Good Medicine

by Bobby Hutchinson

  Could she have fallen in love with Silas Keefer? How did a person really know if they were in love? She’d believed she loved Garry, and look where that went.

  This feeling for Silas was different, though. Bigger, more profound. Frightening, as well, as if something inside her were breaking open, some deep, scarred place she hadn’t even known was there.

  If she was in love with Silas, she was going to have to admit it to him. Regardless of the consequences. She was still thinking about what those might be when she finally fell asleep again, lulled by the steady patter of rain on the roof.

  THE BUSH WAS WET, and Silas had been listening to Patwin grouse about it for hours now.

  “If this is what it means to be an Indian, I’m giving up my status,” the younger man said in his new hoarse voice. “Rain’s dripping down my neck, my sleeping bag’s damp and every stitch of my clothes are soaked. This stupid fire is more smoke than flame, and you didn’t even bring a tent, never mind whiskey to treat hypothermia. Lucky you remembered matches, or we’d have been really screwed. Didn’t you even check the weather channel before we started out? What kind of Nuu-chah-nulth warrior are you, anyhow, big brother?”

  The drugs seemed to be gone from Patwin’s system. Silas had half dragged him along at first, but it wasn’t long before Patwin could walk on his own. When he’d seemed rational, if a bit hyper, Silas asked him about the morphine.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Silas. One of the guys dropped over and sold it to me. My neck hurt so bad I really needed it.”

  “Johnny Swann. Did he say where he got it?”

  “No idea.”

  “Why did you take it, Patwin? After everybody at the healing ceremony told you they’d do anything to help, you turn around and take morphine?”

  “I’m sorry, Silas. I told you, my throat hurt like fire, I just wanted the pain gone. And the doc gave me morphine anyhow, I figured a little more wouldn’t hurt.”

  Silas was too angry and sick at heart to pursue the matter at that moment, so they just kept walking.

  Patwin finally asked, “Where the hell we going, anyways?”

  “To the old fishing camp.”

  “I don’t wanna go fishing. I hate fishing. Dad used to take me out on fishing trips, I always hated it.”

  “At least Peter taught you a little about living in the bush,” Silas said. “The only survival training I got was in making panty raids on the girl’s dorm without getting caught.”

  “Lucky you.” Patwin wasn’t interested. “Why the hell didn’t you bring rain slickers, Silas?”

  “Too heavy to pack.” He hadn’t thought of it. He’d been thinking of Jordan instead. “The garbage bags were a good idea.”

  They wore black plastic bags like tunics in an attempt to keep at least a little dry in the downpour, and they’d made a makeshift shelter out of branches. But it wasn’t doing much good, not the way the rain was pelting down.

  “Can we go home in the morning?” Patwin whined. “Please? I promise, if I live through this I’ll never try to off myself again. And I won’t do drugs anymore, you’ve got my word on it.” Patwin shivered, yawned and took a sip from a tin cup, and then spat the mouthful out. “Shit. That’s the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted, and the detention center had some pretty bad sludge.”

  “You mean that? About not doing suicide or drugs again?”

  Patwin didn’t answer for a moment, but then he nodded. “Yeah, I do mean it, so you can tell Dad and the rest of the family to call off the twenty-four-hour watch, because it’s making me nuts. I wake up at three in the morning and Mom’s sitting beside my bed staring at me, for cripes’ sake. It’s freaking me out.” He was quiet for a while, and then in a different tone he said, “I talked with Mary yesterday. I told her I’d do my best for the baby, whether or not we end up together. It’s not the kid’s fault we aren’t ready for it.”

  Silas nodded. “Good. How did Mary feel about that?”

  “I dunno. She didn’t say much. She’s still got this cockeyed idea that the baby will help her batty mother get over her brother dying. She says you helped her, though.”

  Silas shifted uncomfortably, trying to find a spot where the rain wouldn’t drop down his neck. He wished it would stop raining. He wished that Patwin would go to sleep so he could have the remainder of the night in peace. Wouldn’t you think that with a sore throat the kid would let up on his vocal cords? But no.

  Silas had struggled all afternoon and evening to stay even-tempered through the barrage of complaints and comments, but it was a strain. He had an overwhelming urge to snap at Patwin, to tell him for God’s sake to shut up for a while so he could think.

  Funny he’d never noticed how much Patwin talked before. Was it because no one really listened to him? He’d always been the baby of the family, spoiled and pampered but not really taken seriously.

  “Want some jerky?” Patwin dug in the food pack and pulled out a strip. “The stuff tastes like shit, you’ve gotta be really hard up to chew on it. I dunno why you didn’t bring some real food, chips and cheesies and maybe chocolate bars—or peanuts.”

  Silas sighed. They’d been over that several times already. He’d grabbed whatever was at hand because all he’d wanted to do was get far away from the village. Well, they’d done that, all right. If they hadn’t gone so far, he’d have headed back when the heavy rain started. He wasn’t enjoying being wet, either.

  Silas stuck another piece of wood on the fire. It didn’t burn any better than the others had, and he coughed as the thick smoke drifted his way.

  “So you got something good going with the doc, Silas? I heard Mom say you two were an item.”

  “The old Ahousaht radar,” Silas growled. As if he needed any reminder that it was alive and well. “We’re friends.” Or we were. He got that peculiar sinking feeling in his gut every time he thought of Jordan—and her husband. And what the kids had said about him being a junkie. And all the things she hadn’t told him.

  “How come you never got married or had any kids, Silas?”

  “I don’t really know. I’m a loner, I suppose.” It was a question he’d asked himself plenty of times.

  “What happened with that nurse, that Melinda Paul? You were pretty tight with her, weren’t you? How come you didn’t marry her?”

  Patwin was probably trying to work out his own relationship with Mary, but this personal probing was maddening.

  “I cared about Melinda, but marriage wasn’t in the cards. Her family was from Edmonton, and that’s where she wanted to live. Geographical differences.”

  It was a simplistic explanation. Melinda would probably have stayed in Ahousaht if he’d agreed to get married the way she wanted. He just couldn’t do it.

  “Guess you didn’t love her, eh?”

  Silas started to say that he had loved Melinda, but stopped. This love thing had different levels, just like healing.

  “How about Doc Jordan? You in love with her?”

  “No.” Silas closed his eyes, wondering why the question made his chest hurt. It was over with Jordan, but he wasn’t about to tell Patwin that.

  He rubbed a hand across his heart and the plastic bag crackled.

  “You think it’s better for a guy to have lots of women, or stick to just one like Dad did with Mom?”

  Silas knew that Rose Marie had been Peter’s first and only love, because his stepfather had told him so one afternoon when they were roofing Silas’s cabin. He’d loved Rose Marie before she’d married Angus Keefer and he’d waited for her. He had still been there waiting for her when she’d come back, sick and desolate, after her marriage had ended. Peter had brought her a little gift every day—flowers, bird feathers, unusual stones—encouraging her in every way he could devise to get well again.

  “One woman,” Silas said at last. “Grandmother used to call it finding the other half of yourself. But nowadays it doesn’t happen too often.”

  “How do you really know when you’re in love that way?�
�

  “You’re asking me? I don’t know.” But Silas thought of making love to Jordan, laughing with her at the hot springs, carrying her home when she’d hurt herself.

  Patwin said in a plaintive tone, “I wish sometimes that we could just live like they did in the old days, before television and big stores and motorboats and all that. It was easier then, I think.”

  “It’s never been easy. Sandrine’s stories prove that.”

  “Remember the one she used to tell about the gray wolf pups that came to our island?”

  “Making friends with First Woman, yes.”

  Patwin sounded a little embarrassed. “Tell me the story of how they became her children, okay, Silas?”

  “In the beginning, there was a male and female gray wolf. One spring, after a long, cold winter—”

  Silas’s voice took on the rhythmic cadence of the storyteller. Before long, he could hear Patwin’s breathing grow even and slow. Soon, the younger man was asleep, curled inside his sleeping bag.

  With great gratitude, Silas let his voice trail off into silence. There weren’t many hours of darkness left, and he needed this quiet to try to make order out of his thoughts. He had to figure out why he felt so angry and betrayed by Jordan, and was still so drawn to her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  JUST BEFORE 7:00 a.m. the following morning, Elsie Hays, an elderly diabetic, collapsed while mixing up a batch of bread. Her daughter-in-law came running to get Jordan, who’d just stepped out of the shower.

  Throwing on sweats and racing through the driving rain to Elsie’s house, Jordan found her patient unconscious; face, hair, arms and chest covered in sticky white dough. Taking a blood glucose test, Jordan confirmed that Elsie was in a diabetic coma and used an IV injection of glucose to revive her, getting sticky dough all over herself in the process.

  She then spent a frustrating hour trying to convince Elsie that she had to pay more attention to her disease and use a Glucometer regularly to check her blood sugar.

  “I can’t be bothered with all that hocus-pocus,” Elsie snorted. “I got work to do, that whole batch of bread is ruined now. And if I’m gonna die, I’ll die making bread, the hell with it.”

  Frustrated, Jordan trudged back to the clinic and found four young men anxiously waiting for her. Swollen, dirty and badly bruised, they were all in high spirits, laughing and joking about the fight they’d had the night before.

  Jordan treated them for cuts, abrasions, broken ribs, one broken nose and a fractured jaw, and they explained that they’d gotten drunk and started fighting over the outcome of a televised football game. They’d fought themselves to a standstill, collapsed on the floor to sleep it off and awakened this morning barely able to move.

  “We have to get to work this morning in Tofino—we’re building a house,” one of them told her cheerfully.

  Wondering how anyone could work with the injuries they had, she patched them up and sent them on their way in time to catch the water taxi.

  They were no sooner out the door than a frantic mother arrived with a three-year-old who’d just swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin. Fortunately, the obliging little girl was willing to also swallow a dose of syrup of ipecac, and the explosive vomiting that followed accounted for all the pills. It also meant that both Christina, who’d just come to work, and Jordan, who’d already changed clothes once that morning, had to change again. The treatment room reeked of vomit.

  “Mom just called, Silas and Patwin got home a while ago,” Christina announced as she and Jordan snatched a cup of tea and a sandwich for lunch.

  “Mom says they look like drowned rats,” Christina went on. “And Patwin says he’ll never go into the bush again, with Silas or anyone else. Apparently Patwin used up all the hot water showering, ate four eggs and half a pound of bacon, and then went to bed. Silas headed home, Mom said, as cranky as a bear after hibernation.”

  Jordan had hoped to take an hour off that afternoon and track Silas down, but now she revised that plan. Better to wait until he was rested and more receptive to what she had to say.

  Christina munched on ham and cheese. “What time do you figure your brother might get here?”

  It was good to have something to look forward to besides explaining herself to Silas. “Late afternoon, I think. He’s got to make connections from Vancouver.”

  “Well, it would be nice if things slowed down a little before he got here. What a crazy morning.”

  But the afternoon wasn’t much better. Jordan treated twin screaming babies with earaches, a young woman with a broken toe and a stoic logger who’d severed his finger and brought it in with him to be reattached. Through it all, Jordan kept expecting Toby to walk through the clinic door. When she finally looked at her watch, she was stunned to see that it was after five.

  “That’s it, there’s no one else waiting. I’m going home,” Christina said with a relieved sigh. “You gonna go down to the wharf and wait for the floatplane?”

  “I think I might. Why don’t you drop over later this evening and meet Toby? He’s cute, single and he told me he’s got some money.”

  Christina grinned and her lovely dark eyes sparkled. “What more could a girl want? I’ll wear my best jeans.”

  Jordan washed up and pulled on a hooded slicker. Outside, it was still raining, but it had slowed down. The air smelled fresh, and because it was supper time, there was no one out except her. She ambled down to the dock where the floatplane would land, and leaned against the piling, trying to formulate what to say to Silas when the opportunity arrived.

  All she could do was apologize and tell him the truth.

  Within ten minutes, she heard the plane approaching. Her heart started to hammer with anticipation when it landed and taxied to the dock. The door opened, and for a moment she didn’t recognize the emaciated man who stepped out.

  “Toby?” She couldn’t control the shock in her voice. Recovering quickly, she ran toward him. “Toby, what’s happened? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Hey, squirt, good to see you, too.” He was limping as he took the last two steps to her and grabbed her in his arms, and she could sense that he was in pain. The bones in his narrow face, a masculine version of her own, stood out in sharp relief. His eyes were sunken, with deep hollows carved beneath them, and he looked years older than thirty-four.

  “Tore a muscle in my leg, you know what that’s like. But I brought the ice cream you wanted, it’s in that insulated box,” he said with a grin.

  Only his smile had remained the same.

  Jordan’s gut twisted with fear, and she bit back the questions on the tip of her tongue.

  “You grab that box, and I’ll bring my bag, okay?”

  Jordan took the box, shooting a horrified sidelong glance at Toby. She was stunned by his appearance. “We have to walk a ways, up the hill and along there.” She pointed and hesitated. “Will you be able—?”

  “Sure, I’ll take it slow. Besides, I travel light.” He shouldered his bag and looked around. “So this is where you’re hiding out from the world, huh? Looks wild and wonderful, lots of boats, surrounded by ocean… Just my kind of place.”

  Jordan understood. He didn’t want her asking questions. So she bit them back for now, adjusted her stride to his painfully slow one and chatted about the village as they slowly made their way to her apartment. And every step of the way, her apprehension grew.

  She opened her door and welcoming waves of heat met them. Someone had come by and lit the stove. They’d also delivered homemade pizza. It smelled delicious.

  “You’ve got a pizza place here?” Toby dropped his bag and went over to the counter. His voice took on a reverent tone. “Great Scott, they also deliver homemade apple pie?”

  Tears came to Jordan’s eyes. Nobody but Superman and Toby would ever say Great Scott. It brought back childhood memories. And she’d bet it was Rose Marie who’d brought the food and lit the stove, knowing that her brother was coming and that Jordan wouldn’t have h
ad time to cook.

  “No pizza delivery, but I have good, generous friends who are also fantastic cooks,” she explained, forcing cheer into her voice. “Take off your jacket, sit down at the table and we’ll eat.”

  “I brought wine.” He dug in his bag and produced a bottle of white and another of red. “The guy in the liquor store said these were excellent little vintages with a delightful bouquet, not that I’d know one kind of plonk from another.”

  “Me, neither. I don’t even have any wineglasses. These will have to do.” She produced two mismatched juice glasses, and he made a ceremony out of opening a bottle and pouring.

  The pizza was ambrosia, loaded with cheese and roasted vegetables. In spite of her concern about him, Jordan was hungry, and she wolfed down several slices, noting that Toby kept up with her. At least he still had something resembling an appetite.

  He kept up a steady stream of conversation, describing the small yacht he’d just finished, making her smile with wicked descriptions of the nasty man who’d commissioned it.

  She got up to put coffee on and cut two healthy slices of pie.

  “We’ll have some of my ice cream with it,” she declared, opening the insulated container. “And then I’ll have to put it in the big fridge in the medical center, because it won’t fit in mine.”

  It took self-restraint, but she managed to wait until the pie was eaten before she asked. She’d refilled their coffee cups and sat facing him across the round table. He was recounting some sailing story when Jordan reached across and touched his arm.

  “Enough already with the diversions. Toby, level with me. What the hell is wrong with you?”