The Widow's War Read Free

time we removed the bandage, you began screaming and begged us to put it back on.”
    “Am I going blind?”
    The nun laughs softly. “No, quite the contrary. All your senses seem to have been sharpened to the point of agony. When the cat came into the room a few nights ago, you knew it was there, not because you could see it—that was impossible—but because you smelled it. You asked for us to put it up next to you, and we did. You slept with it for an hour or so, and then, as cats do, it wandered off, perhaps to hunt mice, which is why we allow it to live here.” The nun bends over in a sudden black-and-white blur and plucks the bandage from Carrie’s eyes. “There,” she says, “how’s that? No screaming? Ah, good.”
    Carrie blinks and finds herself staring up into a pock-marked face with coarse features. The nun has dark eyebrows, a large nose, and small, watery eyes. She’s well into middle age and not at all pretty, but her smile is kind, and Carrie is grateful for it. She turns her head and discovers that her neck still aches, but the pain is minor compared to what it was before.
    She is in a large room. The whitewashed walls are adorned with wooden crucifixes. Tall windows let in pink-tinted light—either sunrise or sunset; she’s in no state to determine which. To her left, a row of cots covered with mosquito netting stretches toward an arched doorway through which she can see a courtyard, a bougainvillea vine in full bloom, and a fountain made of those blue-and-white Portuguese tiles that go by the name of azulejos . She notices that only a few of the cots are occupied. Most are not only empty but missing sheets and mattresses.
    “Where am I, Sister?”
    “You lie in the hospital of the Irmandade da Santa Casa de Misericórdia. We found you unconscious on the street and brought you here in a cart along with a dozen others, all of whom had the pox.”
    At the word pox another shiver moves through Carrie’s body. She can feel horrible, inchoate shapes lurking at the back of her mind like caged animals impatient to be let out, but she doesn’t know what they are. Memories? Nightmares? She knows her own name and her distant memories are clear, but she seems to have no recent past. Whatever’s waiting for her has something to do with the word pox. Instinctively, she reaches up and touches her cheek, feels the warmth of her flesh, the curved plain of her forehead, the bridge of her nose. When she moves her hand up to her head, she discovers they’ve cut her hair.
    She remembers it had been waist-length, blond; that it curled in impossible tangles. She remembers fighting it with a hairbrush every morning and winding it into a crown of braids. Most of all, she remembers being pretty, not beautiful perhaps, but pretty: dark brown eyes with flecks of amber in them, an oval face, a complexion that tanned in the tropical sun rather than burned, leaving a line of freckles across her nose. She remembers not minding that her skin darkened even though ladies were supposed to be as pale as milk.
    Shutting her eyes again, she conjures up herself in an imaginary mirror: small, round breasts; long legs. Too tall by a good three inches for current fashions, but slender and high-waisted with curved hips, delicate, long-fingered hands, and lips so red that someone, whose name she cannot remember, once accused her angrily of using paint. She lists her flaws: a crooked toe on her right foot that never healed properly after she broke it, an overbite, a turned up Irish nose—
    Her hand returns to her cheek and freezes. She lies still fighting a terrible suspicion. Slowly she lowers her hand and opens her eyes. She has a question she wants to ask, but she isn’t sure she wants to hear the answer.
    “I’ve had the pox, haven’t I? Tell me the truth, Sister: Am I horribly scarred?”
    “No, not at all, Dona Carolyn. There isn’t a mark on you. You never caught the pox. You had some disease that we have no name for. Your