“Poor Irish,” she said. “Shanty Irish.” Oh, and now her voice rose up till it was like the rattling of husks, like dead cane beating on a dead shore. “A girl half your age, a girl we took in as if she were our own daughter. And you, you—”
“Shh!” he hissed, sitting up with a jolt. “She’ll hear.”
“Who?” she demanded. “Who’ll hear?”
A whisper: “Ida.”
“Ida? Ida’s already corrupted. You corrupted her, Will, you did. And you dirtied me in the doing of it.”
“Edith, then. For Edith’s sake.”
And that was where reason left her — that he should dare to put this on Edith, to mention her in the same breath with that, that slut! She found Edith’s name on her own lips then, found it as if it were a blessing, a salve, but by the time he threw himself out of the bed and took hold of her, shaking her in the grip of his two calloused clumsy hands that were like talons, exactly like, she was screaming it.
* * *
This time the blood wouldn’t stop. It erupted from her as she fought free of his grip and staggered out into the hallway. She tried to contain it, swallowing mechanically, swallowing till she thought she would drown on her own blood, but the cough shook her harder than Will could ever have and the cough was awash in it. She spattered the grubby white wall, spattered the floor, the front of her dressing gown. So bright, her living blood. And the cough. The cough. Will was right behind her, muttering, pleading, but she fought him away and then Edith was there and she clamped a hand to her mouth and her hand came away red. Everything went dark, the whole world folded up and sucked away from her, and then it wavered and came back again. She was on her feet still and how could that be?
Somehow, with Edith’s help, with Edith’s arms wrapped around her and her feet finding the stairs one at a time and all the breath squeezed out of her as if she were climbing the highest mountain anyone had ever known, she managed to make it up to her room. The door flung open, clapping against the wall. Ten steps to the bed, and then she was down, but she couldn’t lie flat. The thing wouldn’t let her. Pillows, she needed pillows to prop her up, and here they were, stony and cold, bunched at the small of her back. Edith, her face drawn down to nothing, ran for a towel and when that was soaked through she ran for another.
She thought of Poe and his story of the Red Death, death that comes in a fountain of blood, and she was ready to let go, so weak, so disappointed, infected after all, fatally infected, and what did it matter how she’d lived her life? Will, Ida. Iron pills, plein air, doctors. James. Edith. Her own mother a continent away. Beyond the window the day was closed up like a fist. Edith sat beside her. She fell out of consciousness, then fell back in. “My medicine,” she pleaded, bleeding, still bleeding, tasting it, swallowing it down, soaking the towel till the towel hung at her throat like a skinned carcass. She took the bottle from Edith’s hand, put it to her mouth and drank it down as if it were water, and then she dropped away again and didn’t wake till it was dark and saw that Edith was still there at her side and that the blood had stopped flowing.
That was when the weight settled on her, the stone as big as the biggest boulder Will had shattered with his dynamite — or no, bigger, bigger still, as big as the island. It was the island, the island was crushing her, she’d known it all along and she might have said it aloud, cried it out, might have said anything, cursing and raving in her throes, thinking This is what death is like, this weight, this crush, and then she fell one more time down the long shaft of her dreams.
The Cruelest Thing
But this was the thing, the cruelest thing: she didn’t die. She was going to die, she’d nearly died, and when she came back to herself on a day as colorless and changeless as the day she’d taken to bed, she wished she had — there was only so much blood in the human body, only so much weight that anyone, even the saints and martyrs, could be expected to bear. The bed was cold. She couldn’t feel her toes. The tips of her fingers, though she rubbed them together, rubbed them furiously, felt numb. She called out for Edith because she wouldn’t have Ida in the room with her, never again, never, and the first thing she heard was the sigh of Edith’s mattress from the room down the hall and then footsteps and then the door was opening and Edith was there, laboring under a frightened smile and asking her how she felt.
And so it was Edith who nursed her, Edith who helped her comb out her hair and brought her her medicine and the bowls of broth Ida sent up from the kitchen, and when Will came in from his work to stand there in the doorway gazing down at her like a mourner at a funeral, she looked back at him as if he were a stranger. There was no need for speech — speech only complicated things. He came and went. She opened her eyes and he was there or he wasn’t. Her breath grated, her lungs rattled. It must have been the third or fourth time he came that she felt strong enough to address the situation, to lift her head and shape words around the emotions stabbing at her. She’d dozed off and woken again to the same pewter light at the window and saw him sitting there in the chair, his hat clenched in one hand and a book open in the other. “I want to go back,” she said.
His eyes shot to her. He looked startled, as if the walls had begun to speak. He closed the book, his thumb marking the place, and drew up his legs so that his knees swelled against the thin worn fabric of his trousers. “I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry for it. Sorry for everything.”
The room seemed to whirl as it had that first day, everything in motion, as if she were looking at him through a kaleidoscope. It took her a long moment to push herself up to a sitting position, her arms sapped, the breath caught in her throat.
“Adolph’s back,” he said. “I sent him to meet with Nichols, and they think — we think — we may have a man to take over here, a hired man who’ll come with his family, a manager, that is…” He rose from the chair and whether he was smiling or not she couldn’t say, his skin so chapped and burned and his features so reduced she scarcely recognized him — and he looked old, old all over again. “And he brought something for you, something to cheer you—”
“Who?”
“Adolph.”
“Adolph brought something for me?” She saw the man then in quick relief, the clod, heavy-faced, humorless, lewd, The softest thing in this world but for one other thing I can think of.
“Shall I go get it? Would you like to see it now?”
What Adolph had brought her — and she froze when Will led him into the room in his filthy work clothes and out-at-toe stockings until she saw it there in his arms — was a cat. Not a Siamese like Sampan, but a silver and black tabby with great all-seeing eyes and a swirl of markings on either side that made her think of marble cake. Adolph came across the room to her, nimble enough for a man almost Will’s age, his eyes downcast — he wouldn’t look at her though she’d caught him stealing glances at the dinner table, and she could only imagine what she must have looked like now, skeletal, bone-white, her eyes huge and luminous and snatching at the light as desperately as the cat’s. He didn’t say a word. Just held the animal out to her — an old tom, docile, loving, she saw that in a flash — and then she had it pressed to her so she could feel the engine of its purring through her robe and her nightgown and down into the thin drawn tegument of the skin stretched across her ribs. A cat. Purring. It was a small miracle. “Thank you,” she whispered, and smiled at him for perhaps the first time since the day they’d met — and that had been a smile of civility, not of gratitude.