by Diane Hoh
The Fever
Diane Hoh
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
A Biography of Diane Hoh
Prologue
DUFFY QUINN TOSSES AND turns in a restless, fevered sleep. Hot…hot…so hot…flames burning…tormenting her parched, dry skin, setting it on fire…
What…what is it? Sounds…noises…ripped into her tortured sleep. No…no…she doesn’t want to wake up…no…leave me alone, she thinks…
Clanging…clanging…metal on metal…
Now a cry, muffled, frightened, “What? What are you—?”
Now a soft, whispered flapping sound, flap-flap, flap-flap, like gentle waves hitting the shore of a lake…
Suddenly another cry, this time filled with terror, “No! Please, don’t!”
Hot, hot, burning, blazing…
There’s a soft thud…then silence…
Silence floats about the room and then is broken again…flap-flapping underneath, rattle-clatter-kadunk on top…clatter-kadunk, clatter-kadunk…
Duffy stirs, moans, tries to sit up.
The clatter-kadunk stops abruptly. Silence.
Duffy whispers, “What? What is it?”
But sitting up is too painful. Duffy sinks back down against the pillow on her hospital bed, murmuring her question. “What…what is it?”
The clatter-kadunk begins again. A faint shaft of light briefly crosses the room as the door creaks open. The door swings closed again and the light disappears.
Silence.
Chapter 1
THE HOSPITAL STOOD ALONE in the center of town. A tall, grim structure of worn gray stone, sparsely covered with wilting ivy, it towered menacingly over the street. The bottom row of stone blocks were mildewed a grimy greenish-black around the base, shielded from the sun’s drying heat by a ragged row of hedges. Visitors entering by the wide stone steps puzzled over the thick odor of mold and mildew. They did not realize that the building itself was gradually decaying from the dampness that began at its base and slowly but steadily made its way up the stone.
The upper-floor windows, tall and narrow, stared unblinkingly down upon the street below, as if a sightless gray giant were planting his feet in the uneven grass and boldly inviting strangers to approach…if they dared.
Residents of the town of Twelvetrees, Maine, had often remarked sourly that it was not the sort of look a hospital established to welcome the sick and ailing should have.
But they had no money for a newer, more modern building. The old one, unwelcoming as it was, would have to do.
On the fourth floor of Twelvetrees Community Hospital, Duffy Quinn awakened.
The fever had engulfed her, burning her body from the inside out, had transported her to a dizzying world of brilliant reds, hot purples, and blazing yellows. During the long hours since her admission due to a sudden, unexplained fever, the pungent, antiseptic smell of the fourth floor had become her only connection with the real world, as she drifted in and out of a surrealistic carnival of colors.
The smell, which wrinkled her nose even before she was fully awake, dragged her back into an unpleasant reality, a hospital world full of grim whiteness, of chilly, uneasy quiet, of medication, illness, even…death.
As depressing as the odor was, it guaranteed that she was still alive, still a part of the real world, no matter how isolated she felt.
As the grogginess of sleep left her, Duffy’s head swung instinctively toward the companion bed. It stood silently opposite her own bed, empty and waiting.
Empty…She couldn’t have heard anything during the night. There was no one in that bed. There hadn’t been, not since she was admitted on Thursday night, when her parents had raced to the hospital in the station wagon with Duffy prone on the backseat, raving weird, nonsensical things, in the throes of a raging, delirium-inducing fever. She remembered nothing about being admitted two nights earlier, but she was certain no one had shared the room even then. The other bed had been empty, and had stayed empty.
What had she heard, then? What had it sounded like…the noises? Metal on metal, she remembered…like the sound her gold charm bracelet made when it clanked against the metal edge on her desk at school.
Had it been someone out in the hall doing something useful with the old metal bedpans? Newer hospitals had plastic bedpans…not so freezing cold. Metal ones could make the noise she’d heard.
She was so hot…so hot…the room was so stuffy, not like at night when they turned off the furnace even though the early spring nights were still chilly. Then the room felt like a refrigerator. Her mouth was so dry, it felt like the cotton balls they swabbed her arm with before they stuck nasty needles into her flesh.
Somewhere within the thick stone walls, water ran. The exhausted plumbing shrieked in agony. The sound of running water made Duffy thirsty. But her hands, the left one impaled by the IV needle steadily feeding her antibiotics, had been robbed of strength by her illness. They floundered around like dead fish on the hills and valleys of her rough, off-white bedding.
What about the other sounds she’d heard? The slapping sound…the rattly, kadunking sound?
And something else…a desperate, terrified cry for help?
No, that couldn’t be right. She must have been dreaming.
Hot…she was so hot…burning…burning, as if she were lying on the beach in the middle of July with a cruel sun mercilessly beating down upon her flesh.
She needed water. “Nurse,” she murmured, “nurse…” Where were all the nurses?
A figure appeared in the doorway. Her doctor. Jonas Morgan. Young, bearded, a gold ring in one ear, sneakers on big feet. Tall, bony, skinny. Not like a doctor at all. Doctors were supposed to be balding or gray. They gave you pills and sent you home. All Dr. Morgan had given her was a battery of tests, thousands of questions…and he hadn’t sent her home.
He didn’t seem to know the first thing about smiling. He frowned a lot, sending thick, shaggy, dark eyebrows on a collision course, and he seemed to take her illness very seriously. She supposed she should be grateful for that, but what she really wanted to do was say, “Lighten up, Doc!”
He took her pulse, listened to her chest, and ordered the nurse who had followed him into the room to take more blood. Duffy groaned. “Again ? I don’t think I have any left. I’m down at least a quart.”
He didn’t smile. She hadn’t expected him to. “We haven’t learned anything yet,” he said solemnly, “about what brought you here. It’s probably the flu. But we have to make sure.”
Minutes later, he was gone, bony shoulders slumped, probably weighted down with the worry of what on earth was wrong with Duffy Quinn.
“Were you in here last night?” she asked the tall, broad-shouldered nurse in white, who took her temperature and then her blood.
“Me? No, hon, I came on this morning at seven. Why?”
“I just wondered. Someone was.”
“Another nurse, probably. Your temp has to be monitored.”
But no one had taken her temperature. Not when she’d heard the sounds; anyway.
Or had they? Maybe she’d just forg
otten. Everything was so fuzzy now, with her brain on fire. How could she be sure of anything? Yesterday her mother had told her some of the things she had cried out in her delirium on the way to the hospital. Silly, bizarre things, like warning her mother to get her umbrella out and shouting at her father to change the light bulbs in the kitchen. Crazy stuff.
Maybe last night had just been more of the same.
The nurse took her blood and left, and was immediately replaced by a second nurse, young and pretty, who gave Duffy an expert sponge bath, a clean hospital gown, white with tiny blue flowers, and a delicious back rub.
But she hadn’t been on duty the night before, either, and couldn’t tell Duffy anything about who might have been in her room. She, too, said it was probably one of the nurses.
Wouldn’t a nurse have answered when Duffy called out?
Amy Severn, a classmate of Duffy’s and a Junior Volunteer at the hospital, brought her breakfast tray.
Duffy liked Amy…now. At school, Duffy had hardly noticed the quiet, dutiful student, who wore neat, “preppy” clothes like plaid skirts and sweaters, and always had every single blonde hair perfectly in place, sprayed so stiffly each strand looked like plastic. But here, in the hospital where Duffy felt so incredibly helpless, the qualities Duffy would have found uninteresting in Amy in the “outside world” proved comforting. She was kind and helpful, the two things Duffy needed most…besides a complete cure, which Amy couldn’t provide.
“Are you just getting up, sleepyhead?” Amy asked with a sweet smile as Duffy stirred and moaned. Making a place for the tray on Duffy’s cluttered bedside table, she helped the patient struggle to a half-sitting position, which was all Duffy could manage.
“Did you have a bad night?” Amy asked sympathetically as she expertly swung the top of the portable table across the bed and put the breakfast tray on top of it. “Poor Duffy. You’ve never really been sick before, have you? I can tell. You’re not used to lying around with people fussing over you.”
Duffy shook her head. It was always so hard returning to awful reality, waking up and hearing the sounds of the hospital’s daytime routine: the rattle of the food carts as they arrived on the fourth floor, the muted thuds of countless rubber-soled shoes, nurses calling back and forth to one another, the squeaking of wheelchairs and, occasionally, someone in pain crying out for relief. And there was, always, the pungent, antiseptic smell of the hospital.
“No,” she murmured in response to Amy’s comment. “I’ve never been sick before. Not like this. And I hate it!”
Amy’s blue uniform whispered crisply as she nodded a head full of stiff curls, neatly held back from her pink, round face by a pale blue ribbon. She took a packet of silverware from the pocket of her uniform and removed the plastic wrapping. Then she slid a bowl of clear soup closer to the edge of the tray. “I know it’s awful being sick. Have they taken your temperature yet this morning? Maybe it’s gone down.” That was Amy…forever optimistic.
Duffy made a face of disgust. “I wouldn’t know. The nurse who took it wasn’t in a sharing mood. I asked her what it was. I mean, it is my temperature, not hers. But she just shook her head, as if telling me would get her sent to prison or something. It was the nurse with the linebacker shoulders, the one with gray hair.”
“Margaret. She’s a good nurse, Duffy.” Amy’s voice was stern.
“Why can’t she tell me how I’m doing? Nobody tells me anything around here.” Duffy looked up at Amy. “Amy, couldn’t you sneak a peek at my chart? See if my fever’s gone down?”
Horror washed across Amy’s face. “Duffy! Volunteers are absolutely, positively not allowed to handle the patients’ charts. If I got caught even touching one, I’d be thrown out of here, and I love being a volunteer. Forget it.” She unfolded a cheap paper napkin and tucked it under Duffy’s chin. “Your doctor will probably tell you about your temp when he comes back in this afternoon.”
“No, he won’t,” Duffy complained. “He never tells me anything, either.” But she gave up, knowing she wasn’t going to get any information from Amy, who obviously thought that rule-breaking ranked right up there with murder and manslaughter.
Her hands were shaky. The spoon clanked against the bowl. But…not the same sound, she told herself. Not the same sound as last night at all. That sound was…sharper.
She was so tired. She glared at the bowl of thin, pale liquid staring up at her. “This is my breakfast? It looks like something you’d spray on flowers to kill insects.” She gave the bowl a rude shove, sending its contents slopping out across the tray. “If I eat this, I’ll barf!”
Amy swiped frantically at the mess with an extra napkin she carried in her pocket.
Of course she carries extra napkins, Duffy thought nastily. But she was grateful that Amy didn’t scream at her, or even scold her. All she said was, “Duffy, you have to eat. You have to keep up your strength. You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
Duffy’s fevered eyes swept around the high-ceilinged, rectangular room. The walls, road-mapped here and there with small cracks, were a dingy white, the windows tall and narrow, shielded by old-fashioned wide-bladed Venetian blinds. The floor had worn black and white tile squares, and she had already memorized every spidery vein in the yellowed ceiling tile overhead. At night, when the hospital was deathly quiet, the grim little room was illuminated only by a tiny nightlight perched beside the heavy wooden door leading to the hall outside and beyond that, the nurses’ station.
It was a lonely, isolated place, and Duffy wanted more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life to be free of it.
“Yes,” she said softly, “I want to get out of here.”
“Well, then, you have to eat. Here, I’ll help.” Amy sat on the edge of the bed and began to carefully spoon broth between Duffy’s fever-cracked lips.
Duffy opened her mouth reluctantly.
Every time the spoon clanked against the bowl, she was reminded of the night sounds she’d heard.
Chapter 2
SHE HAD SIPPED ONLY a few spoonfuls when a husky voice said, “Hey, she’s eating! Medical progress is being made in this room today,” and a tall boy dressed all in white entered the room, a broad grin on his sharply angled face. “Congrats, Amy! Yesterday, the sight of food made the patient, excuse the expression, puke. You must have magical powers.”
Smith Lewis was an orderly at the hospital, but Duffy had seen him around town more than once before she became a patient. His arrival in town several months earlier had sent pulses racing among the female populace at Twelvetrees High School. They didn’t get many new arrivals in town. It was the kind of town young people left before the ink was dry on the diploma. So the new arrival, older than they and already out of high school, had been unexpected. And, to most of Duffy’s friends, a delightful surprise.
Smith’s hair was thick and straight, slightly darker than his eyes, which were the color of root beer. His body moved carelessly, as if he were proud of being tall …or proud of being Smith Lewis. Most girls found the proud walk sexy. Duffy found it arrogant.
“Why don’t you like him?” Duffy’s best friend, Jane Sabatini had asked once when Smith, the top down on his black sports car, passed them in the mall parking lot.
“I didn’t say I don’t like him. I said I couldn’t possibly like him as much as he likes him.”
She had heard that he was given to practical jokes, which should have endeared him to her, since she had pulled a few pranks herself. But he talked too loudly, drove too fast, and grinned too easily, as if he were saying, “You think I’m adorable, right? Me, too.” Every time she saw him, he was with a different girl. It was hard to imagine that someone like Smith Lewis could ever settle down to a medical education and career, which was what someone had told her he planned.
And whether she ate or not wasn’t any of his business.
Duffy scowled at him. “I don’t need an orderly. Amy’s helping me.”
Smith shook his head. “Eatin
g hasn’t improved your disposition, I see. Too bad. Didn’t any of the nurses tell you that being nice to people isn’t a bad idea when you look like something washed up on the beach?”
Duffy felt herself flushing and knew it had nothing to do with body temperature. Obnoxious though he was, she knew Smith was right. Her hair felt like an oil slick and she had no makeup on. And although the sponge baths given daily by the nurses were better than nothing, she yearned fiercely for a long, hot shower.
“Leave her alone,” Amy told Smith, but she smiled sweetly as she said it. “She’s sick. Quit picking on her.”
“I just came to get the extra bed,” Smith said, ambling over to stand behind the item in question. “You’re not using it, and they need it in Pediatrics.”
Duffy glanced over at the bed, remembering the night sounds she’d heard. The bed stared back at her. You were hearing things, it seemed to accuse. Can’t you see that I’m empty? There was no one here last night but you.
“Amy,” she asked slowly, “that bed’s been empty ever since I came in, right?”
Amy nodded. “Sure. You’d remember if you had a roommate, Duffy. The hospital is filling up, though. A lot of flu in town. That’s probably what you’ve got.” She grimaced, her round, pink cheeks sliding up under her blue eyes. “There’s an awful lot to do. And not enough nurses. They’ve put some of the volunteers on extra hours to help out. I’ve got band practice, so I can’t do it, but Cynthia and a few of the others are helping out.” Cynthia Boon was Amy’s best friend.
Smith pushed the wheeled bed to the door. “Try to swallow something with sugar in it,” he teased Duffy. “A sour female is a sad sight to behold. Take it easy, Duffy Quinn.” And he left the room, laughing.
“Pig!” Duffy said heatedly. “A sour female? I should have thrown a pillow at him.”
Amy laughed. “Oh, Smith’s okay, Duffy. He told me once that his mother named him Smith because it was her last name. She’d always hated having such a boring last name, but thought it would be interesting as a first name. Smith has that same twisted sense of humor. He stole a skeleton from the lab a couple of weeks ago and stashed it in one of the empty beds. That little nurse from the third floor, the one with braids, found it. I guess she almost had a stroke.”