Before dinner the next day, the door opened. Kate looked toward it and all she saw was a gray streak cannoning toward her. “Mutt!” she said, and was ashamed that her voice trembled. “Where did you come from?”
“I thought you could use some company,” said a voice from the door. “I brought you some books, too.” Jim Chopin set a sack on the table next to the bed.
Mutt had leapt to the bed and was nosing Kate all over, an anxious whine coming from her throat. “I’m all right, girl,” Kate said, half laughing, half crying. She winced when a leg bumped into her side, but it was the best pain she’d ever felt and she wouldn’t have traded it for no pain and no Mutt.
“She has to behave,” Jim said. “I had to get a special dispensation from the doctor to get her in here.”
“She’ll behave,” Kate said, knotting her hands in Mutt’s ruff and shaking her. “Won’t you, girl?” She looked up at Jim.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Ethan told me to tell you that Johnny’s fine. Johnny told me to tell you that Gal’s fine. Giroux said I couldn’t stay long, so I’ll-” He jerked a head at the door and retreated a step.
“You brought Mutt to me?” To her horror, her voice began to quaver.
He shrugged. “Yeah. Well. I better go. I’ve got-”
By a sheer effort of will, she mastered her voice. “Jim.”
He fell silent.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome. I mean, it’s nothing. I just, I-Jesus, Kate, I thought you were dead.”
His face was pale and strained. “Mutt came for me; she practically took the door of the cabin off. She bullied me into my clothes and into Billy’s Explorer and down the road. It was all her.” He paused, thinking of the last time he and Mutt had ridden to Kate’s rescue, not near long enough ago, when Kate had been dumped like so much garbage in a landfill outside Ahtna. He didn’t know how many more times his heart was going to stand up to that.
“I thought you were dead,” he repeated. “There was so much blood-all over you, all over the floor.” He stopped again, then swallowed with difficulty. All over the floor where they had lain together just days before. “At first, I couldn’t find a pulse.” Mostly because he’d been so scared, but he wasn’t going to say that. Not yet anyway. “I wrapped you up as best I could.” He shook his head and gave a brief unhumorous laugh. “I couldn’t find hardly anything to use for bandages-I’d used up pretty much everything they had on Ruthe. In the end, I tore my shirt into strips and used that.”
Mutt lay down next to Kate. She watched him over the big gray head.
He took a deep breath. “Longest drive of my life, longest flight. It was blowing snow and fog by then, I took off and landed both below minimums. I’m probably going to hear about that from the FAA.”
He didn’t sound overly concerned about it. She watched him twist the ball cap with the trooper emblem on the front between his hands. “I thought you were dead,” he said, his voice so low that she could barely hear it. “I thought I’d lost you.”
It was very quiet in the room for a few moments. Kate opened her mouth and found that she had to clear her throat before she could speak. “What about Christie?”
“She’s down the hall.”
“They told me.”
“Under guard, in case she gets up, which they tell me she won’t anytime soon. Mutt-” Mutt’s ears went up at this mention of her name by her idol, who stepped near enough to reach her ears and give her a good scratch. “She’s alive, but I think Mutt was kind of in a hurry. Plus maybe a little pissed off.” Mutt’s tail thumped gently on the bed. “Christie’s probably going to lose that arm.” He shrugged. “But then she won’t need it where she’s going.”
His hand slipped from Mutt’s ears to cup Kate’s cheek. “I thought you were dead.”
He was leaning forward when they heard the squeak of wheels in the corridor, the jingle of dishes, followed by a knock on the door. “Oh, yummy,” Kate said. “Dinner.”
He didn’t know whether to curse or laugh. Instead, he looked down at her and smiled. “You want me to bring you a burger?”
She looked at him with her heart in her eyes.
“Poor John,” Ruthe said.
Her skin was almost translucent, but she was conscious, and there was a faint flush of color along her exquisite cheekbones. Every doctor and nurse in the place was head over heels in love with her, naturally, and Kate’s visit had been constantly interrupted by this one or that wanting to take Ruthe’s temperature or blood pressure, or plump up her pillows, or tempt her taste buds with some god-awful dish from the hospital cafeteria. A surgeon who wasn’t even attending her case scored heavily when he brought in a box of fried chicken and french fries. The smell of deep-fried chicken almost obscured the Phisohex-like smell endemic to all hospitals, making Kate’s mouth water. Ruthe’s graceful thanks brought a flush to the surgeon’s cheek and a gleam to his eye, and he floated out the door with a smile on his face.
Not bad, Kate thought, and wondered if she would be able to pull that off at seventy plus.
“Here,” Ruthe said, passing her the box. “I can’t, not yet.”
Kate, wrapped like a mummy and tucked into a wheelchair, didn’t even try to talk her out of it. It took real nobility to offer to share with Jim. He accepted with alacrity, and she tried not to call him names inside her own head. Mutt gave her a pitiful look. “Chicken bones are bad for you,” she told the wolf, and tucked into a drumstick.
“Poor John,” Ruthe said again. “He really loved Dina.” She turned her eyes from the window to where the two of them sat side by side, eating. “How’s the chicken?”
“Sure you won’t try a piece?” Kate said.
“Certain sure,” Ruthe said. “Besides, I’m afraid to get in the middle of you two. Might tear my hand off.”
Jim, drumstick raised, laughed. Kate, mouth full of thigh, didn’t.
Ruthe had woken from her coma two days after Kate had been brought in. Much to the trooper’s frustration, she still couldn’t remember anything from the day of her attack, even though the doctors had said that was to be expected. “Short-term memory is what goes first after a violent attack,” they’d said, and Jim snapped, snarled, and growled, but in the end, because he’d had experience with a head injury and a subsequent short-term memory loss himself the summer before, he subsided into a frustrated silence. “Don’t harass her,” they had warned him. “She doesn’t need to do anything right now but get well. Don’t mess with that.”
So this was strictly a social call, except that Ruthe wanted to know everything that had happened since she’d been away, including why Kate was one door down.
She was paler when they finished. Kate told her about the potlatch, and the picture, the original of which she had had Jim bring to the hospital.
Ruthe wept at the sight of it. “I remember that day,” she said, mopping her eyes with the Kleenex Kate moved within reach. “Mudhole was starting air tours from Cordova to the mine. That was the inaugural flight. He loaded up everyone he could think of and gave us the VIP treatment-had champagne and caviar waiting for us when we got there. We all got a little tight.”
“Emaa had champagne?” Kate said, awed.
“We all did.” Ruthe’s smile faded. “That was the day it started, I think. Dina sat next to John. They hit it off. I think it was more chemistry than it was anything else, but it was strong and it was immediate, and a month later, they were married.”
Kate didn’t look at her, not wanting to exacerbate Ruthe’s pain. “That must have hurt.”
“What? Why?”
Kate looked up. “Well, I-” She cast about wildly for some way to say it without sticking the knife in. “Dina left you. You know, for John.”