Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

Irene, who still hadn’t admitted to Eudora, or to the rest of us, all that had happened between her and Naomi, wrote, What kind of work?

“As a trolley conductor,” Eudora answered, wondering why this would matter. “Maybe being so good with her mother’s car helped.” While Irene drew a jagged border in the margin of her writing pad, she added, “But the important thing is that she’s in one piece.”

Eudora had found a fresh glove for Irene after the fire, changed the cotton inside the fingers, later wrapped the ugly wound on her neck with a bright printed scarf. In all ways she’d been an excellent assistant and it would have been nice to spare her feelings. Still, Irene had to ask, Do you know why Naomi left?

“I’m not sure,” Eudora said.

Irene waited, her pencil motionless.

“She saw Leo and me together, at the movies,” Eudora admitted. When Irene nodded, Eudora continued, “She was upset. We were all upset. But it’s worse than I knew. She…” Eudora paused and looked out the window — it was lovely outside, the leaves just beginning to turn color on the trees near the pond and the swallows eagerly darting — before taking two folded sheets of paper from her pocket. “I’ve been wanting to show you these.”

Irene read Naomi’s letter, and then Leo’s. Then Naomi’s again. She wrote, What did she have that belonged to Leo? Leo’s name she underlined twice.

“She had a bag with her that night. I saw some drawings in it. Drawings of him.”

Irene nodded. She showed them to me as well.

“Did she?” Eudora asked. For a minute they looked at each other. “She might have meant those.”

She might, Irene wrote. She turned her gaze to the swallows while she decided what she’d keep to herself. Then she added, What will you do now?

WE WEREN’T SURPRISED to hear that Eudora had decided to leave us; with the X-ray laboratory destroyed and Irene unable to work, she didn’t have much reason to stay. Irene and Dr. Petrie helped her apply to a nurses’ training school in Jamestown, where she might get certified quickly as an aide. She planned to head overseas when she was done, with whatever organization would take her. Once she was in France she could find a place helping with a mobile X-ray unit or assisting a radiographer in a field station. At worst, she could work in a base hospital. Three months, she told Leo, when she’d forgiven him enough to write. I’ll let you know where I’m posted as soon as I hear.

From Miles, who caught her one afternoon on the lawn near the men’s annex, she hid both her own plans and Leo’s whereabouts. Nor did she tell him what she’d learned from her brother about Naomi. Behind his good manners was not, she thought, the meek creature Naomi had thought she could manipulate so casually. She avoided Miles when she could, now, and concealed anything important when she couldn’t.

“I suppose Leo’s gone to be with Naomi,” Miles said bitterly. The wind, blowing from the west, carried with it the smell of a thousand miles of pine. “They’re probably in the same place. What have you heard?”

“Not a thing.” She turned and headed toward the annex.

From right behind her, crowding her heels, he said, “Why do I ask you anything? You thought he was in love with you. ”

“I’ve been wrong about quite a few things,” she replied. Including, she thought, her own feelings for Leo. Packing up her few belongings, explaining to her distraught parents why she had to do this, her anger at Leo had faded. She liked Leo enormously, she realized. She longed to touch him, take care of him, sleep next to him — was that love? She couldn’t imagine joining him now, when she’d still accomplished nothing and been nowhere, but she could imagine returning to him.

WINTER SET IN not long after Eudora left, the coldest winter anyone could remember. The lakes surrounding us froze quickly, their surfaces so glossy that from our porches we could see them gleaming like mirrors between the hills and hear the runners’ whisk as the iceboats flew from shore to shore. In New York, the Hudson River locked up partway into the bay, allowing astonished men to walk from Staten Island to New Jersey but stopping all traffic between there and Albany. Families froze to death in tenements as wood and coal grew scarce. Men who’d been drafted in July and shipped to army camps thrown up from wood and canvas shivered next to each other on cots without blankets, trained without woolen socks or overcoats; whole regiments came down with pneumonia. There were investigations, hearings, newspaper articles condemning the ill treatment of our new soldiers. Once the revolutionary government in Russia signed an armistice with Germany, the war news became even worse, and that, in a way, was a blessing for us: suddenly no one had time for us anymore, and we were left alone.

In January one blizzard after another marched over us and then on to the East Coast cities. The wind blew, the snow fell. The snow fell and fell and fell and no one could get anywhere, but we didn’t care: we had nowhere to go. There were Bolsheviks in the Bronx, we heard; no longer admirable fighters for freedom and peace but traitors. We ignored the cold, we ignored the news. (Although we paused at that word “traitors”: was that what we were?) Clinging to what was left of our weekly gatherings, beginning at the same time to realize what we’d done, we went to work. No single person, we thought, had done anything so terrible. Yet together, without noticing exactly what was happening, we’d contributed to destroying our own world. We wanted to understand how we’d done that, or how we’d failed to prevent it.

Even as our time on the crowded porches grew more bitter, our hands stiffer, our faces more frozen, we continued to sift and sort our recollections. We’ve made more progress than we might have thought. By February, we’d looked at the various letters and at Dr. Petrie’s reports, and also at the drawings Eudora left with us, which deepened our sense of Naomi’s desperate attachment to Leo. We looked at the green volumes Irene tried to give to Leo, which Dr. Petrie retrieved and which taught us something about scientific proof. The last piece of the puzzle came from Irene herself, though, when she regained a whisper of her voice.

She’s completely one of us now that she can’t work, a patient again as she was in her youth. She was, as she’s admitted, unwilling at first to rejoin us, disappointed by our cowardice, our pettiness, the misplaced sense of clannishness that drove us to cling together and push Leo away. But eventually, she also began to remember some of what she’d seen in us during our Wednesday sessions. Our hopefulness, our eagerness to learn. Our belief that, sick and inadequate as we were, we might help each other. One night, finally — we had gathered in the kitchen, completely against the rules — she told us what she’d omitted from her letter to Dr. Richards and also withheld from Eudora.

On the Friday evening of the fire, she’d been sorting radiographs, looking for images that Dr. Petrie might find useful. Later she meant to go upstairs to the movies, but she was behind in her filing and the work went slowly. Images of the dead she laid to her right, images of the living to her left. Through the door, which she’d left open to air out the musty room, she heard footsteps pounding down the stairs and rushing past before stopping, walking back, and tentatively entering the lab.

She rose from her desk in the back, which was behind a dividing wall lined with shelves, and walked into the area nearest the corridor. In the pale light of her desk lamp, she could see a young woman huddled on the couch. Her head was in her arms and she was weeping.