Read Online The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online Page A

When I cried, Mom said, ‘Don’t make a fuss. You’re barely even sunburned.’ She waited three days to call a doctor.”
    Carolyn described the doctor as a smelly old man with white hair in his ears. “He had lollipops in his shirt pocket,” she said. “I could see the little sticks poking up. He pulled out a purple one and held it toward me, and he was disappointed when I didn’t want to eat it. ‘Well, I’ll leave it on the table here,’ he said.
    “Then he opened his black bag. He took my temperature and tapped my chest. He looked in my ears with a flashlight on a stick. He told my mom, “It’s a summer cold. Nothing to worry about.’ He said, ‘Let her rest a few more days. She’ll be as fit as a fiddle.’”
    That afternoon, said Carolyn, her arms stopped working. When the sun went down she was having trouble breathing. Her father flew into a rage, ranting about the doctor. “He seemed twenty feet tall,” she said, looking up at the mirrorabove the iron lung. “His voice shook the room. I thought my bed was whirling round and round.”
    She didn’t remember clearly what happened after that. “I was in an ambulance. We were rushing along gravel roads, shuddering over potholes. There was a little bump when we came onto pavement.”
    Soon, said Carolyn, the darkness of the country gave way to city lights. She remembered the coolness of the air as the ambulance doors were opened, and looking up to see people looming all around her, frightening figures in gowns and gloves, with masks on their faces. “All I could see were their eyes.”
    Beside her now, Chip was silent. No one made a sound as Carolyn talked.
    “The next thing I knew, I was sealed in an iron lung,” she said. “There was a hole in my throat, and a tube stuck inside it. Air was going in and out with horrible whistles and gasps.”
    The next days seemed hazy to her now, she said. She had slept and woken, and slept again. And then a priest was standing at her side, clothed as black as a crow. He was holding something above the iron lung, moving his hand in the sign of a cross.
    “It was the last rites,” she said. “I was dying.”
    She described how he muttered the strange Latin words, how his hand moved up and down, back and forth. “I thought when he finished I would die,” she said. “I wanted to signal to him that I was still alive. But I couldn’t call out. I couldn’t move a hand to warn him. I could feel my fingers, my toes, my arms and legs, but couldn’t make them work.”Every muscle in her body was burning hot, she said. But her skin was all prickles and ice.
    “Then it was morning. There was sunlight in the room, and a bird was singing somewhere,” said Carolyn. “A nurse in white was moving round the iron lung. Her shoes were squeaking.
    “When she saw me, she smiled. It was the most beautiful smile.”
    Now Carolyn too smiled up at her mirror. She told how the nurse ran to the hall, shouting, “She’s awake! She’s awake!” and then ran back again to hold the girl’s face in her hands, to stroke the blond hair that was then nearly as short as a boy’s.
    “Her hands were warm,” said Carolyn. “She kept saying, ‘I knew you’d pull through. I just had a feeling you would.’ I tried to talk, but no sound came out. Then the nurse put her finger on the end of the plastic tube, and suddenly there was air passing through it, into my mouth, over my lips and gums and teeth.” Sucked with lovely coolness down her throat, it filled her lungs, and as the bellows pumped below her machine, Carolyn spoke for the first time in ten days.
    “I asked, ‘Where’s my daddy?’ That’s all I cared about. He was out in the hall. He had been there every night,” she said. “When he came in, he looked as old and worried as Rip Van Winkle. All he did was cry. He just stood beside me, crying.”
    Laurie asked, “Was your mother there?”
    “No, but she came right away,” said Carolyn. “She was in a hotel down