Chapter 11: Fever

"How long?" I asked.

Gunnar didn't let go of the sink.

"A week. Fever first. Then the shakes get worse. Then he comes back."

"And then?"

"And then everything else."

He said it to the drain, not to me.

We brought the twin home the next afternoon with a cast covered in signatures from the night nurses.

By evening Gunnar's skin was hot enough that I could feel it from a foot away.

He tried to go out to the barn to sleep.

He made it as far as the porch steps and sat down on them hard.

"Inside," I said.

"I'm fine."

"You're sitting on the steps sweating in October. Inside."

Glory took one arm. I took the other.

He was too tall for the couch, so his boots hung off the end.

The baby climbed up on his chest, sat there, and bit his chin.

Gunnar didn't open his eyes.

"Ow," he said mildly.

"He's checking if you're alive," Glory said.

"Tell him I am."

"He doesn't believe you. You're gray."

The first night the fever went to a hundred and four.

I know because the twins took turns reading the thermometer to me like it was a ball game.

"A hundred and three point eight!"

"No, point nine!"

"I'm the one holding it!"

"You're holding it upside down!"

Gunnar laughed weakly from the couch and then groaned because laughing hurt.

I put cold cloths on his forehead and his chest.

I hadn't seen him without a shirt before.

He was all long muscle and old scars, and every inch of him was burning.

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