I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(69)
In the end, that fear is what saved Edith: jolting her out of her fog into an acute, raw wakefulness, sharpening her senses, jerking her attention back on track whenever it began to stray. And Edith believed forever after that it was the baby who saved Sarah. Quiet for the first two-thirds of the trip, as his mother grew sicker, he transformed into a bundle of steely will, of raucous demand, his throaty, mechanical cries making the air inside the car pulse like a migraine as he insisted on his own survival over and over and over. Even when his mother muttered, delirious with fever, wild-eyed as an animal, or when she seemed to slide into and out of unconsciousness, some tiny, clear piece of her remained to hear him, to hear him and to answer. When Sarah was too weak to hold her head upright, she pressed her son into the curve of her body with an unflagging grip. When she no longer seemed to know where she was, she lifted her shirt and nursed him.
By the time they got to the border checkpoint, Edith was so tired that, for a panicked moment, she forgot the words George had told her to say to the guard, but just as she was rolling down the window, she remembered.
“We’ve come all the way from Latrobe to visit our northern cousins,” she said, smiling.
After a quick glance at Sarah and Steven in the backseat, the guard delivered his line: “Latrobe? Isn’t that where the banana split was invented?”
“It is,” said Edith, with a sigh of relief. “It is, indeed.”
Because of the indirect route, the trip took over twenty-four hours, so that it was dark when they arrived at the safe house. Edith didn’t know what she’d been expecting—a mansion? A fortress?—but the sight of the farmhouse set back from the road in a copse of maples took her by surprise. It was so ordinary, so peaceful with its mailbox, its brick walkway, its gabled roofs, its amber porch light, its shaded windows like closed eyes.
The young doctor who lived there came out to meet them. He’d been expecting them. “Oh, Lord,” he said at the sight of Sarah. “I’ll need to get her to the hospital tonight.”
At Edith’s alarmed expression, he said, “Don’t worry. There are people there who know, who help. Friends. My mother is a friend, too. She’s waiting inside.”
The next half hour moved around Edith like a dream. She handed over the baby. She heard bathwater running, saw clean pajamas draped over the back of a chair, smelled bread baking. But, reeling with exhaustion, without bathing or eating or changing her clothes, still wearing her winter coat, she tumbled onto the bed and slept.
When she woke up, it was the afternoon of the following day.
The doctor’s name was Thomas Farley. His mother introduced herself as May.
Edith took a bath in a claw-foot tub as big as a rowboat, sinking into the steaming water up to her chin. The air smelled of talcum powder and rosewater, and Edith wished she could stay right there all day, cradled and weightless, the hot water coaxing the ache and stiffness from her muscles. She washed her hair and dressed in the clothes she’d hastily packed, another of Joseph’s sweaters and a pair of blue jeans. Examining her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she shook her head and said, “Aren’t you a sight,” and then, following the fragrance of bacon, she went down to find May.
When she walked into the kitchen, May turned, spatula in hand. She was diminutive, pink-cheeked from the hot stove, her gray hair cropped. She should have been a cute old lady but somehow she wasn’t. May gave Edith a fleeting once-over, and then, without remarking on her appearance, turned back to the stove, where an egg danced in a skillet. She flipped it in a glory of sputtering and said, grinning, “I know it’s almost four o’clock, but I figured it was breakfast time for you.”
“Thank you,” said Edith. “I’m ravenous and that smells like heaven. But how is Sarah?”
“After you eat,” said May, sternly. “And no rushing. I can only imagine what you’ve been through, driving all that way through the cold and dark with a sick woman and an infant. First and foremost, your body needs nourishment.”
She placed a plate of eggs and bacon and fresh buttered bread before Edith, and then stood watching while she ate it. For all her kindness, there was something commanding about May, rooted there in her kitchen, keen-eyed and upright and stalwart, like a soldier or a lighthouse. Not until Edith had eaten every bite—and it didn’t take long—and May had taken her plate away and brought her a mug of tea thick with cream did she sit down next to Edith at the table, fold her hands before her, and say, “About Sarah.”
“Is she all right?”
“Not yet,” said May, shaking her head. “She’s got a rough road ahead of her. They had to take out her spleen, and that’s a long recovery all by itself, but she’s got an infection as well, which has sent her into shock. An infection without a spleen to help fight it off . . . well, I won’t sugarcoat it; Thomas is worried sick.”
Edith’s chest tightened and she grabbed onto the arms of her wooden chair.
“Don’t do it,” said May. “Whatever you’re second-guessing yourself about, just don’t.”
“I had to try to bring her here,” Edith said, gasping. “She insisted. But there was a time when we stopped and I slept because I was just so tired that nothing felt real or made sense, and when I woke up, I knew, I knew she had taken a turn for the worse, the much, much worse, and I shouldn’t have slept or I should’ve taken her to a hospital right then and—”