A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [73]
The injured were triaged, the worst cases sent to a series of stretchers against a wall. Women volunteers walked among the white iron cots, soothing when they could. If Hazel had been alive, Innes thought, she might be doing much the same.
On a break, Innes wandered the wards, stepping over cots and bodies as he went. He had never seen so many injured and dead. Even his worst imaginings of France had been less chaotic, less bloody.
He asked again and again for Dr. Fraser, receiving no answers. Innes thought about leaving the hospital, returning to the place where the Fraser home had once stood, and searching through the wreckage. But he doubted that he could find it in the dark. Through a blown-out window, a high wind had come up, and, with it, snow.
My God, Innes thought. A blizzard.
He was fed with bread and water and dried peas, an odd combination he gratefully consumed. On the second floor of the hospital, Innes was informed, were the patients who had been treated and who were resting. He climbed the stairs and found, in the stairwell, a nursing sister in uniform, curled into a ball, asleep. He did not wake her.
Through swinging doors on the second floor was a vast corridor with wards to either side. Innes searched the first ward, quiet and dark with a single candle and a white pitcher on each bedside table. A nursing sister, ashen but efficient, was the only one on duty for what looked to be at least fifty patients. Innes was struck by the number of children.
From a distant ward, Innes could hear a woman keening.
He made his way through the wards, searching for any of the Frasers, the only people he had known in Halifax. Some of the patients had their surnames written at the foot of the bed. Others’ beds were blank, perhaps indicating patients who could no longer speak or who did not remember who they were. Innes examined faces. He thought of the ten-year-old girl who had taken his hand. Would she have begun to speak by now? Would she have been told the fate of her family?
The keening grew stronger as Innes approached the end of the corridor. The sound changed to a frantic squabble, a bird interrupted and screeching. Something in the tone of the voice made Innes pick up his pace, and he was on a run by the time he swung through the door. A woman, her head bandaged, was sitting in a wheelchair, making guttural and frenzied noises and clawing at the air in front of her. Below the bandages that covered both eyes, Innes recognized the fringe of wavy light brown hair, a blouse with epaulets and brass buttons. A nursing sister, in desperation, batted away one of the patient’s hands.
“I’ll take over,” Innes said, reaching the nursing sister’s side.
“She’s off her rocker, this one.”
Innes saw at the nurse’s feet a spilled bowl of soup. He crouched and faced the woman in the chair. He caught her hands and brought them together in his own. He could feel the wildness and the panic in her arms as she struggled to break free. “Louise,” he said. “It’s Innes.”
The woman cocked her head so that her right ear was turned toward him. Innes knew, though Louise did not, that this was her good ear, the one with which she would “see” everyone who spoke to her for the rest of her life.
“Mr. Finch?” she asked.
“Yes, Louise. It’s Innes.”
“Oh God,” she wailed, reaching for him. He allowed Louise to feel his face and hair. Her fingers were blunt, unpracticed. Briefly he closed his eyes.
“They are all dead!” she cried. “All dead.”
“Who are all dead, Louise?” Innes urged.
“Mother. Father. Hazel. All dead.”
“How do you know this?” Innes asked, trying to keep his voice calm. Louise could not actually have seen the bodies, he guessed, not to judge from the blood-soaked gauze at her eyes.
“The man who found me told me. He said they were all dead.” Louise began to tremble uncontrollably, and Innes bent forward to hold her. A rank smell rose up from