All the while, George faded. Red spots tacked up his thigh like a spire lurching up from the wound to his waist and the fevers returned no matter how often she sponged him down. He would utter words in his delirium that she had no way to know the meaning of.
“I saw it,” he would say with a hoarse whisper, a wry smile upon his face, so childlike she almost laughed at his own satisfaction. “It was real. Real. Real…”
“It was,” she replied, encouraging him as she dabbed his forehead. “It was indeed.”
Like this they conversed, neither one knowing the other’s thoughts, empty words passing between them, and soon she fell asleep to his ramblings. When she woke she heard not just his voice but a full conversation in midstream, causing her to jump.
Silas stood with his hands in his pockets, his denim shirt half-buttoned, glancing blithely at George.
“It’s just me,” he told her. “You were still asleep when I peeked in; George invited me to stay.”
“Not too long,” George said. “I can only manage the man in fits.”
George was so alert it nearly unnerved her. He had sweat through his fever, but there was no way she could delude herself into thinking the turn in his health might last.
“Thank you for helping with me,” George said to Silas. “I can only imagine the strain.”
“It’s my pleasure. I must say with you locked up in here, that it’s the best we’ve gotten along in ages.”
“You two,” Isabelle said. “Like old friends…”
“Hardly. I’ve asked Silas to go fetch Ezra. I know he wanted a word.”
She was bewildered by his ability to recollect Ezra’s attempted visit at the hospital, given his febrile ravings at the time.
“How nice,” she stammered.
“I’ll get on it,” Silas said, and he put a hand on George’s shoulder before turning to leave.
The smoke had finally cleared from the sky and the day was unseasonably mild; a shallow gust at the open window rippled the curtains.
George asked if there might be a way to bring the bed closer to the window.
“I’d like to see outside,” he said. “It would mean the world.”
She didn’t know what to answer. For the first time since their reunion in the hospital, he was with her now, totally and fully, and knowing how short their time together might be, she felt it was paramount that they discuss the most prominent matters. But his needs overcame her own, and she swallowed her words.
“If I put pillows under the legs,” she said, “it should move over without much issue.”
“Oh, you must,” he said.
She knew what he would find when he looked out, what had come to his land, and yet she would abide by his wishes. He had a right to see for himself what had happened, and besides, there was beauty amidst the destruction—in the forest beyond their own that remained intact, in the sky he’d observed from the porch for so many years.
“Wait here,” she said.
“Isabelle,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll be going far.”
Once she’d wrestled the bed next to the window, George looked on without a word. His mind, she knew, was somewhere in the past. Even she could cobble together the memories in her own head—based around stories she’d heard endlessly—and imagine what George sensed taking place around them: his mother was in the guest room, tucking a sheet around the bed; his father outside, calling his name to join him on a tramp through the woods, the same woods where George would take his own son—the same woods where he’d find Prentiss and Landry.
She couldn’t bear to sit idle, holding her peace, with the forest before them burned to cinders. Though the field wasn’t visible from here, she was sure he was imagining what had happened to his crops over the hill.
“It was terrible, George,” she burst out. “I’m so sorry for your land. For the crop. I thought of lying to you, but I could never do such a thing. It can be salvaged, though. I promise you that much. I’ll do everything in my power to make it so.”
He blinked once and studied her with a distant serenity.
“It’s very persistent land. A few seasons, with your assistance.” He shook his head knowingly. “It will be better than I might ever have made it myself.”
Could the land he’d nursed and doted on be reduced to something as trivial as the calm of his demeanor suggested? The weight that was released from her—the bit of pain that was set free—made her want to believe it.