By the second day of the storm, the ferry had stopped running, forty-one people on Gull Rock Island were sick with the stomach bug, and the only doctor on the island was the man who had left Rosalind Vance standing alone at the altar in 1975.
Rosalind found out when the community hall phone rang at six in the morning.
"Roz," said Marge Tillotson, who ran the island's general store and its gossip. "It's at the senior center. It started after the Christmas potluck. Half the bridge club's down, and the Petersen kids, and old Nils is real bad. Doc Brandt's been up all night."
Rosalind looked out her kitchen window. The waves in the channel were white all the way across to the mainland. No boat was crossing that today.
"Why are you calling me, Marge?"
"Because you're a nurse, honey," Marge said. "And because Wally Brandt asked me to."
Rosalind was seventy-two. She had been an emergency room nurse in Seattle for thirty-eight years, and before that a ward nurse in the old county hospital, back when one nurse ran a thirty-bed ward with a clipboard and a watch. She had retired to her late parents' cottage on Gull Rock Island in 2016, because it was quiet and the island did not need her for anything.
She had known Wally Brandt would be on the island. He had been the island doctor since 1980. It was a small island, eleven hundred people in winter. For ten years, she had managed to avoid him anyway. She shopped on Tuesdays, when he golfed on the mainland. She sat in the back pew at St. Columba's. She had not said one word to him since the morning of June 14, 1975.
She looked at the phone in her hand for a long time.
Then she got her coat.
The senior center was a low, gray building by the ferry dock. Inside, it smelled of bleach and sickness and burned coffee. Folding cots lined the main room where the potluck tables had been. Old people lay on them under blankets, pale and shivering. A teenage girl was carrying a bucket. Somebody was crying in the bathroom.
Wally Brandt was kneeling beside a cot at the far end, holding an old man's wrist.
He was seventy-five now. White hair, wire glasses, a cardigan with a hole in one elbow. He looked up when the door opened, and his face did something she had not expected. It sagged with relief.
"Roz," he said. "Thank God."
"Don't," she said. "I'm here for them. Not you. What have you got?"
He told her. Norovirus, almost certainly. It had come over on the last ferry before the storm, maybe in a casserole, maybe on somebody's hands. Forty-one sick in two days. Most of them over seventy. The worst was Nils Halvorsen, ninety-three, a retired fisherman who had not kept down water in thirty hours.
"I've got two bags of IV fluid in my office," Wally said. "Two. Coast Guard says they can't fly a helicopter in this wind. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Thursday."
"How many volunteers?"
"Marge. The Petersen girl. A couple of the fishermen's wives." He rubbed his eyes. "I've been trying to keep track of who's had fluids and who hasn't, Roz. I can't. I've lost it. I've got names on napkins."
Rosalind looked around the room. Forty-one cots. Three volunteers. One exhausted doctor.
She had seen this before. Not the bug. The room. A county ward in 1976, during a flu wave, with one nurse and thirty beds and a charge nurse named Mrs. Delahunt who had taught her the only thing that mattered.
"Get me a roll of masking tape," she said. "A marker. A clipboard. And every clock on this island."
By noon, the room had changed.
Every cot had a strip of masking tape on the frame with a name and a number. Every patient had a cup beside them with a line drawn on the side in marker. Rosalind had borrowed eight kitchen timers from Marge's store and set them on the windowsill in a row.
"Small sips," she told the volunteers. "Every fifteen minutes. Not a whole cup at once. A whole cup comes right back up. A tablespoon stays down."
She showed the Petersen girl, whose name was Kayla and who was sixteen, how to write it on the clipboard. Name, time, sips, kept it down or didn't. She showed the fishermen's wives how to mix bleach and water for the bathrooms and the doorknobs, and told them to wash their hands with soap and hot water, not the hand gel by the door.
"The gel doesn't do much against this one," she said. "Soap and water. Scrub like you mean it."
Wally watched her from the end of the room. He did not say anything.
At two o'clock, she sent him home to sleep for four hours.
"I'm the doctor," he said.
"You're a seventy-five-year-old man who's been awake for thirty-one hours," Rosalind said. "Go home, Wally. I've got it."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he went.
The afternoon went the way afternoons like that go. Slowly. One cup at a time.
The bridge club began to keep down water. Mrs. Okafor, eighty-one, asked for a saltine at four, which Rosalind considered a small miracle. The Petersen kids were sitting up. The timers on the windowsill went off one after another, all day, like a kitchen full of cakes.
But Nils Halvorsen did not get better.
He lay on the cot by the window with his eyes half closed. His lips were cracked. When Rosalind pinched the skin on the back of his hand, it stayed up in a little tent. Every sip Kayla gave him, he lost.
Rosalind hung the first bag of IV fluid from Wally's office at five o'clock, on a coat hook screwed into the wall. She ran it slow.
At six-thirty, Wally came back. He looked a little better. He checked Nils, and his face went grim.
"He needs the second bag," he said quietly. "And then he needs a hospital. Tonight, if we can get one."
"Can we?"
Wally went out to the dock to call the Coast Guard again. He was gone a long time.
When the door opened, it was not Wally. It was Marge Tillotson, out of breath, with snow on her shoulders.
"Roz," she said. "You need to come outside. Wally's down on the dock. He went over all at once. He's sick, honey. He's got it too."