I tried to swallow when I realized I was holding my breath to the point where my throat and my chest ached. Grandpa was giving him Willie’s name, too!
“Until you remember your own name,” he added. “Okay?”
I waited to see if the boy would speak, but he didn’t.
Grandpa acted as if he had, however. “Good,” he said. “Good.”
I felt everything I had eaten churn in my stomach. I covered my mouth and then moaned and rushed back to my room and into my bathroom, where I vomited and vomited until I sank to the floor by the toilet.
Which was where Myra found me in the morning.
6
Dorian Camden was at my bedside, looking as concerned as my mother would have. Myra had called her out of Willie’s room. I imagined everyone expected I would be happy that we had a real nurse in the house when we needed one, but I still couldn’t get used to the sight of her parading about in that nurse’s uniform and all that it meant.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Sick,” I said. I wanted to add, What kind of a nurse are you? How am I supposed to feel after throwing up and falling asleep on the bathroom floor? But I didn’t. I didn’t want to talk at all. I closed my eyes and then opened them when I felt her hand on my forehead.
She looked at Myra, who was gray with worry. Who could blame her? Willie was killed, and now I was sick. What was next? The very walls falling in?
“Are you going to the bathroom a lot?” Dorian asked.
“You mean, do I have diarrhea?” I wasn’t the poisoned boy. She could talk to me like an adult.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“It still could be a touch of the stomach flu,” she told Myra. “I don’t think she has any fever. I’ll check. You don’t always have a fever with the flu.”
“I’ll get My Faith to put up some tea and honey,” Myra said, and hurried out.
Dorian looked down at me, her eyes full of suspicion. “You haven’t eaten or drunk anything you shouldn’t have, have you, Clara Sue?”
“Of course not.” Was she thinking I had been sneaking whiskey into my room? “You can search my room if you want,” I snapped at her, and turned away, just the way the poisoned boy would turn away when someone spoke to him or asked him questions.
“But you threw up?”
I didn’t respond. I could feel her gaze locked on me.
“Do you have any pains in your stomach?”
“No.”
“Are you still nauseated?”
“No,” I said, a little louder. I didn’t want her asking me any more questions.
“People can make themselves sick, you know. They can get themselves so upset that they start to take on the symptoms of illnesses or just make themselves more vulnerable to diseases and such. Is that what’s happening here?”
I spun around and glared up at her. “You’re the nurse. Figure it out,” I said.
She winced, turned, and walked out. I thought that was the end of her, but she returned with a thermometer and said, “Please open your mouth.” She put it under my tongue. As soon as Myra arrived with the tea, she took out the thermometer, looked at it, and said, “Normal.”
“That’s good.”
“I would keep her on a light diet today and make sure she has lots of liquids,” she advised Myra. She looked at me, expecting me to say thank you, I was sure, but I just turned away until she started out.