But they silenced him by disappearing him into a cell. A few might have died dragging him there. And there he has remained, his anger growing viler and more toxic as time progressed. With chunks of stone and hunks of rusted metal, he sketched out on his cell walls scenes of war and torture, a fantasia of retribution that became his reality, like someone who reads over and over again a novel until its words are rote and its characters flesh.
The old man who put him there is dead. The doctors said it was the result of infection brought on by the surgery, his arm broken in several places. The old man had been in a cast only a few days, wracked by the fever that came from the infection, when he suffered a heart attack. Colter knew the heart attack could have come at any time, when he was giving a speech or humping his wife or knifing into a steak, whether his arm was broken or not. But all the what-ifs and maybes did not change the fact that his death more or less came at Colter’s hand.
The mayor’s son is alive. Hiding somewhere out in all this waste. Colter has been given a gift. The gift of freedom. They let him go and wished him good hunting. Colter knows how to hunt and he knows how to hurt. With knives and ropes and whips and glass and fire. With his own hands. With his wolves. And now he is supposed to hurt Lewis, the man he still thinks of as a thin-wristed, pale-skinned weakling of a boy, the son of the man who clapped him away and left him to rot after all his years of service.
He follows the dry river, follows the messy stream of hoofprints in the sand, follows the ashen piles of dead campfires, the withered lumps of stool, the castaway supplies the wolves sniff, lick. He squints at the horizon, where the sun sets, a kaleidoscope of bloody colors.
Chapter 23
EVERYONE CALLS HER the doctor. She doesn’t mind. She knows that once a woman becomes a certain age, people stop seeing her. In the Sanctuary, at the hospital, people made eye contact, asked questions, listened to her answers, because she was of service to them. She was the doctor. But on the streets she was no one, invisible. Not the doctor and not her given name, Minda Shields. She was a ghost.
She never married, never had children. No one ever bothered to pursue her. Maybe because of the way she looked, face scrunched, prematurely gray, appearing old long before she ever was. Maybe it was because the right man never seemed so important and the right woman always felt impossible to acquire. Or maybe it was the way she behaved. All business, people said. Which was another way of saying, unkind. She didn’t mean to be. It was just her way. If someone came in, whimpering about stomach cramps or heatstroke or whatever ailed them, she would say, “We’re here for symptoms, not sympathy.” She understood the way the body fit together and came apart, the way it ruined and healed, and she wanted to help a person in the same way a builder might mortar a crumbling foundation or a gardener might pull a weed in an overgrown pot.
As the years passed, she tried to be better. She tried to help more, mother more. She wanted people to turn a needy face toward her in a bad time. She had no one but her patients. That is how she knows Clark, as a patient, treated for alcohol poisoning. She pumped her stomach and brought the cups of sugar water to her lips and held her hair as she vomited into a bucket and monitored her for twenty-four hours. She checked up on her weeks later, finding her at the stables, asking if she needed anything.
“What makes you think I need anything?”
“I’m just checking. That’s all. Just seeing if you’re all right. Healthy.”
“I’m fine.” Clark looked at her curiously. “Hey, you want to get a drink?”
A patient treated for alcohol poisoning asking her out for a drink. The doctor almost laughed, but she could tell Clark asked the question without irony. To her drinking was like breathing, like talking, and the doctor decided she would like to share that with her. She wasn’t one to visit bars, but she visited one that night. Clark had a way of rallying people, convincing them of what they never realized they wanted. It wasn’t one drink or two. It wasn’t two weeks or three. It was a long seduction, a slow, secret sharing, before Clark revealed their plans and asked if the doctor might join them. They needed someone like her. To care for them.
To be needed. How good that felt.
The doctor realized then she couldn’t remember the last dream she dreamed. She couldn’t remember the last patient she saw or the last meal she ate or the last book she read. Those things happened, but they happened in the haze that had become her life. Nothing was worth committing to memory any longer. So she said, “Yes.” She would go. She would go anywhere Clark asked.
Clark might be reckless, given to wild mood swings, occasionally crippled by her indulgences, but there was something about her — the way she punched the air to punctuate a sentence, the way she never stopped moving except right before she was about to give an order, the way she threw back her head when she laughed, as if her laughter were a swallowed sword. Her heart was too big. It owned her. And when she was angry or happy or sad, you knew about it, because her heart couldn’t be hidden, slamming everyone within fifty yards with its drumbeat. It was hard to doubt someone like that, someone who lived so fully.
The doctor is taken. They all are. They are all there because of Clark. She is their rallying force. Which is why, when the doctor leaned over her cold, pale body, when she dug through her bag and searched for anything that might restore the life to this beautiful, precious person, she felt wounded in a way she never had before. She understood at last what it meant to be the weeping patient.
It was not her care that brought Clark back. It was not anything the doctor pretended to understand, a force beyond any education. But none of that mattered. All that did was Clark’s survival. About this the doctor feels, with no other comparison available in her life, joy.
The doctor dotes on her. Tidying her blanket. Cleaning the dressing on her wounds. Telling her to rest, rest, please. Pushing back her hair and kissing her on the forehead. Whatever she needs, the doctor will take care of.
She tells Reed to leave Clark be. “She doesn’t need you.”
And she doesn’t. The doctor has never liked him. He is the kind of man women love — with his predatory smile, his stalking walk, his way of standing too close — but he has always struck her as a rank dog eager to hump a leg.
She does not care for Lewis either. For other reasons entirely. She has a grandnephew, a boy of seven who can play the fiddle brilliantly but avoids eye contact and makes strange conversation with himself. There is something similarly unsettling about Lewis, who has always seemed to occupy a different room even when in the company of others and who has abilities beyond any of their understanding. A magician, a miracle worker, an aberration — she’s not sure what word best suits him.
The doctor thought he would die. After the transfusion — if that’s the right word for it — he remained still for two days. His breathing so shallow his chest barely moved. His pulse so weak she gave up trying to read it, sensing only one impossible heartbeat a minute. The doctor stayed away, but Gawea sat by him.
She could talk now — the doctor suspects she has been able to talk for some time — but rarely speaks, as if rationing her words. If the doctor asks how he is doing, she says, “The same,” and if she asks if Gawea has brought a damp rag to his lips, she says, “Yes.” Gradually his color flushed. And his eyes began to shudder beneath their lids. And he began to speak in his sleep, uttering words that were clearly enunciated but in no recognizable language.