“Why? Didn’t any lawyers survive?”
“Not any who will admit to it,” said Edith.
Coral liked the woman. She was straight-talking, and Coral had no doubt she’d be doing the bulk of the medicine here. She took the white coat, put it on—it was about two sizes too large—and said, “Okay. If I don’t look like a little kid playing doctor for Halloween, I’m ready.”
Good thing she was. The bell on the front desk rang the instant she said that.
It was a busy day. Mostly, people were coming by to meet her. What surprised her was that a half-dozen people came who were clearly neurotic, either hypochondriacs or hypochondriacs by proxy about their children, or hoping to hear they had some dramatic ailment when all they had was hunger or a hangnail. Coral dispensed no medicines, gave little advice, and took her cues from Edith on how to treat each person. She tried to act like every doctor she’d ever seen as a patient.
Edith had been right about what to do. Mostly, she listened. And over the course of the day, she felt more and more impatient with the whining ones. What she wanted to say was, “Have you looked outside lately? Do you not see that people have far bigger problems than imaginary mold allergies?” As the day wore on and she became hungrier and weaker, it was harder to control her impulse to snap at them, and she deferred to Edith more and more. The other woman seemed to have unlimited patience for the nonsense.
Toward the end of the day, she saw a pair of six-year-old twins for minor scrapes, and that was fun. One had fallen hard enough to scrape his knee through his jeans and the other had purposefully scraped himself in solidarity with his twin. Coral tried to be serious when she explained that they didn’t have many bandages left, and there were other ways to be a good brother. It was a good moment, near to what she’d always dreamed of when she had imagined being in family practice one day.
She smiled at the mother as she was bundling the twins up to leave. “They’re adorable.”
“Adorable to visit, maybe,” said the mother. Then she glanced at Edith, and a guilty look came over her face. Her children had survived, and others had not.
When she was gone, Coral asked Edith, “Is it hard for you? Dealing with the children?”
“No, not at all. With this few of us left, it feels a little like the children are communal property, in a way. We’re all pitching in together to get them through it. So it’s like being an aunt to them all.” She gave a sad smile. “I miss my kids something awful. But the world is what it is. We have to make the best of it.”
At the end of the day, when she thought she could summon not one more smile, the bell rang again. Edith went to greet the patient, and she brought back Benjamin.
“You hurt?” Coral said.
“Not in any new way. Parnell told me to get my arm checked out before the clinic closed. I’m just following orders.”
Coral realized she’d barely spared a thought for him all day. Being busy was no excuse. She had to remember what was important. Playing doctor for a bunch of strangers was not. Benjamin—he was what mattered.
“Is it bad?” she asked. She meant Parnell, and his orders, not the arm.
His eyes darted to Edith. “No, not bad. I’m used to doing what I want, when I want.”
“Except when I boss you around.”
He gave her his half-grin. “Except for that.”
“At least I have a chance to treat this in decent conditions, now. Take your shirt off, please.”
He took his jacket off and his new shirt, and when he tried to untie the bandage, she stopped him.
“Let me,” she said. She worked out the knot in the strip of shirt she’d put around the wound, and then carefully tugged off the gauze pads, taking care not to tear the scabs off with them. Both wounds looked better. She blew out a sigh of relief.
“Gonna live, am I?” said Benjamin.
“Yeah. You are.” She pressed at the edge of the exit wound. The excess heat was gone. She tested his skin down at his elbow for a comparison. Hardly any difference at all in temperature. It wasn’t as puffy now, and it wasn’t as red. The wound was still an ugly thing, but the scabs that had formed were doing their jobs now, and she would leave them alone.
To Edith, she said, “What do you think about using mercurochrome on this?” The stuff hadn’t been used in American medicine for a long while, and she knew little about it, except her grandmother still had some in her medicine cabinet.
“Hasn’t hurt anyone yet.”
“But because of the depth of the wound, I’m wondering if that’s best, or….?”
Edith stepped closer. “It seems to be healing on its own. I’d be sparing with the use of anything we have, as we don’t have much.”
“At least I have clean bandages now.” Coral dabbed a bit of the mercurochrome at the edge of one of the scabs, where it looked slightly redder than the rest, and padded each side with a square of clean cotton, then tied another strip of clean cotton around it. “In a couple days, if it’s still healing, and if you’re someplace warm inside, like the kitchen, or Levi’s office, or here, leave it open to the air.”
“My arm hardly knows what air is any more.”
She washed her hands in soap and water, then turned back to him. Edith had put the trash into a can kept on the box of kindling. Anything burnable—and the old gauze bandages were—got burned for heat in their stove. Edith had quit feeding the fire an hour ago and had banked the stove, preparing for the end of the day.
When Coral turned back to Benjamin, he was easing on his jacket again.
“I wish that jacket wasn’t so dirty.”
“The shirt is clean,” he said.
“Maybe you can borrow another coat for a couple of days while this one gets laundered and dries out. That’d be good.”
“What about yours?”
“Mine, too. And our sleeping bags and blankets, if they’ll do those. I assume they have heat in the laundry so things dry quicker?” she asked Edith.
The woman nodded.
“Show me how to close the clinic up for the day.”
“I can do it.”
“No, I need to learn, so you can take your days off soon. You’ve done more than your share today. You kept me from screaming at that Gloria person, for one thing.”
“She can be a trial,” said Edith. “It’s easy to tidy up and close. Shouldn’t take us five minutes.”
Benjamin leant a hand, and Edith was right. In five minutes, they had everything put away, the floor was swept, and the chairs in the waiting area straightened out. Someone, probably Edith, had left a couple books in there, like magazines left in a regular doctor’s office. One Coral glanced at had pictures of African animals, so you could entertain a kid with it while you were waiting. As she put it down, it struck her than none of these children would ever again see a zoo or get a chance to look at a giraffe or zebra in real life.
Edith had a key for the clinic door, and she locked it. “One of the few places we do lock,” she said. “Along with the kitchen and food stores.”
They didn’t entirely trust each other, then. That made Coral feel marginally better about staying in Boise. Otherwise, it was a little too Stepford Wives for her. The Stepford Survivors. That they understood there would be theft among the small community made them seem more human to her.
Edith walked with them for a few minutes then split off to go home.
When she was out of earshot, Benjamin looked around to make sure they were alone and said, “Let me tell you about
my
day.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Coral.
Benjamin glanced around again. “It’s not awful—but it’s strange.”
“Levi, you mean? Or Parnell?”
“A few things. Yeah, them too.” He pulled his jacket tighter.
When he adjusted his mask on his face, she remembered hers and dug in her pocket for the bandana, finding it and slipping it on. “Tell me,” she said.
“Let’s keep walking, but slowly.”
“Maybe we should head for the kitchen.”
“We have some time before supper.”
“So let’s walk around the block.”
“Sure.” He rewound his scarf. “Cold.”
She nodded. It was getting colder. Or maybe going in and out of heated spaces was making the cold feel worse.
“He asked about what we’ve seen out there. I explained more about the cult. He wouldn’t give me my rifle back.”
“That’s not surprising.”
“He said he’d think about it the first time he sent me out hunting.”
“What do you mean, hunting?”
“Like Kathy and them were doing when we met them. Scavenging, really. Looking for supplies and canned food.”
“Then he gave you that as a job?”
“That’s his hope, he said, that it would work out. For now, I’m to apprentice as a perimeter guard—no gun, just a lookout—and I help Parnell out when he needs me. That’s what I did today.”
“What’d you do?”
“All he had me do today was report to another guy who had me haul boxes of books and scrap wood to the kitchen, for burning.”
“What was weird about that?”
“This isn’t some sort of utopia,” he said.
“No.” She hadn’t believed it would be. It was better—or closer to the old world—than anything they’d seen so far, but she no longer trusted other people. “What’s bothering you in particular?”
“I got to see Levi’s quarters when I took wood there, for one thing. Just a glimpse, but it’s pretty fancy, compared to Doug and Abigail’s place. And he has a stove, and it had heat coming off it, even though he wasn’t there.”
“Does he live alone?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
“No one else was there?” She wondered why they’d waste fuel for the stove, then.
“There were signs a woman had been staying there. When I asked another laborer if he was married, he laughed. Apparently, there have been several women.”
Coral said, “That’s not too odd. If the women are willing, it may be the privilege of command. I mean, presidents slept around a lot, right?”
“It wasn’t the idea of a woman, or her nightgown, or whatever. It was the place, and everything in it. He definitely uses more than his share.”
“Some of us are more equal than others,” she said. When Benjamin looked at her strangely, she said, “It’s a quote from a book I read in high school. I mean, you have government of any sort—and Boise counts as a place with government—then you have a privileged class, right?”
“You’d have to see it. Some of what was in there was not necessary. It was indulgent.” He was getting frustrated trying to communicate with her. “It was
wrong
.”
“Okay.” Coral didn’t want to belabor the point. Besides, she trusted Benjamin’s view of the situation. Even if he couldn’t put something into words, she believed in his judgments. “What else?”
“It was—I don’t know. Then Parnell was interested in you, which makes sense. But there was something else going on.”
She grabbed his jacket sleeve to stop him and make him look at her. “Whoa, you mean something sexual from him? Toward me?”
“No, no. I don’t mean interested in that way. There was a kind of greedy look in his eyes. Not sex. Some other kind of greed I can’t identify. So be careful with him. And something else odd? After talking with Levi a few minutes, after I’d answered his questions about our route, and what we’d seen, I felt like I was disappearing, right before his eyes. Like I was turning invisible for him.”
Coral could easily imagine that. That couldn’t be good news. The leaders could reject Benjamin from the community and force her to stay. Not going to happen, no how, no way. If they didn’t want him, she would leave with him. “I shouldn’t have let them separate us,” she said. “It was stupid of me. Tomorrow, I’ll talk to him, tell him that if he wants me as a doctor, you need to assist me.”
“I’m not qualified to do anything like that. I’m not even good with people.”
“Who cares? We’ll pretend you’re doing one thing and you can be useful doing another. You can be the receptionist, pull up patient files, tidy the rooms. Whatever. We need to stick together until we know more about this place.” And before any kind of serious trouble visited them while they were apart from one another.
Benjamin was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s going to fly.”
“We won’t know what he’ll think about it until we ask.” And she’d ask for their supplies back, too—all of them, including the hatchet and rifle. If they wanted her as their doctor so damned much, they could accommodate her requests. Benjamin and she began to walk again. “Did anyone order you to be somewhere tomorrow morning?”
“I’m supposed to report to Parnell again after breakfast, in the library.”
“Good. I’ll come—” but she was interrupted by a call from a person in the distance, too far away for her to make out. “Who is it?” she said.
“Martin, I think,” said Benjamin.
Coral raised a hand in greeting, and Martin detoured their way.
When he came closer, he yelled, “If you’re headed to supper, you’re headed the wrong way. It’s over there.” He pointed back the way they had come.
“Oh, right,” Coral said.
“I’ll walk with you, so you don’t get lost.”
She and Benjamin would have to finish their conversation later. But that was okay. She needed to think on how to approach Levi, how to sell him on the idea that Benjamin was required at the clinic.