Return to Exile (22 page)

“You don’t have to bark at my wife!”

“When Diona added blood to her complaints of belly pain, I thought she was whining about her monthly,” Vivia explained.

“Her bowels could have perforated.” Lisbeth conducted a quick exam. “Low pulse. Spleen swollen and tender. Abdomen distended.”

“Sepsis.” Mama stood. “I’ll get my scalpel.”

“Wait.” Lisbeth’s mind retraced the sketchy details of the ileal perforation surgery she’d observed in the OR as a medical student. “We don’t have intravenous antibiotics, or a way to correct her electrolyte imbalance, or even an NG tube to suction her stomach.”

“We’ll have to improvise.” Mama retrieved her tool satchel.

Improvising was Mama’s go-to answer for every medical emergency. A broken arrow shaft had saved Laurentius. Elevating the head of a bed and pounding on a child’s back had saved Junia. But Diona’s rapidly deteriorating condition left little room for improvisation.

“Do you have any mandrake root in your bag of tricks?” Lisbeth asked.

Mama smiled. “Someone’s done their homework.”

She didn’t consider herself anywhere near the expert herbalist that Mama had become, but she had devoted some serious study to the healing properties of natural remedies. “The least we can do is knock her out,” Lisbeth said. “Any rue? We’ll need to empty her stomach as best we can.”

“Nothing makes a mother prouder than when her daughter knows how to induce emergency vomiting.”

“You are a strange people.” Vivia turned her head as if the whole subject was beneath her.

Mama and Lisbeth shared an amused glance as Mama poured rue oil into a cup of hot water and stirred until the contents turned a muddy brown. If the mixture tasted as bitter as it smelled, Diona’s gag reflex would quickly accomplish what was needed. Mama added a hint of honey to make the emetic go down easier.

Lisbeth set about making the operating field as sterile as possible. She heard Ruth’s voice in the kitchen. If Ruth was in the kitchen, who was watching Maggie? “Mama, I’m going to make
sure someone’s keeping an eye on Maggie while we knock out this surgery. I’ll be right back.”

Lisbeth hurried to the kitchen. “Where’s Maggie?”

“In bed with Junia.” Ruth chopped vegetables. “Poor Laurentius was ready for a break.”

“Is Cyprian with them?”

“He, Barek, and Pontius are in the garden organizing the church into a more effective workforce.”

Lisbeth couldn’t drag her eyes up from the flawless movements of Ruth’s hands. She hated the illogical resentment still simmering in her belly, the feelings she couldn’t get a handle on, but simply by choosing not to do anything about the two-family situation for now, it was as if Cyprian had silently chosen Ruth. It seemed no matter how congenial they all tried to be, there was no going back. They’d each spent the day tending the assignments she’d made and sticking to their chosen areas of Cyprian’s massive estate.

Which was just as well.

At least behind the safety of thick plaster walls, neither of them had to pretend they weren’t stealing glances at the other. Lisbeth knew, coming back, that things might have changed a bit during her time away, but she had no idea she would feel so uncomfortable in her own home. She almost wished she’d stayed in Dallas rather than watch Cyprian dote on Ruth and her growing womb.

Jealousy burned in the place where her own child had developed within her womb. During those long, frightening months of waiting on Maggie’s birth, she’d longed to have Cyprian’s hand on her belly, to watch him smile when he felt Maggie’s determined little fist pummel the walls of her watery cocoon.

Lisbeth started to reach for a vegetable but suddenly remembered they were raw, like her emotions. “Mama’s doing an ileal per
foration repair, and I’ll be assisting. I’d appreciate it if you could keep an eye on Maggie. She likes to kick off the covers.”

“I’m enjoying her. She’s no trouble.” Ruth scraped sliced vegetables into a large bowl. “Naomi’s tending the fire close by, but if it will give you some peace, I’ll sit with the girls as soon as the soup starts to simmer.”

Enjoying my daughter?
“Just keep an eye on her, that’s all I ask.”

Lisbeth returned to the typhoid hall, feeling guilty for her less than gracious response. Prickly as Lisbeth was now, she’d been even more caustic and difficult in the early days of her first visit to Carthage. Yet Ruth had patiently shared her clothes, her wisdom, and her love. Freely. Selflessly. With no strings attached to her offer of friendship. Lisbeth owed her old friend more than an apology. She owed her for introducing her to a whole new way of thinking, an introduction to Christ that had changed her life. She would find Ruth and offer an apology once they had Diona stabilized. A truce would make her time here bearable.

Lisbeth slipped back into their OR with her backpack. “I brought you something.” She presented Mama with the new scalpel and suture needles she’d brought with her from the twenty-first century.

“Perfect.” As Mama fingered the new equipment, her gaze traveled to a place Lisbeth could only guess at: her old operating rooms perhaps, maybe even Papa. She couldn’t be sure.

Lisbeth dropped the new scalpel into the boiling water, then went around the hall, gathering lamps. She filled all three with oil and fresh wicks. After she placed a clean chamber pot within easy reach of Diona, she suggested to Vivia and Titus that they might be more comfortable waiting in the garden.

When Titus refused, Lisbeth rigged a blanket drape between Diona and her parents. “Whatever you do, stay on that side.”

Titus lifted the blanket and marched to Diona. “If I’d wanted
my daughter to be sliced up by a slave, I would have hired the quack who tends my horses.”

Lisbeth bristled. “My mother is one of the best surgeons I’ve ever seen.” She escorted Titus back to his chair. “If your daughter lives it will be because that wonderful
doctor
saved her life. Step around that blanket again, either of you, and I’ll throw you out of here myself.” She strode around the drape and lit the lamps.

“I hope you haven’t made promises I can’t keep,” Mama whispered as she concocted an antibacterial solution of warm water, goldenseal, myrrh, and turmeric to wash the peritoneal cavity once she repaired the leak. “Ready?”

Not really.
“When you are.” Lisbeth dropped to her knees opposite Mama, gloved up, and lifted the girl’s head.

Mama managed to pour a few sips of the rue down Diona’s throat. Within seconds, the gut-wrenching results left their patient so weak she barely had the strength to chew on the dried mandrake root.

Once Diona’s eyelids closed and her body went limp, Lisbeth removed the parsnip-shaped bark with the strong, earthy fragrance.

Mama stood ready with a stainless steel scalpel in one hand and a blunt bronze metal probe in the other. She swiped her brow on her sleeve. “Here we go.” She leaned in and made a long, vertical incision.

Diona didn’t flinch.

Mama used metal hooks to clasp the lip of the abdominal walls and expose the small intestine. “Hold these.”

Lisbeth took over the hooks. “You know they have little cameras that can look around inside a person now.”

“You don’t say.” Mama lifted healthy gray sections of bowel and carefully searched for the tear. “I’d rather trust my hands and eyes, but I’d give my right arm for some decent Kelly forceps.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time I come.”
Next time? There won’t be a next time.
Lisbeth blinked back tears. How would she convince her mother to take Laurentius and leave with her when there were so many depending on her here? Was she going to lose Mama as well?

Mama poked around until she found the fiery ulceration on the intestine. A quick debridement of the perforation’s ragged edges was quickly followed with some well-placed sutures. “We’ll clean up the infection as best we can, then close.”

Lisbeth plugged the earbuds of her stethoscope into her ears to check Diona’s vitals.

“So much blood.” Vivia peered over the draping.

“Lady, I said not to look over here.” Lisbeth tilted her head to indicate Vivia should sit down.

“I hear singing. Do you?”

“It’s impossible to hear anything with you jabbering.”

“It is the water goddess.” Vivia’s wide eyes were locked on her daughter’s open gut. “She comes from the sea to cry for the loss of her children.”

“You’ve not lost your child.” Lisbeth draped the stethoscope around her neck and handed Mama the antibacterial wash. “Titus, you better get her out of here.”

“But I hear the water goddess—”

“I don’t believe in your gods, Vivia.” Lisbeth dabbed fluid from the open cavity.

“Then it must be the Christians singing.”

Lisbeth and Mama glanced at each other over their masks.

“People talk, you know.” Vivia clutched the lip of the drape. “Titus didn’t want to come to the healer of the Christians, but I said we had no choice. Galen wanted to cut her wrists. Bleed her out a little. I said no.” Her lips pursed, as if she might vomit. “And look . . . you’ve done worse.”

Lisbeth and Mama kept working.

“Do you believe in the one God of these Christians?” Vivia asked.

This was one of those moments Lisbeth had considered since she first saw Christians ripped apart in the arena. Would she have the courage to stand up for her beliefs? Declare Jesus her Lord in the face of hatred?

Lisbeth slowly lifted her eyes to meet Vivia’s earnest expression. “I do.”

She noticed Mama’s pleased smile, and she knew, for this moment at least, that her faith had passed its test. However, if there was a sword poised over her neck or a lion charging at her child, she wasn’t sure she could trust her thin courage to remain so bold.

“Can this one God help Diona?” Vivia’s voice quivered with more emotion than Lisbeth had seen or heard since her arrival.

“We’re praying to him now,” Mama said. “Now, Titus, you need to get her out of here.”

Titus put his hands on Vivia’s shoulders. “Come, my dear.”

Lisbeth and Mama cast each other relieved glances.

Mama slowly irrigated the infection from the peritoneal cavity. “Apparently you didn’t limit your studies to infectious diseases and herbal remedies.”

How could she put into words how the selfless acts she’d witnessed on her last visit had changed her? Anything she could say would only be a clumsy attempt to explain something that just didn’t make sense. She felt as naked as the first time she and Cyprian had made love, and strangely, just as happy.

“Lisbeth! Come quickly!” Ruth stood at the door of the typhoid hall, her face void of color. “Maggie’s gone!”

27

L
ISBETH ABRUPTLY DROPPED THE
surgical retractors into the bowl of hot water and rose from her squatting position beside the operating mat. “Are you sure she’s gone, Ruth?”

“I’ve searched everywhere.”

Maggie would never step out on her own, especially into the confines of the dark. She was afraid of everything . . . or at least she had been . . . until they came here. And that’s what scared Lisbeth. Budding courage and a totally new and dangerous world could be a precarious combination. The scar on her own wrist was proof of the perils of fearlessness, and the scar on her heart, that of foolishness.

Lisbeth tore the gloves from her hands. “Where’s Cyprian?”

“Still with the church. In the garden.”

She raced from the typhoid hall. Fear thundered in her chest as she burst into the garden.

Twenty or thirty of the same people who’d come to help her reorganize the hospital had returned and were bunched around the fire, their arms outstretched over the flames and their faces intent on whatever was being said.

Lisbeth pushed through the crowd. Cyprian and Barek were seated on a stone bench. Between them sat Felicissimus. “What? Why is he here?”

Cyprian jumped to his feet. “Lisbeth?”

Part of her wanted to demand explanations for Felicissimus’s presence, to expose his betrayal, but the swift retribution he deserved would have to wait. “Maggie”—tumbling from her lips—“is missing.”

Cyprian rushed forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “Calm down. She’s probably just hiding, playing one of her many games.”

Before Lisbeth could reply, Ruth interrupted. “No. Junia is missing, too.”

“They’re together?” Lisbeth didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more frightened. Maggie had grown much braver since she’d jumped into this world. No telling what she might do with an older friend to egg her on. “Where could they have gone?”

Barek stepped forward. “They must have gone to the tenements.”

“How do you know?” Lisbeth demanded. Barek glanced from Cyprian to Ruth. Lisbeth grabbed the boy’s arm. “Tell me.”

“Maggie wanted a doll.”

“I don’t understand.”

Cyprian shimmied into a cloak and tossed another to Pontius. “Junia left a doll under the bed in her old apartment.” He added a small dagger to his belt. “Maggie asked me to get it for her.”

“And you told her no, right?”

“Of course,” Cyprian snapped. “But she has a will as strong as her mother’s.”

The knot in Lisbeth’s lower abdomen told her what Barek and Cyprian had said was true. Maggie
would
risk everything to get her hands on a doll. “Let’s go.”

“You’re not going. Barek, Pontius, and I will fetch the girls.”

“Do you know where Junia used to live?” Lisbeth asked pointedly. “I do. I stayed there several days after her parents died.”

“She’s right, Cyprian,” said Pontius. “The tenements are far too large to search blindly.”

Cyprian reluctantly agreed. “Very well, but you will follow my instructions.”

“Fine.”

“Then we’re all set to go,” Ruth said.

“Whoa.” Cyprian snagged Ruth’s arm. “You have no reason to put yourself in danger.”

Determination pushed Ruth’s normally perfect features out of place. “Junia is like my own daughter.” Refusing to entertain any further arguments, she ordered the dogs to stay and went to ask Naomi to keep an eye on Laurentius before leaving.

Lisbeth paced, furious they’d been forced to wait on Ruth to join their little entourage. Mama emerged from the typhoid hall, wiping her hands on a towel. Lisbeth quickly filled her in on what was going on and kissed her cheek.