Refuge Read online

  “I’m not going to die,” she said.

  “Of course you’re not,” the nurse said briskly. She tucked the flannel close under her chin and slipped dark glasses over her eyes, releasing a scent of freshly washed skin as she leaned across the bed.

  Once, in a delirium, she’d seen her nurse as an angel, the light from the tall windows raising a halo around her long-aproned body, her golden hair piled loose and glowing like a spider’s spinnings in the mist.

  “Now stop thinking gloomy thoughts,” the nurse said as she wheeled the bed through the wide-open doors onto the porch. “Rest also means relief from mental exertion. Stop thinking. Let your body do its work.”

  Her mind, which had seemed to float free of her corporeal self for long days at a time, settled back inside her skin. She progressed from sitting on the edge of her bed to standing, then to walking with the help of a stick. Her limbs strengthened and rounded.

  As she healed, the details of her surroundings sharpened. “Why are you doing that?”

  “Because it will make you better,” the nurse said as she collected sputum or arranged the lamps that shone ultraviolet rays on her bared chest.

  “But why? I want to know.”

  “You are incorrigible,” the nurse said with a laugh. “All right, if you insist. It’s called heliotherapy. These lamps produce a kind of artificial sunlight that prevents the growth of tubercule bacilli. The more the treatment darkens the skin — the epidermis — the less likely the tubercules will spread to other parts of your body.”

  Heliotherapy. Tubercule. Epidermis. She held the words close, like healing amulets.

  By midwinter, she was roaming the wards, trailing after one nurse or another with her questions. To keep her busy, they gave her small tasks to perform, the sort of simple jobs a ward maid might do: winding gauze for bandages, cutting muslin into squares to catch the patients’ phlegm, bringing trays of coddled eggs to the porches, delivering radiographs from the X-ray laboratory in the basement to the doctors in the centre wing. She glimpsed worlds she might never have otherwise encountered: the men’s ward filled with gaunt-cheeked workers and young men returned diseased and broken from the Great War; the children’s ward, where wasting toddlers lay glassy-eyed side by side with babies who never cried; the sterilization room with its shiny rows of autoclaves; the darkroom with its gorgeous ruby light and intoxicating chemicals, where technicians miraculously produced images of the inside of her body and where she saw, with her own eyes, how much the shadow cast by the tubercule had shrunk. Each week some new, small responsibility, some hidden enclave exposed, until, by the end of a year, no corner of the sanatorium and its work was unknown to her.

  ~

  On the morning of her fifteenth birthday, she retraced her journey with May, heading south out of the hills, then east into the cleared and surveyed townships of home. Lizzie and her husband picked them up at the railway station with a team and wagon and delivered them to the farm.

  May let out a cry of pleasure when she saw the fresh cloth on the table, the vase of late lilacs. She couldn’t seem to keep her hands from stroking the curve of the hand pump, the nickel flange of the stove, the pressed backs of the chairs.

  “It’s so good to be home,” May said. “Don’t you think so?”

  She didn’t reply. After the vast, antiseptic whiteness of the sanatorium, the old stone house seemed little more than a shack to her. The linens were stained and shabby; the outhouse, an abomination; the wooden counters, a breeding ground. She drifted room to room, whispering her father’s name, but she sensed nothing in return, not even in the empty stables of the barn.

  When her sister left to arrange the return of their few cows and pigs and her precious laying hens, she slipped up to May’s room, pulled on her sister’s one good dress, and walked the six miles into the village of Newbliss, where she sat in Doctor Stevens’s waiting room with Tommy Jackson’s boy, who had ringworm, and Hazel King, who was puffed up with a pregnancy so advanced that she worried the girl would give birth right there and then.

  “I want to be a nurse.”

  “Most hospitals like their nurses a little older than eighteen,” the doctor said, pushing himself up out of his chair and coming around the desk. She thought for a moment his smile was a smirk, that he meant to tear away the three years she’d added to her age. But no. He walked past her to the rows of books that held one wall of his office.

  “You’re lucky there’s a nursing shortage. What with all those boys coming back wounded from the war, the hospitals are desperate. You’ll have to sit the upper school exams, of course. Earn your matriculation.”

  He pulled down a navy blue volume with gold lettering and handed it over his shoulder. She reached to take it, freeing the breath jammed tight in her chest. Principles and Practices of Nursing.

  “Your father wasn’t much of a farmer, but he did well by you girls, I’ll grant him that,” the doctor said, facing her again. “Study this and come in to work with me on Wednesdays. That’s the day I do home visits.”

  He turned to the sudden pounding on the door. “Get May’s permission. Show some talent and I’ll see what I can do.”

  The girl is rapping on the door so hard it shudders like a dying animal under the battering of her fist. I should get Bryan to fix the flimsy thing.

  “I’m coming,” I say, thrusting myself out of the shadows. “You don’t have to knock the door down.”

  I shrug back my shawl, lean forward to lift the hook, then give the door a mighty shove with a stick I keep tucked in the chair beside my hip. The flinging door almost knocks the girl flat but she jumps back in time. I don’t apologize. Best to show her from the start I’m no pushover.

  “Yes?” I say, as if I haven’t been expecting her, hadn’t got up at dawn to sit in the corner of the verandah, eyes trained on the opposite shore, desperate to see her before she saw me.

  I hitch myself up in my chair, straighten my spine. I hate meeting people from a sitting position. It puts me at a disadvantage. I could have made an effort to meet her on my feet, but then I might have toppled over, and how impressive would that be?

  “Miss Cassandra MacCallum? I Nang Aung Myaing.”

  “Who?”

  I can’t resist giving her a hard time. It is one of the few prerogatives of old age: people expect you to have lost your manners. You can get away with just about anything and still they smile and say nice things to you, as if, like a mental patient or a naughty child, you can’t reasonably be held to account.

  “I write email. Charlie O’Brien, he my grand father. He your son. Yes?”

  The sound of his name in the mouth of this smooth-faced girl takes my breath away. I wheel my chair around, give her my back.

  “Well, you’d better get in out of the black flies.”

  She swings her pack onto her shoulder and follows me into the verandah. The screen door slaps shut as I face her again, positioned like a sentinel in front of the cabin door, which is firmly closed. I am not a complete idiot.

  “Who did you say you were?”

  That’s another advantage of being old: people expect you’re hard of hearing and a little dim. I use it to buy myself time. I look the girl over. She is sturdier than I thought, her hair not so black. When she cocks her head, as she does now, there is a hint of red, from a bottle, no doubt. Everybody has red hair these days. The face is foreign, the cheekbones high. And that smudge on her temple isn’t good, honest dirt; it’s a tattoo, a spray of thick circles, some joined, some broken, bits falling away. A face that’s all shadows and question marks, except for the eyes. The eyes are clear blue.

  “Nang Aung Myaing,” the girl repeats without expression. She looks directly at me without blinking, as if to say she is here on serious business, business so important she can afford to be patient. “A Pho Charlie O’Brien, he my grand father. Your son.”

  A
sprig of hope pushes up. I quash it like the noxious weed I know it to be.

  “I don’t suppose you have a passport or anything.”

  “Yes sir. I no have. I Burma refugee.”

  “So you say.”

  The girl stands her ground just inside the screen door, although her cheeks colour lightly at this last exchange.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I take bus. Vancouver, village New Bliss.” She makes a bridging motion with her hand. “I walk. Find boat.”

  “You do, do you.”

  I’m being cranky and I know it. That’s how I get by, alone in this cabin.

  “You might as well come in, now that you’re here. We can talk in the kitchen. You’ll want to be on your way before dark.”

  It’s a mistake, I know. Once she’s inside, she’ll be harder to get rid of. Like feeding a stray. But at least inside, she’ll be sitting down where I can get a better look at her.

  Listening takes more work than talking. And seeing requires more from us than listening and talking both.

  I wheel around, hook the cabin door handle with my stick, twist it open, and push myself forward, letting the door swing all but shut behind me. I shove hard with one foot, skidding the chair to the far side of the room where I turn sharply and hunker down, my eye on her.

  She hesitates, then hunches her pack further up on her shoulder and steps across the threshold, ducking slightly, as if stepping into a cave.

  “This way,” Don Arturo said, stepping through a small door in the carved portal.

  The high pink walls of Don Arturo’s house enclosed an entire block in a district of grand houses, not far from Mexico City’s central station. He’d introduced himself on the train, on her way to Helen, her dearest friend, who had left nursing school to move with her family to a Mennonite colony in the wilds of Chihuahua.

  I’m going crazy here! Helen scrawled on the postcard of yapping dogs, her words impatient on the page. The Mennonites could use another nurse, and I want YOU. Come now!

  Don Arturo Arcadio Alves dos Santos. The hand he extended was delicate, the nails on his narrow fingers shiny, as if brushed with clear varnish. His face was long and oval, soft-lipped, almost prissy compared to the farmers and doctors she’d known. But when he spoke to her, the air between them shimmered with the same electricity she’d felt working with her father in his makeshift laboratory.

  Don Arturo led her to the dining car and ordered for them both. When the food was set in front of her, she devoured it like a penitent just in from the desert. Her tongue, dormant for days, loosened. Now and then, he posed a question that pried open another well in her, so that during the course of the afternoon she poured out her life for him: the death of her mother, her overbearing older sisters, the vigilant aunts; the stony farm near Newbliss; her silver-eyed father and his clever experiments; the wounded she cared for in her island hut; the illness that set her on this path. When she spoke, he leaned toward her, as if unwilling to let a word pass without his notice. Reworked for his ear, her story sounded intriguing even to her. Like the past of someone she had only just met.

  “You are very brave travelling to a foreign country alone,” he said.

  “My sister thinks I’m foolish.”

  He looked at her a long time before he spoke. “If I had a daughter, I would want her to be such an adventuress.”

  Heat rose to her cheeks. “It isn’t much of an accomplishment. You are travelling alone too.”

  “Ah, but I am coming home. From Chicago. A conference on the diseases of children. And what is your destination?”

  “I’m on my way to Chihuahua. To visit my friend, Helen. We trained together at Salvation Army Grace.”

  “You are a nurse!” he exclaimed. “You must come to Mexico City. I will show you my hospital, the Cruz Roja, where I am director. You will be my guest.”

  He removed a card from a silver case and pushed it across the white cloth. She ran her finger over the relief of the familiar red cross. Within the hour, their train would be in Saltillo, where she would change to a smaller train that would cross the Plain of the Giants and the Plain of the Christians to Chihuahua, a town she imagined inhabited by skinny, yapping dogs. “I can’t. My friend is expecting me.”

  “See our great city first,” he insisted. “Such an opportunity is not to be missed. My house is very large. You will have your own suite, where my mother lived until she died. Ramón, my driver, lives in rooms at the back with his wife, Adela, who cooks and manages the household for me. Ramón will take you wherever you please.” He looked at her with something like alarm. “Chihuahua is a wild place. Become accustomed to the country, to the language, then go to your friend.”

  She had the sensation of butterflies alighting on her arms, on her neck. “Perhaps for a few days. If you’re sure I won’t be any trouble.”

  “Mi casa es su casa,” he said as Ramón pulled up to the curb in front of the high pink walls. Above the ancient doors, a woman’s torso strained forward, as if to move the house out of harm’s way.

  ~

  She’d earned her nurse’s cap in the spring, the only probationer hired on at the hospital, a prize she’d won for highest proficiency in the final examinations.

  Working on the wards, she’d got the idea she would like to become a doctor. She started a scrapbook of medical advances: new liver treatments for pernicious anemia, Doctor Banting’s discovery of insulin, a German forest-keeper’s vinegar cure for hydrophobia. She found she was drawn to stories of a certain kind. The rural doctor who was the first in the world to remove an appendix from a living person. The surgeon who reached into an open chest to touch his patient’s heart.

  “I would like to train as a physician,” she said to the doctor who complimented her skill in removing a splinter of glass from a workman’s thigh. “I want to be a surgeon.”

  He looked at her a long time. “You will have to start again from the beginning. A university degree in the sciences, then medical school, followed by a year of practical study with a surgeon, most likely in another country. Women surgeons are not yet widely welcome here,” the doctor said, waving at the hospital corridor as if it were a club she would never be allowed to enter.

  She blushed as he laid it out: the particular obstacles she would face, the costs. He might as well have told her to get herself to the moon.

  Even so, she made the trip home to May.

  “I had to sell off the best of the laying flock and the work horses so you could be a nurse. And now you want more. You’ve always been too greedy for your own good.”

  “Couldn’t you sell the back field? With the island? That must be worth something. City people are crazy for a cottage in the country.”

  May pursed her lips. “I told Father I would never sell the farm. I intend to keep my promise.”

  In the old, narrow kitchen that smelled of boiled potatoes and musty stone, she struggled to hold onto her vision of the operating theatre with its shining instruments, the sure cuts she would make.

  “I would be a good doctor,” she insisted.

  “You’re a nurse,” May said sharply. “Be satisfied with that. It’s more than the rest of us got.”

  When she returned from May’s, Helen’s postcard was waiting on the hall table of the rooming house. Ten weeks it had taken to travel from Mexico. It must have dawdled on its journey, she thought, to arrive at so precisely the right time. The instant she saw it, she knew what she would do.

  I’ll be there just as soon as I can! she wrote in reply. The truth was, she would have gone just about anywhere.

  All through the summer and fall, she hoarded every penny, making do, darning her stockings when they wore through at the heel, spooning down porridge for a hot meal at any time of day.

  She had always been petite, but in those months, she grew slight, her complexion pale, although h
er energy never failed her. A sprite, one of her patients called her, an old Scots woman dying of botulism from a tin of poorly potted sausage her brother had sent for her birthday.

  By October, she had saved enough. As she pushed the bills and coins under the wicket toward the stationmaster, she refused the thought, This rightfully belongs to May. What need did her sister have of money, planted there on the farm?

  Start from what you are sure of, her father had written. Move toward the unknown.

  On the train, she found her seat and felt for her ticket, tucked between the cheese and apples in her bag. The car jerked forward. She was on her way to Helen, her only friend in the world. Couplings crashed and bells clanged. The locomotive bellowed twice. Too late now for a change of mind, everything she knew sliding behind as the train ploughed out of the station, out of the darkness into a starburst of light.

  ~

  Chicago. St. Louis. San Antonio. Laredo. With the map spread across her knees, she believed she knew exactly where she was going.

  Small towns flashed by. A solitary automobile at a crossing. A station, little more than a shed with a lonely light arched above the door. Tractors moved across fields that were snow-skiffed, then stubble-brown, then golden with standing corn, the growing season unfolding in reverse.

  She pulled the blind against the landscape and stretched out in her seat. The train was only half-full, so she had a bench to herself. A woman with a face like a shovel sat across the aisle with her pale, thoughtful son. Behind her, two men passed a flask between them, talking loudly into the night. Toward the front sat a pair of spinsters, tall and thin and shapeless as May, although not off a farm — their faces were too smooth and pale for that. But not rich, either, else why travel on the cheap like her, slumping in their seats to sleep? They’d settled first near the rear of the car, but an hour into the trip, they’d moved ahead of her, positioning themselves as far as possible from the young couple who had made a nest at the back. Honeymooners, she decided, although she preferred to imagine that the lovers had run off, slipped the stranglehold of family.