Elizabeth gave her a look that indicated she saw right through her fine manners.
“Let me help you out of the bath,” she said. “And then I’ll go.”
Anne nodded. Because she was cold now, and stiff, and it would be hard enough to get out of the tub on her own and she was not about to call in Dr. Madison for help.
Or Steven.
If he was still here.
Elizabeth grabbed a towel from the stack and Anne stood up carefully, the water lapping at her knees. The towel Elizabeth wrapped around her was warm. She gasped at the pleasure, her chilled skin soaking up the heat.
“Steven warmed it by the fire,” Elizabeth said. “As well as your robe. He also has a fire set in your room.”
Oh, what a luxury. She hadn’t used the fireplace in her room—not once.
“He’s still here?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He and the doctor are pacing outside, growling at each other. Well, Steven is growling. The doctor looks sick.”
Yes. Annie imagined he would.
She took a deep breath and tied her wrapper tighter around her waist. It felt good, the warm wrapper, the tight belt. Like it was going to keep her together when she felt in danger of shaking apart. The cold water had seeped right into her bones. She’d stayed in too long.
Or perhaps it was the night that had seeped into her bones.
There had been a lot of horror during the war. She’d helped her father in the physician’s tents. She’d cared for her sister after Jimmy had raped and beaten her.
But this… this night… She couldn’t quite catch her breath. She couldn’t feel the edges of her body. It was as if she were wrapped in cotton and she couldn’t get out. Tomorrow would be better, she understood that, but the hours between now and then seemed treacherous.
“You're gonna be okay,” Elizabeth said.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because you don't have a choice. You gotta wake up every day and be okay.”
Anne looked at Elizabeth, those wide eyes. So steady.
“You ready?” Elizabeth whispered.
“I'm ready,” Anne answered.
Elizabeth opened the door and Annie stepped into the hallway. Both men turned to look at her. Doc did indeed look sick. And Steven, at the far end of the hallway, leaning his broad shoulders against the wall—Steven looked furious. Like if allowed he’d cheerfully kill Dr. Madison.
“Anne?” Dr. Madison asked. “How are you feeling?”
She laughed. Or tried to. But the sound was only a raw bark. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I don’t…” His eyes were bright, and she realized the doctor was near tears. “I don’t know how to make this right.”
“Leave,” Steven said from the far end of the hallway. “And don’t come back.”
“Is that what you want?” Doc asked, his eyes darting between Anne and Steven. “Because I'll go.”
“And be another town’s chloroform addict? Find another woman to hide behind?” Anne shook her head. She was not angry. She was just tired of him. “No. I don’t want you to go anywhere. I want you to put away the bottle and be the man you should be.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he whispered.
“Me neither,” she told him, and then because she had nothing left to give him—no room, no care, no thought—she turned her back on him.
“Would you like some help?” Elizabeth asked.
“Go,” Anne said. “Care for your child. I’ll be fine.”
As if they’d all cried their dissent at once, she could feel everyone’s rebuttal to her statement. How, they were all thinking, could she possibly be fine?
But she ignored it and walked over to the staircase. Her leg throbbed from being in the tub for so long and her hands were shaking.
Quietly, Steven was at her shoulder. The sleeves of his shirt rolled up, revealing his arms, the golden hair there. The muscles. The tendons. She looked at his arms rather than his eyes, because she did not have the strength for that. His shirt was smeared with blood, and she remembered him cleaning her glasses.
“Thank you,” she breathed. “For all that you've done.”
“Anne—”
“You can go home, too.”
“No.”
Her eyes flew to his. His smile was sad. His eyes were clear. “I'll stay here tonight.”
Quite suddenly she was out of manners. Her mother would be horrified, but all she could do was nod her head and bite her lip against more tears.
“Do you need help up the stairs?” he asked.
She nodded again and Steven took her arm. She flinched away, vaguely remembering him carrying her. Touching her.
Her skin flushed and crawled.
“Anne?”
“Don't,” she whispered. She felt more than saw him nod, and he walked beside her one step at a time to her room.
It was warm in her room. Hot nearly. Which was fine. She was ice all the way through.
The covers of her bed had been pulled back and she imagined Steven in here, among her meager possessions. Her mother’s brush set on the dresser. Her dresses hung on the hooks. The books, stacks of medical and biology texts, beside her bed.
“Are you hungry?” he asked once she was settled in bed.
Her stomach tightened at the thought of food. “No,” she said.
“Your ears seem better,” he said. “You’re not yelling.”
“They are. They ache. But Dr. Madison says I should have my full hearing back by tomorrow.”
His jaw clenched tight at the mention of the doctor’s name.
“What are you going to do with him?” he asked.
“Kick him out, you mean?”
“Marry him, I mean.”
“No,” she said. Whatever coy game she’d been attempting to play with these two men, it seemed stupid now.
He glanced over at her, his eyes unreadable. His face cast in gold from the fire.
“He would rather I turned him out than ask him to stay,” Anne said. “He's perhaps both sicker and more cowardly than I'd thought.”
“He might not be here in the morning,” Steven said.
“No. He might not.”
She could feel him wanting to know what she would do if that was the case, but she had no answers and no desire to sift through her soul to find that kind of answer.
“Have you heard about Stella?” she asked.
“Dr. Madison went to Delilah’s and examined her. Said she should make a full recovery.”
Not full, she thought. Not for a while. Anne had no doubt but that she’d remember this night for a long time.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked, looking big and helpless and awkward. It was endearing. She was greatly softened towards him.
The shock of seeing him at Delilah's was distant now. But still there. And she didn't know how to put it aside, so it sat ragged and sharp, right between them.
“The brush from my dresser.” He brought it to her where she sat up against the pillows of her bed.
He picked up the chair near the fire and pulled it closer to her bed. Near as he could get, actually. Any closer he’d be in bed with her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. “Tell me what happened.”
She blinked at him.
“Tonight. Tell me what you saw, what you did wrong. What you learned.”
It was what her father had done. Steven remembered. He was offering her the same kind of relief. He would hold her horror, if she wanted him to.
But she found herself reluctant to burden him. “You don’t really want that,” she said. “I know you, Steven.”
“You're my friend, Anne. Perhaps my best friend. When you were in that room..." He shook his head, once, sharply, as if knocking something loose. "I told myself if you got out, there was nothing I wouldn't do to help you. Not one thing. And if it would help you, I want you to tell me. I need you to tell
me.”
She ran her brush through her hair and the familiarity of it, the small domesticity of it grounded her, while his words sent her reeling in some internal, girlish way.
“He’d beaten her. I think…maybe with the gun. She had a cut over her eye. There was a lot of blood. There wasn’t much I could do for her, except try to get the bleeding to stop. Sam was hysterical. Just… I’d never seen him like that.” The bristles of the brush scratched her scalp and she realized how hard she was pushing. “What did you say to him?”
He blinked, and his wide shoulders curled as he put his elbows on his knees. His collar was undone and she could see his neck. The knot of his clavicle. In whatever state she was in, it seemed utterly right that they should sit here like this. Him in his shirtsleeves, her in her robe. “I just tried to keep him talking. I figured if he was talking he couldn’t hurt her anymore. Or himself. His father was a cobbler. He’d had plans to do the same before the war.”
He looked up at her and she looked away, into the fire.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “A cobbler.”
“That was all we talked about. His father's shop. His life before the war.”
“Everyone had plans before the war,” she whispered. “Except me. I was…utterly without purpose before the war.”
“I can’t believe that,” he said.
“There was no place for a woman like me. No man would want to marry me, and that was the only purpose that mattered. My future was as a spinster aunt with prize goats.”
“Goats?” His lip curled in a charming smile.
She smiled back, so grateful for him. “I am very fond of them.”
“If I had known I would have given you Tildy,” he said, talking of his own goat up at the clearing, a hundred miles from here.
“Sometimes I feel so awful that my life became better on the backs of all these aborted plans and broken dreams.”
They were both silent. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking of, but she was thinking of Sam, of his broken plans. A cobbler—and instead he became a body beside a bed.
“He was so upset,” she said. “So angry with himself for hurting Stella. And I think everything we said to him, just proved to him how nothing would get better for him.”
“Maybe he was right,” Steven said.
“You don’t believe that,” she gasped.
“How were things going to get better for Sam Garrity, Anne?”
“If we could get him to stop drinking. If we could get him a purpose. A reason to care about himself. If we got him to talk—”
“Talking is no cure,” he said. “Some things are just too much.”
“Perhaps, but it’s a diversion, isn’t it? And maybe with enough diversions, things become...better.”
He was silent, as if to refute her statement in action, rather than words.
“I miss my sister,” she said, her voice thick with tears she could no longer hold back. “I mean, I always do. But tonight I really miss my sister. She always chatted, about the most inconsequential things. Hollowware as opposed to flatwear. The difference between Louisiana cotton and Carolina cotton. It was such nonsense, but somehow… it was comforting. And I would like some of that nonsense right now. I would like to be comforted by that nonsense.”
She shifted down on the bed, curling up on her side as if to hold her misery in the cradle between her bent knees and her chest.
“I don’t have nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know anything about cotton.”
She hiccupped, holding back a sob. He was the wrong man for what she needed right now. He was too silent. Too hard.
And she loved him and he didn’t love her and it was awful.
“I…ah…slept in the same room with my brothers my entire life,” Steven said, rocking slightly in the chair. When he rocked back, the runner hit the bedframe, so he changed the depth of his rock. “The same bed. Gavin, our youngest brother, snored.” He smiled slightly, as if the memory was a good one. “It was like sleeping with some kind of great beast. A locomotive, even. But Cole and I got used to it. And we had this dog, and Cole was a fool for this dog and would let it come in and sleep by our bed, and it would…” He looked over at her, grinning. “Fart.”
She laughed through the hand she clapped over her mouth. “It just…stank. So bad,” he continued. “And we’d try to get Cole to stop sneaking the dog in at night, but he insisted on the dog. So Gavin snored, and our dog farted. And Cole rolled around, jabbing us with elbows and knees. Taking the covers. It was miserable. But every night, that was what I was used to. When I volunteered I shared my tent with a boy from a few towns over. He was so quiet in his sleep. I don’t think he even rolled over. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep. I’d gotten so used to so much commotion that I didn’t know how to sleep without it. The soldier was shot and killed at Bull Run. Didn’t even make it through the first battle. The next man I shared my tent with—he snored. And I finally got some sleep.”
She could not breathe for fear of shattering this moment. For fear that he would stop, that he would wake up from whatever dream he was in and he would stop talking to her.
But he spoke again. “And then, in Andersonville, there was no tent, just whatever shelter we could make with our coats. And we were all together. All of us prisoners. Sleeping side by side. Barely any room between us. Some boys… they never slept. They were always waiting for the guards or the raiders to come by, kick us awake for the fun of it. Or the crying would keep them awake. Or the nightmares. The flies. Lots of things to keep a man awake in Andersonville. But I slept. It reminded me of that bed growing up. Gavin snoring. Cole jabbing me with his big elbows. The dog farting. It was… comforting. I can’t believe I’m saying that.” He rubbed his forehead and he even managed to smile, though his eyes were far away and she sensed, somehow, that he was being pulled away. This is why he didn’t talk about the war and Andersonville, because the memories had claws.
“I slept with my sister until she got married,” she whispered, trying to keep him here with her. “It took me a long time to get used to sleeping without her.”
He looked away from the fire and met her eyes. “I imagine.”
“I never thought of beds as lonely places before she got married. Now…” Her sigh was shuddery and sad and she glanced down at the bed, with its sea of linens, its wide prairie of mattress.
He stood up from his chair, and he was so close his knees touched her mattress. “My mother would have my hide for this,” he breathed.
“I miss my mother,” Anne cried. Her mother who had not particularly liked her, but even she would not let Anne feel so miserable all alone.
“Hey, shhhh, shhhh,” Steven whispered, and he lay down on the bed beside her. Facing her.
“What are you doing?” she asked, blinking at him.
“Pretend I’m your sister,” he joked, and she reluctantly smiled, because that was simply impossible.
He mirrored her posture, his hands beneath his cheek, his knees curled up until they touched her. Both of them immediately rearranged their bodies so they weren’t touching. So there was one scant inch of buzzing space between her knees under the blanket and his knees over the blanket.
“What would you and your sister talk about?” he asked. “Besides cotton.”
“Boys. Boys were always a popular topic.”
“I might have guessed.”
“My sister was a terrible flirt.”
“And you?”
“I was too serious to flirt.”
“Hasn’t stopped you lately.” He arched a golden eyebrow at her.
“I have been quite scandalous, haven’t I?”
“Totally shameless. It makes me doubt this picture you paint of yourself before the war. The shy wallflower. I don’t credit it.”
“No one saw me.”
“I see you.” His eyes were blue all the way through, just different shades. Lighter to darker, from outside to inside.
She wanted to ask him why he we
nt to that brothel, but the words were thick in her mouth and when she opened her lips she only sighed.
The heat from the room was making her drowsy. The comfort from his weight on the mattress, pulling her slightly toward him, made her relax. And right now she didn't care about his being at the brothel. Tomorrow she would care. She'd remember her outrage and pain.
Tonight she was just glad he was here. Part of her wanted to resist these crumbs of affection, but she had no will for that.
“You’re safe now,” he told her. Her eyelids drifted shut, too heavy to keep open. “Sleep,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
“Thank you,” she breathed, reaching for his hand, but then she stopped. Remembered. That he didn’t like to be touched.
“What happened?” she sighed. “To you in the war?” To the young man of leisure, whose blue eyes must have made the girls wild for him.
“It’s not a happy story.”
“I'm not in need of a happy story,” she told him. They were murmuring, their voices hushed.
But again he shook his head. “Another day, perhaps.”
He meant never. He planned to never tell her.
And they would never change. This, right now, their knees almost touching on her narrow mattress. This was as close as they would ever get.
And that was worse than everything else.
Steven watched her sleep, curled up on her side, thin strands of hair falling over her face, pushed around by her breath. One was caught at the corner of her lips, and with his fingers he eased it free, brushed it back behind her ear.
Her hair was silky and wild against his skin. As she would be, he imagined.
Sleep was good. Sleep would make things better in the morning.
He should go downstairs, to the hard settee in the sitting room. But when he rolled off the bed, he only got as far as the chair. She was so small in that bed. And he couldn’t leave her there alone to fend off the nightmares that would come. The fire was dying and he put another log in it, sending sparks up into the chimney, and then he went back to the chair.
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