“I could give you something to help you rest,”
he suggested gently. “You could find someone else
to care for her.”
She didn’t look up from her task. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to be here.”
Adam slipped the stethoscope back into his bag. “Her lungs are full of fluid,” he said. “My recommendation is to drain them.”
“Drain them?” The dark brown eyes turned in his direction and he was struck again by how large they were.
“With a tube, uh, into the chest cavity.” Adam touched his own side. He knew it sounded pretty awful. Well, it was pretty awful. But he had seen it done successfully, and he knew he could do it. “She’s drowning, actually, in the infection.”
“This would…hurt her?”
“There would be some pain, yes, but she’s in pain now, and it could save her life.”
The young woman shook her head and turned her gaze back to her grandmother. “I can’t let you hurt her.”
“I don’t mean to hurt her,” he said. “I want to save her. If I don’t do it, she will die. It’s her one chance.”
Tears welled up in Miss Sparks’s eyes and she brushed them away. “Don’t you understand? It’s already hopeless, and she’s already had more pain than she can stand-than I can stand.”
Adam clinched his teeth as the dying woman took another rattling breath. “Is there other family I can talk to?” he asked.
“No. We only have each other.” She turned to him and spoke fiercely for the first time. “I won’t let you experiment on Grams. If you can’t help her sleep, then there’s nothing you can do.”
Adam hesitated. This wasn’t how he had imagined starting his practice. He had planned to save his patients. Especially the first one. “Miss Sparks, you don’t need to be afraid of modern medicine. I’m a trained physician. I want—”
“Thank you for coming, Doctor. I’m sorry I bothered you. If you’ll just tell me what I owe you…”
She had dismissed him. She returned the cloth to the basin, repeating a task she had doubtless done a thousand times. He watched her for a moment, then found the bottle of morphine. He poured a tiny measure of the powder into a folded paper and crimped the edge closed.
Handing it to her, he told her the price and said, “Dissolve this in a little water and see if she can drink it. I don’t think you’ll need more than that.” He hoped she understood the last as his prediction on how much longer she’d have to nurse her grandmother.
She reached for it cautiously. As soon as it left his fingers, he turned from the room. She caught up with him in the kitchen and paid him the money without another word.
He made his way back through the dining room and down the hall, wondering who would finish preparing the meal while she waited for the old woman to die. He knew he shouldn’t be angry with Miss Sparks. She thought she was protecting her grandmother. Still, he couldn’t help thinking that a dramatic rescue of such an ill patient would have gotten his practice off to a better start.
Jane returned to her seat beside Grams just as she heard the front door close behind Dr. Hart. What had she expected? That the doctor would tell her Grams wasn’t dying, that everything would be all right? Had she expected him to offer a miracle cure the other doctors had not?
She shook her head. Of course not. Grams had taken ill almost three months ago and had been unable to leave her bed now for several weeks. Even if she survived the pneumonia, she would never be well. Dropsy, the doctors had said. Her heart was failing.
All Jane had expected from Dr. Hart was something that would stop the pain when Grams awoke. Every breath was agony for her grandmother, and all she could do was cry.
Jane fingered the paper in her hand. That was what he had given her, something for the pain. Then why did she feel cold inside?
Because he had put it into words. Grams was dying. Not in a few months but now. And he had forced her to make the choice to let her.
“Oh, Grams,” she whispered. “Did I do the right thing?”
When she thought of the doctor poking a hole in Grams’s frail side, forcing a tube into her chest cavity, which hurt already, Jane knew she had been right. She had to believe she was right.
She refreshed the cloth on Grams’s forehead one more time, then went back to the kitchen. With the door open she could hear nearly every breath her grandmother took. It had become the rhythm of her life these past few days, the slow labored inhale and exhale. With both dread and longing she waited for the moment when the breathing would stop. How could Grams take much more of this? And - how could she?
Adam’s trunks arrived shortly after he returned. He set to work unpacking them immediately, glad for the activity. The steady stream of patients he had imagined didn’t materialize. He checked his front door a couple of times and finally left it open so he’d be sure to hear a knock. All the time he was upstairs he listened for a voice from below. He opened the windows, thinking he might hear footsteps on his porch. He finished unpacking and returned to the front room, having been uninterrupted the entire time.
Uninterrupted if he didn’t count his own thoughts. He kept seeing Jane Sparks with tears in her eyes and that poor woman lying beside her.
He could have saved her. He still could. There was probably still time. But how would he convince the granddaughter? She hadn’t been willing to consider the procedure. And he didn’t know how to convince her.
If he were more experienced, had seen a little more death and had saved a few more people, he would know what to say. But he didn’t, and his first patient in his new home was going to die, probably within the next few hours.
He was pacing the front room, seething with guilt and frustration, when he finally heard footsteps on his porch. He turned toward the open door to find Mayor Pinter there.
“Evening,” the little man said. “Did you get settled in?”
“Pretty much,” Adam said, forcing a smile. “I hadn’t realized it was dinnertime already.”
“We eat a mite earlier here than in the city, I suppose.”
“I won’t complain about that,” Adam said, realizing how hungry he was. Wonderful smells had been wafting through his open windows and door all afternoon, smells he had tried his best to ignore because he knew they came from Miss Sparks’s kitchen.
“It’s nice of your family to let me come to dinner,” he said, slipping into his suit coat as he joined Pinter on the porch.
“I don’t have a family,” Pinter said, preceding Adam down the steps. “I take breakfast and dinner at the boardinghouse. Got myself a permanent seat at her table. I recommend you do the same. Unless you got talents I don’t know about, it’ll likely be the best food you’re gonna find.”
The boarding house. So much for putting Miss Sparks out of his mind. Not that he would have anyway, Adam supposed, but he had been looking forward to a distraction.
“Miss Sparks has got four rooms upstairs that she rents out. If they’re all filled, she can accommodate only three more guests at her table. You gotta arrange ahead, like I did for you tonight. There’s money left in the fund we started to bring you here. It’s payin’ the rent on that little house, but there’s enough left to feed you. Besides,” he added, leaning closer to Adam’s shoulder, “the little lady needs the money. I should know-I’m the banker.”
As Pinter opened the front door of the boardinghouse, Adam noticed a small sign nailed to the siding