Chapters (54)
He didn’t ask, but she was not well, with a sourness in her gut, fatigue, and lightheadedness. Her being among other women was a comfort, for their sympathy and gentle manner—and most were nurses, trained to be healers. She knew they were scrutinizing her out of concern for her well-being, not out of nosiness—niele, as Luana called it. Luana, in the room next to hers, took to sizing her up and putting a motherly arm around her when, in the evening, they headed to Emergency for the night shift.
Olive felt compelled to say, “You mustn’t fuss. I’m really all right, you know.”
But her denial made her self-conscious, and Luana’s smile seemed an understanding that something was wrong.
“You never eating nothing.”
“I eat enough.”
That seemed lame too. All the nurses ate together in the hospital cafeteria; it was impossible to hide anything from them, especially from their nurses’ watchfulness.
One night, admitting a woman who showed signs of having overdosed—limp, nauseous, dizzy, with depressed breathing: all the signs; she’d been left by a man who’d hurried away—Olive struggled with the woman, who was heavy, her flesh cool to the touch. She put her on her side in a recovery position and went faint. She staggered, but she was caught in her fall by Luana, who took over, urging Olive to lie down, then sped the woman to the doctor on duty. She soon returned to Olive, who lay doubled up.
“I’m better.”
Luana frowned. “I’m thinking for a long time, Ollie—how you know you not hapai?”
They used the word all the time at the hospital. That thought had occurred to her, that she might be pregnant, but her periods were often irregular or late, so she’d kept an open mind. And what was this? Only a week or a little more of nausea and fragility. And she related it to the disturbance she felt, provoked by Sharkey’s strangeness.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s we do one test,” Luana said, pulling open a drawer and poking at small plastic boxes. “You need to make shishi.”
They did the test together, Luana manipulating the test tube and the litmus paper while Olive sat watching, wondering, listening to the clatter outside the room, keenly aware of the anxious questions of the injured, the smells of illness and disinfectant.
“You hapai,” Luana said, and hugged her.