Die Once Live Twice by Lawrence Dorr

Author:Lawrence Dorr [Dorr, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Silverado Publishing
Published: 2011-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

RESURRECTION

On the second day, Park arrived to find Marion sleeping on the floor next to Jonathan’s bed. “There is no change in Jonathan, Doctor Park,” she said when he awoke her. “He mumbles nonsense. I force him to drink water and he is peeing. It is coming out some. The nurses keep giving him aspirin to lower his temperature and keep him cool with ice in his groin and armpits.”

Park worried, If the kidneys quit, there’s nothing we can do. The rash on Jonathan’s chest and arms was still rampant. Park told Marion he had wired Emil von Behring, the German doctor who first used diphtheria antitoxin. If anyone would have experience with serum sickness, it would be von Behring. He hoped to hear from him by wire tomorrow, and in the meantime, Park emphasized, Marion must keep forcing water into Jonathan. “It is life itself to the sick.”

Marion spent her waiting hours with her head full of childhood memories of Des Moines. Her family was well-to-do and her parents had sheltered her from the deaths of their friends. Though she had schoolmates who died from TB, they were quickly removed from school when they became sick and she never saw them again. She never went to any of the funerals of her parent’s friends. So Marion was not at all comfortable with thoughts of death. To her it was mysterious and awful.

She was sad that she had never taken Jonathan back to her hometown. Although the foundries lining the Des Moines River gave Des Moines a reputation as a dirty town—the Pittsburgh of the West—Marion had only pleasant memories of her childhood. The lawns around their home were expansive and dotted with trees, which became castles in her imagination. As she grew older, in the summer she and her friends rode horses to swim in Gray’s Lake and occasionally the Raccoon River, even though her parents had given her strict orders to not swim in either the Raccoon or the Des Moines river. Every summer two or three kids drowned and the whole town galvanized. Word spread rapidly and the river banks were quickly crowded with people as divers searched for the body. These drownings made death seem even more surreal to her.

When Park returned the third day, Marion was dripping water into Jonathan’s mouth. Jonathan shook his head from side to side in response to his cheeks being squeezed. Marion stopped and looked with pleading eyes at Park, who returned with the answer from von Behring. He shook his head no. Marion hung her head and cried. How much longer could he last without an antidote?

Marion wished she could take Jonathan to Younkers Department Store, where she and her mother had shopped together so often. They would ride a carriage over the iron bridge across the Des Moines River to the east side and visit the state capitol building. Her father had taken her there several times when he went to visit the governor. She and Jonathan would ride the streetcar up North Street to Drake University, which she had attended.

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