CHAPTER 14
The next day, Mirielle spent the afternoon hastening from bed to bed in the ladies’ infirmary. No sooner had she refilled a glass of water or fluffed a pillow than another patient’s bell rang. Everything was made doubly hard with her arm still in a cast. Her feet ached when she returned to her room, and she would have ignored the call to supper had Irene not barged in and dragged her to the dining hall.
Fastening the buttons of her beastly uniform the next morning, Mirielle began to second-guess this helping business. How was fetching someone an extra blanket or emptying their bedpan getting her any closer to home?
When she arrived at the small, one-room X-ray building for her shift, a long line had already formed along the walkway outside. Twice weekly the building doubled as the shot clinic. Her fellow residents looked resigned, if not a bit wary as they stood waiting. Mirielle tugged at her ill-fitting collar, then shimmied past and went inside.
The hulking X-ray equipment had been pushed against the walls to provide room for a dressing screen and a small table crowded with supplies. Doc Jack sat on a stool behind the screen while Sister Verena inspected a set of needles each the size of an ice pick. When she was through with her inspection, she handed Mirielle a record book.
“Listed here is each patient’s prescribed dose of chaulmoogra oil. Call it out when they enter and I will prepare the syringe. You must also keep the supply table stocked and needles cycling through the boiler for sterilization. Do you think you can manage that?”
Mirielle grabbed the book and rolled her eyes. Of course she could manage it.
The first patient entered and told her his name. She opened the book, balancing the spine on her cast arm, and flipped through the pages until she found his record. “Eight cc’s.”
The man shuffled behind the screen and unbuttoned his drawers while Sister Verena drew the medicine into a syringe. A sluggish air bubble drifted upward through the oil when she tapped the glass. She handed the syringe to Doc Jack, who wiped one side of the man’s rear with betadine, then jabbed in the needle. A rush of queasiness washed over Mirielle as she watched the plunger descend. When Doc Jack removed the needle, a syrupy mix of blood and oil oozed from the injection site.
Mirielle unbuttoned her collar and fanned herself with the record book to keep her breakfast down while Doc Jack mopped up the mess with a cotton square. He taped another square over the site and said, “All done,” at the same time as Sister Verena said, “Next dose.”
Mirielle turned back to the line of patients. The man in front grunted out his name, and she thumbed through the record book, her stomach still swimming. Soon it was all she could do to keep up with names and doses, never mind the dwindling supply of cotton squares and the pile of sticky needles in need of sterilizing. Morning passed in a blur, and her queasiness faded. She bustled between the back table where the boiler sat and the line of waiting patients, juggling the open record book in one arm and fresh supplies in the other.
The lunch bell brought only a brief reprieve. Soon patients were lining up again. Most seemed to remember exactly where they’d stood before the bell and filed into line without fuss or jostling. But Jean, the young girl who lived with Mirielle in house eighteen, cut in near the front. Several of the adults behind her cussed and grumbled.
“Brat,” one of them said.
“Get back to the end of the line, or I’ll drag you there by the earlobe,” said another.
“Hey,” Mirielle said, setting down the record book and moving toward the ruckus. “Leave her alone.”
After the tadpole incident, she’d kept her distance from the girl, though she suspected the crayon markings that had mysteriously appeared on her cast when she woke this morning and the tangle of worms between her sheets two nights before to be Jean’s handiwork. But that didn’t mean the other patients had any right to bully her. She was a child, after all. Only a few years older than Evie.
“Ain’t no one allowed to cut in line,” a fellow with Jack Dempsey–sized arms said. His red, disease-thickened face made him look all the more like a man who’d just come from twelve rounds in the ring.
“That doesn’t mean you get to call her names.”
“I can do whatever I damn please.”
Another man stepped out from his place in line. “Mais, Dean! Ya in a hurry to get your ass poked today?”
Mirielle recognized him—first by his blunt, misshapen hands, then by his vivid blue eyes—as Frank, the tour guide she’d yelled at her first day at Carville. He waved over Jean with one of his claw-hands. “Anyway, I promised I’d save a spot for her.”
Jean skipped to his side, a grin, sweet as it was sinister, stretched across her face. Dean scowled but quit his griping, and Mirielle returned to the tiresome record book.
“I see ya found a way to skip the line,” Frank said when he and Jean made it to the front several minutes later. “Looks good on ya, the uniform.”
Mirielle didn’t return his smile. “No one looks good in matte white.”
He chuckled. “You’re about as good at taking a compliment as ya are at absconding.”
Ignoring his steady gaze, she balanced the record book in the crook of her cast arm and flipped through to find their names. She’d called out Jean’s dose to Sister Verena and was looking for Frank’s when a flash of movement caught her eye. Before she’d realized what was happening, squares of cotton were floating in the air. They clumped together in a small cloud as they left Jean’s outstretched hand, then dispersed as they fluttered downward like huge square snowflakes. Jean giggled. She skipped past the dressing screen and out the door. Cotton squares landed everywhere—on the X-ray equipment, on the floor, on Doc Jack’s head.
“Ahem,” Sister Verena said, setting down her syringe and brushing the white squares off her shoulders and the pointy wings of her hat.
Mirielle bent down and began scooping the cotton off the floor. Frank squatted beside her.
“I’ve never met an ornerier child in my life,” she muttered. Her children would never misbehave like that.
“Don’t think too badly of her,” Frank said, helping Mirielle with the mess. “Been here three years and she ain’t heard nothing from her family. Not a visit or a letter. Her daddy, he dropped her at the front gate and didn’t look back, him.”
Mirielle glanced at him, then back to the cotton squares scattered across the floorboards. The ever-present ache she felt for her daughters deepened. Did they know how hard she was trying to make it back to them? Or did they feel as abandoned and forgotten as Jean?