The Fever

by Diane Hoh

  Duffy swallowed a laugh. The stunt appealed to her. It was the kind of thing she’d love doing herself. But Smith had said she looked like beach debris. “What a stupid, childish thing to do,” she announced primly.

  Amy grinned. “Who are you kidding, Duffy? Everyone at school still talks about how you and Kit Rappaport and Jane stole the bust of Walt Whitman from Mrs. Toggle’s English room and hung it from the flagpole.”

  Ignoring that, Duffy asked, “Why didn’t Smith get fired? I know the head of the hospital, Dr. Crowder. He doesn’t look like he’d have a sense of humor.”

  Amy shrugged. “Smith did get a lecture. But he told Dr. Crowder it was an experiment. Said he wanted to study the physiological effects of shock.” Amy laughed. “Can you believe it? I don’t think Dr. Crowder fell for it, but he didn’t fire Smith.”

  Duffy was annoyed with Amy for laughing. She knew it was only because Amy, usually too stiff-necked to find any humor in rule-breaking, thought Smith was cute. Smith was probably the sort of person who got away with murder, just because of his looks. She hated that. It was so unfair.

  “I’d think the nurses would all hate him, he’s so obnoxious,” she said hopefully.

  Amy slid off the bed and picked up Duffy’s tray. “Nope. Just the opposite. He’s a real hard worker. Sometimes he stays late when he doesn’t have to, to help out. He’s always hanging around the hospital. The nurses appreciate that, especially right now.”

  “Amy…” Duffy hesitated, not sure how to phrase her question. “Are you absolutely sure there wasn’t anybody in that other bed last night? I mean, I was so out of it yesterday.…Maybe they brought someone in while I was sleeping, but she got better during the night and went home this morning before I woke up and you came on duty.”

  Amy frowned. “Duffy, this isn’t a hotel. People don’t just check in for a few hours. The patient in that bed was discharged last week and it’s been empty ever since.” Tray in hand, Amy fixed round blue eyes on Duffy. “This is the second time you’ve asked me about that bed. What’s up?”

  Duffy shook her head. “Nothing. Only…never mind. Forget it.” How could she explain what she’d heard when she didn’t know what she’d heard? She wasn’t even sure, in broad daylight, that she’d heard anything. Amy would think brain-rot was setting in.

  Maybe it was.

  “Look, I’ve got to go,” Amy said. “I’ll bring you some magazines later, okay? Is Jane coming this afternoon? Kit?” After Jane, Christopher “Kit” Rappaport was Duffy’s closest friend.

  “I hope so.” What Duffy hated most about being in the hospital, even more than the ugliness, the grimness, and the smell, was the horrible sense of isolation. She missed her friends, her family, her normal routine. This was Saturday. If it weren’t for this stupid fever, she’d be home planning a trip to the mall, maybe a movie after dinner….Real life was going on outside these moldy stone walls, and she was no longer a part of it. She hated that.

  Nodding, Amy turned and hurried out of the room, the skirt of her crisp blue uniform swaying stiffly after her. “Get some rest,” she called over her shoulder as she reached the door. “Dr. Morgan says that’s the best cure.”

  Then Duffy was alone in the stuffy silence of her small, dreary prison. She knew Amy was right. Dr. Morgan had said, “Rest and quiet, that’s the ticket. Sleep restores the body like nothing else can, so get plenty of it and you’ll be out of here in no time.”

  Duffy settled down among the scratchy, yellowed bedding. Of course, Dr. Morgan hadn’t added that getting plenty of sleep in a hospital wasn’t easy, when nurses and volunteers and orderlies were forever taking your temperature or your blood and giving you baths and emptying your wastebasket or cleaning off your messy bedside table. Sleeping in a hospital was a luxury.

  Especially when your room was full of frightening, unexplained sounds that came at night when everyone else had finally left you alone.

  She closed her eyes, but she was suddenly afraid to sleep. She didn’t want to have the clanking, clattering, flap-flapping dream again. The dream with the cry of terror.

  If it was a dream.…

  Chapter 3

  DUFFY LAY IN HER hospital bed, her pretty, oval face flushed with fever, her eyes on the yellowed ceiling. She couldn’t sleep. She flopped over on her side, unmindful of the IV needle embedded in her left hand.

  I wish Jane and Kit would hurry up, she thought. If I tell them about my dream last night, Kit will react logically and rationally, the way he always does. Maybe he can help me figure it out.

  Kit Rappaport, graduated the year before from Twelvetrees High School, was a math wizard who had been offered several scholarships and turned down all of them to continue working in his uncle’s shoe store. The worst fight Duffy and Kit had ever had was about that shoe store.

  “You’re nuts!” she had shouted, and he had answered, “You just don’t get it, do you? I owe the man!”

  Kit Rappaport had been Duffy’s good friend since she was nine. He had come into her fourth-grade class, his reddish hair very like hers except that his was carroty while hers was more cinnamon-colored. His plaid shirt was too small and flapped loosely outside of his jeans, his shoelaces untied. He had taken the seat opposite hers. Halfway through arithmetic, the frog he’d hidden in a pocket escaped and jumped to the floor. Without thinking, Duffy had reached down and scooped it up, hiding it in the folds of her gray sweatshirt before eagle-eyed old Mrs. Lauder could spy it and confiscate it. After class, she had returned the frog to Kit.

  They’d been friends ever since, even after Kit skipped ninth grade and moved straight on to tenth, leaving her behind.

  They’d never been anything more than friends, although Kit was cute enough, even if he was unaware of it. But he was so wrapped up in the misery of his home life that he had no thought for romance. Orphaned at nine by an automobile accident, he had been taken in by his aunt and uncle. “It’s our duty,” they told everyone sanctimoniously. Grim, humorless people, without affection or warmth, they believed that children should be useful. So Kit was put to work immediately in his uncle’s shoe store, stocking shelves, sorting sizes, and pricing boxes. He hated every second of it.

  A day or so after Duffy’s argument with Kit about rejecting the scholarships, she had learned the truth from Jane. Upon Kit’s graduation, his uncle had demanded that Kit “pay back every cent we’ve spent on you over the years” by working in the shoe store until the “debt” was paid off.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” Duffy shrieked at poor Jane.

  “He thought you’d call him a wimp.”

  Duffy had been ashamed then, because that was accurate. She would have.

  Kit told her later he would have ignored his uncle’s demands and left town, but his aunt had suffered a heart attack a week after graduation and was unable to help out in the store. He felt then that he had no choice. He would have to stay.

  Their friendship had continued. Duffy knew that a lot of her friends didn’t understand. Kit was cute and smart and nice. Why wasn’t she in love with him? Well, she did love Kit, but not the way most girls loved a boy. She loved him because he understood her, her restlessness, her odd sense of humor, even her temper—and he liked her anyway. And she knew he would always be there for her. Even when he finally did go away to college, they’d still be friends. Forever. That was just the way it was.

  And if he could get away from the shoe store, he would come with Jane to visit her that afternoon.

  She missed him as much as she missed her parents and Jane. He would calm her down, help her to accept the hospital’s routine. Kit could do that when no one else could.

  “Hi,” came suddenly from behind her, and Duffy turned, hope in her gray eyes.

  But it wasn’t Kit. Or Jane. Instead, Dylan Rourke was standing beside her bed.

  A classmate and an employee of the hospital, Dylan was wearing the obligatory pea-green slacks and tunic. The tunic pulled impatiently at shoulders that spent an hou
r every day lifting weights and had been used repeatedly as a battering ram on the football field. Dylan’s nose had been broken twice in the same spot and now leaned slightly to the right. It gave his square, honest, open face a look of devilishness, which was quickly cancelled out by the trail of freckles leap-frogging across that same nose. Unlike Kit, Dylan had to struggle for good grades, a battle Duffy thought he was losing. That might keep him out of medical school.

  Still, while Dylan might not be as smart as Kit, he was shrewd. Working at the hospital part-time put him in touch with doctors who, if he impressed them favorably, could put in a good word for him in pre-med programs at colleges across the country.

  One way or another Dylan was determined, like Cynthia and Smith, to become a doctor. Maybe his methods were different, but Duffy had known him since ninth grade and when Dylan wanted something that much, he usually got it. He might look like an ad for a physical fitness magazine, but there was a lot more to Dylan than brawn.

  “Your friendly maintenance engineer is here, at your service,” he said, grinning, making the freckles dance across the bridge of his nose. His deep blue eyes focused sympathetically on her flushed face. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “You mean my friendly janitor,” Duffy said crankily.

  Dylan shrugged good-naturedly. “Whatever. Duff, you look really sick. You okay?”

  Duffy glared at him. “Dylan, would I be in this horrible place if I were okay?” She waved her needle-pinioned hand at him. “This stuff isn’t doing a bit of good. I’d get better faster at home, where I belong.”

  Concern filled his square, open face. “I know you hate it here, Duffy. It’s not the greatest place in the world to spend your weekend. But when someone’s as sick as you are, this is the safest place to be.”

  When he turned away to pick up her wastebasket, his broom clanked against the side of the metal container.

  That sound last night—was this the same sound?

  No. It wasn’t quite right…it didn’t…clank enough.

  “Dylan,” she asked, “did you work last night?”

  “Uh-uh.” He lifted the nearly full basket. “I was wiped out from a chem exam yesterday in Deaton’s class. Man, that guy can really dream up some wicked questions! Think I passed, though. No, I wasn’t on last night. Why?”

  Disappointed that Dylan couldn’t help her with last night’s puzzle, Duffy sank back against the pillow. “I had this dream…” she began. Maybe Dylan could help her figure it out. “At least, I think it was a dream. There were these noises…it was really bizarre, like there was someone in the room. It was too dark to see, and I was kind of asleep. I was sure someone was doing something in here. But when I called out…if I really did call out, no one answered me.”

  Dylan looked interested. “Maybe someone was in here. The other bed is gone. Maybe someone was taking it out while you were sleeping and that’s what you heard.”

  Duffy shook her head. “No. Smith just came and got the bed a little while ago. Took it to Pediatrics. And Amy said at breakfast that no one’s been in that bed the whole time I’ve been here, so.…”

  Dylan thought for a minute. “One of the nurses told me your temperature was headed for the record books when they brought you in. No wonder you’ve been hearing things. I’m surprised you’re not seeing things, too.” He stopped and gave her a quizzical look. “You’re not, are you? I mean, did you see anything last night?”

  “No. It was too dark. That little night-light over by the door isn’t worth two cents. A jar of fireflies would make a better light.”

  He laughed. Then he took the wastebasket out into the hall and emptied it into a giant wheeled container.

  As he left the room, Duffy sat up straight in bed. There was something…

  When Dylan returned to put the small basket in its proper place, Duffy commanded, “Do that again.”

  “What? Do what again?”

  “Go out and come back in. Go on! Quit looking at me like I just sprouted a second head. I have a good reason. Just do it, please.”

  Frowning, Dylan obeyed. When he came back in, he said, “What was that all about?”

  “It’s your shoes!” Duffy leaned forward to peer over the edge of her bed. “That’s one of the sounds I heard last night…that funny slap-slap on the tile. Rubber-soled shoes!”

  Dylan was visibly unimpressed. “Duffy,” he said kindly, “this is a hospital. Practically everyone wears rubber-soled shoes, so we won’t disturb the patients.”

  Duffy struggled to figure out if she’d just learned anything important. “Yes, but if a member of the staff was in my room last night, why didn’t they answer when I called out? There was just this weird, creepy silence.”

  “You said you weren’t quite awake. Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

  Disappointed that Dylan had no better answer than that, Duffy flopped back down on the pillow.

  “Hey, don’t be mad,” he said softly, reaching down to take one of her hands in his. Hers felt parched and dry, his strong and comforting. “Maybe it’s your fever. High temperatures can do crazy things to people.”

  Crazy? That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  Seeing the look on her face, Dylan said hastily, “Look, you had to be dreaming, Duffy. If no one was in the other bed, the only reason a nurse would be in this room would be to take care of you. Since you say no one was doing that, it’s pretty clear that there wasn’t anyone here, right?”

  “I don’t say that no one was taking care of me, Dylan…no one was, I’m not making this up.”

  But she didn’t want to be mad at Dylan. Especially not over something she herself didn’t understand. It wasn’t fair to expect Dylan to understand it. They’d been friends a long time. She probably would have dated him once upon a time, but he, like everyone else, had thought she and Kit were a couple, and he’d begun dating Amy Severn. They had broken up only a couple of weeks ago. And he’d been so nice to Duffy since she was admitted to the hospital, she was beginning to wonder if he might be interested in more than friendship now.

  She was too sick to think about romance. Besides, how could anybody possibly be interested in someone who looked like roadkill? Dylan was only in her room because he had work to do.

  But when she was well again…maybe…

  “I guess you’re right,” she said after a moment or two of silence. “When my temp spikes, I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. It’s like being in another world. A very hot one.”

  Satisfied that she wasn’t going to stay mad at him, Dylan began sweeping the room, using his considerable bulk to heave the broom sideways in strong, straight strokes.

  “Have you seen Jane or Kit?” Duffy asked.

  Dylan glanced at his watch. “Too early for visiting hours. You’ll have to wait until after lunch. Isn’t he working today?”

  Dylan said “he” with a noticeable note of resentment in his voice. He and Kit weren’t friends. Dylan, strong and determined, had been Football. Kit, light and fast, had been Track. Maybe the difference between the two of them was just that simple. Or maybe it went deeper, had something to do with the fact that Dylan was the center of a huge, happy family but had trouble in school, while Kit, who had no family to speak of and lived a lonely, depressing life, had been valedictorian of his graduating class and won scholarships that Dylan would have killed for.

  When Dylan talked about Kit, his face suddenly didn’t look quite so warm and friendly.

  But that only lasted a second. His face cleared quickly as Duffy answered his question.

  “I don’t know if he’s working. I haven’t seen him or Jane since I got here. They wouldn’t let me have visitors the first day. But it’s Saturday. I can’t imagine The Grinch Who Stole Kit’s Future letting him have a weekend day off. So yeah, he’s probably working.”

  “Kit owed the man,” Dylan argued mildly, “he said so himself. He’ll go to college next year.”

  “They brai
nwashed him. Dumped guilt on him. He should have gone, anyway.” But Kit wasn’t like that, and both Duffy and Dylan knew it.

  When he had finished his task, Dylan came over to the bed to hold her hand in his briefly. Then he said, “Keep your chin up and do what the doctor says, even when you don’t want to, okay? I’ll be back later to see how you’re doing.”

  The hushed slap-slap of his rubber-soled shoes echoed in Duffy’s ears for a long time after the sound had faded away. It reminded her…

  She was being stupid. Of course she’d heard that sound before. As Dylan said, practically everyone in the hospital wore the same kind of shoes.

  But if a member of the hospital staff had been in her room last night, why hadn’t he or she answered when she called out? Wasn’t that what they were there for, to help when help was needed?

  What kind of nurse or doctor or orderly or volunteer would ignore a night cry from a patient?

  No kind. They wouldn’t do that. So Dylan had to be right. She’d been dreaming.

  But it had certainly seemed real.

  In an effort to clear her mind of the maddening puzzle, Duffy rolled over on her side and tried to doze until lunchtime and then, she hoped, the arrival of Jane and Kit.

  Except for an interruption by the nurse Duffy called “Vampira” because she came in only to collect blood from Duffy’s already-sore arm, she remained alone, and finally fell asleep.

  Chapter 4

  WHEN JUNIOR VOLUNTEER CYNTHIA Boon entered Duffy’s room shortly after the dismal lunch tray had blessedly been taken away, the patient was struggling to force a comb through her tangled, cinnamon-hued waves.

  “Oh, I give up!” she cried in despair, heaving the comb across the room. It made a sharp, insulted click when it hit the floor tile. Bouncing twice, it landed in a corner.

  “Easy, easy,” Cynthia cautioned softly. She walked over swiftly and picked up the comb, returning it to Duffy. “You’re not supposed to get upset. Your temperature will spike again.”