Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

He forced himself to take a breath. Perhaps this wouldn’t be as easy as he’d thought? He didn’t remember the language being so thorny but perhaps this was the result of the translation. He took another breath and dove in again.

On the other side of the divider Abe and Arkady were arguing, fiercely but amiably, and in very low voices — we were not supposed to talk during this time, we were supposed to rest completely — about Chernyshevsky, who Arkady felt had been crucial in shaping revolutionary thought but who Abe thought was a fool. Sean and Otto, a few spaces down, had both dropped into a heavy sleep, which meant they’d be up and tossing restlessly all through the night, while over in the other wing Lydia was staring at a magazine, fiercely scanning a column listing new inventions — cotter pins, a peanut stemmer, a device for rolling and finishing shrapnel bars — and considering how to patent her own. Elsewhere on the women’s porches, Sadie, Olga, Karin, and Pearl were whispering about their cousins or the men they hoped might become cousins, gazing at advertisements for lipsticks, reading with despair a child’s misspelled note from home, watching the sliver of moon creep up on the edge of a cloud, disappear, and slowly reemerge. The stars swung slowly and in the woods an animal shrieked. Irene, alone in the basement, looked up from her desk.

If only, she thought, the moment when her two visitors had surprised each other had been more illuminating. Between the chemistry text, which distracted Leo, and her own squeal of pain, the pair had hardly interacted and she couldn’t be sure what she’d seen. She might have asked Leo directly how he felt about Eudora, or at least asked Eudora more about Leo, but she hadn’t had the nerve. Leo’s gaze, she’d wanted to tell Eudora, might change her whole life, and pretending not to see it wouldn’t help. The thing was to acknowledge it; to see what it meant and decide what she wanted. Yet instead of finding out what was going on between these two, she’d been diverted by Leo’s responses. He’d once known, she now understood, at least as much chemistry and physics as she did herself; all these months she might have been training him as well as Eudora. Stupid, she thought, not to have seen that.

IRENE ALSO DIDN’T see — neither did we, but how could we? — how quickly one of our essential souls might disappear. On the Tuesday after Leo first visited Irene’s lab, Ephraim got a frantic message from his wife. Gemma, his youngest daughter, had something that might be meningitis, a piercing endless headache and a fever that wouldn’t come down, and although two doctors had seen her and everyone in the community at Ovid was trying to help, she was in grave danger and calling out for her father. I do not want to disturb you when you are yourself so sick, Rosa said. But…

The thought of Gemma crying for him — Gemma, who when he left home for Tamarack State had been too young to speak — made Ephraim’s hands curl as if he might still cup her head. Nothing our director, Dr. Richards, said could keep him from leaving. Nor could Dr. Petrie, to whom Ephraim had, otherwise, always listened, convince him to stay, not even when he pointed to his temperature charts for the last three months, his last radiograph, the results of his last sputum count. “You have a new spot, an active one, in your left lung,” Dr. Petrie said. “It’s essential that you rest for some months. You put your own life at risk by leaving here. Not to mention your family.”

“I’ll sleep on my cousin’s porch,” Ephraim said. “I’ll take my meals separately. You’ve taught us plenty about how to quarantine ourselves.”

“That wasn’t so you could kill yourself,” Dr. Petrie said. “I could force you to stay, there are papers…”

Ephraim, who towered over Dr. Petrie, shook his head. “You wouldn’t.”

“I might, to keep you alive.”

We don’t know if it would have come to that; Ephraim arranged things otherwise. That night, after supper, he lay silently next to Leo on the porch until finally he slapped the arm of his cure chair and rose. “I can’t stay,” he said. “You have to help me.”

“Whatever you want,” Leo said. Lying so close to Ephraim’s chair, he’d felt the tension building in his friend. Rosa, Gemma, Rosa, Gemma . If he himself had someone he loved, a family and a home of his own, he too would go.

He followed Ephraim to the front of their room and held open the carpetbag that Ephraim took from his metal locker. Ephraim stuffed into it two shirts, a pair of pants, three books; because it was very cold that night — the rest of us, still on the porches, were complaining to each other — he was wearing almost everything else he owned.

“People on the outside are going to notice those,” Leo said, pointing at the pajama bottoms hanging below the hems of Ephraim’s thick wool pants.

Ephraim stripped, handed the bottoms to Leo, and put the pants back on. Leo added the pajamas to the carpetbag along with a knitted scarf of his own and then stood looking at his friend.

“You’ll leave tonight?”

“It’s the best thing,” Ephraim replied. “I’ll get a ride into the village with someone I know, then take the first train out from there. If I try to leave from here tomorrow, Dr. Petrie is going to stop me. It’s not his fault, he has to do it. But it’s not my fault I have to go.”

“It’s not,” Leo agreed. “But I worry about you. I have three dollars — would you take that?”

“Thank you,” Ephraim said. “You know I’d do the same for you. There’s one other thing, though.”

“Should I make up a story about where you’ve gone?”

“They’ll know,” Ephraim said. “But I don’t think they’ll bother to look for me once I’m safely off their hands. They just don’t want to be responsible for letting me leave.”

He reached into the locker again, pulling from behind some books the small metal box Leo had last seen when the young man had visited from Ovid. “Felix said a friend of his would come for this before summer. Could you keep it until he gets here?”

“Whatever you want. You don’t want to bring it home?”

“Better it should stay here,” Ephraim said. “This way I know that it will get to the right person.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Leo said, embracing his friend at the door. “You have no idea how much I’m going to miss you.”

“I have an exact idea,” Ephraim said, smiling wryly. “I wish I could say I’ll be back soon, but if all goes well I won’t.”

“She’ll get better,” Leo said, quickly stuffing the metal box into his own locker. In Odessa, in the months before he’d left, he’d known wild-eyed men with boxes hidden under their beds, boxes holding pistols, ammunition, knives, foreign currency, fevered tracts; he’d left in part to escape their frenzy and he resented Ephraim’s friend for bringing that shadow here. Still, of course, he would do what Ephraim asked. “You’ll get better, too,” he predicted. “I’ll come and see you in Ovid as soon as I’m discharged.”

Ephraim waved, scouted the corridor to make sure it was empty, and then without a word to the rest of us — not those who’d known him since the beginning, not those who, until Leo’s arrival, had thought of ourselves as his closest friends — he tiptoed along the corridor, down the stairs, and out the kitchen door.

AFTER EPHRAIM LEFT, the women among us began to play a larger role at the Wednesday sessions. All the first speakers had been men; to make up for that imbalance, a string of women — all of whom had been here longer than Leo, which meant deferring Leo’s talk yet again — now spoke as we began our new year. Sophie started, describing the settlement house she’d worked at before she became sick, and how she’d taught English and history to people like us at night. Pearl, who until her money ran out had been in a cure cottage not as fancy as Mrs. Martin’s house but still nice enough, and who’d had stretches when she was nearly well, then spoke about her weeks working as an extra on a movie shot here in the village, where the frozen rivers and the gray cloudy sky had stood in for the Klondike. After that, we had some discussions in the halls and over dinner about the direction of our talks.