The Stars Are Fire(27)

“My daughter’s had a seizure.”

“I’m Dr. Lighthart.” He takes Claire in his arms and feels her forehead. Without a word, he walks with her to a room beyond the receptionist’s empty desk. Grace has to run to keep up with him. He lays Claire on a gurney, strips away the blankets, raises her pajama shirt, examines her, then listens to her heart. He checks her back, looks at her tongue, and sticks a thermometer in her mouth. “Try to hold this here,” he says.

“Where’s Dr. Franklin?” she asks.

“He retired after the fire. I’ve taken over.”

A clean sheet is put on the gurney. Claire’s body is limp.

“We need to get the temperature down fast,” he says, removing the thermometer from Claire’s mouth and glancing at it. “Have you given her anything?”

“One aspirin.”

“We’ll cover her with cold towels. Then, if necessary, we’ll put her in an ice bath. She won’t like any of it, so be prepared. You’d best get her clothes off.”

For the first time, he glances up at Grace.

“You,” he says, puzzled.

“You!” she says, astonished.


Grace holds a bared wrist under the water until the temperature is as low as it will go. She remembers her legs buried in the muck of low tide, the way the doctor and Matthew thought she might be dead. She raised her head then, but couldn’t move her arms, and the men had to slip the children out from under her grip.

“When we found you,” Dr. Lighthart says, “the high tide of the night before had taken most of the belongings of the families that had come to the water’s edge, but here and there, the items were sloshing back in with the new tide. We’d been collecting people who’d been told to evacuate. I remember that I was watching the gas gauge on the dashboard of the truck. It was below empty according to the dial. We talked about how you would have to be our last rescue until we found a gas station that hadn’t burned down. Later, after we had you in the truck, I was worried we wouldn’t make it to the hospital.”

“But you did, and thank you.”

Grace wonders if the belongings sloshing in the ocean on the new tide had returned to be reunited with their kin.


Claire looks as though she has been wrapped in a shroud. Death. Grace’s knees weaken.

“She needs the ice bath now,” the doctor insists. “I’ll get the ice. As soon as the towels feel warm, unwrap her.”

“What do you think she has?” Grace asks, frantic.

“Scarlet fever most likely, though it could be meningitis or polio. She’ll need an antibiotic.”

Polio.


When the doctor returns to the room, he sets a blue rubber tub layered with ice under the tap, filling it half full. “This is going to wake her up. What’s her name?”

“Claire. Claire Holland.”

“Age?”

“Two and a bit.”

“And what’s your name? I don’t think I ever knew.”

“Grace.”

He picks up the child and slowly lowers her into the ice bath. Claire wakes with a shudder. At first she whimpers, and then she screams.

“Hold her there,” he says. “I’m going to prepare an injection.”

“Of what?”

“Penicillin. In case there’s a bacterial infection. We won’t know until morning when symptoms begin to present themselves.”

“Isn’t a seizure a symptom?”

“It’s a result of high fever. Not the disease itself. Is your daughter allergic to penicillin?”

“I don’t know. She’s never had it.”

Grace fights to keep the slippery Claire in the tub. The fight goes against every instinct in her body.

After Dr. Lighthart has prepared the injection, he says, “Let’s do this over here.”

Grace lifts her daughter up and dries her with a towel, thinking, This must be torture for Claire. The child is silent, relieved to be out of the bath.

“Put her on her side facing you. Keep talking to her.”

Grace holds Claire’s face and croons soothing words, but she doesn’t miss the flash of the needle as it goes in. After a split second, Claire shrieks.

“That’s good,” the doctor says. “Listlessness isn’t.”

Grace wraps Claire in a dry towel and holds her close. The feeling of momentary relief is intense.


Grace follows the doctor into a small room in which there are two cribs. He lowers the slats on the side of one of them. “I’m going to cover her with only a light sheet. I’ll be across the hall in my office. If there’s a problem, just yell and I’ll hear you. If you think she’s too hot, if you spot a rash, if she seizes, if she vomits, if she starts to bark like a dog, anything you don’t like, you come and get me.”

Grace nods. She understands that he won’t tell her that everything will be all right, because both he and she know that might not be the truth.


Claire feels warm. What’s the precise point at which warm becomes hot? Grace is reluctant to use the thermometer because Claire is asleep, and Grace knows the child needs rest. She lays her head against the slats of the crib. It’s too much, she nearly says aloud. The fire, the loss of the baby, Gene, and now Claire. If something should happen to Claire, Grace knows that she will break apart into pieces that will never be put back together again.