Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (54 page)

“Bree? Where did you—Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!”

Her mother was suddenly there, snatching the crumpled paper out of her hand, seizing her with a strong arm round her waist.

“Down,” her mother said, calm and authoritative. “Sit all the way down. Yes, that’s it—” Her skirts bloomed around her as she sank to the floor, a yellowish cloud flickering through the white haze. Hands braced flat on the floor, she resisted her mother’s pressure to lie down, shaking her head.

“No.” She didn’t seem to have any connection with her voice, but she heard it, hoarse but clear. “Be okay. It’s okay.”

“All right.” A creak of boards; her mother eased down beside her, and she heard the scrape of a wooden cup against the floorboards. Warmth…her mother’s hand wrapped round her wrist, a thumb moving in search of a pulse.

Good luck with that one,
she thought muzzily. But as she thought it, the racing eased. A confused halt, one or two random beats, and then her heart quietly resumed its normal operations, as though nothing had happened.

It had, though, and she lifted her head to find her mother’s eyes fixed on her face, with a look of intent thoughtfulness she knew all too well. The heron.

“I’m fine,” she said firmly, trying anyway. “Just—I just got light-headed for a minute.”

One of her mother’s brows twitched up, but Claire said nothing. Her hand was still wrapped around Brianna’s telltale wrist.

“Really. It’s nothing,” she said, detaching herself from her mother’s grip.

Each time, she’d told herself it was nothing.

“When did it start?” Claire’s eyes were normally a soft amber—except when she was being a doctor. Then they went a sharp, dark-pupiled yellow, like the eyes of a bird of prey.

“When you told me you— Jesus, did you just tell me…” Brianna got her feet under her and rose. Cautiously, but her heart went on quietly beating, just as it should.
It’s nothing.

“Yes, I did. And I don’t mean this time,” her mother said dryly, rising, too. “When did it
first
happen?”

She debated lying, but the urge to keep denying that anything was truly amiss was fading fast against the need—the hope—of being reassured.

“Right after we came through the stones on Ocracoke. It was—I didn’t think I’d make it.” The giddiness threatened to come back with the memory of that…that…Her gorge rose suddenly, and she leaned over and threw up, a light spatter of half-digested porridge on the clean new boards of the surgery.

“Dear me.” Her mother’s voice was mild. “You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

“Don’t even
think
it!” She shuddered, wiping her mouth on her apron. “I can’t be.” She hadn’t even thought of the possibility, and wasn’t about to start. She was already haunted by the idea that she might die and leave Jem and Mandy…

“On Ocracoke,” she repeated, getting hold of herself. “I came out of the stones with Mandy in my arms. I couldn’t see—it was all black and white spots, and I thought I was going to faint, and then I sort of
did
…I was lying on the ground and I still had hold of Mandy; she was fighting to get loose and yelling, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ but I couldn’t answer her and then I realized my heart wasn’t beating. I thought I was dying.” She smelled something sweet and pungent, and her mother wrapped Bree’s fingers around a cup and guided it to her lips.

“You’re not going to die,” her mother said, with a welcome tone of conviction. Bree nodded, wanting to believe it, even though her heart was still skipping beats, leaving moments of emptiness in her chest. She sipped the liquid; it was whisky, sweetened with honey, and with something herbal and very fragrant in it.

She closed her eyes and concentrated on taking slow sips, willing things to settle down, to go back to normal. Her surroundings were beginning to come back. The sun from the big window fell warm on her shoulders.

“How often has it happened?”

She swallowed, savoring the sweetness that was seeping into her bloodstream, and opened her eyes.

“Four times, before now. At Ocracoke, then again the next night. We were camping, on the road.” She flinched at the memory; lying rigid on the ground next to Roger, the children asleep between them. Her heart racing, fists clenched not to grab Roger’s arm and shake him awake. “That was bad—it went on for hours. Or at least it seemed like hours. It stopped finally, just before dawn.” She’d felt wrung out, limp as the dew-damp clothes that wrapped her limbs; she still remembered the terrible effort needed to rise, to put one foot in front of the other…

The next time had been a week later, on a barge in the Yadkin River, and the last before this on the road from Cross Creek to Salisbury.

“Those weren’t so bad. Just a few minutes—like this one.” She took another sip, held it in her mouth, then swallowed and looked up at her mother. “Do you know what it is?”

Her mother was wiping up the last of the vomit from the raw floorboards, lips compressed, a pair of vertical lines visible between her soft brows.

“There’s a limit to what I can say for certain, lacking an EKG,” Claire said, eyes on the cloth she was using. “But speaking very generally—it sounds as though you’re exhibiting something called atrial fibrillation. It’s not life threatening,” she added quickly, looking up and seeing the alarm on Bree’s face.

Her heart had given a sort of flopping leap at her mother’s words, and was beating now in what seemed a tentative fashion. Her knees were quivering and she sat down, quite suddenly. Her mother dropped the cloth, got down beside her, and pulled her close. Her face was half buried in her mother’s coarse gray apron, smelling of grease and rosemary, soft soap and cider. The smell of the cloth, of Mama’s body, brought helpless tears to her eyes. Maybe it wasn’t life threatening, but she could tell that it wasn’t nothing, either.

“It’s going to be all right,” her mother whispered into her hair. “It’ll be all right, baby.”

She was clutching her mother’s arm, hard, the slender bone a life raft.

“If—if anything happens—you’ll take care of the kids for me.” It wasn’t a question and her mother didn’t take it as one.

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation, and the quivering sensation eased in Bree’s chest. She was breathing hard, but there didn’t seem room for enough air.

“Okay,” she said. She could feel her fingers trembling on her mother’s arm, and with an effort let go. “Okay,” she said again, and sitting up straight, pushed her hair out of her face. “Okay. Now what?”

LUB-DUB, LUB-DUB…
THE
meaty sounds of a healthy heart were clear through my wooden Pinard stethoscope. Beating a little faster than normal—and no wonder—but healthy. I straightened up and Bree instantly clutched the neck of her blouse closed, her face tense.

“Your heart sounds perfect, darling,” I said. “I’m sure that it’s a bit of atrial fibrillation, but that’s just a matter of stray electrical impulses. You aren’t going to have a heart attack or anything of that sort.”

The tension in her face eased, and my own heart clenched a little.

“Well, thank God for that.” A thick lock of hair had come loose from its ribbon, and I saw that her hand was trembling as she brushed it back from her face. “But it—is it going to keep happening?”

“I don’t know.” Aside from bad news, “I don’t know” is the worst thing a doctor can say to a patient, but it’s unfortunately the most usual thing, too. I took a deep breath and turned to my medicine shelves.

“Oh, God,” Bree said, the genuine apprehension in her voice tinged with reluctant amusement. “You’re getting out more whisky. It must be serious.”

“Well, if you don’t want any, I do,” I said. I’d chosen the good stuff, the Jamie Fraser Special, rather than the strictly medicinal whisky I gave the patients, and the scent of it rose warm and lively, displacing the smells of turpentine, scorched metal, and pollen-laced dust.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I do.” She took the tin cup and inhaled the comforting fumes, her eyes closing involuntarily and her face relaxing.

“So,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “What
do
you know?”

I rolled my own whisky slowly round my tongue, then swallowed, too.

“Well, as I said, atrial fibrillation is a matter of irregular electrical impulses. Your heart muscle is sound, but it’s—once in a while—getting its signals crossed, so to speak. Normally, all the muscle fibers in your atria contract at once; when they don’t get a synchronized message from the electrical node in your heart that supplies them, they contract more or less at random.”

Brianna swallowed another sip, nodding.

“That’s pretty much what it feels like, all right. But you said it’s not dangerous? It’s freaking scary.”

I hesitated, a fraction of a second too long. No one but Jamie was more sensitive to the transparency of my face, and I saw the alarm rise again at the back of her eyes.

“It’s not
very
dangerous,” I said hastily. “And you’re young and very fit; it’s much less likely.”

“
What’s
less likely?” She put down the cup, agitated, and glanced involuntarily up at the ceiling; Mandy was back in the children’s room just overhead, loudly singing “Frère Jacques” to her doll Esmeralda.

“Well…stroke. If the atria don’t contract properly for too long—they’re meant to squeeze blood down into the ventricles; the right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs, the left to the rest of the body—” Seeing her ruddy brows draw together, I cut to the chase. “Blood can pool in the atria long enough that it forms a clot. And if so, it might dissolve before it gets out into the body, but if not…”

“Curtains?” She took a much bigger gulp of her drink. She’d been pale as a fish belly after the attack, and looked much the same way now. “Or just being disabled, so I drool and can’t talk and people have to feed me and drag me around and wipe my butt?”

“It’s not likely to happen,” I said, as reassuringly as possible, which under the circumstances was not all that reassuring. I could visualize the hideous possible outcomes as well as she was obviously doing. Somewhat better, in fact, as I’d actually seen a good many people suffering the aftereffects of stroke, including death. I had a momentary absurd impulse to tell her a fascinating fact about men who die of stroke, but this wasn’t the time.

“So what can you do about it?” she asked, straightening up and firming her lips. I saw her eyes turn toward the bulk of the new
Merck Manual,
and I handed it to her.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Have a look.” I wasn’t hopeful, given what atrial fibrillation actually was—an intermittent derangement of the heart’s electrical system.

“I mean,” I said, watching her thumb through the book, brows furrowed, “you can stop a severe attack—one that goes on for days—”

“For
days
?” she blurted, looking up wide-eyed. I patted the air.

“You don’t have that sort of fibrillation,” I assured her.
Mind, you can always develop it…
“You just have the minor, paroxysmal kind that comes and goes and may just disappear altogether one day.”
And God, please, please let it do just that…

“But for a severe attack, the normal treatment in the 1960s was to administer an electric shock to the heart with paddles applied to the chest. That makes the fibrillating stop and the heart start working normally again.”
Most of the time…

“Which we plainly can’t do here,” Bree said, looking round the surgery as though estimating its resources.

“No. But I repeat—
you don’t have anything as severe as that.
You won’t need it.” My mouth had dried at the remembered visions of cardioversion. Even when it worked, I’d seen a patient shocked repeatedly, the poor body seized by electricity and jerked high into the air, to fall back limp and tortured onto the table, only to face another round when the EKG pen fluttered like a seismograph. I gulped the rest of my whisky, coughed, and set down the cup.

“Does it say anything helpful?”

“No,” she said, closing the book. Her tone was deliberately casual, but I could see clearly how shaken she was. “It’s just the same as you said—administration of electric shock. I mean—they
do
have a medicine that they say works sometimes on some patients, but I’m sure that isn’t anything we can manage here, either. Digitalis?”

I shook my head. Penicillin was one thing—and even that was by no means dependable; I still had no way of producing a standard dosage, or of telling whether a given batch of the stuff was even potent.

“No,” I said regretfully. “I mean—you
can
extract digitalin from foxglove leaves, and people do. But it’s dreadfully dangerous, because you can’t predict the dosage, and even a bit too much will kill you. And we do have a few things to hand.” I tried to sound brightly helpful. “We’ll make sure to keep a good stock of the white willow tea on hand—it’s the most powerful.” White willow didn’t grow in North Carolina but was reasonably available from city apothecaries, and I had a good stock that Jamie had brought me from Salisbury.

“Tea?” she asked skeptically.

“As a matter of fact, the active principle in willow-bark tea is exactly the same chemical that you find in aspirin. And while people mostly use it for pain relief, it has the interesting side effect of thinning the blood.”