Plague

Chapter 4 Day 1, 8:45 PM

Chapter 4
Day 1
8:45 PM

The Chapel was on the first floor, stuck behind a stairway. Jacob had always figured that’s how it is with religion. It’s only there if you look hard enough.
It wasn’t difficult to find the boy’s parents. They were sitting alone, in the front, crying and holding on to each other as tightly as they could. Jacob stood quietly and watched them, while the man crooned softly to the woman and gently stroked her hair.
Medicine may be hard, but the hardest thing of all they don’t teach you in medical school. How do you tell someone that they just lost their only child? The fact that Jacob couldn’t tell them why their son was dead, what caused the hemorrhage in his brain, made Jake feel worse.
He grimaced. It’s hard to feel worse then you do when you already feel like shit, he thought.
Jacob walked slowly to the front of the Chapel, purposely banging a chair to attract their attention. That way they could meet him after they tucked away the ragged edges of their fear and embarrassment. They were in a situation and in a place they could barely comprehend. All they had was their dignity, and Jake wanted them to place it in front of them like a shield, which would make the whole sorry business a little easier. For everyone.
As he walked up the aisle, even with the two of them looking at him hopefully, Jacob realized that he didn’t even know their names: he didn’t even know their dead son’s name. He hadn’t thought he could feel worse then he already did. He was wrong.
“My name is Dr. Wright. I was told I could find you here.”
“How is my little boy, doctor? Is he gonna be all right now?”
The woman grabbed Jacob’s hand as she spoke and looked at him with fear in her eyes. Her husband stood up and took her shoulders.
Jacob guessed the woman saw the sorrow in his eyes, because she clutched her husband’s arm with both hands. Her fingernails drew blood, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“What is wrong with my son? He is okay?”
Jacob took a deep breath and put his hand on the man’s arm above her hand. He could feel it quivering.
“I’m sorry, but Jose is dead. I can tell you that he died without pain.”
So necessary for them to hear, Jacob knew, but he had no idea if it was in any way true.
The woman fell to her knees, clutching her bosom and sobbing loudly. Her husband looked blankly at Jacob and got on his knees next to his wife, cradling her in his arms. Jacob stood silently, wishing he was anywhere else. In a few moments the man stood up.
“Why he die, doctor? Was it our, our, was it because of us?”
Jacob looked at him and put his hand on his shoulder.
“You did nothing wrong. I don’t know why he died, but I want to find out. I know this is not a good time for you, but I need to ask you some questions. Is that all right?”
“My wife, she talks English better than me. You ask her.”
The woman got to her feet and sat on a nearby pew.
“Doctor, I will tell you what I can. I want to know what killed my Jose. He was fine until yesterday.”
Jacob went over with them what he had been told by Tom Brighton. They nodded through most of it; occasionally the man asked his wife something in Spanish and she answered in the same language. They made few corrections.
“Did Jose complain of a headache? Did he throw up after you found him? Do you think he had a fever?”
She answered “no” to all of Jacob’s questions. This went on for several minutes. Finally, Jacob asked about how the child looked when he was first found. The description also matched what Tom had told him.
“When he was in bed and you tried to keep him under the covers, he was moving,” Jacob asked them. “Could you show me what these movements looked like?
They spoke to each other for a moment. The father looked up and began to jerk his arms, one at a time, back and forth, almost flinging them to the side or in front and behind him. The hand, forearm and shoulder seemed to move independently of each other. Jose’s father stopped and his mother said that the boy’s legs moved the same way.
“What did he sound like when he talked to you?”
The woman performed then, slurring her speech and speaking syllable by syllable, seemingly having a hard time coordinating her breathing to her speech.
Jacob looked at his watch and realized that Stephen Johns would be arriving at any moment. The boy’s father must have realized that he was getting ready to leave them. He stood up and grabbed Jacob’s shoulders hard and shook him back and forth, trying to be gentle. The man started to cry and then began sobbing, trying to talk at the same time. Jacob made out the words “find out”, repeated several times. When the man let go of his shoulders, Jacob stepped forward and put his arms around the man, hugging him for a short period of time, just long enough to let him know that Jacob could at least commiserate with his sorrow and his fear.
When Jacob finally stepped back, the man’s wife stood up and put her arms around her husband and looked at Jacob with understanding and some compassion, sensing his own dislike of what he had to do and his empathy at seeing her husband’s sorrow.
“Please, doctor, find out why my boy died,” she said.
As Jacob left the Chapel, he looked back once and saw the woman holding her sobbing husband and talking to him. She reached up to kiss his forehead as Jacob closed the door.
Jacob realized that he had promised her, at least in his mind, to find out what had killed Jose.
He had an odd feeling that he didn’t really want to know.