Marilyn Wales Carlyle baked in the gown, gloves, face shield, and cap the nurses insisted she wear while visiting her father, Harry Wales, in the isolation room at Harborcenter. The fifty-two-year-old mother and grandmother had been warned not to lay a hand on her dad because of the risk of contagion, but Carlyle flatly refused to comply. And having glimpsed Carlyle’s fierce determination, the nurses had given up trying to force her.

Carlyle’s chair was pulled close to the bed, but she spent most of the time on her feet, leaning over the bed-rail, squeezing her father’s hand and dabbing at his dripping brow. She sang the same songs that in her childhood he sang to her. When he was agitated at the nursing home, those Sinatra and Bennett standards used to always placate him. But her singing did nothing now to deter his moans and cries. Only morphine seemed to help, and that help was short-lived and incomplete.

At eighty, her dad suffered from moderately advanced Alzheimer’s to the extent that he recognized his daughter only on his best days. She hadn’t expected him to last much longer. At times, she had prayed for him to be freed from the misery of his wheelchair-bound dementia. But not like this, she thought. No, never like this.

The persistent bedsore on his leg, which had led to his most recent hospitalization four weeks earlier, had flared unexpectedly into an aggressive skin infection. The doctors feared it was flesh-eating disease. But everyone agreed that Harry was too frail for major surgery. With Carlyle’s support, the doctors decided to treat him conservatively with only painkillers and IV fluids but no antibiotics.

After they had rushed her father into the cold isolation room, Carlyle learned that had they wanted to treat him, the doctors had no effective antibiotic available. She’d never heard of the mutated group-A streptococcus that was infecting her father’s leg, but she overheard the nurses whispering that the bug was the same one that had claimed the life of the tragic girl who had stayed in the room next to Harry.

Typical of her father’s tenacity, he refused to go quickly. Two days after the diagnosis, he continued to languish on the ward. His leg looked more like a burnt log than a human appendage. Why, Carlyle wondered for the umpteenth time, couldn’t the nurse give him the whole syringe-full of morphine and end his agony? If they only left her alone for a minute with the syringe, she wouldn’t hesitate to plunge it into his IV.

A drop of liquid fell on the bed and she realized she was crying. Carlyle reached her gloved hand up to her face. She slid it under her face shield, wiped away the tears, and then rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

Her hand froze.