Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James

waiting for something to come—the hard grip of fingers, or the screams. Or the shuffle of feet behind my back. Dawn was years away.
    And Syd’s cold bedroom, dark and abandoned. Someone moving behind me that day, too, as I stood in the doorway.
    No matter how bad it gets,
I said to myself just as I did every day,
I’m never going home.

CHAPTER SIX
    O ver the next two days of grueling work, I came to know more about Portis House. I learned to coax water from the reluctant taps in the laundry, where we filled our buckets for daily washing. I learned how to rub polishing wax onto a floor so it wouldn’t look opaque. How to buff the convoluted knobs of a brass bedstead without missing a spot. How to carry a bowl of hot soup up a flight of winding stairs without spilling any on the tray. How to fold a bedsheet properly at the corner of a bed, though I was slower and clumsier than Nina, and had to watch her more than once from the corner of my eye, admiring the fast, sure way she hefted the mattress with her beefy hands.
    I also learned how to spend just five extra minutes in the lavatory, rubbing my aching feet; and, for a wonderful, beautiful quarter hour, I found a deserted spot outside the kitchen door, out of sight of the windows, where I smoked a cigarette, my eyes closed in a rapturous daze, the breeze blowing last autumn’s leaves over the cobbles in front of me and out over the low, rolling grounds beyond.
    West, the soldier with the missing legs, had lost them to a grenade lobbed into his trench by advancing German infantry; his fiancée had abandoned him after he came home in a wheelchair, and his family had sent him to Portis House after he’d embarrassed them by weeping at his coming-home party. Other men were here because of anger fits, drunkenness, the inability to get out of bed, and—the worst cases—delusions and even catatonia. The last catatonic patient, however, had been removed some three weeks earlier, it having been decided that Portis House was too remote and far too understaffed to care for such a case.
    All of this I learned from Archie Childress, the soldier Nina had taken broth to on my first day. On the second day he was assigned to me. “He can’t eat. You’ll have to coax him,” was all Nina said. “You’ll see for yourself.”
    The infirmary was on the same floor as the men’s bedrooms, though down a corridor and near the entrance to the west wing of the house, which was completely closed off. It was large enough to accommodate three beds, a working sink, a cupboard with linens and basins, two wooden chairs, and a small table, which I assumed was for dressings or doctors’ instruments. It had a single window, and the patient lay here alone, unattended and looking at nothing. It took me a moment to realize that the room was so large because it had once been the master bedroom.
    That first day I entered, carrying a bowl of hot soup and a cup of tea on a tray, I found a man sitting on one of the beds, fully clothed but for shoes, leaning on the headboard with his legs stretched out, his hands folded politely in his lap. The curtains on the window were closed and his face was half lit, though I could see he was too thin for the patient’s uniform he wore.
    I set the tray on the table and straightened. The quiet fell like a blanket. The man on the bed made no move.
    Perhaps I should say something, I thought. No one had told me what ailed this man, so I had no idea what to expect. “I’ve come with your supper,” I said, my voice loud in the silence. He took a deep breath and shifted a little, and in the intimacy of that sound I realized this was the first time I’d been alone—completely alone—with a patient. We even had this section of the house to ourselves; the rest of the men, with the exception of mysterious Patient Sixteen, were downstairs. My throat closed a little.
    What was I supposed to do? He