Sarah took her blood pressure—270 over 140. Pulse rate 132. Temperature 106 degrees. She had perhaps half an hour to live, fifteen minutes before brain damage or a stroke. Sarah got more ice, put a pack behind her neck, another between her legs. The temperature dropped to 104 degrees.

Over ten slow minutes, Miriam pumped five more times. Leo came to and looked from one of them to the other out of agonized eyes.

“How do you feel?” Sarah asked.

“Water, please . . .”

Miriam withdrew the needles. Sarah took alcohol and iodine and cleaned Leo’s wound and stopped the leakage of blood with a small pressure bandage. She didn’t need to do anything for Miriam. Her wound healed itself inside of a minute.

“How did you know when to stop?”

“Her skin told me.”

Miriam’s people could diagnose practically anything in human beings by merely observing their skin tone. It was quite remarkable.

“What would have happened if you’d kept on?”

“I would have wasted blood. She would have died.”

Miriam took Leo in her arms and went out with her, saying nothing to Sarah. She was more alien right now, less human, than Sarah had ever seen her. She realized that Miriam’s whole personality was a sort of act. Seeing her like this, you realized that she was light years away from being human.

Sarah followed Miriam up to their bedroom. Miriam laid the girl, whose whole body was now flaming red, in the center of their bed. The Sleep was coming heavily onto Sarah, and she longed to lie down, too. But Miriam went to bed with Leo, enclosing her in her arms.

Sarah was left to the daybed. As she drifted into the dreams she would share with the victim whose life flowed yet within her, she heard her Miri singing to her new captive,

“Sleep my child and peace attend thee,
All through the night.
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night ”

She cried herself to sleep, Sarah did, but when sleep came, it took her into a golden ship that sailed a windswept sea. In the purest blue sky she had ever seen, white seagulls wheeled and dove and cried. They came down and flew among the sails of her ship, and called to her with their harsh, haunting voices.

She knew that they were the birds of God’s careless and unquenchable love, calling to her and to Leo, and even to Miri, as indeed they do to all.

FOURTEEN: The Veils

FOURTEEN

The Veils

Sarah awoke when the afternoon sun, glaring in the tall bedroom windows, turned the inside of her eyelids bloodred. Leo was there instantly, kissing her, embracing her. “Oh, Sarah, I’m so glad you’re awake! I’ve been missing you like crazy!” “You—you’re not sick?” She should have been hanging between life and death.

“Oh, I was,” Leo said. “I was so sick.”