Read Online Elena by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online Page B

inconsequential cough, held the possibility of unparalleled ruin, in which life betrayed itself in death, leaving in its wake the shocked and helpless anger of unanticipated grief. Surely within the history of disease there is an unexplored human terrain that is made up almost entirely of rage.”
    During the next forty-eight hours, I moved in and out of the world with each beat of my heart. I can remember feeling that my body was being pressed down by huge weights, my lungs aching with each breath. “My brother drew life in with each inhalation,” Elena wrote, “and with each exhalation tried to drive it out again.”
    On the third morning of my illness, I awoke in a bed literally soaked with my own sweat. There was a terrific pounding behind my eyes and my head felt as if it were about to blow apart. I looked up and saw Elena sitting quietly beside my bed, her hands curled into her lap.
    â€œHello, William,” she said. Her face was drawn, pale, terribly weakened, as if she had gone through the same illness I had.
    I lifted my hand to wave to her, and as I did so, a spurt of blood suddenly shot out of my nose, spilling across my bedclothes.
    Elena jumped to her feet and ran for my mother.
    Seconds later my mother dashed into the room, stared at the blood as if transfixed by it, and then shouted, “Clean it up, Elena! Clean it up!”
    Elena pulled the nightshirt from my body, and wiped my face with a wet cloth.
    â€œYou’re going to be all right,” she said softly.
    I looked at her languidly, then dropped my head back on the pillow. In my half sleep, I could feel her stroking my face and hair, squeezing my fingers one by one, murmuring softly, “You’ll be all right, William. You will. You just have to.”
    None of us could have known it then, but that sudden burst of blood was the signal that my fever had finally broken and that I would surely live.
    I awoke again a few hours later. Elena was still sitting beside the bed.
    â€œWhere’s Father?” I asked.
    â€œHe’s not here,” Elena said. “We tried to reach him, but he wasn’t in the hotel he said he was going to be at.”
    I nodded and closed my eyes.
    In the final paragraph of the chapter of New England Maid that deals with the epidemic, Elena wrote: “My father could not be located during the critical illness of my brother. Because of that, an important experience was lost to him, the special joy of caring for a beloved person who is deathly ill, of soothing him with your voice, cooling him with water, loving him more now, at the edge of loss, than you have ever loved.”
    I have often wondered what my father must have felt when he read that.
    Within a week I was perfectly fit again, although still weak. Often I would sit on the front steps and watch the people pass. Elena usually joined me. She seemed preoccupied with having nearly lost me, forever going over how things would have changed if I had died.
    â€œYour room would be all empty,” she said on one occasion. “And I’d have to give the boat away.” She meant the Yankee Clipper I had laboriously constructed and which sat like a trophy on my bureau. “And your clothes, your ice skates — no one to use those.” She looked at me quizzically. “There’s only one of everybody. Only one.”
    I laughed. “Boy, that’s hot news, Elena.”
    She was only nine years old, and for her, I think, it was.
    W here does art begin? We do not know. For its first fruits are nearer to the end than the beginning:
    I go to places in the night,
    Full of terrors dark and bright,
    Into forests black and deep
    Through which I wander, stumble, creep.
    At last I wait until the light
    Reveals my courage or my fright.
    And then I toss and leap and whirl
    Till I return, a little girl.
    Elena wrote this poem when she was ten. Nothing she wrote after that more fully revealed her. “In the prologue,”