That's you. I can ride faster your leg in this rain on that road. Calder shook his head once. Not cruelty, just arithmetic. You know I'm right.
Wesley's jaw tightened. He did know. He knew it and hated it. And the hating of it was visible for a second before he put it away. All right, he said.
The others don't need to know how serious it is. Calder said. Keep it calm in here. Keep the fire up. Who's going to keep her temperature down?
Wet cloth on her forehead. Change it every 10 minutes. Cold water if you have it. Not ice. We don't have ice anyway.
Keep her talking if she's awake. What if she she's going to be all right? Calder said it firmly. He said it the way you say things when you need them to be true. Keep her warm and keep her talking.
He went for his coat and his boots and was out the door before the clock on the mantle struck the quarter hour. The storm received him without ceremony. The rain was the kind that came at an angle, and found every gap in a coat, no matter how well fastened, and the road between the ranch and Red Hollow, had gone soft in the upper half, and genuinely dangerous in the lower half, where the ground flattened out near the creek. Calder's horse, a gray geling named Rook, who was reliable in most conditions and nervous in exactly one, which was lightning. And there was lightning now in the south, felt the road change under him, and slowed without being told.
Calder let him slow. You did not push a horse on a wet, dark road. You let it pick its footing and you stayed forward in the saddle and you did not think about what was behind you because thinking about what was behind you would make you rush and rushing on this road tonight would put both of them in the ditch. He thought about it anyway. He thought about Maisy's face, the wrong color in the lamplight.
He thought about Clara's voice tight in a way he had never heard before. He thought about Wesley standing in the doorway doing the math of a situation he couldn't fix. He pushed the thoughts aside and focused on the road. The creek crossing was worse than he'd expected. The water was a foot over the flat rocks that usually made the bottom of the crossing, running fast and dark and carrying things, branches, debris, the sound of itself loud enough to compete with the rain.
Rook stopped at the edge and planted his feet, and Calder sat for a moment and looked at the crossing and calculated. Not too deep. The far bank was visible. The current was fast, but not the kind of fast that took horses off their feet. He pressed his knees in.
Rook went. The water came to Calder's boottops at the deepest point of the crossing, cold enough to cut through the leather and the wool sock underneath, and Rook's hind quarters swung slightly with the current before he found his footing on the far bank, and came up out of the water with the shaking indignant energy of a horse that has been asked to do something unreasonable and has done it anyway. Good, Calder said. Good boy. Rook shook himself and moved.
The last three miles to the doctor's house took 40 minutes in conditions that should have taken 20. Back at the ranch, the night was happening without him. Wesley had done what Calder told him. Fire up. Cloth on Maisy's forehead changed every 10 minutes.
The others kept as calm as possible. He'd told the awake ones that Calder had gone for the doctor. And Maisie had a fever and everything was going to be handled. And he'd said it in the flat certain voice that he used when he needed to be believed, which was the voice he'd been developing for three years. Jonah had gone and sat near Maisy's doorway without being asked, not inside the room, just near it, the way he sat near Pearl close enough to be present, far enough not to crowd.
Eddie had taken it upon himself to keep the fire at exactly the right level, which gave him something specific to do with his hands and his brain. And Eddie needed something specific to do, or the worry came in through the gaps. Benny woke up at some point 11 and understood something was wrong immediately. The way children who have learned to read rooms always understand these things. He looked at Wesley.
Maisie, he said, "Fever. " Wesley said. Calder's getting the doctor. Benny sat with this for a moment. Then he went to the kitchen and came back with the cup of water that Clara had left there and took it to Wesley without comment because Benny, when the situation called for something other than talking, sometimes surprised everyone, including himself. "Thank you," Wesley said.
Benny sat down on the floor near the fireplace next to Jonah and did not say another word, which was the most extraordinary thing that had happened in the house in 6 weeks. In the bedroom, Clara was managing. She was managing in the specific grinding way of someone who is doing what needs doing while also being genuinely frightened and who is not allowing the frightened part to interrupt the doing part. She changed the cloth. She spoke to Maisie in a low steady voice, not the content of what she said so much as the sound of it, the tone.
Because Maisy's eyes were sometimes open and sometimes not. And Clara did not know how much Maisie was taking in. You're going to be fine," Clara said, which was what adults had always told them, and which had not always been true, but which Clara said now because she needed it to be true, and saying it out out loud was the only thing she had. Maisy's fingers found Clara's wrist and held on. "Cold," Maisie said.