The fever and the chills chased each other in an endless circle. Harriet sang song after song.
Nights were so much worse than days. Sometimes the fever waned slightly in the daytime, though it raged at night.
Sometimes in the daytime when Harriet said, “Hello, sweetheart,” to Eugenia, she would open her eyes. Every once in a while she woke up and seemed completely rational. Even when she cried and said it hurt, they took it as a sign of strength.
But at night she never slept for more than an hour. When she wasn’t sleeping, she went back to fighting, as Jem described it. She thrashed her head, back and forth, and shouted until her voice cracked. When she did sleep, it wasn’t a natural sleep, but the kind from which people don’t always wake.
One day Harriet realized that Eugenia had been ill, really ill, for two weeks. She was sitting by the bed, wringing out a cold cloth to put on Eugenia’s forehead when she heard Jem outside the door. “Can’t you do anything?” he asked the new doctor fiercely.
And the man’s voice, low. “God, and I wish that I could. We just don’t know enough. There’s people studying fevers, but they’ve little to say about rat-bite fever.”
And then she heard Jem walk away, down the hall, break into a near run. He never cried in front of her. But every day his face was more strained, the lines by his mouth more cruel.
When he returned, later that day, Harriet went to take a bath. The house was quiet, just a huge house and somewhere in it the rat that had given Eugenia a fever.
Just a house, and a father and his dying daughter.
She stopped and rested her forehead against the corridor wall.
Days stretched into another week.
Eugenia was shrinking every day. Her little face grew more peaked and tired, her eyes larger.
One day Harriet went out for a walk, and when she came back, she saw with fresh eyes what she had known inside for days. Eugenia was dying. It literally felt as if her heart stopped, and not silently, but with some great screeching pain.
Eugenia was shaking her head again, back and forth, back and forth. Her cheeks were red and she was moaning, a little slipstream mumble of words, but Harriet knew what they were: a litany of pain.
She stumbled forward and fell on her knees by the bed.
Jem was perfectly stark white, his eyes surrounded by black circles. “It’s not going anywhere,” he said hoarsely. “It’s taken hold for good.”
“You can’t know that,” Harriet whispered. “No one can know.”
“She can’t bear this much longer.”
Harriet swallowed, buried her head in the covers, as if not to hear.
“The doctor says perhaps today.” Jem’s voice didn’t even sound like his own. It sounded like a voice echoing from far away.
Harriet’s tears burned her hands, burned the inside of her nose, burned her heart. “Would you like to be alone with her?” she said, raising her head. Tears dripped from her cheeks.
He shook his head. “Stay with me. With us.”
So they sat together.
The day wore on. Toward evening, Harriet found herself thinking the oddest thoughts: that twilight is not really dark. It’s gray. The sun gone, the world turns gray, without emotion, without color. It seemed a fitting time for a little girl to slip free of all this pain, to let go.
But Eugenia never did. She would fall into silence, and panic would grip Harriet’s heart, and then she would start shaking her head again.
“She’s fighting it,” Jem said suddenly, after hours of silence. His voice cracked mid-sentence. “She won’t let go.”
Harriet managed to smile at Eugenia. “Good girl,” she said.
“No.”
“No?”