With Every Breath (17 page)

“I’ll do no such thing. The new issue of
Hemoglobin Research
just arrived, and I intend to read it tonight.”

There had to be a tiny speck of humanity buried under that block of ice. She’d seen it in the churchyard. She’d seen it on the rooftop. Trevor had a heart that bled and ached and longed to cure the disease that was killing thirty-two people on the other side of this wall. Unless he could drag it out and let the rest of
the world see it, he would continue to burn bridges wherever he went.

“Let me repeat myself. You
will
come to dinner tonight. You
will
be polite. You need allies in this war, and you’ve never bothered to collect any. I cannot fight for these people if you won’t. You said you wanted someone willing to help you slay dragons. Why am I the only one making an effort to do it?”

She was yelling now, but it seemed to be the only way to break through to him. He looked stunned by her statement. He tilted his head to the side and wrinkled his brow the way he always did when he was deep in thought. She moved in for the kill.

“Six o’clock at my parents’ house. And don’t you dare be late this time.”

There was a long pause, and then a gleam of respect lit his eyes as he contemplated her, a smile hovering around his mouth. “Okay,” he finally said.

She smoothed a wayward strand of hair back from her forehead, straightened her blouse, and opened the door to leave.

Six of the patients huddled around the door, eavesdropping. Given the guilty looks on their faces, they must have heard every word. “Score two points for Kate Livingston,” Leonard Wilkes said loud enough for Trevor to hear.

Trevor had gone back to scowling when she closed the door.

* * * *

Trevor arrived for dinner ten minutes early and brought a bouquet of daisies for the table. He was a perfect gentleman as Kate reintroduced him to a handful of the boarders who sat near him at the crowded dining table.

Kate asked her mother to be on good behavior too, so the main topic of conversation at dinner was the possibility that former President Cleveland might try to recapture the White
House next year. When the conversation turned to Trevor’s work, he was equally polite, even when Mrs. Zomohkov started raising the alarm about tuberculosis. Kate spoke no Russian, but the disgust in Mrs. Zomohkov’s tone was blatant. Her husband cleared his throat and dabbed his mouth before providing the translation.

“My wife is concerned about the poor and wonders if they are more prone to the ravages of the disease?”

This showed that Mr. Zomohkov had perfected the art of diplomacy. Given Mrs. Zomohkov’s rancid expression, Kate was fairly certain his wife had spoken more colorful words about contagious disease among the poor.

Trevor’s reply was tactful. “The poor are more likely to contract the disease because they live in crowded tenements, but it can strike anyone, anywhere. Soldiers and sailors are especially vulnerable, because they live in tight quarters.” He then looked directly at Mrs. Zomohkov and said gently, “I will find a cure someday. And when I do, it will protect you, and your children, and all your friends from a disease that can strike any one of us. We are all in this together.”

They waited while her husband translated. There was a hint of a thaw as the tension in Mrs. Zomohkov’s shoulders eased, but displeasure kept her mouth frozen in distaste. Then Trevor surprised them all.

“Sprechen sie
Deutsch?”

“Ja,”
Mrs. Zomohkov said. A spiel of foreign words then passed between the pair. They were speaking in German? Some of the newspaper clippings mentioned that Trevor had spent a number of years studying at the University of Vienna. Trevor grinned as he leaned forward and whispered something to Mrs. Zomohkov, who began giggling like a schoolgirl.

There was something oddly attractive about watching Trevor
converse in a foreign language. Where had Trevor learned German well enough to study abroad?

After a few minutes, Trevor leaned back in his seat. “Forgive us,” he said to everyone. “Mrs. Zomohkov and I were reminiscing about the Vienna Opera House. I was privileged to hear the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky perform there.”

Mrs. Zomohkov kept smiling and nodding as Trevor spoke, even after the conversation turned to modern music and whether the city of Washington would ever open its own performance hall.

Later, Kate handed Trevor his jacket and walked him to the front door. As Trevor slipped into his jacket, he gave her a slight grin.

“One dragon down,” he whispered before he left.

12

A
fter the evening Trevor charmed Mrs. Zomohkov, he began coming to dinner regularly, and Kate was thrilled by his progress toward becoming a warm-blooded creature. In the weeks that followed, he grew more relaxed among the boisterous crowd. One night Tom Wilkerson from the Patent Office amused them all by describing an invention designed to exercise overweight house cats. As he spoke, Kate became strangely mesmerized watching Trevor.

Still wearing his vest but with his collar loosened and his cuffs rolled up, he listened politely while absently fiddling with his empty teacup. She asked if he wanted a refill. His eyes were warm as he shook his head and went back to listening about the cat exerciser, a half smile on his face while running his thumb along the rim of his cup in a slow, lazy motion. Those hands could perform surgery. Manipulate the dials of a microscope. Trevor’s intelligence had always fascinated her, but when he looked relaxed like this . . . well, all the inappropriate fantasies she’d been nurturing about him came roaring back to life.

But he could still turn on a dime.

The morning Ephraim Montgomery died, she got a glimpse of the old Trevor in all his glory. It was the first time a patient died since Kate had begun work at the clinic, and she was upset. She stood in the doorway of the men’s ward, watching Trevor make notations on Mr. Montgomery’s chart. Two hospital orderlies rolled Mr. Montgomery’s bed down the aisle and out the door, leaving a wide gap in the tidy row of beds. Ephraim Montgomery had been some woman’s son, or husband, or brother.

An ungainly sob escaped as she stared at the empty spot in the ward. From across the room, Trevor glared at her. He flipped the chart closed and stalked down the aisle toward her.

“Outside,” he snapped.

She couldn’t meet his eyes as she followed him. He pulled the door to the ward shut and towered over her. “Don’t you dare turn into a blubbering idiot in front of the patients. If you can’t hold it together, go home. Don’t you have any idea how scared they are?”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Kate said in a shaky voice.

Trevor looked like he wanted to shake her. “You’re part of the staff here, and that means they look to you for courage. For strength. At the very least, they look to you for the hope that death is not some awful finality of nothingness. Existence doesn’t end with death, and when you blubber like that it saps their confidence. Find your backbone. Have the fortitude to stand up and fight. That’s what I hired you for.”

He turned his back and followed Mr. Montgomery’s bed out of the clinic without a backward glance.

Kate hung her head. She had a stomachache and a headache, and sometimes Trevor made her brain want to explode. The worst part was that he was right. Her inability to reconcile herself to death was surely the biggest moral failing of her life.

All of these patients knew they were going to die soon. She
was starting to understand what Trevor meant when he warned her they would be bruised and broken on a daily basis as they battled this disease. They would be beaten down time and again, but tomorrow morning she had to get up and face the day with renewed strength.

“He’s wrong, you know.”

She whirled around. Leonard Wilkes was sitting in the turret alcove, gentle sympathy on his wasted face. Leonard was always the patient most likely to make a macabre joke about death, so the compassion on his face took her by surprise. She sniffled and adjusted her collar.

“Who’s wrong?”

“Dr. Kendall. Oh, he’s right that we’re all in God’s hands, whether here on earth or on our journey to the other side, but there’s no shame in grieving. It’s normal. Grief freshens our perspective on life; it helps us appreciate the blessings we’ve been showered with. ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ You’re doing fine, Mrs. Livingston.”

She didn’t feel fine. She could accept everything Jesus said about faith and the afterlife, so why did she have such an irrational terror of watching people die? Why did she gnash her teeth over what happened to her baby brothers and to Nathan? What happened to them was so unfair. She still couldn’t understand how a loving God could snatch children away for no apparent reason, or make Ephraim Montgomery suffer such a lingering and horrible death.

And she felt small and mean for those thoughts. A better person would not question God like this.

She managed a smile for Mr. Wilkes, but as the day wore on she felt worse both in body and mind. It was a glorious autumn day, but she wanted just to crawl into bed and stay there. Instead she pulled out the chart of statistical calculations. She had
plenty of work to do and would not give Trevor the satisfaction of seeing her run away.

* * * *

“Trevor, you could be a little nicer to me.”

Kate’s voice smacked him in the face as he returned to their office after completing Ephraim Montgomery’s autopsy, where he had a view of how tuberculosis ravaged the liver, stomach, and intestinal tract. Kate’s declaration caught him by surprise, even though he supposed he’d been tough on her this morning. But losing patients was always disastrous for him, ripping a tiny piece of his armor away. If he gave in and wallowed in emotion like Kate, he would never survive.

“Why should I?” He tugged off his lab coat and hung it on a hook near the door. “You knew this job was going to be a challenge when you accepted the position.”

“Because I have a normal human heart that bleeds and hurts when someone dies. I can’t shut off my feelings the way you can.” There was no accusation in her voice, just a deep aching pain of bewilderment. “When I was fifteen, two of my brothers died from diphtheria.”

He remembered. An announcement had been made at their school to explain Kate’s absence, and everyone rallied around her to offer support when she finally returned. Trevor watched from a distance, unsure how to respond. Kate had been shattered by the loss, and for months she was a mere shadow of the girl who usually competed with him so fiercely.

“I always wondered what they would be like if they’d been given the chance to grow up,” she continued. “Carl was only twelve, and Jamie ten when they died. Whenever I hear a boy singing, I remember Jamie. He used to sing his lungs out in the washroom, because he loved the way it echoed off the tile.
And then Mama would come running and tell him to shush, that he was waking up the boarders. I wonder if Carl would still be a sore loser over chess.” She doubled over in her chair, her breathing ragged as she battled tears. “I wish I’d let him win sometimes. I should have done that . . . I was older than him, and I should have let him win every game we ever played. I wish I’d bought Jamie that stupid toy train for his birthday, even though it cost too much. He wanted it so badly, and he went to his grave without ever playing with a decent train set. Will this never stop hurting?”

Trevor went to stand next to her. His hand hovered just above her head. He wished he could pick up the grief that weighed on her spirit and carry it for her.

She straightened, turning her tear-stained face to him with a flicker of hope in her eyes. “That’s why I want Tick to go to the Naval Academy. It’s safer for officers, and I can’t bear the thought of Tick going into harm’s way. I’d rather he become a ragpicker than a soldier on the front line.”

He noticed how she hovered over Tick. Everyone noticed. He dragged his desk chair across the room to sit beside her. Their knees were practically touching. He leaned down so he could look her directly in the eyes.

“Men are different from women,” he said. “We want to conquer things, whether it’s a foreign enemy or a microscopic germ we can’t even see. If you try to protect us from that, we’ll begin to die. Tick isn’t destined to become a ragpicker, and you know that.” A strand of her hair was stuck to her face, and he reached out to tuck it back. “Don’t try to stop Tick from following his dreams, wherever they may lead.”

She pulled back in her chair, looking tired and defeated. “The thought of Tick dying has always scared me to pieces. I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to work here. I barely knew
Ephraim Montgomery, but I’ve been a watering pot all day. I think maybe I don’t belong here.”

A shaft of fear seized him. “Don’t talk like that. You’re strong enough to handle this.” It startled him to realize how quickly he’d come to need Kate, to depend on her.

“I don’t feel strong. I feel weak and brittle, and sometimes I just need someone to lean on. I don’t think I can keep doing a job where all these people will keep dying.” Two big tears slid down Kate’s cheeks.

Trevor sighed. He knew she was keeping the boardinghouse afloat with her wages. She’d pulled strings to get Tick assigned to the hospital. After a long day dealing with terminally ill patients, she helped serve dozens of people at the boardinghouse with an endless stream of good humor. And this morning, when she showed the first hint of weakness in a job most people would loathe, he called her a blubbering idiot.

“You can’t quit, Kate. I was wrong this morning when I said you needed to toughen up. I sought you out for this job because you are fierce. Because I’ve traveled all over the world, and you’re the only one who ever prodded, challenged, and inspired me.”

Inspired.
It was such a puny word to describe what she did for him. She made him want to call down the moon, to grapple with whirlwinds, to slay dragons.

He took her hands, squeezing them and looking in her eyes again. “I want you beside me, shoulder to shoulder. We’ve got months and years and maybe decades of slogging through this before we will find a cure. That’s how it is in medicine. I would give my right arm to make it otherwise, but there are no shortcuts. It’s going to be a long, hard ride. That’s why I need you with me.”