Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

Charlotte looked down at her face-a beautiful face that reminded her of nineteenth-century portraits she'd seen hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. The features were delicate and refined, the eyebrows thin and arched, but the overall effect was oddly ethereal and unreal, as if she was in fact looking at a portrait, or a lovingly created waxwork. Something that wasn't quite real.

Focus, Charlotte thought. Just focus on doing your job. Don't get distracted by all the other stuff you can't make sense of yet. It was a lesson she'd learned, over and over again, in the ER.

“Eleanor,” she said, leaning close, “can you hear me?”

The eyelids fluttered.

“I'm Dr. Barnes. Charlotte Barnes.” She glanced over at Michael. “She speaks English?”

Michael nodded vigorously. “She is English.”

Charlotte took a second to absorb this, too. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

Eleanor's head turned slightly on the headrest, and her eyes opened. She looked up at Charlotte with a confused expression, her gaze fluttering to the reindeer prancing across the sweater, then back to her broad face.

“That's good,” Charlotte said, encouragingly. “That's very good.” She patted Eleanor on the back of her hand. But if she isn't the woman from the ice, if she isn't Sleeping Beauty, who else could she be? And how else could she have gotten here-to the South Pole? Charlotte chased the thoughts away. Focus. “We're going to get your body temperature up, and you'll be feeling a whole lot better in no time.”

Charlotte used her stethoscope to listen to her heart and lungs. The woman's dress, done in a Victorian style, gave off a briny, icy odor. Almost as if she's been underwater. Charlotte asked Michael to go to the commons and get “something nice and hot, maybe hot chocolate,” while she completed the cursory examination. She proceeded with caution, so as not to do anything that might shock a patient with an antique sensibility. Whoever she really was, and wherever she'd come from, she obviously lived, even if it was only in her own head, in another century. Charlotte had once seen a patient who thought he was the Pope, and she had always been careful to address him as Your Holiness. As might have been expected, Eleanor appeared mystified by the blood-pressure cuff, and the pen-light, used to peer into her eyes, also occasioned astonishment. The whole time, she was watching Charlotte with a gradually increasing awareness, shaded with perplexity. What, Charlotte wondered, would she be making of her-a big, black woman in a boldly patterned sweater, purple pants, and braided, streaked hair piled up in a messy knot on top of her head?

“You are… a nurse?” she finally whispered.

Oh well, it could have been worse, Charlotte thought. “No, I'm a doctor.” She did have an English accent.

“I too am a nurse,” she said, one pale hand lifting toward her bosom.

“Is that right?” Charlotte said, glad to hear her talking, as she readied a syringe for a blood sample.

“With Miss Nightingale.”

“How about that?” Charlotte said, before the words had really sunk in. Eleanor had said them as if she hoped they might make an impression. And of course they did. Holding the needle up to the light, Charlotte paused and said, “Wait-as in what? Are you talking about Florence Nightingale?”

“Yes,” Eleanor replied, apparently happy to hear that this name was still familiar. “In the Harley Street Hospital… and then the Crimea.”

Florence Nightingale? The lady with the lamp? From… when? History had never been Charlotte's favorite subject. It had to have been, what, a couple of hundred years ago? More or less?

Concentrate, Charlotte reminded herself yet again. Concentrate. And don't do anything to alarm the patient, or-in a case like hers-upset a belief system that might be crucial to her mental stability.

“Well, then, Miss Ames, you've come one very long way to get to a place like this.” Charlotte rolled up a sleeve of the dress-the fabric was coarse and stiff, and felt like a stage costume. “Even today, it's not easy getting here.” She swabbed a spot with alcohol. “Now you just hold real still-you're going to feel a little prick-and it'll be over in a few seconds.”

Eleanor's eyes went down to the needle and watched the blood being drawn, as if she had never seen the procedure before. Had she, Charlotte wondered? Could she have? Out of curiosity alone, Charlotte planned to look up Florence Nightingale as soon as the exam was over. Purely, she told herself, for academic reasons.

Just as she was removing the needle, Michael came in, carrying a tray on which he'd placed not only a cup of cocoa, but a blueberry muffin and some scrambled eggs under tight plastic wrap. While he looked for a place to put it down, Charlotte opened the minifridge, where the perishable meds and the red plasma bags were kept, and deposited the blood sample inside for safekeeping. Eleanor, she noticed, was still following her every move. For someone who claimed to be well into her hundreds, she was certainly looking more alive by the minute.

But frozen, in an iceberg, for centuries? Hard as that was for Charlotte to believe, there was only one thing even harder-and that was coming up with some other explanation-any explanation-for who she was or how she came to Point Adelie, one of the most remote and inaccessible spots on the face of the earth.

“Are you hungry?” Michael said, finally finding a place for the food on a standing instrument tray. He rolled it over toward the examining table, and asked, “Can you sit up?”

With Charlotte's help, he was able to put his arm around Eleanor's frail shoulders and lift her into a sitting position, her back cushioned by the pillows. She regarded the food with a kind of polite disinterest, as if it were something she had seen once before but couldn't quite place.

“Try the cocoa,” he said. “It's hot.”

As she lifted the mug to her pale lips, Michael said to Charlotte, “Murphy's outside-he wants to talk to you.”

“Good, ‘cause I'd like to talk to him, too.”

Charlotte took her clipboard, on which she'd been recording the results of the exam, and left the mysterious Eleanor Ames to Michael. Truth be told, she was glad to leave. She'd been feeling a chill ever since entering the infirmary and she didn't think it was just a reaction to the patient's cold, clammy skin or her frosty clothes. It was as if, for all her years of training, she'd finally been presented with something utterly beyond her experience and beyond her scope.

Apart from the wind whistling outside the window, it was silent in the infirmary. Eleanor took the mug away-a bit of white foam still on her lips-and with her eyes still downcast, said to Michael, “I'm sorry if I hurt you in the church.”

He smiled. “I've taken worse hits.”

When he and that other man-Lawson? — had tried to escort her out of the little back room, she had refused to go, and even remembered pummeling Michael on his chest and arms with a flurry of blows that wouldn't have injured a sparrow. A second later, after having expended her last ounce of strength in the attack, she had crumpled to the floor, weeping. Michael and Lawson had carried her, protesting but unable to offer further resistance, outside, and placed her on the seat of Michael's machine. Then they had set off back toward the camp with the storm coming on fast.

“I know that you were only trying to help.”

“That's all I'm still trying to do.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly and lifted her eyes to meet his. How could he ever know, or even imagine, what she had been through? She broke off a piece of the muffin, then glanced around the room.

“Where am I?”

“The infirmary. At the American research station I told you about.”