With Every Breath (5 page)

No translation was necessary, though, as Mr. Zomohkov rose and embraced his wife. He growled something in Russian and kissed his wife on the lips. Twice. He also swatted her on the behind and flashed her a lusty grin, which Mrs. Zomohkov returned.

Customs must be very different in Russia, for these two engaged in open affection with each other each time Mrs. Zomohkov made her appearance. Kissing, hugging, and murmuring words that brought a flush to the Russian woman’s cheeks. Though their blatant affection sometimes bordered on embarrassing, Kate thought it rather charming. Except it made her miss Nathan. It had been four years since he died, and the ache of loneliness was getting worse instead of better. At least she was finally able to listen to fiddle music without dissolving into tears. Nathan was a carpenter by trade, but he loved the fiddle and played it whenever they wished to celebrate. Birthdays. Inaugurations. The first sight of tulips in the spring. When Mama made an apple pie. Really any excuse was good enough for him to break out his fiddle. They had been so happy together. . . .

Her mother set a tray of pastries before Mrs. Zomohkov, then launched into another tirade against Trevor. “That boy has nothing but vinegar in his veins. The sour will spread to anyone standing next to him. It’s not safe, you working for that man.”

“Life is never safe,” Charlie said. “Tell us, what is it Trevor will be having you do?”

Trevor’s face, tense with barely contained energy, flashed before her.
“I need someone
who wants to win as badly as I do
.
”
Just remembering the intensity vibrating in his voice made her heart race a little faster.

“He’s testing a new serum that might stop a lung disease from spreading to other organs in the body. If it works, it will prolong the patient’s life.”

“What kind of disease?” Mr. Zomohkov asked.

“Tuberculosis. He only takes the very worst cases.”

The diplomat reared back. Turning to his wife, he unleashed a spiel in Russian. Mrs. Zomohkov gasped and shot to her feet, tipping over her teacup. Kate tossed a napkin over the spreading stain, but Mrs. Zomohkov was shrieking in Russian and gesturing like a madwoman.

The diplomat finally persuaded his wife to stop yelling, but not before she grabbed her pastries and fled upstairs.

“What do you know of tuberculosis?” Mr. Zomohkov demanded.

Kate looked around the room and all the faces staring at her, awaiting an answer. “Trevor explained the disease to me. It sounds horrible, but he is determined to find a cure.”

“There is no cure for tuberculosis,” Mr. Zomohkov pronounced. “Only misery and death. It spreads from person to person and leaves people twisted and crippled and dead. It is a dangerous disease, Mrs. Livingston. You will be playing with fire if you tamper with it.”

He stormed off to follow his wife, and Kate was left to wonder if he was right to be so afraid of the disease.

* * * *

It was the first question she asked Trevor on Monday morning. She arrived at the conference room promptly at nine o’clock to find the large table covered with stacks of paper. Once again, Trevor was wearing a black suit with a vest and tie beneath his white lab coat, a stethoscope clamped around his neck.

“Of course it is dangerous,” Trevor said. “I told you that.”

“Is it frightening enough to send a woman shrieking from the room at the very mention of it?”

The clock on the conference room wall ticked out a steady beat as Trevor contemplated her with that expressionless stare of his. “She is a wise woman. Tuberculosis ought to strike fear in the heart of anyone who works with it. All my employees are tested each month to ensure they have not contracted the bacillus. I’ll need you to provide me with a sputum sample as soon as we go upstairs.”

Heat stained her cheeks. She’d happily go through the rest of her life without mentioning the word
sputum
in polite company. “Isn’t that overreacting?” Kate asked.

“If we catch the disease early, there is a chance at recovery.”

“How good of a chance?”

“Almost none, so try not to get it.” He continued to sort his papers as though she were going to be satisfied with that horrific assessment.

“Is that your best scientific opinion? You want me to risk my life over a flippant response like that?”

His face softened just a trace. “Only around ten percent of people who get tuberculosis will survive. We are beginning to believe that moving to climates with high, dry air is the best chance for a cure. People who go to such settings can double their odds of survival, but tuberculosis is still usually a death sentence. You will need to be scrupulous about following the safety rules while you are here.”

He went on to describe how the disease was contracted by inhaling the bacillus. Victims of tuberculosis were often seized with uncontrollable fits of coughing, during which moisture from their lungs sprayed into the air. The most common way for the disease to spread was to inhale air near an infected person who had been coughing.

“I insist you wear a mask whenever you are near the patients. If you follow the rules, you will be fine. Come on, let me show you the ward.”

Kate followed him up the narrow staircase to the top floor. She’d never been in a hospital clinic and didn’t know what to expect, but it seemed remarkably homey. The entrance had a sitting area tucked into the semicircle of a turret. An assortment of comfortable chairs, a sofa, and a small table filled the cozy space. Beneath the window were a set of bookshelves crammed with reading material. Cotton drapes on either side of the window billowed forward in a gentle breeze.

“Tuberculosis spreads in cramped, poorly ventilated quarters,” Trevor explained. “The more fresh air we can keep in the ward, the better. It will get chilly in the winter, but the fresh air is good for the patients. Here’s a mask. Keep it with you from now on and always wear it in the wards.”

The other side of the reception area had a nurses’ station with a single desk and filing cabinets, all behind an oak counter. The nurse at the desk was a dark-haired matron wearing a starched uniform with one of those funny little caps. Kate nodded and smiled to her, but Trevor didn’t bother to introduce Kate as he strode down the hallway.

Kate scurried to keep up. “It would be nice to be introduced to people. I’m new here, and it seems a basic courtesy.”

Trevor shrugged as he opened the door to the ward and gestured her inside. It was a spacious room with huge windows on one wall and rows of beds on the opposite side, all filled with patients. They were all women, and a few turned to look as Kate entered the room. Others were reading, and some still slept.

“Everyone, this is Kate Livingston. She will be helping me to gather data.” Trevor looked at her. “Happy?”

She smiled. “You are as warm and friendly as I remember.”

A thin girl in the bed nearest to Kate started snickering. “You tell it to him, ma’am,” she said with approval in her voice. Kate thought the girl was going to laugh, but instead the child was racked with a deep, scratchy fit of coughing.

Trevor tied a mask over his face and motioned for Kate to do the same. The heat of her breath felt strange against her face as she tied it on. The damp warmth was uncomfortable, but she dared not take the mask off.

The girl struggled to heave in a lungful of air while she reached for a mask on the small metal table beside her bed. It sounded like she had gravel rattling in her lungs.

Trevor took a seat on the chair beside the girl’s bed, then motioned for Kate to come closer. Seeing him with the lower half of his face covered by the white cotton mask underscored the danger of her new position. Had the Russian diplomat’s wife been right to run screaming from the room at the mere mention of the disease?

Trevor shot her an impatient glower and beckoned her again. She took a tiny step forward but couldn’t make her other leg move. It was as if her feet had taken root in the cold linoleum floor. That poor, sweet child . . . but Kate dared not get any closer. An invisible weight kept her frozen in place.

“It’s all right,” Trevor said. “This patient is not currently contagious, but I insist all coughing patients use a mask until the seizures pass, whether they’re contagious or not.”

He went on to explain that patients were not usually contagious, that only when the bacillus morphed into a particular stage did it have the ability to infect others, and he carefully monitored each patient’s health daily. The employees always knew which patients were contagious.

She could see little of Trevor’s expression behind his mask, but his voice was typically clinical. He motioned again for her
to draw closer. Kate forced her legs to move, praying that Trevor was right about what he said. She was unable to meet the girl’s eyes. What must the child think of her?

“My name is Kate,” she said, silently asking the girl’s forgiveness for her hesitation.

“Hi, Kate. I’m Hannah Wexler.” If the girl resented the way Kate behaved, she gave no indication. Kate looked directly at the girl. Beneath Hannah’s chalk-white skin, a tracery of blue veins fanned across her face.

“Pull up a chair, Kate. I’ll show you how I gather data and track the results.”

Curiosity nudged away the fear as Kate took a seat in a plain metal chair beside Trevor, who grabbed a chart hanging from the end of Hannah’s bed. “This is patient 27F62. That means she’s the twenty-seventh female patient admitted to the study, and her birth year is 1862. All the patients are filed under their numbers. As I scan data, it’s easier for me to place their relevant details when referring to them by their numbers. Lean forward, please.”

Trevor pressed his stethoscope against the girl’s back and closed his eyes to listen, but all Kate could think was that she and the child were the same age. If Hannah was born in 1862, that made her twenty-nine, just like Kate. The girl looked so wasted away and tiny, as though she hadn’t even reached puberty yet.

Trevor explained that the first thing he did each morning was to listen to all the patients’ lungs and take their temperatures. All patients were to drink a vial of the serum Trevor was hoping could slow the progress of the disease, and two hours later Trevor would draw samples of blood and saliva for testing. The samples were sent to the laboratory for analysis, and the results sent to Kate to calculate the effect of the serum.

Trevor gestured to a column of numbers on Hannah’s chart. “This is where we track her weight, temperature, white blood
cell count, and the levels of iron in her blood. So 27F is doing comparatively well in the past few weeks.”

“
Are
you feeling better, 27F?” Kate asked Hannah. “I can’t help but wonder what it feels like to be referred to as a number. If it is in any way a life-affirming practice, perhaps I can get a number too.”

Hannah smothered a laugh. “We’re all used to Dr. Kendall and his strange ways. Besides, I’d rather deal with Dr. Kendall than the undertaker,” she said with a wink.

Kate blanched. Had she understood the girl correctly? This sort of gallows humor seemed shocking, but perhaps it was the way the patients coped with their condition.

As they progressed through the ward, Trevor examined one patient after another, all of whom he referred to by their patient numbers. There were fifteen patients in the room, and one empty bed. On their eighth patient, Trevor turned the chart over to her and instructed her to begin writing down the data.

It felt good to handle numbers again, and she was eager to learn how to interpret all this data. She closed the manila folder of the last female patient and followed Trevor out of the room. The male patients lived in an identical ward across the hall. She thought they were going into the men’s ward next, but Trevor reached behind her to close the door to the female ward with a smack.

“Do you know why bed number nine is empty?”

Kate gave him a blank look. Trevor tugged his mask down to dangle around his neck and continued, “It’s empty because 23F died on Tuesday. I will have another patient take her place as soon as I find one who meets the criteria for this study, and that patient will also be referred to by her number. Trust me, it will be easier for you to think of a patient as 27F rather than Hannah Wexler.”

“But she’s a human being, not a number.”

Trevor gave her a wintery smile. “This may be difficult for you to accept, but there are areas where I have far more insight than you. Treating dying patients is one of them. Every person you just met will be dead within a year. They won’t be among the lucky ten percent who can hope for a cure because their cases are too advanced. All I can do is buy them a few more months and the satisfaction of knowing their participation in this study may someday lead to a cure. They will all die, and they know it. It will be easier if you refrain from becoming friendly with them. Don’t ask after their children. Don’t look them in the eyes or encourage pointless conversation. They are research subjects, not friends.”

There might be a grain of truth to what he said, but did he have to be so stone-faced? “Trevor, you are the most cold-blooded person I’ve ever met. I’ll bet you need to sun yourself on a rock to generate body heat.”

His face remained stoic as he grabbed a set of blank forms from a wall bin. “We do the same procedure for the male patients,” he said, then pushed open the door and strode into the men’s ward, where all sixteen beds were filled.

The men ranged in age from a boy of sixteen to a man of fifty. Some of them didn’t appear to be all that sick, while others looked like skeletons. One man was so weak he couldn’t sit up on his own. Trevor helped peel him up from the mattress so that the patient sagged over, then Trevor pressed the flat disk of his stethoscope at various spots on the man’s back. When instructed to take a breath, the man’s eyes darkened in pain. The ridge of his spinal column was so prominent it tented up the back of his nightshirt. As Trevor helped the man lie back down, she wondered if it hurt to lie on a spine that exposed. His name was Ephraim Montgomery, and agony distorted every line
of his face. Despite his emaciated frame, he had wide shoulders and broad hands. It would not surprise her if Mr. Montgomery had once been a carpenter or a longshoreman. He was probably once a strong man who could have hauled twice his own weight. Now he could not sit up without help.