Jonas only half listened, having heard some version of the refrain near daily for the past three weeks. It had not grown more hopeful, or for that matter helpful, since the first time.
The doctor gestured to a chair. “Sit. I want to have a look at your shoulder.”
Jonas scowled again but removed his shirt and did as he was instructed. The doctor lifted the bandage covering his half-healed wound and sniffed.
“There’s no sign of infection. It’s healing well, although you’re fortunate not to have torn it open again, using it as you have.” He glanced back toward the room where Amelia lay.
Jonas ignored the rebuke. He had been forced to accept the help of a nurse in the days immediately after their injuries, when his arm had been immobile and he’d needed laudanum to quell the pain, but he didn’t like having a stranger around and sent her away as soon as he was able. He’d nursed Amelia by himself after that.
Well, almost by himself. Tommy’s mother kept him fed, and she had insisted on coming over several times to sit with Amelia. Mrs. Franklin was a powerful force for such a frail old woman. She’d ordered him out of the apartment when she arrived, and he’d been intimidated into obeying. He returned to find the place scrubbed and shining and Amelia lying on clean sheets. She’d been far more help than the doctor, with his lectures on the mysteries of the human brain.
“Keep the wound clean, and it should heal without loss of function.” The doctor reached for his hat. “You were lucky. Any lower and it would have hit something vital.”
Jonas showed the man out with as much politeness as he could muster—it wasn’t much, he knew—and returned to Amelia’s bedside. Lucky. He didn’t feel lucky.
Seeing her fall had been the worst moment of his life. Terror had swamped the pain in his shoulder. He’d wrenched the arm of the man he held until it popped and shoved him away, only dimly aware of the man’s howls and Tommy’s arrival. The man and his companions, who hadn’t gotten far, had received a thorough lesson in the folly of attacking Sabine’s guests. Jonas would have enjoyed helping impart that lesson, but he’d missed the rest of the action. With blood streaming from his shoulder, he had managed only to stagger over to where Amelia lay and reassure himself that she was breathing before he collapsed beside her.
He would be fine. But Amelia might not. Jonas looked at her in the weak afternoon light. She had grown alarmingly gaunt in the weeks since her injury. She swallowed when he trickled water into her mouth but had taken no other nourishment. Her cheekbones threw deep hollows in her face, and her breathing remained so shallow that more than once he’d held his hand beneath her nose to reassure himself that she still lived. If she didn’t wake up… Or, he shuddered, if she did but wasn’t there anymore.
They’d known a boy back at the Foundling, when they were children, who had fallen from a tree and dented his skull. He lived, but it was a shadow-life. Jonas knew Amelia would prefer a pillow pressed to her face to living like that.
But what if she stayed as she was now? How long could she live like this? How long could he afford to care for her? He wasn’t working, and Sabine had already brought in another fortune-teller to use Amelia’s room.
“I can’t have it standing empty,” she’d said when he complained.
He and Amelia had savings enough to keep paying their rent for a while longer, but the money would run out eventually. His jaw clenched. She had to wake. She had to recover. He’d promised to take care of her, and if he failed…
Jonas closed his eyes, pushing away the dread and forcing himself to take a deep breath. Releasing it with a sigh, he picked up the book he’d left at the foot of the bed. He found his place and continued to read:
Dantès rose and looked forward, when he saw rise within a hundred yards of him the black and frowning rock on which stands the Château d’If. This gloomy fortress, which has for more than three hundred years furnished food for so many wild legends, seemed to Dantès like a scaffold to a malefactor.
“The Château d’If?” cried he, “what are we going there for?” The gendarme smiled.
“I am not going there to be imprisoned,” said Dantès; “it is only—”
“Haven’t we read this one before?” A weak voice from the bed shocked him to silence. He froze for a moment, then dropped the book and leaned forward. Amelia’s eyes were shadowed but lucid.
“You’re awake! And you’re you. Thank Christ.” His voice shook.
“Sister Martha would wash your mouth out for that. What happened?”
“What happened? You nearly got yourself killed, that’s what happened. You’ve been lying there closer to dead than alive for weeks. How do you feel? The doctor just left.” He leapt up. “I’ll get him back.”
“No, don’t, there’s no need,” she said.
“How could you possibly know that?” he said with sudden irritation. “You weren’t the one sitting here worrying you weren’t ever going to wake up. Worrying that if you did you’d be feeble. I’ve been half out of my mind—”
“Could I have some water?”
“Oh. Oh, god. Yes, of course.”
He dropped his pique and hurried off, returning with a cup. He helped her sit up to drink, holding it to her lips as she leaned forward.
“Little sips. That’s right.”
She finished it all and sat back. “Thank you.”
Jonas looked at her in silence, then squeezed her hand. After a moment, he stood. “You should eat.”
She nodded.
He came back a few minutes later carrying a steaming bowl of Mrs. Franklin’s stewed chicken. Amelia was asleep again. This time, however, she was curled on her side and breathing with a deep and satisfying regularity. Jonas muttered a prayer of thanks to a god he was fairly certain didn’t exist, then took his book and crept from the room.
* * *
Amelia recovered. Each day she remained awake longer, spoke more. Jonas kept nursing her. By the next week, she was up and moving around.
Jonas spent part of a night away from the apartment and returned wearing a beautiful silk scarf, his initials monogrammed in one corner. Something tightened in Amelia’s chest when she saw it. She looked away, her lips pressed into a thin line.
Late that afternoon, they were in the yard enjoying the last of the sunshine—Jonas sitting on the third step and Amelia in the chair he’d insisted on hauling outside for her—when Tommy and Mrs. Franklin appeared at the mouth of the alley. Jonas waved to them, and the pair turned, identical looks of pleased surprise spreading over their faces.
“Miz Amelia,” Tommy called as they neared. “Good to see you out.”
“It’s good to be out.” She smiled at them. “I’m glad to get a chance to thank you,” she told Mrs. Franklin. “Jonas says you were a great help to him while I was ill.”
The old woman waved off the thanks. “People got to help one another. And besides, you’ve been good to my boy—he told me you treat him right.”
They chatted for a few minutes more before mother and son made their farewells. Mrs. Franklin patted Amelia on the arm with a gnarled hand, her thumb brushing against Amelia’s wrist as she withdrew. Amelia’s vision darkened at the touch, and half a dozen images roiled inside her head, layered one over another, all stinging and urgent. It was over in an instant, before Amelia could so much as gasp in surprise.