Cima’s visit to the Mennonite families turns a line maintained for safety into a place of contact. At Hig’s invitation, she crosses the quarantine boundary, introduces herself as a doctor, and treats the sick and injured in an old farmhouse. The encounter brings medical care to people long kept apart, while exposing the tension between the fear that has protected them from attackers and the fear of contagion that has isolated them from help.

Background and the Quarantine Line

Hig estimates that about thirty Mennonites live south of his airport. They have suffered a blood disease that appeared after the flu pandemic; it affects adults and children, and some members of the community die each year. Hig describes the illness as slow-burning and says that children are born with it, sick and weak. Its presence has made the families vulnerable, but it has also shaped how others approach them: signs warning of blood along the edges of their fields encourage outsiders to stay away.

The families’ isolation is therefore both a response to illness and a defensive barrier in a dangerous landscape. The warning signs frighten off potential attackers, helping preserve the community’s lives even as the disease continues to kill them. Hig and Bangley have treated the families as distant neighbors, keeping their own security perimeter separate from the settlement. That arrangement leaves the Mennonites exposed to illness and in need of care, while making the risks of contact seem uncertain.

Cima has medical expertise: when asked what kind of doctor she is, she identifies herself as an internist in public health. The broader origins of the pandemic remain unsettled in her account. Press reports blamed the outbreak on a superbug mutation combined with bird flu and initially associated its origin with New Delhi; a rumor instead placed its origin at Livermore, where a sample was supposedly being transported to England before a military aircraft crashed in Brampton. These stories do not establish the cause of the families’ later illness, but they place Cima’s work in a world where both disease and reliable knowledge about it have become difficult to separate from rumor.

Crossing the Boundary

Cima wants to visit the families as soon as she arrives with Pops. Hig takes her there, and they land on the drive. People gather along the quarantine line in the yard: some run toward the visitors, while others can barely walk. As Cima approaches, their expressions change from wary attention to surprise. Hig observes their widened eyes and open mouths, then sees the children watching her with curiosity and apprehension.

Cima steps across the DMZ. The group recoils by half a step, opening space around her, and she raises a hand to reassure them. She tells them she is a doctor, then gives her name. The introduction does not erase the risk they associate with contact; the families have just seen a stranger enter the space they have been taught to guard. But the exchange changes the meaning of the boundary. It is no longer only a line that separates the sick from visitors: it becomes the threshold Cima crosses to offer care.

The children soon approach her. They reach for her skirt, and one young girl clings to her leg. Hig recognizes the significance of the gesture in a community whose members have been treated as untouchable. Cima greets the children and asks their names. Their first contact with her is physical and immediate, preceding any detailed explanation of disease transmission. Hig is worried about the exposure, but he also sees the families’ welcome and considers the sight worth the risk.

Medical Work in the Farmhouse

Cima establishes herself in a room of the old farmhouse that had once served as a parlor. Wearing latex gloves, she examines the people one at a time, calling the next patient in from the kitchen. Her work is practical and varied: she stitches serious cuts, dresses wounds, and asks for buckets of warm water. She also counsels a young woman who is six or seven months pregnant and consoles an older man whose crying can be heard from outside the screened kitchen door.

The sequence makes her medical role concrete rather than merely declarative. Her medic bag supplies the gloves she needs, and she moves between treatment, advice, and comfort as the patients come to her. Hig watches from the farmhouse and reports that Cima tells him he may cross over and mingle with the families: in her understanding, the danger has been misperceived. She compares transmission to hepatitis C and to the former understanding of HIV, emphasizing fluid and blood rather than ordinary proximity. The account presents this as Cima’s medical explanation, not as a guarantee that the illness poses no risk.

The visit also reveals the cost of the community’s isolation. Their illness is visible in their weakened bodies and exhausted movements, yet the warning signs that deter strangers have made it harder for them to receive help. Cima’s treatment does not cure the disease or undo those losses. It does, however, bring medical attention across a boundary that fear had made seem impassable.

Aftermath and Significance

Hig and Cima fly back in silence. That night they lie close together outside, watching clouds over the mountains. In the quiet afterward, Cima recalls studies from the end of the pandemic era. They suggested that the autoimmune disease’s onset could be accelerated by a breakdown in the body’s ability to produce vitamin D, a mechanism she describes as curious and only tentatively comparable to AIDS through its effects on T cells. The evidence remains qualified: the studies offered a possible explanation, not a settled account of the disease.

The farmhouse visit thus joins immediate care to the larger uncertainty surrounding the pandemic and its aftermath. Cima can treat wounds and explain what she believes about transmission, but neither she nor Hig can claim complete knowledge of the families’ illness. Her willingness to cross the line nonetheless challenges the assumption that distance is the only form of protection. The encounter’s decisive change is social as well as medical: people who have been marked as dangerous to touch accept Cima’s approach, and Hig witnesses contact replace separation, at least for the duration of the visit.