Justin Cronin - The Passage

Take care of your brother, Theo .

– Mama, he said. I’m Peter.

He’s not strong, like you .

He was jarred by voices outside and the clatter of the opening door. Sara strode into the ward, the lantern swinging from her hand.

“Peter? Is everything okay?”

He blinked into the sudden blaze. It took him a moment to reassemble his sense of where he was. He had slept only a minute, and yet it felt like longer. Already the memory, and the dream it had produced, were gone.

“I was just… I don’t know.” Why was he apologizing? “I think I must have dozed off.”

Sara was busying herself with the lantern, moving a wheeled tray to the side of the cot, where the girl was sitting up, an alert and watchful expression on her face.

“How’d you talk Dale into letting you in?”

“Oh, Dale’s all right.”

Sara sat on the girl’s cot and opened her kit to reveal what she’d brought: flatbread, an apple, a wedge of cheese.

“Hungry?”

The girl ate quickly, polishing off her meal with darting bites: first the bread and then the cheese, which she sniffed suspiciously before tasting, and finally the apple, right down to the core. When it was gone she wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing juice over her cheeks.

“Well, I guess that settles it,” Sara declared. “Not the best table manners I’ve ever seen, but your appetite is normal enough. I’m going to check your dressing, okay?”

Sara untied the gown, drawing it aside to expose the girl’s bandaged shoulder while leaving the rest covered. With a pair of shears, she snipped the cloth away. Where the bolt had entered, tearing skin and muscle and bone, all that remained was a small pink depression. It reminded Peter of a baby’s flesh, that soft freshness of new skin.

“All my patients should heal so fast. No point in leaving those stitches in, I guess. Turn around so I can do the back.”

The girl complied, swiveling on the cot; Sara took up a pair of tweezers and began pulling the sutures from the exit wound, dropping them one by one into a metal basin.

“Does anybody else know about this?” Peter asked.

“About the way she heals? I don’t think so.”

“So nobody else has been in to see her since this afternoon.”

She clipped off the final stitch. “Just Jimmy.” She pulled the girl’s gown back over her shoulder. “There you go, all set.”

“Jimmy? What did he want?”

“I don’t know, I assume Sanjay sent him.” Sara shifted on the cot to look at Peter. “It was kind of strange, actually. I never heard him come in, I just looked up and there he was, standing in the doorway with this… look on his face.”

“A look?”

“I don’t know how else to describe it. I told him she hadn’t said anything, and then he left. But that was hours ago.”

Peter felt suddenly rattled. What did she mean by a look? What had Jimmy seen?

Sara took up her tweezers again. “Okay, your turn.”

Peter was about to say, My turn for what? But then he remembered: his elbow. The bandage had long since worn down to a filthy rag. He guessed the cut was healed by now; he hadn’t looked at it for days.

He sat on one of the empty cots. Sara took a place beside him and unwrapped the bandage, releasing a sour odor of stale skin.

“Did you bother keeping this thing clean at all?”

“I guess I forgot.”

She took hold of the arm, bending closely with the tweezers. Peter was aware of the girl’s eyes, intently watching them.

“Any news from Michael?” He felt a jab of pain as she tugged the first suture. “Ow, be careful.”

“It would help if you held still.” Sara repositioned his arm, not looking at him, and resumed her work. “I stopped by the Lighthouse on the way back from the house. He’s still working. Elton’s helping him.”

“Elton? Is that so smart?”

“Don’t worry, we can trust him.” Her eyes flicked upward with a troubled glance. “Funny how we’re all talking like that, all of a sudden. Who can trust who.” She gave his arm a pat. “There, move it around a little.”

Balling his hand into a fist, he pumped his arm back and forth. “Good as new.”

Sara had stepped to the pump to clean her tools. She turned and faced him, drying her hands on a rag.

“Honestly, Peter. Sometimes I worry about you.”

He realized that he was still holding his arm away from his body. He awkwardly dropped it to his side. “I’m fine.”

She raised her eyebrows doubtfully but said nothing. That one night after the music, Arlo and his guitar and everybody drinking shine; something had come over him, a sudden, almost physical loneliness, but then, the moment he kissed her, a puncturing jab of guilt. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, nor that she had failed to make her interest less than plain. Alicia was right, what she’d said on the roof of the power station. Sara was the obvious choice for him. But he couldn’t will himself to feel something he didn’t. There was a part of him that simply didn’t feel alive enough to deserve her, to offer in kind what she was offering him.

“As long as you’re here,” Sara said, “I’m going to go look in on Hightop. Make sure somebody remembered to feed him.”

“What do you hear?”

“I’ve been inside all day. You probably know more than I do.” When Peter said nothing, Sara shrugged. “I expect people are divided. There’s going to be a lot of anger about last night. The best thing would be for a little time to pass.”

“Sanjay better think twice about doing anything with him. Lish will never stand for it.”

Sara seemed to stiffen. She drew her kit from the floor and hung it on her shoulder again, not looking at him.

“What did I say?”

But she shook her head. “Forget it, Peter. Lish is not my problem.”

Then she was gone, the curtain shifting with her departure. Well, Peter thought, what to make of that? It was true that Alicia and Sara couldn’t have been two more different women, and nothing said they had to get along. Maybe it was simply the case that Sara blamed Alicia for Teacher’s death, which would hit Sara harder than most. It was sort of obvious, now that Peter considered it. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

The girl was looking at him again. She gave a quizzical lift of her eyebrows: What’s wrong?

“She’s just upset is all,” he said. “Worried.”

He thought it again: How strange it all was. It was as if he could hear her words in his head. Anybody who saw him talking like this would think he’d lost his mind.

Then the girl did something he hadn’t expected at all. Aroused by some unknown purpose, she rose from her cot and moved to the sink. She primed the pump, three hard pushes, and filled a basin with water. This she carried back to the cot where Peter sat. She placed it on the dusty floor at his feet and took a cloth from the cart and sat beside him, bending at the waist to dip the rag in the water. Then she took his arm in her hand and began to dab the place where the sutures had been with the moistened cloth.

He could feel her breath on him, breezing over his damp flesh. She had unfolded the cloth against her open hand to increase the surface area. Her gesture was more thorough now, not a cautious dabbing but a smooth, even stroking motion, rubbing the dirt and desiccated skin away. An ordinary kindness, to wash his skin, and yet completely surprising: it was full of sensation, of memory. His senses seemed to have gathered around it, the feel of the washcloth on his arm, her breath on his skin, like moths around a flame. As if he were a boy again, a boy who had fallen and scraped his elbow and run inside, and she was washing him clean.