Strangers

and twisted hands, in spite of the pain she had endured, Emmy believed in God's goodness, and in the inspiring rightness of the world that He had created.
        Strong faith was, in fact, a trait of nearly all the children in St. Joseph's Hospital. They remained convinced that a caring Father watched over them from His kingdom in the sky, and they were encouraged.
        In his mind he could hear Father Wycazik saying: If these innocents can suffer so much and not lose their faith, what sorry excuse do you have, Brendan? Perhaps, in their very innocence and naďveté, they know something that you have forgotten while chasing your sophisticated education in Rome. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this, Brendan. Do you think so? Just maybe? Something to be learned?
        But the lesson was not powerful enough to restore Brendan's faith. He continued to be deeply moved, not by the possibility that a caring and compassionate God might actually exist, but by the children's amazing courage in the face of such adversity.
        He gave Emmy's hair a hundred strokes, then ten more, which pleased her, and then he lifted her from the wheelchair and put her into bed. As he pulled the covers over her pathetic bent-stick legs, he felt a surge of that same rage that had filled him during Mass at St. Bette's two Sundays ago, and if a sacred chalice had been close at hand, he would not have hesitated to hurl it at the wall once more.
        Emmy gasped, and Brendan had the odd notion that she had read his blasphemous thoughts. But she said, "Oh, Pudge, did you hurt yourself?"
        He blinked at her. "What do you mean?"
        "Did you burn yourself? Your hands. When'd you hurt your hands?"
        Bewildered by her question, he looked down at the backs of his hands, turned them over, and was surprised by the marks on his palms. In the center of each palm was a red ring of inflamed and swollen flesh. Each ring was two inches in diameter and sharply defined along all its edges. The circular band of irritated tissue which formed the ring was no more than half an inch wide, inscribing a perfect circle; the skin around and within the circle was quite normal. It almost looked as if the marks had been painted on his hands, but when he touched one of the rings with a fingertip, he could feel the bump it made in his palm.
        "That's strange," he said.
        

    ***
        
        Dr. Stan Heeton was the resident physician on duty in St. Joseph's emergency room. Standing at the examining table on which Brendan sat, peering with interest at the odd rings on Brendan's hands, he said, "Do they hurt?"
        "No. Not at all."
        "Itching? A burning sensation?"
        "No. Neither."
        "Do they at least tingle? No? You've never had these before?"
        "Never.
        "Do you have any allergies that you're aware of? No? Hmmmm. At first glance, it looks like a mild burn, but you'd have remembered leaning against something hot enough to cause this. There'd be pain. So we can rule that out. Same for acid contact. Did you say you'd taken a little girl to radiology?"
        "Yes, but I didn't stay in the room while the X rays were taken."
        "Doesn't really look like a radiation burn. Maybe dermatomycosis, a fungal infection, perhaps in the ringworm family, though the symptoms aren't sufficiently indicative of ringworm. No scaling, no itching. And the ring is much too clearly defined, not like the inflammation patterns you get with a Microsporum or Trichophyton infection."
        "So what does all this boil down to?"
        Heeton hesitated, then said, "I don't think it's anything serious. The best guess is a rash related to an unidentified allergy. If the problem persists, you'll have to take the standard patch tests and find the source of your problem." He let go of Brendan's hands, went to a chair at a corner desk, and began to fill out a prescription form.
        Puzzled, Brendan stared at his hands a moment longer, then folded them in his lap.
        At the corner desk, still writing, Heeton said, "I'll start with the simplest treatment, a cortisone lotion. If the rash doesn't disappear in a couple of days, come see me again."
        He returned to the examining table, holding out the prescription form.
        Brendan took the paper from him. "Listen, is there any chance I might pass on an infection to the kids or anything like that?"
        "Oh, no. If I thought