Fully awake now, I ran down the spiral staircase, past elegant rooms retrofitted into surgical theaters, a laboratory, and a convalescents’ dormitory brimming at full capacity, my white coat flapping against my bare legs. It had been years since I’d had a good pair of nylons, but I’d seen too much of war to mourn their absence.
I was the first one to reach the foyer, grabbing a flashlight on the hall table and flipping it on. The inner doors to the vestibule were temporarily affixed to the wall, requiring only a swift pull on the outer doors to access the outside. A strong gust of rain knocked into me, effectively soaking me and plastering my coat and dress to my body.
I ran down the slippery stone steps toward the ambulance as it pulled to the curb, its headlights with the tops half painted black, its flashing lights extinguished. The driver, a large man with sad eyes peering out from beneath the brim of his dripping hat, stepped out of the ambulance.
“Wait,” I said, blocking his path, having to shout to be heard over the din of the rain as it hammered the ambulance and streets. “We have no more room. We even have patients on cots in the dining room. We are beyond capacity.”
“Just following orders, ma’am. We got an officer here right off the boat who’s in pretty bad shape. They told me to bring him here.”
“But . . .”
The man walked past me as if I were a small yipping dog just as Dr. Howard Greeley walked calmly down the stairs with an umbrella and approached the back of the ambulance. His bug eyes raked over me, taking in my sodden appearance and clothes, which had melded to my body. He didn’t offer shelter under his umbrella.
With a quick shake of disapproval, he turned to the driver. “What do we have here?”
“Officer, sir. He’s in bad shape.”
“We’ll find room for him.” Dr. Greeley sent me a withering look.
Both men continued to ignore me as the ambulance doors were thrown open by an orderly, allowing us to peer inside to where a form lay huddled beneath a blanket. Despite the June heat, the body twitched as if seized by chills.
As the orderlies began to prepare the patient, Dr. Greeley was handed a folder that I assumed was the patient’s medical records. No longer willing to be a bystander, I grabbed the folder, then moved to stand under the doctor’s umbrella. Ignoring his scowl, I said, “Good idea. You hold the umbrella while I look at this.”
Trying not to drip onto the pages, I skimmed the notes inside, paraphrasing for Dr. Greeley. “He sustained a bullet wound to his leg at Cherbourg—damage to the bone. Field doctor wanted to amputate, but”—my gaze drifted to the top of the page, where the soldier’s name was printed—“Captain Ravenel talked them out of it. They debrided the wound and applied a topical sulfanilamide, but lack of time prohibited delaying primary closure.” I felt my lips tighten over my teeth, understanding now how the wound had become infected. “The apparent effectiveness of the sulfanilamide led them to the conclusion that he was well enough to be stitched up and put on a ship home, seeing as how his leg, assuming it recovers, won’t be much use to an infantryman.”
I held the flashlight higher as I scanned down to the last paragraph, written in another hand and presumably by the ship’s surgeon. “A piece of bone fragment or another foreign body must still be lodged in the leg, causing the infection, but because of a scarcity of penicillin on the ship, the captain said he’d wait for surgery until he got stateside.” I closed the folder. Fool, I thought, but with a tinge of admiration. “You’re a real hero, Captain Ravenel,” I said softly.
The orderlies began removing the stretcher from the ambulance, eliciting a groan from its inhabitant. The exposed part of the blanket quickly darkened to a muddy brown from the rain, and, rather than wrest the umbrella from Dr. Greeley, I thrust the folder and flashlight at him before shedding my white coat, determined to shield the soldier from any further harm.
As the orderlies carried the stretcher up the steps toward the door, I did my best to block the patient from the teeming rain, succeeding only marginally due to the saturated nature of my coat. I couldn’t see his face, but I leaned down to where it would be positioned on the stretcher and spoke to him. “Captain Ravenel, I am Dr. Kate Schuyler and you’re at Stornaway Hospital in New York City. We are going to take very good care of you.”
It was my standard refrain to each and every patient who came through the elegant brass and wrought-iron doors, but for some reason it seemed this soldier needed to hear those words more than most.
Two nurses held the doors as the orderlies brought in the stretcher, then looked at Dr. Greeley for instructions. “Take him to surgical theater one. It’s the only remaining bed we have. We’ll need to examine him first, of course, but my bet is we’re going to have to take off his leg.”
“No.”
We looked at each other in surprise, wondering where the seemingly disembodied voice had come from.