Chương 189: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE: THE REPORT

Denise Okonkwo came into the clinic's back room and stood just inside the door in the way she still did, four months in, not quite committing to the space. Okafor handed her the report.

"Read it," she said. Denise read it. Marcus watched her get to the part where the fever broke on day four and the mother asked to take the child home. He watched her stop. She read the rest of it. Then she read it again, from the beginning, slowly. Then she put it down on the table and put both hands flat on either side of it and did not say anything for a long time.

"She's four," Denise said finally.

"She's four," Okafor said.

"And this woman — Halle — she'd never seen it before."

"Never," Okafor said.

"She had it for six weeks. She learned it from Rue standing in her station in December." Denise looked at the page.

"I sat in that cottage in year four," she said. Her voice was doing something.

"I had twenty-two sets of notes on the floor and I sorted them for two days and I found it. And I remember exactly what I thought when I found it." She stopped.

"I thought: nobody will ever know this." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"You wrote it down anyway," Marcus said.

"I wrote it down because there was nothing else to do with it," Denise said.

"It wasn't — that wasn't noble. I had a thing in my head that was true and there was nowhere to put it, so I put it on paper, because that's where you put things." She pressed her hands against the table.

"For five more years. Every season. Watching it work and having nobody to tell." Okafor said nothing.

"There'll be more," Denise said. It was not a question but she said it like one.

"The season runs eight weeks," Okafor said.

"Across twenty-six stations. Last year we had thirty-one presentations of what we now know were two illnesses. Perhaps twelve of them will be the dangerous one." She paused.

"Under the old protocol we would expect to lose eight of the twelve."

"And now?"

"Now, if your six-year rate holds," Okafor said, "we lose one." Denise Okonkwo stood in the clinic with her hands on a report about a four-year-old girl in a farmstead six miles north, and Marcus watched nine years of a cottage on the edge of a township arrive somewhere all at once.

"I'd like to go," she said.

"Go where?"

"To the stations. During the season." She looked up.

"Not to treat. I can't — I'm under supervision, I know. To be there. When one of them has a day-four break and the mother is asking to take the child home and the practitioner has never done this before." She paused.

"I've done it thirty times. I know exactly what that hour feels like." Okafor looked at her for a moment.

"Yes," she said.

"Take Rue's northern circuit. She's coming back for the second half; you take the first."

"That's not supervision," Denise said.

"It is supervision," Okafor said.

"You're supervising them." She paused.

"The undertaking to the court says you practise under review. It does not say you may not teach. And what you are proposing is not practice." Denise picked up the report again.

"Can I keep this?" she said.

"It's the establishment's record," Okafor said.

"So no." She paused.

"But Rue made a copy for the training file, and I have no idea at all what happened to the copy, and I am not going to look for it."