Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

His topic had been the importance of following the rules of our sanatorium even more rigorously than usual: the harder we worked, the faster we’d heal. One of the most encouraging features of the war against tuberculosis is that it requires few new weapons or strange and complicated ammunition for the rank and file of the army, he said. Did we look like an army? Our weapons are food, fresh air, and sleep. If you do what you are told, and do it well, you will cut days from your cures. And each day cut saves vital funds for our effort overseas.

We could feel the knife. The harder Miles pushed, the further we pulled away from Leo — who from his place between the willow and the larches saw that he might have to leave. There was nothing here, there had never been anything here but our community, which the fire had destroyed. He hated the room he’d once shared with Ephraim; he hated his slot on the porch. He hated the chaotic new dining room where, although his tray clattered against our trays and his elbows banged ours at the crowded table, we talked across and around him. He had no friend and yet he was never alone. If he’d been alone, away from the whispers and night noises of Otto, Arkady, and Abe, he might have been able to sleep, which might have allowed him to think. He’d barely slept since moving back among us and now the whole place seemed to him diseased.

The warning bell for supper rang, six strokes thudding through the air. We turned at once, we turned as a group, and Leo saw how we’d file inside together, find our places together, whisper about him together in the few minutes it would take him to follow. When he walked through the dining room door alone we’d turn together to look at him, or together ignore him: unbearable, either way. He had to leave. He wouldn’t go back to the city, though; he’d never go to a city again. He wanted a place where no one resembled him, where no one spoke Russian or German, no one remembered crossing the ocean or slept six and eight to a room and pretended that was a reasonable way to live. He wanted fresh air, animals, open land; people one or two at a time but never in groups: Ephraim’s place in Ovid, near the Finger Lakes. Ephraim, his friend.

At the door to the dining room the roar of all of us talking at once rose like a concrete wall. He told the nurse on duty that he was feeling poorly and then turned and went to his room and fetched his bag. He wrote a quick note to Dr. Petrie, thanking him for his help. He wrote another to Irene, thanking her for the gift of the books and for her confidence in him; also for her letter, which he hadn’t seen. Then he wrote Eudora’s name on a third envelope, put Naomi’s letter inside it, and added a note of his own. I am leaving, he wrote. I am starting over; I don’t want to say where but I’m sure you know. My health is very much on the mend and that last incident meant nothing. I wish you would join me when you feel ready. I love you. Leo Marburg.

HE LEFT US with hardly more than what he’d brought to Tamarack State. That night, carrying one small bag with a change of clothes and the little box Eudora had given him, he caught a ride down the hill with Roger, our night watchman, who’d been called up and knew he’d be leaving soon. Sympathetic to anyone wanting to get away, Roger dropped Leo off at the lake. There Leo spent an hour on the bench where Miles and Dr. Petrie had talked. When dawn came he walked to the village station, which he hadn’t seen before. Red brick, a square tower capped with a skylight, a stone arch over the door rimmed with green tiles. In the stone were chiseled the words that would have greeted him had he arrived by choice, with money in his pocket, headed for a place like Mrs. Martin’s house: Welcome, Health-seekers! He took the first train headed south.

IF WE FELT ashamed of ourselves — Otto, Abe, and Arkady especially; if we worried about the ways we’d failed Leo, we were comforted by the way, almost immediately, the tension here eased. Still the Four-Minute Man came to lecture us; still Miles came several times each week to consult with Dr. Richards. But our routine settled down after Leo vanished, as if Miles wasn’t interested enough in the rest of us to continue constricting our lives. Curiosity about our own behavior would come to us later; what we had at first was a continued curiosity about the fire and its causes, and also about what had happened to Naomi. Any information, we knew, would come to us from Eudora — but Eudora, after Leo left, didn’t spend much time with us. She worked extra shifts, still; she performed her duties carefully and was always pleasant when cleaning our rooms. But she left as soon as her tasks were done, and although she never said anything about Leo’s sudden departure, we knew she judged us.

To Irene, her only real companion after Leo left, she admitted how angry she was with us (we expected that) and also, more surprisingly, how angry she was that Leo had bolted without talking to her. That he’d finally state his feelings not in person but in a note: how was she supposed to respond to that? Something delicate and interesting had arisen between them in the X-ray room, which was one of the reasons she’d agreed to meet him at movie night — and which, after all that had happened, still hung unresolved. A blunt line, at the end of a note, only served to hide everything worth talking about. And she was further distracted by his first paragraph, which explained how, after all this time, he’d finally received Naomi’s letter.

That letter itself she read with a terrible pang. Naomi’s feelings had developed in front of her as steadily and clearly as a photographic plate, but she’d acted as if, because Leo didn’t share them, they meant nothing. When she’d suggested that Naomi should let Leo know how she felt, she’d imagined a few words, perhaps a warm glance at the end of a Wednesday session — never a letter like that. But she also hadn’t imagined that Naomi would sneak into the movies on a night when she was driving Miles. All their walks and talks and bicycle rides, the confidences they’d exchanged, the times they’d skated on the frozen lake with their arms linked and the moon rising over the mountains, counted for nothing against the moment when Naomi had caught the look she and Leo exchanged. Naomi had left without a word, without even a hint. Now the letter made Eudora suspect she’d never hear from Naomi again.

When she did get news of Naomi, it came indirectly, in late September. In Irene’s tidy room, which Eudora visited each week and which was slowly filling with the books Dr. Petrie begged from friends to replace the collection destroyed in the basement, she flipped through a radiography manual. She glanced at a formula for mixing a developing solution — already, this was out of date — and then she told Irene that her brother Ernest had seen Naomi in New York.

Irene reached for her pad and pencil. Still, then, she hadn’t regained her voice. I didn’t know they were even friends, she wrote.

“I didn’t either, really,” Eudora said. “She used to see him at our house, but I never thought of them as close . Ernest wrote that she’d gotten in some trouble during her first few weeks in New York — I guess that’s where she went from here — and then she looked him up.”

She’s all right, then?

“So Ernest says.”

You must be relieved.

“Ernest didn’t know how she got to the city, or what she did when she first arrived. But he said she showed up at his room one night — he has a tiny place in an attic, near Central Park — and stayed for a couple of months. Then one day she told him she’d found work in Brooklyn, and the next day she left.”