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DAWN GARISCH
Once, Two Islands
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The doctor sat a moment at his wife’s bedside, tracing with his eyes her last exhaled breath, feeling the great insulated door of the freezer of his chest swing closed. What had happened, what had gone wrong? He had been the top obstetric student in his final year, he had won a prize for his fifth-year essay on “The Use and Abuse of Antibiotics: Keeping the Upper Hand in the War between Man and Microbes”. His CV ran to several pages and he’d had as many options for his career path as there were fingers on both hands. He hadn’t had to come and toil in this godforsaken windswept corner of the world, he could be advancing to professorship in a top academic hospital, he could be flying all over the world to conferences, delivering scientific papers on vaccinations for malaria, AIDS, prosthetic heart valves or proton-pump inhibitors. He had come here for a short adventure and had stayed for love, love of this woman now gone, now snatched away, this burnt cinder of his love still warm on the bed in front of him.
Sister Veronica closed Angelique’s eyes, washed her hands, and left the room quickly to break the news to Frieda, asleep next door. She so badly wanted to rest her hands on the poor doctor’s shoulders, to lift from them the weight that bore down so heavily. She wanted to take him into her arms and comfort him, to let him weep into her breast, to stroke his dark cropped hair. It isn’t your fault, she wanted to tell him. She could’ve told him about Frieda’s native stupidity, about how his wife had been exposed to wind and rain, she could have pointed fingers, and she did consider this. But she knew the fault lay with her alone and she would never be able to tell him why, never. She had trained at the best hospital on the mainland, there was nothing wrong with her technique or her hygiene or her knowledge, oh no. It was her thought that had spirited the young, unsuitable wife away. She would make it up to him, she would.
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