Serafim and Claire Read Online Free PDF Page A

the hoped-for result. Human beings seemed to have (and Claire certainly more than most) a hidden ability to will change, to shift things — slightly, and for only short-lived instants — to their advantage. It was an astounding realization, and one that filled her fifteen-year-old mind with drunken promise.
    Having recalled this memory through to its end, each detail still as vivid as the day it unfolded, Claire remembered with a measured degree of certainty that she had not gotten around to uttering her delicate threat to Dr. Bertrand the other night. She began to remember other things too — how he’d said she had a serious infection, and that he would have to operate on her to find out more. What did that mean, exactly?
    Claire fought towards consciousness, a battle, she found, that wasn’t all that easy to win. There was no “waking up” to be had. Instead, she was stuck in a hazy confusion of sounds and images, intermittent sensations swinging in and out of a white-edged awareness. There were brief interruptions of touch and smell — being washed with a harsh soap, turned over, propped up, the bitter rod of a thermometer speared under her tongue — but the rest of the time Claire simply felt adrift in a limbo of her memories, the journey exhausting; though in some far-off and urgent way, she understood that she must not, could not, settle by the wayside to rest.
    She felt a sudden hand behind her neck, then the feeling of water in her mouth, washing down the pinching taste of copper that seemed to have coated her palate for an eternity, making her tongue clammy. She opened her eyes for the first time to see a middle-aged nun, her habit framing Claire’s focus on her face, constricting it, sharpening the woman’s frown, the wrinkles around her lips creasing deeper. “Mademoiselle O’Callaghan?” asked the nun. Claire, whose last name was not O’Callaghan but Audette, felt the need to process this contradiction with a blink, though she never quite got around to lifting her eyelids again. Instead, she slid back into an echoing darkness, while the nun, her voice increasingly distant, called after her.
    Some time later, Claire tried to move the dead-stone weight of her limbs, and managed to flex her fingers, then her right hand, and, with this, was soon rushing forward into consciousness. Her eyes slowly opened to a bright, blinding light. She began to stretch herself out, and was instantly met with a shooting pain at the bottom of her stomach.
    Seeing her distressed expression and open eyes, a nun appeared at the foot of her bed, stern and indifferent. “Mademoiselle O’Callaghan. How feel you this morning?” she asked, struggling to speak English.
    Claire, finding that her pain was not subsiding but increasing, arched her back and sank her head into her pillow, her hands rising to her stomach, where she felt, to her horror, filaments of thread, like grotesque insect legs, protruding from her skin, skittering down a thick scar that made a ridge from below her navel to her pubic bone. She relaxed her muscles and remained breathlessly still, until the pain gradually unclenched its fist.
    The nun continued to speak in her broken English, explaining how, several days ago, Claire had been brought in just before dawn and left in the entry hall, with a note from a certain Dr. Reilly, who explained that he was a visiting doctor to Montreal, on his way back to Europe. Just prior to his leaving, however, he was called in to perform an emergency appendix operation on you. With this note and his apologies, he left sufficient funds for your care, estimating your stay to be two to three weeks. You are in the Hôtel-Dieu. This is your fourth day. Can I get you anything? Do you need to use the bedpan?
    Claire slowly shook her head, then eyed the nun as she walked away to tend to another patient. The nun, however, kept looking back at her suspiciously.
    Claire looked up