Chapter 18

18

ADA HAD JUST RUN PAST THE TRAIN STATION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL WHEN the clouds unleashed a sudden downpour. Up and down the hillside, people scrambled into their houses, but Ada kept her head down and charged ahead, watching her skirt drag in the mud. By the time she got to the top, she was dripping wet. Under the cover of the veranda, she stomped her feet once and snapped the skirt of her dress, and when she looked up, she saw Antoinette standing at the threshold of the open front door.

“I got medicine from the commissary,” Ada said, holding up the jar.

Antoinette shook her head.

“Her fever came down?”

Again, Antoinette shook her head. “Just now...”

She spoke so quietly that amid the thrashing rain, Ada could not quite hear. “What?”

“Just now...”

Ada saw Antoinette’s lip trembling, and she knew. “Just now?” Ada whispered.

Antoinette nodded and turned back into the house.

***

WHEN MICHAEL ARRIVED, he found the girl standing on the veranda with a look of pure shock on her face. She was holding a jar of pills in her hand, and vaguely he wondered what they were for. Before he could find out, however, before he could even say hello, the girl, as soon as she saw him, said, “Go fetch Mr. Oswald and send him here to the house. Tell him hurry. Go as quick as you can.”

Michael, who would have done anything the girl asked him to do, darted back into the rain with his mailbag heavy across his shoulder. He ran down the hill to a district office and asked where Mr. Oswald might be found. “It’s an emergency,” he said, and when an engineer there suggested maybe the field hospital, where John Oswald was known to keep an office, Michael ran there and asked the first doctor he saw, and the doctor said he had not seen him today but maybe the field hospital in Culebra, where he often went, and Michael ran the one mile to Culebra and asked a young medic there, and the medic said Mr. Oswald had gone down in the Cut earlier that morning but he had not seen him since, and in all Michael ran to five different locations—the mail delivery would be late for many people that day—until at last he found Mr. Oswald sitting alone in one of the hotel restaurants eating a pork chop smothered in gravy with a side of green beans. Breathless, Michael announced that there was an emergency at the house. “Go back,” he panted, and John Oswald did.

***

ANTOINETTE PACED IN circles, wringing her hands and thinking to herself. Lord, Lord, Lord, such terrible things down here on this earth. Lord have mercy, what has happened this day? And why did it have to happen when she had been here by herself? She did not want to be blamed. Antoinette ran over it in her mind like a finger over a fish, trying to feel for the bones. The girl should not have left. That was to start. Even the doctor said he had not seen her, which meant she must have been away for quite a long time. And where had she gone? That whole time at the commissary? Couldn’t be. How long could it take a person to run to the commissary and buy a bottle of pills and run back again? How long on those fresh young legs? However long it should have taken, it took longer than that. Far too long. Lord only knew what the girl had been off doing all that time when she was supposed to be here. And it wasn’t the first time she had left. There was that day she went out gathering herbs to make her pitiful bush tea. In addition to pacing and wringing her hands, Antoinette nodded as well. It was true that the terrible thing had happened when she was here by herself, but she was sure not to blame, and if Mr. Oswald came to question her, she had her defense.

***

AS ANTOINETTE PACED down below, Ada stood in the bedroom upstairs, staring at Mrs. Oswald. Tentatively, she took a step closer and hovered her hand beneath Mrs. Oswald’s nose. No breath. She had never seen a deceased body this close before, and in one strange way she was relieved by how ordinary it looked. The person in front of her was still Mrs. Oswald. That had not changed. And if there was another life beyond this one, as Ada had been taught to believe, she would still be Mrs. Oswald there, too. Ada burst into tears. The image of Millicent lying in bed rushed to her mind. Millicent huddled under the quilt, breathing low. She tried to see Millicent getting out of that bed and smoothing the quilt and folding it back as Ada had seen her do so many times, as their mother expected them both to do even though between the two of them Millicent was the only one who obeyed, but Ada’s mind would not budge and all she could see was Millicent in bed, the same place Mrs. Oswald was, the only place Ada had ever known her to be, and now she had come to her end, and Ada stood there and cried.

After a time, she heard the front door downstairs open and close. Ada wiped the tears off her face and lifted her head. Mr. Oswald was here. She took a deep breath to collect herself. Across the room, the drapes were closed—probably Antoinette’s doing—and before Ada left the room she walked around the foot of the bed and dragged them open again. It was still raining outside, but Mrs. Oswald would have wanted them open.

***

MR. OSWALD SUMMONED the doctor, who returned to the house at once. That was perhaps the saddest part of all, Ada would think later, for calling the doctor betrayed a level of hope. As if maybe, just maybe, there was something yet to be done. But when the tall doctor arrived and walked into the room where the three of them—Mr. Oswald and Antoinette and Ada—had gathered, he removed not a single tool from his flat-bottomed bag. All he did was lay one hand on her chest and two fingers of the other against the side of her neck. Then he removed both his hands and turned to them and nodded. Ada again burst into tears and excused herself from the room.

She was still standing in the hallway, sniffling, when the doctor came out of the bedroom. He stopped when he saw her and shifted his bag. “You returned, I see.”

He was at least a head taller than she was, and Ada raised her eyes up to meet his.

“You were not at the house when I came earlier,” he went on.

“I went to the commissary—”

The doctor appeared surprised. “The commissary?”

“To get medicine for her fever, yes.”

“Ah, but the medicine is my job. Your job was to stay here, was it not?”

“Yes, but—”

“And at the critical moment, you left.”

Ada stared at the doctor, dumbfounded. She wanted to point out that he himself had been late, and that if he had been here on time she would not have needed to leave, to find fever pills on her own, but at that moment Mr. Oswald stepped into the hall and very quietly closed the bedroom door. He turned to face the two of them standing in the dim hallway, but pointedly, Ada noticed, he did not look at her. He looked only at the doctor and said, “Pierre, a word with you, please.”

***

LATER, THE CORONER came to confirm and record the death, raising the sheet over Mrs. Oswald’s face and leaving her body in the bed. He would be back the next day, he told Mr. Oswald, to prepare it for burial.

Two men from the newspapers arrived, not only The Canal Record , but the Star & Herald , too, and Antoinette brought them both glasses of limeade as they sat in the parlor with Mr. Oswald, who answered their questions while the newspapermen took notes. Both papers ran a full obituary that identified Marian Oswald as the wife of Mr. John Oswald and told that they had been married for eleven years with no children between them. Neither of the obituaries said anything about Marian’s degree in botany or about the work she had done before she met John, although the Star & Herald did run a photograph of her along with the announcement.

The coroner returned the next day with the death certificate. He was a no-nonsense gentleman with a thick black mustache and equally thick black eyebrows that were so unkempt that they hung over his eyes like awnings. In two years in Panama, he had attended a death nearly every other day. Typically, he was enlisted to the hospital, and it was rare that he had business at an individual home. He would never say so, but he thought that John Oswald, brilliant as he was rumored to be, had been wrong to keep his ailing wife at the house rather than send her off to receive better care. He was also wrong to have hired Pierre Renaud as the attending physician. Renaud was fine in character, but the coroner knew him to have an ego that at times interfered with his practice.

Unfortunately, what was done was done. The coroner rolled up his sleeves and asked for a bucket of hot water and rags. He carried everything into the bedroom and commenced the work of cleaning the body, the way he had so many times before.