She went over to her desk and removed a sheet of paper. She sat for a while, not sure of what to say. After a few minutes, she picked up the pen.
Alfred,
You’ve heard by now that I was taken back to North Brother. Mr. O’Neill said he is going to keep trying. I’m not sure what to think — I’m just so tired. I barely saw you at all.
I’m allowed to have visitors now. I would love for you to visit me here, Alfred. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s something. I’ll wait to hear from you.
Mary
She addressed the letter to the stable instead of Thirty-Third Street, and left it poking out from under her doormat on the step where the mailman would notice it. Then she closed the door of her cottage and curled up on her cot. Her body smelled ripe. Her best blouse would be ruined for good. It was so very hot. The walls so close. Late at night, when she was sure no one would see her, she carried the heavy chamber pot outside, emptied it in the river, and returned immediately to bed. In the early mornings she heard the foghorn of the lighthouse behind the hospital. She listened to the rhythmic tap and scrape of the bricklayer’s instruments as he pointed the brick of the new walkway that connected the hospital to the outbuildings. She heard John and his gardening shears slicing through the green, and she heard someone leave meals on her step three times a day. After a few days she decided that was the way it would be from now on. She’d stay in her hut and if they needed her, let them break the door down. If they wanted her samples or wanted to draw blood, by God they’d have to drug her and get ten men to hold her. No more. After several days — her head felt light from lack of food, her teeth thick and soft, and under her arms itched for a scalding washcloth rubbed with strong soap — John pounded on her door and warned her that he’d brought a nurse and they were going to enter without an invitation if she refused to come outside. Finally, as threatened, he opened the door, and the smell of fresh-cut grass turned her stomach.
“My God,” he said, turning his face toward the fresh air of outdoors and drawing a deep breath. “Are you suffocating yourself?”
“Get out.”
“I’ve brought Nancy,” he informed her, as if she knew who in the world Nancy was. As if she cared. “Tell her,” John urged the girl. The nurses got younger every season.
Nancy looked at him and then at Mary.
“Tell her,” he said again, nodding toward her hand. Mary noticed the girl was holding a newspaper.
“There’s a dairyman,” Nancy said. “In Camden. Upstate.”
Mary waited. The girl whispered something to John, but he couldn’t hear her. Mary promised that she’d kill them both with a single shot if they didn’t get out.
“They say she gets mad if…”
“If what?” John asked.
“Yes, if what?” Mary asked.
The girl took a step backward. “If anyone says anything about her having the fever.”
Mary sat up in her cot.
“Don’t worry about that,” John assured Nancy. “Just keep going.”
“There’s a dairyman in Camden who’s passing the fever through the milk.”
Mary sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”
John took over. “She’s just after reading it to me. He’s a dairyman. Had the fever forty years ago and hasn’t been sick a day since. There were outbreaks of Typhoid wherever his milk was sent, at groceries and markets all over New York City, and now they’ve traced it to him. Got lots of people sick with it. They’re saying maybe hundreds. More than—”
“More than what?”
“More than they claim you made sick. A lot more.”
“Where are they sending him? Not here, I guess. Camden is all the way up near Syracuse, isn’t it?”
“That’s just it. They’re not sending him anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because he’s the head of his household and has a family, they’ve decided it would be too much of a hardship to put him in quarantine, so he can stay exactly where he is, as long as he promises to never have anything to do with milk production. So he has his sons running it and he’s bossing them.”
“You mean they’re isolating him somewhere in Camden. Somewhere he can be near his family.”
“No, Mary. I mean they’re letting him stay in his own damn house. You understand? With his wife. With his dogs and his sons and his grandchildren. Not a thing has happened to this man except being told not to go near the milk that’s distributed for sale. As for the family’s milk he can do as he pleases. None of them have ever had Typhoid, so your Dr. Soper believes they must be immune.”
“Soper? Soper went up there?” Mary tried to make sense of what she’d just been told. “Hundreds, you said? Hundreds? They say I infected twenty-three.” It was one of the rare times she’d said it out loud.
Nancy piped up. “I think, if I may, that you’re considered, more of a… well, a special case? There’s a bit on you at the end here.” She held out the folded newspaper for Mary to take. “This man knew he had Typhoid forty years ago. He remembers it well. You claim to have never had it at all. So.”
“I claim?” Mary said. She advanced toward the girl with her arm stretched out for the paper, which the girl handed over before backing away. “You can go now, please, and tell the other nurses not to bother coming down here with any more glass canisters for collecting or they won’t like what I do with those canisters when they get here. I’m finished with all that. You understand?”
“I understand.”
When the girl had left, John announced that he was going to sit on the step outside where the air flowed a little easier. “She was trying to help, Mary,” he remarked over his shoulder. “She didn’t have to tell me about that article, but she did. She said she thought you should know.”
“Everybody is trying to help. And look where all their help has landed me.” She scrutinized the back of John’s head for a moment, his sunburned neck, and then, sighing, went over to sit beside him.
“If you hadn’t bit Nancy’s head off, she would have also told you that the article says there are likely many, many more like you and this man up in Camden. It says the Department of Health already has leads on several of them from tracing local outbreaks.”
“And none of them are in quarantine.”
“Nope.”
Mary tried to ignore the reek of her body and looked over at the moon, just an impression yet, the sky still blue around it. Her muscles felt weak from lying in a prone position for so long. She leaned over to the tray John brought with him and broke off a piece of the bread.
“But I was the first so I get the prize.”
“I guess so.”
John plucked a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth. He leaned back on his elbows and closed his eyes. “I like it out here, days like this. Feels like the country, and this island gets a good breeze compared to over there.” He lifted his chin to indicate the water, the tall buildings on the other, larger island to their west. He sat up. “Oh, before I forget, I cleared a path down on the other side, you know, by that heron’s nest you found that time? It goes all the way down to the beach and you can’t see the hospital from there if you walk down a bit and get the trees between you and it.”