Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

“It is true,” Dr. Petrie said. On the lake a group of gulls drifted quietly toward the grass at the foot of the park. “How many times did you insist on telling me exactly how you feel about her? And the patients who attended the Wednesday sessions know how you feel, as well — did you think they didn’t notice? They talk about everything.”

A faint noise, which might have been a groan, emerged from the umbrella.

“And now,” Dr. Petrie continued — here he took a huge, intuitive leap at which he would later marvel—“now that we know what she took before she left…”

The umbrella rose, sending all the gulls into the air as Miles’s head swiveled toward Dr. Petrie. “What do you know about that?”

Fascinated, Dr. Petrie continued to press at the same spot. “Certain things are missing from the X-ray laboratory. From other places too. I’m sure the members of your organization would find that interesting, given the access Naomi had to your room and your papers.”

Miles furled his umbrella and stood up. Instantly the rain began to dampen his hair, so that it flattened against his skull. “You would blackmail me?”

“A request, let’s say. Leave Leo alone. You know he didn’t do anything.”

“Why go to such extremes to protect him, if he’s not guilty?”

Dr. Petrie rose, folding the oilcloth twice along its length before rolling it into a tidy cylinder. “Because someone,” he said, “has to put a stop to this.”

NONE OF US, including Leo, learned of that discussion until much later. In the infirmary Leo had been dreading the arrival of Miles every day since the restriction on visitors was lifted, but no one came except Eudora. That Thursday, Dr. Petrie completed his examination of Leo’s chest, pronounced him much improved, and then said, offhandedly, that he could return to his room tomorrow, and that Miles had finished his investigation and withdrawn his accusations.

“Has he figured out what started the fire, then?”

“Not that I know of,” Dr. Petrie said. “I still think Irene’s idea — that a piece of equipment shorted out down there — seems most likely.”

“I do, too,” Leo said, even as the image of the missing pencil flashed before him. For the first time he began to think seriously about how it might have disappeared, and if it might have been involved in the fire. Even to Dr. Petrie, though, he couldn’t suggest this. Instead, keeping the focus of their conversation on Miles, he said, “Maybe he just needed some time to reconsider.”

He coughed twice and sipped at the glass of water near his bed, anticipating his release. His own room, at last. His old routines, however those might have been changed by the fire. He hadn’t seen the new dining room, the sealed-off central building, the curving dirt path hastily cut to provide a detour between the single, combined dormitory wing and the wing where he lay now. He imagined our days were essentially the same, except that our quarters were slightly more crowded.

“Maybe that helped,” Dr. Petrie said, fiddling with his stethoscope. “And also Irene wrote a very kind letter on your behalf.”

He said nothing about his own intervention, summarizing, instead, what Irene had written. Leo listened, amazed. Once, perhaps, one of his teachers might have done such a thing for him, or the Odessa merchant who’d sent him to school. But no one since. That Irene, still almost a stranger, could be so kind, and that her kindness could defuse Miles’s heated accusations, made him think that perhaps he hadn’t made such a bad decision seven years ago, when he’d crossed the ocean to come here.

That Friday, when he left the infirmary, his cough was gone, his fever was down, and Miles was nowhere in sight. Making his way through the corridors of the women’s annex and then across the new dirt path — the central building looked terrible, he noted, and the garden was trampled — he felt almost hopeful despite the humming he’d heard from the porches. The covered walkway leading to the men’s annex looked as it always had, and so did the stairs and the second-floor corridor. He stood before the door to his old room, delaying for a moment the pleasure of returning to the place he’d known before the fire, which he’d been used to thinking of as home. The instant he crossed the threshold, he saw that it now belonged to Arkady, Otto, and Abe.

Politely, as they might have received a guest, they made room for him. His bed was perfectly made; the clothes in his locker neatly arranged. His precious books had vanished from his bedside table, which was clean. Every other surface was covered with his roommates’ belongings, as every molecule of air seemed saturated with their smells and sounds. They were patient with him, courteous, but even on the first night he sensed that they made only small talk in his presence, saving any real conversation for the times when they were alone.

At his first breakfast in the new dining room, he felt the same thing on a larger scale. Not since the night of the fire had he eaten with all of us; we might have applauded when he came in, we might have roared our approval or at least stopped what we were doing to welcome him. Instead, we carried on as if we’d never missed him. He waved across the cramped space at Kathleen, who looked remarkably well; smiled at Vivian, now walking with crutches; wedged himself into one of the tightly spaced chairs. Over our dishes of oatmeal with dried fruit and heavy cream, of eggs scrambled and heaped on toast, we nodded as he passed, said hello when he greeted us, asked politely after his health. But nothing more. No one, not even Kathleen, whose life he’d saved, came over, wrapped an arm around his shoulder, and said, “We know you haven’t done anything.” No one mocked Miles, his agents, or his league, as we would have done — had done — until the moment we’d learned about the box and what was in it.

It was no surprise that Miles remained suspicious of Leo even after he dropped the investigation. The surprise was that we remained suspicious too. After Dr. Petrie released Leo, he’d finally let some of us know the contents of Irene’s letter; from that we knew that Leo couldn’t have started the fire directly. Still, the letter didn’t make us forget the horrors of that night, or bring Edith and Morris and Denis back from the clearing. The letter didn’t restore our lives as we had known them, which had been far from perfect but which were at least ours. Everything familiar had vanished in the fire, which had laid bare the real nature of our confinement and still seemed related to Leo. In his secrecy, in the way he’d been so absorbed in his studies, in the way he’d stopped confiding in any of us after Ephraim left, we couldn’t help feeling that he was guilty of something.

Dinner that day was the same, and so was supper. When Leo walked into the library, five or six of us were there; fifteen minutes later he was alone and he knew this was no accident. That night, when he went out to the porch and found his chair squeezed between Arkady’s and Sean’s, the partitions torn down and the line of bodies, stretching in both directions to the ends of the annex, so tightly formed that we looked ready to leap the railing together at the sound of a whistle, he was startled to hear himself apologize as he wedged himself into position. By nine o’clock he began to hear the humming sound, first from the porch above and the one below, finally spreading to the far ends of his own rank. Once in a while, he caught the sound of his own name.

AFTER HIS MEETING with Dr. Petrie, Miles had skipped dinner and spent a long night out on his porch, inspecting the wreckage of the plans he’d made a year ago. Bad enough that everything he’d hoped to do at Tamarack State had been destroyed by the fire and by Leo. But that his crucial war work was threatened and his feelings for Naomi cast into doubt made him so angry he thought his heart might burst. This from Dr. Petrie, whom he’d once counted as a friend. A little, little man after all, as small in spirit as he was in stature, who’d used Miles’s feelings against him and twisted what Miles knew was a generous impulse toward a troubled young woman until it seemed like a weakness.