and now she’d lapsed into unconsciousness. Two orderlies in white helped Serena off the train and into the waiting ambulance. Pemberton and the hospital doctor got in as well. The doctor, a man in his early eighties known for his bluntness, lifted the soggy towel and cursed.
“Why in God’s name wasn’t she brought sooner?” the doctor said. “She’s going to need blood, a lot of it and fast. What’s her blood type?”
Pemberton did not know and Serena was past telling anyone.
“Same as mine,” Pemberton said.
Once in the hospital emergency room, Pemberton and Serena lay side by side on metal gurneys, thin feather pillows cushioning their heads. The doctor rolled up Pemberton’s sleeve and shunted his forearm with the needle, then did the same to Serena. They were connected now by three feet of rubber hose, the olive-shaped pump blooming in the tubing’s center. The doctor squeezed the pump. Satisfied, he motioned for the nurse to take it and stand in the narrow space between the gurneys.
“Every thirty seconds,” the doctor told her. “Any faster and the vein can collapse.”
The doctor stepped around the gurney to minister to Serena as the nurse squeezed the rubber pump, checked the wall clock until half a minute passed, and squeezed again.
Pemberton raised his shunted arm and gripped the nurse’s wrist with his hand.
“I’ll pump the blood,” he said.
“I don’t think …” the nurse said.
Pemberton tightened his grip, enough that the nurse gasped. She opened her hand and let him take the pump.
Pemberton watched the clock and when fifteen seconds had passed he squeezed the rubber. He did so again, listening for the hiss and suck of his blood passing through the tube. But there was no sound, just as there was no way to see his blood coursing through the dark-gray tubing. Each time he squeezed, Pemberton closed his eyes so he could imagine the blood pulsing from his arm into Serena’s and from there up through the vein and into her heart, imagined the heart itself expanding as it refilled with blood.
Pemberton turned his head toward her. He listened to her soft inhalations and matched his breathing exactly to hers. He became light-headed, no longer able to focus enough to read the clock or follow the words passing between the doctor and nurses. Pemberton squeezed the pump, his hand unable to close completely around it. He listened to his and Serena’s one breath, even as he felt the needle being pulled from his forearm, heard the wheels of Serena’s gurney as it rolled away. He still heard their one breath, the pulsing engine of blood inside their veins.
PEMBERTON WAS STILL on the gurney when he awoke. The doctor loomed above, an orderly beside him.
“Let us help you up,” the doctor said, and the two men raised Pemberton to a sitting position. He felt the room darken for a few moments, then lighten.
“Where is Serena?” he asked. The words came out halting and raspy, as if he had not spoken in months. He directed his eyes toward the clock until he was able to focus enough to read it. Had one been on the wall, he would have checked a calendar to know the day and month. He closed his eyes a few moments and raised forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes and things seemed clearer.
“Where is Serena?” Pemberton said again.
“In the other wing,” the doctor said.
Pemberton gripped the gurney’s edge, prepared to stand up, but the orderly placed a firm hand on Pemberton’s knee.
“Her constitution is quite remarkable,” the doctor said, “so unless something unforeseen occurs, she’ll live. But the baby is dead. And your wife’s uterus, it’s lacerated through the cervix.”
“And that means what?” Pemberton asked.
“That you and she can have no more children.”
“But she will live?”