The Doctor's Undoing Read online

  An hour later, Ida turned over yet again, unable to get comfortable in the thick night air. No matter how much she needed sleep, it was nowhere to be found tonight. Her ability to nod off in even the worst of conditions had been a blessing at Camp Jackson—Ida couldn’t remember the last time she had trouble catching winks. “Fine!” she declared to the dark room, sitting up and reaching for the light. “Now what?”

  She didn’t feel like reading. She’d already organized most of her things, and that sounded as if it would make too much noise anyhow. There wasn’t enough light to paint properly, and the black and white of sketching sounded entirely unappealing.

  It wasn’t a breeze that the Good Lord sent, but an idea with just as much refreshment. Dashing to the bottom drawer of her bureau, Ida found her knitting needles. Leanne had taught her the craft at Camp Jackson, where many of the nurses worked in their free time to make socks for the thousands of soldiers who fought for freedom on tired, cold feet. Ida had become a competent knitter, even if the required soldier colors of navy, black and olive left much to be desired.

  Now that the war was over, colored yarn had become one of life’s everyday luxuries. As a matter of fact, Ida was pretty sure she had just enough... “Aha!” she cried, as her hand found the small ball of bright pink yarn. It had been a gift from Leanne. A cheery bright pink was just the thing to lift her spirits.

  Trouble was, the only thing Ida really knew how to make from memory were socks, and this ball wasn’t enough for a full-size pair, nor was it the proper thickness.

  Unless the feet were very small. Surely, somewhere in all those children in all those sizes was a pair of feet tiny enough to fit whatever socks emerged from this yarn.

  Grinning and wide awake, Ida peered at the ball and her needles, calculating if her memorized sock pattern could be adapted just enough to create a pair of small pink socks. “There’s only one way to find out,” Ida told the yarn in her hands. “I’m ready if you are, and it surely beats staring at the ceiling.”

  Adjusting her lamp, Ida tucked herself into the chair by the window and began to knit.

  * * *

  Saturday morning had brought a drenching rain, a sweet relief to the choking heat that had pushed children and staff to the limits of their manners. While Daniel could always do without the mud puddles and the leak that invariably sprung in one roof or another, he was always grateful for the way a good “gully washer” could rinse the world fresh and clean. A smile found its way across his face as he walked in the welcome shade of the afternoon. Midsummer like this, rain perked up the plants around the grounds, coaxing out a few of the blooms that still graced the yards from the years when the property had been a grand estate. “The Home still has the bones of a great lady,” Mother was fond of saying, even though both women were showing their age. Time hadn’t been kind to either of them, and Daniel felt that sting more fiercely with every passing month.

  “See how that makes a circle right there? How it meets that line from the other side?” He caught Miss Landway’s voice as he turned a corner toward the front of the compound.

  “It’s just shapes?” a child’s voice, full of wonder, came in reply. Daniel slowed his steps, not wanting to intrude but still curious. He peered to his left to see Miss Landway seated on the stone bench by the front gate. She had a pair of girls on each side of her, more at her feet and a large pad of paper perched upright on her lap.

  “Shapes and color. That’s how an artist sees the world.” She moved her hand over the paper, and Daniel shifted closer to improve his view. “Look at the gate and tell me what shape it is.”

  “A rectungle,” one girl said. Miss Landway’s laugh chimed across the courtyard in reply.

  “A rectangle, yes. Very good.” He watched her sketch out the shape in the center of her page. “But not just any old rectangle. What’s special about this one?”

  “It’s got a moon on top,” Gwendolyn Martin, on the bench right next to Miss Landway, piped up as she pointed to the gate’s rounded arch.

  The nurse’s smile was warm and bright as she nodded toward her seatmate. “Right you are, Gitch. The moon is also a shape, called an arch or a crescent, and if you plop that big old moon sideways on top of our rectangle—” she added the curve to the top of the drawing “—you get our gate.” Miss Landway spun the drawing around so that the girls at her feet could see, and a chorus of wide-eyed ooohs met her display. The part of him that worried how long the Parker Home could retain a nurse was happy to note she used the word our when she referred to the gate. Lord, You know I was looking for someone entirely different, but I’d still be grateful if this one actually stays. He could try to learn to see the world in colors and shapes if it meant she stayed here where she was most definitely needed.

  As if she’d heard his thoughts, Miss Landway opened a tray of watercolors on her lap with a flourish and announced, “Now we’ve got to add the colors. Call out the ones you see.”

  “The gate is black,” young Miss Martin offered.

  “Only it’s got red and orange around the hinges and in spots on the side,” added another girl.

  “The dirt is brown but the leaves are green,” another girl spoke up, pointing to the objects she named.

  “But not the same color as those leaves over there,” came another comment. “Those are a different green.”

  The children called out half a dozen colors and a few more shapes as they peered hard at the landscape before them. Miss Landway held up her pigments and had each girl match the color she saw with a color from the tray. For a woman who continually bemoaned the lack of color at the Home, she was wasting no time in digging up a palette right here. He stood and watched, fascinated, as she used each color to create a painting of the gate and the plants around it. Miss Landway had skill; the image was pleasant enough to hang in the staff dining room.

  If only she had stopped there.

  “The best thing about art,” she said once she’d finished with each child’s color, “is that we don’t just have to leave the world the way we found it. We can have more fun than that.”

  Daniel felt his jaw go slack as Miss Landway dove into her palette and created a riot of hues around the gate. Under her enthusiastic brush, a full and wild garden sprung up around the gate on her paper. In a matter of minutes, two outrageously colored birds perched on the wall under a blinding yellow sun. A bright red house rose up beyond the gate whereas in real life only a dull gray shed stood on the other side of the street. Before she was finished, every inch of the paper was filled with motion and color until the canvas looked more like a tropical circus than the scene Daniel saw before her. When Miss Landway flipped the painting around to show the children, giggles and applause echoed across the courtyard along with her loud and musical laugh.

  How had she done that? Daniel’s gaze flicked back and forth between the real-life gate and Miss Landway’s fantastical painting. It irked him that suddenly the Home’s serviceable but pleasant front gate now looked dull and dreary, even to him. He’d liked the gate just fine before, and ought to still like it now. He didn’t care for the funny, poke-in-the-ribs feeling Miss Landway’s artwork produced, nor did he care one bit for the sad dissatisfaction that filled the eyes of some of the children after a moment.

  She didn’t realize what she had done. It would probably never occur to the plucky Miss Landway that she had just shown them a world they could never have, and left reality that much worse for the visit to a fantasy. How on earth was he to explain such a thing to the likes of Ida Lee Landway?

  He walked over to the group, flipping his watch open as he came closer. Gwendolyn saw him first and stood up, a streak of fear in her eyes. They all looked as if he’d caught them doing something naughty, and that bothered him immensely. He took pains to soften his voice when he asked, “An art lesson, Miss Landway?”

  “The girls wanted
to watch me paint.”

  “Our gate is a rectangle with a moon,” Gwendolyn pronounced. It bothered him that the little girl offered it like the grandest of compliments.

  Miss Landway raised one eyebrow, a “what are you going to do with that?” gesture that made Daniel feel as if he were being tested. It should have been the other way around. Even ten minutes later, Daniel still hadn’t quite figured out how Miss Landway had turned the tables on him so that he walked away without uttering one word of the lecture on appropriate reality he had planned. An hour earlier, he had thought his biggest fear in regards to Miss Landway was the possibility that she would leave. Now he had a new fear entirely—that she would stay, and fill the children’s heads with dreams that were out of their reach.

  His mother’s admonition echoed in his brain as he made his way back to his office, stumped and more than a little worried. “Be careful what you pray for—the Good Lord just might give it to you.”

  Chapter Five

  Daniel was just sitting down to enjoy his weekly indulgence of an hour’s quiet reading before Saturday supper when the sound of yelling reached his rooms. He put down his book and cocked his ear, listening. No, it wasn’t yelling, it was crying. Girls crying. Several girls crying. Something was most definitely amiss.

  Ignoring his disappointment, Daniel pushed himself out of his chair and made for the door. The cries were coming from the dining hall, where Mrs. Smiley and the girls ought to be setting out the dishes for supper. Had someone cut themselves? Was one of the girls ill? He started walking in the direction of the noise, half expecting to be ambushed by one of the children or staff coming to get him, but he met no one on his way toward the torrent of girlish tears.

  Of all the things Daniel steeled himself to see, a flock of angry girls slamming down tin plates in tearful fits was not on the list. No one seemed to be injured, but each of the five girls on supper table duty that afternoon was crying.

  “I want some,” the youngest girl moaned as she slapped a napkin into place. “Why can’t we all have them?”

  Daniel scanned the room for Mrs. Smiley, hoping for an explanation to the sea of unhappiness swirling before him. He found her, two tables away, having angry words with...with Ida Landway. While Mrs. Smiley was easy to irritate on a good day, Daniel was at a loss for what Miss Landway could have done to not only raise the ire of Mrs. Smiley, but each of these girls, as well.

  Dodging past a sniffling nine-year-old brandishing a fistful of forks, Daniel made for the teacher. “Mrs. Smiley, what has gone on?”

  Miss Landway’s eyes snapped up at the question, and Daniel could see the nurse was upset. It wasn’t surprising; despite her cheerful name, Mrs. Smiley’s tongue could curdle milk when she got angry—he’d had to have more than one conversation with the woman about keeping her temper under control. When the older woman turned, however, Daniel’s jaw slacked.

  Baby Meredith Loeman, the youngest occupant of the Parker Home for Orphans at just over a year old, wiggled a pair of bright pink booties at him from Mrs. Smiley’s arms.

  “I don’t suppose I need to explain it to you now,” Mrs. Smiley snapped.

  As if to drive the point home, wails of “I want pink socks” and “Why can’t Nurse Landway knit me socks?” and “I hate my socks!” surged up behind him.

  The only thing stronger than the matron’s glare was the look of stunned regret in Miss Landway’s eyes.

  “She hasn’t got a lick of sense, this one.” Mrs. Smiley cast a disparaging glance in Miss Landway’s direction. “Giving a trinket like that in front of all the girls.” She scowled at Miss Landway. “What did you think would happen when you did such a thing?”

  “I...I...” The nurse looked at him, her eyes wide and startled. “It’s just a pair of socks.”

  Daniel swallowed a weary sigh. This was why gifts were such a tricky business at the orphanage. But before he could explain that to Miss Landway, he needed to calm down the children. “Girls,” he began in his best “let’s all be sensible” administrative voice, “y’all are already wearing socks. Perfectly fine socks.”

  “Perfectly dreadful socks!” Little Mary Donelley could always be counted on for a dramatic interpretation. “They’re plain old white and mine has a hole in the heel.”

  He walked toward Mrs. Smiley, trying hard not to be charmed by the chubby pink legs wiggling pink booties. Most women he knew would be cooing and tweaking such pink-booted toes. The handmade booties were adorable little things that would have made for a very welcome sight—were they anywhere else but an orphan home. Why? The “I want some!” whine from behind him served as a painful example. No wonder Mrs. Smiley was completely uncharmed by Meredith’s clear delight in her present—the poor old woman was likely to have a tiresome evening as a result of Miss Landway’s innocent little gift.

  Daniel held his hand out. “I wonder if I could take a look at those.”

  “Gladly.” Mrs. Smiley plucked them off Meredith’s feet with a huff so loud even Daniel almost winced. Miss Landway certainly looked as if the sound pierced her ribs.

  Daniel pocketed the pink socks and nodded in Miss Landway’s direction. “Why don’t you and I have a cup of coffee in the other room? Mrs. Smiley and the girls can finish up in here.”

  Once inside the staff dining room, Miss Landway pulled the door shut behind her with one hand while the other went over her eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”

  She looked as if she might cry, and Daniel was surprised at how deeply her regret touched him. It wasn’t right how unfair this place could be to anyone trying to make a difference. Daniel remembered how the need to do something—anything—for these children had nearly drowned him in his first days at the orphanage. He’d given a sweet to one of the girls when she’d banged a finger and found himself amid a similar storm of “Why can’t I have one?” howls.

  He searched for something soothing to say. “It was a generous and kind impulse, Miss Landway.”

  She slumped down on one of the dining chairs, distressed. “I had no idea it would cause such a ruckus. I just wanted to put a bit of cheery color...”

  “I believe your heart was in the right place.” Daniel moved to the sideboard and poured two cups of coffee. “You simply need to learn how to channel such impulses into things that benefit all the girls without singling out one.” He held up a cube of sugar in a silent inquiry, and she nodded, parking her chin on one hand. “It’s one of the most difficult things about working here, and one of the reasons I asked you to clear any ideas with me.”

  “They’re just socks.” Her moan sounded as if it could have come from one of the girls.

  Daniel set the cup and a small pitcher of cream down in front of the nurse. “No, they’re not. How can I get you to see that?”

  Miss Landway dumped a generous portion of cream into her coffee. The woman did nothing by halves, he was beginning to see that. “So I can’t do anything for one of them, I have to only do things that can be done for all of them?” She made it sound dreadful.

  “I think what just happened should make that obvious.” He collected his own coffee and sat opposite her.

  “But they’re individuals. Each of them is unique. Their differences ought to be celebrated, not ignored by making sure everything they have is exactly the same.”

  Daniel remembered that urge, and felt a tinge of regret that practicality had squelched it out of him so effectively. “In a perfect world, I’d agree, but...”

  Her eyes sparked. “But nothing. Don’t you go telling me we don’t live in a perfect world. That’s a poor excuse for not letting a baby girl wear pink booties.”

  She was going to take some breaking in, this one. “I’m not saying Meredith cannot wear booties. But she cannot be the only one wearing pink booties.” He fished the pink things out of his pocket. “Make them all booties, or
socks, or whatever—I’ve no objections to gifts as long as every girl receives them.”

  “It’ll take me months.” He noticed her phrasing. She would do it. He could see it in her eyes.

  He didn’t know where she’d find the time—he didn’t know how she’d managed to make the pair he now placed on the table between them. “When did you make these?”

  She took a long sip of coffee, which gave him a hint of the answer. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Once I got the idea, I couldn’t sleep until they were done. This place is starving for color, Dr. Parker. Can’t you see that? I just had to do something.” She reached out and fingered one of the small pink fluffs. “They made Meredith so happy.” Miss Landway looked up at him. “And they made all the other girls so miserable.”

  He couldn’t help but offer her a smile. “In your defense, it doesn’t take much in this heat. The smallest thing can set them off. Even Mrs. Smiley can lose her delightful charm.” That last remark surprised him—Daniel hadn’t joked about Mrs. Smiley’s dour personality in months.

  “She is quite the heavy hand,” Miss Landway replied with a sparkle returning to her eyes.

  “She is very good at what she does. Her job is enormous. If you don’t realize that now, you will soon. I’m not so sure her firm hand isn’t absolutely necessary in order to get things done.” He picked up his own cup. “Surely an army nurse can grasp that.”

  Miss Landway smirked. It wasn’t an expression Daniel often attributed to women, but it applied in this case. “Not this army nurse.” She thought for a moment. “I’ll find a way, you know.”

  “A way to what?”

  She nodded toward the door. “To shower those girls in a rainbow of colored socks. You just watch. My mama always said I could teach a mule how to be stubborn.”

  Daniel believed it. “Really?”

  “If I can give each girl socks in as many colors as I can, provided they all get the same number of socks, do I have your permission to do so?”