M. Wren - A Gift Upon the Shore

Laudanum. Something to ease Rachel’s pain.

Another bag was filled with strips of cloth for bandages, another with dried apple slices, another with a plucked and dismembered chicken, and the last with barley. And the leather cosmetic case—Mary had brought it with her to the Ark. She opened it, found her brush and comb, toothbrushes, soap, cuticle scissors, a jar of aloe and oil.

Finally there was Rachel’s sketchbook. The paper for the admonitory identifications had come from the back of it, but Bernadette had been careful to tear out a blank page.

And it had to be Bernadette who had come in the night with this gift. Who else would have access to the medicines? Who else could get Mary’s cosmetic case and the sketchbook from the household? Who else would leave the Ark at night, fearlessly traveling by moonlight a road as familiar to her as the forests around it, knowing exactly where Mary would go to camp because there was no better place nearer?

“Mary, please— who is Bernadette?”

Mary didn’t realize she’d been speaking aloud. She took the bottle to Rachel. “Bernadette lives in our household. Look at this, Rachel. Laudanum. Now you can get some rest from the pain. And she brought herbal medicines—she’s a nurse at the Ark—and bandages and a chicken and…” She couldn’t stop laughing, and she didn’t try, because Rachel was laughing with her, and there was hope in it.

The laughter died finally, and there were things to do—the first was giving Rachel a dose of laudanum—and nothing could dim the revived hope that was Bernadette’s real gift. Even when Mary removed the bandages from Rachel’s leg, the wound didn’t seem to look as bad as it had yesterday evening. At least, she told herself, it looked no worse. She didn’t bandage the wound, but cleaned it, applied some of the yellow ointment, and left it open to the air. She constructed a gauze tent with supports of sticks bound by tape, and placed it over the leg. Then she heated the leftover rabbit meat. Rachel ate only a cupful of broth, but she found Bernadette’s herb teas easier to get down.

Despite her lack of appetite, despite her fever, Rachel seemed encouraged. She wanted to sit up, and Mary rolled the bearskin to put behind her against the trunk of the spruce, then helped her wash her face and brush her teeth, and combed and brushed her hair. Rachel spoke only occasionally, and sometimes she repeated the same question or forgot what Mary had said. She didn’t seem to understand why Mary was determined to find some sphagnum moss. But that mental vagueness, Mary was sure, could be attributed to the laudanum.

Mary judged from the position of the sun that the morning was nearly half-gone when she was finally ready to leave in search of sphagnum. The fire was newly replenished, and she had tethered Epona on the bank of the creek where there was plenty of grass. Rachel lay quiet, and beside her, within easy reach, were a canteen, a cup, and the laudanum. Yorick refused to leave her.

Mary knelt at her side. “I won’t be gone long.”

Rachel’s eyes were heavy-lidded, but she brought forth a smile. “I’ll be fine. Good luck.” And her eyes closed.

Mary set off at a brisk walk, but before she had covered more than fifty feet, she stopped abruptly. She looked back at the camp, saw Rachel propped against the spruce, motionless. Mary felt a chill she couldn’t explain, but she shrugged it off. Rachel was only asleep. She needed that healing sleep.

Rachel was going to be all right, she was going to live.

Mary smiled in the warmth of that conviction and walked along the creek until it disappeared in an echoing culvert under the highway. She crossed the eroded asphalt, then again followed the creek into the forest. In places, salal and elderberry grew so thick she couldn’t push through them, and she had to make her way upstream on the rocks in the creek. But within a quarter of a mile the forest canopy thickened, the undergrowth thinned, and she was deep in cool, green rain forest. She angled away from the creek, but didn’t stray so far from it that she couldn’t hear it. In this forest it would be all too easy to get lost.

She was traversing a slope luxuriant with sword fern, when her foot caught in a hidden snare of roots. With a startled cry, she fought for balance, lost it, plunged into ferns over her head, and tumbled down the slope, futilely grasping fronds that ripped out of the soft ground.

Her descent ended as suddenly as it had begun, and she lay dazed in a tangled mass of crushed fern, nostrils filled with the heavy, dank scent of the earth.

And she was looking into the face of death.

A deer’s skull. It lay shrouded in broken fern only inches from her head. A pale spider crawled out from between the crenellated teeth. The bone was gray and rotten, stained with green moss, yet there was in the exquisite curves of its empty eye sockets a ghost of sentience that terrified her, and she didn’t understand the terror, didn’t understand the shivering of her muscles as she recoiled from that relic of life, didn’t understand why she was sobbing uncontrollably. On her hands and knees, she backed away from the skull, staggered to her feet, stumbled toward the sound of the creek, and when she reached its bank, looked up at the sky through dusky plumes of fir and spruce, and a cry of anguish tore out of her throat.

But sky and trees absorbed the sound, made silence of it. She felt the burning in her throat, felt the reverberations in her head, but the sound didn’t seem to exist here.

She didn’t seem to exist here.

Hold on. Damn it, hold on. You can’t let go now .

She sank down on a boulder warmed by the sun, sagged forward across her folded arms. She felt no physical pain, except for the aches that would turn to bruises later, but she couldn’t stop trembling. She might have hurt her baby, she might have disabled herself, and what would happen to Rachel then?

Hold on ….

She took deep breaths and let them out slowly, and finally she felt the mantle of numbness, dark and weighted, settle into place again.

Yet she had lost something in that spasm of panic. She wasn’t sure what it was until she remembered her mission here: sphagnum moss. Until she thought, It won’t help .

What she had lost was hope.

Or perhaps she had only lost the illusion of hope.

“No! Rachel will not die !”

She listened to the words, teeth clenched, then rose and set off into the forest again. Sphagnum moss. She found it growing on the flank of a nurse log in a silent glade that reminded her of the forest around the tree at Amarna. She cut enough to fill one of the cloth bags, and on the way back downstream, she gathered fern fiddleheads for the chicken stew. Barley to give it substance, and fiddleheads—added at the last moment—for their piquant flavor and color.

She held on doggedly to the remnants of hope.

But when she reached the camp, even those eroded remnants began to slip out of her hands.

She heard Yorick’s whining bark as soon as she crossed the highway. Heart pounding, Mary ran to Rachel, found her uncovered, sprawled with one arm over her face, the gauze tent knocked aside. She had vomited into the litter of needles by the sleeping bag. Mary knelt beside her, pulled her arm away from her face. She was weeping, tears glistening in the dry furrows of her skin. She said in a panting whisper, “Mary, don’t let me die alone… stay with me….”

Mary gathered her into her arms, felt the shuddering tremors of her body, felt her cheek hot against her own, and it was a long time before the trembling abated, until finally, with a sigh, Rachel relaxed, and Mary eased her down, looked into her dark, sunken eyes, and still could find no words. Rachel touched Mary’s cheek with fingers as tremulous as butterflies. “I’m all right now. Must’ve been a nightmare.”