The Last Time We Met

December 1918, San Francisco, California

Jocky startled at my feet when I snorted and woke myself up. It took long moments to understand where I was, sitting beside the bed, holding Henry's hand. I touched the back of my hand to her face – it was fever hot. Her breathing sounded terrible, a death rattle if I ever heard one.

I stood up on creaking knees. I hadn't meant to fall asleep in the chair. After running a bath for her, as she had done for me, I had put a cold compress on her forehead and read to her from Anne of Green Gables, one of her favorites from childhood. "You're my Gilbert Blythe," she whispered, reaching up to touch my face.

She fell asleep soon after, and I followed. I wanted to nurse her to health, as she had done for me. My body still felt achy and stiff, and I had a persistent cough, but at least my head felt clearer. The morning my fever broke and I woke in cold, damp sheets, I rolled over to discover Henry asleep on her side of the bed still in her day dress, shivering under a heavy blanket.

Afraid to place the thermometer in her mouth, I unbuttoned her nightgown and placed it under her armpit. For three minutes I paced, then pulled it out. Two days of this fever and it was higher than ever. One hundred and four. Last night it had been one hundred and three. Steadily climbing.

I hurried downstairs and lifted the telephone receiver. I waited for the operator, then asked her to connect me to our doctor.

"Sir, it's the middle of the night," the operator said.

"Please, it's an emergency."

The line rang and rang and rang. Finally the operator came back on. "Perhaps I can connect you to the hospital."

"Yes, please."

A woman picked up after the second ring, and I explained to her about Henry's fever.

"You'll need to bring her to the hospital right away," the nurse said.

Henry had said the hospital was a terrible place to be, but I didn't know what else to do. I had done everything I remembered her doing, and her fever was climbing. I pulled thick socks and slippers on over her feet, and wrapped her coat around her, then carried her out to the car. Once she was safely in the seat, I put a mask over her nose and mouth. I had a thought that I should pack a bag for her, with fresh clothes and Anne of Green Gables, but she was already in the car and I couldn't think straight.

I put on my own face mask and drove slowly, so that Henry would not wake.

I carried her inside, and the nurses swarmed. They all wore face masks. "Oh dear. Is it the influenza?" one of them asked me.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I was ill, and she cared for me. She's a nurse down at the military base."

"Oh dear," the nurse repeated. "Oh dear."

I followed the gurney into a large ward that had all of its windows open and was so chilly I shivered. I pulled my coat around me as the nurses checked Henry's vital signs. All around, in their beds behind white curtains, people coughed and moaned.

The doctor came over and listened to the nurse's assessment, then told them to administer a dose of aspirin and left without ever touching Henry himself. The nurses had been prepared for this and shook Henry to wake her up. They had apparently dissolved the aspirin in a glass of water, and helped her to swallow it.

Henry had doubted how helpful aspirin was. I watched the nurses administer aspirin to the next patient, and the next. I must have dozed off, for when I woke they were giving Henry another dose. I gripped Henry's hand in mine and watched her sleep for a short while before again drifting off myself.

Sunlight streamed in the next time my eyes opened, and I squinted against it before turning my attention back to Henry. "Darling," I whispered, stroking her face. Her skin burned. I removed the compress the nurses had applied and soaked it in the basin water beside her bed, and wiped her face with it before leaving it on her forehead once more.

Henry sucked in a breath that sounded watery.

"Darling?" I bent low, hoping to hear some word from her dry, chapped lips.

I left her side only to take care of my bodily needs, visiting the toilet and venturing out to purchase a cup of coffee and some toast from a diner across from the hospital. It was all I could eat, and even that made my stomach protest. That night, as I lay my head to rest on the bed so that my hand gripping hers was all I could see, her breathing became all I could hear, the labored wheeze of it, the increasingly frequent coughs and gasps for air.

When I woke the following morning, Henry's hand felt cool in mine. I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, expecting to see her covered in sweat as I had been. I blinked, and it was her, and it was not her. She had gone. I blinked and it was another face, from another time.

She was a man in a tattered, sweat-soaked tunic, the skin of his face taut and wrinkled and tinged with blue.

She was a young man with dark skin, his eyes tinged yellow, wide open and staring into nothing.

She was the peasant woman with buboes on her neck.

She was a girl wrapped in the folds of a toga, her dark hair curled around her face, which bore red, oozing pox.

The faces flashed before me, all the centuries of pain and loss. I disappeared somewhere within it, collapsing onto the bed and hoarsely begging for her to return to me.