WtAF Eloise Journal DT2
Downtime
Dear Luther,
I've spent the majority of the last week at the hospital during my waking hours. While Josephine was admitted overnight, and stitched up, poor Daniel and Oz were in for a longer stay. The surgeons did good work on them, but they've got a longer road of healing ahead of them.
Oz is positively frantic to get out of the hospital. He's afraid - he wants to be behind a proper threshold, where vampires can't come in and get him. There is a certain vehemence to his insistence that is making me feel very sad and helpless, because it reminds me of his reactions when his mother left: desperate for some kind of control over what was happening in his life, doing anything he could think of to avoid thinking about the awful things going on. I do worry about him sometimes.
I spoke with some of the hospital administration about Daniel's medical bills. I would never bring this up to him directly, of course - the Frosts have always had their pride, even when they had little else - but I've spoken with some of them about the state of coverage programs. One of the financial officials - someone who'd been invited to one of the last Christmas parties we threw at the house just before you passed, apparently - said she'd look into the matter personally and see that the young man didn't fall on hard financial times because he isn't able to afford insurance.
Speaking of Daniel, I had a bit of a meaningful conversation with Josephine the day she was getting out of the hospital. She'd come to some realizations about Daniel's affections for her, and was scared. She confided in me some very personal things which I won't even repeat here (it's not the sort of thing I'd have shared with you when you were alive, either, so it seems wrong to include it here), but she's had some experiences that make it difficult for her to trust. We discussed that strange dynamic, and what it was like to be angry at those we love - you, Luther, and her father - for excluding us from this world of monsters, and the hypocrisy we felt having to do the same thing. She was very caring, and said some things that brought me quite a bit of peace with that anger with you. I hope she was right, Luther. I hope that by my remaining ignorant, my remaining safe, you were able to find some peace from the monstrousness and horror.
As an aside, I've been speaking with a doctor at the hospital, a lovely woman named Dr. Meredith Davies. She asked a lot of pointed questions about the injuries Daniel and Oz received, and some of our recent involvement with Magdalena, Karol and the other girls. I don't think she knows what goes on "behind the scenes" as it were, but I think she suspects something. And she's rather got the haunted demeanor of someone that perhaps has seen some things they can't explain.
The day is coming when we won't be able to simply take the boys in to the hospital anymore, and Dr. Davies mentioned having difficulty getting enough hours. I may very well see if she'd be amenable to picking up extra income here and there by coming over to the House to help stitch us Josephine and the boys when the need rears its ugly head. I'm having some of the downstairs space cleared out and turned into an infirmary for just such a time. The back storage space will serve perfectly, and we can store medical supplies and the like in the old silver and glass storage (which is all but empty these days). I'm going to talk to Robert about putting up a wall to separate it from the rest of the storage, and perhaps make the only method of getting into it is through the wine cellar entrance to that area. He's confident of his ability to mount one of the wine shelves on a track in front of the door, so we'd have a hidden medical area tucked away from the workshop (vital if we're going to have someone that isn't one of us tending to our wounded).
