The tingling in David’s arms and legs made him wobble. He strained not to faint again.
Something was horribly wrong. He recalled the fireflies in his bedroom and the dove in the mausoleum.
But none of those things had happened!
Yet he knew, as if remembering, every dismal instant he’d endure for the next forty years. His future was so clear and detailed that he could not believe those forty years, every wretched minute of them, could have been crammed into so brief an unconsciousness.
While unconscious had he imagined the possible course of his life?
He breathed deeper, faster, on the verge of hyperventilating.
Or was he remembering his life from the perspective of forty years later?
His chest felt tight. What in God’s name is happening?
In his dream, the next events in his life had been that, after he wakened from fainting, his dizziness had worsened. He’d been forced to stay in bed until the next day. When he felt well enough to return to the Bone Marrow Ward, his son had contracted septic shock.
But none of that had happened! At least not yet.
But would it?
His dizziness intensified. In a rush, he pulled a chair from the table and slumped into it. He propped his elbows on the table and clutched his head. His chest felt squeezed.
I’m having a heart attack!
But he didn’t feel a sharp pain down his left arm. And his heart-though it rushed-didn’t skip or feel stabbed.
Mouth parched, tongue swollen, he knew he shouldn’t move if this was a heart attack, but he took the risk and staggered toward the kitchen sink, where he turned on the tap, bent down, and gulped water. He shoved his head beneath the faucet and drenched his hair.
At once, he had the vertiginous sensation of floating over an old man in a hospital bed. The old man’s eyes were closed. Hooked to life-support systems, the old man was surrounded by nurses and doctors raising the foot of his bed, injecting medications, and turning dials on a respirator. An elderly woman slumped over the old man, sobbing.
My nightmare!
Drifting down a brilliant corridor, he hovered in a radiant doorway.
Fireflies.
Power chords.
Hunched over the kitchen sink, David almost threw up. Man, you’re in really bad shape. You’d better go to bed.
But that’s what happened in my nightmare! And the next day, the septic shock hit Matthew and…!
Septic shock? He suddenly realized he’d never heard those words before. Except in his nightmare. But he understood what septic shock meant. Or thought he did.
Floating from an old man’s body. Hovering in a radiant doorway. Searching for a firefly among splendrous millions.
You’d better get control.
David drank more water and turned off the tap. Grabbing a dish towel, he wiped his dripping hair.
Well, there’s an easy way to convince yourself it’s all in your head, David thought. In your nightmare, before you staggered to bed, you phoned Matt’s room at the hospital. You let it ring ten times, but no one answered.
David groped past a window toward the phone on the kitchen wall. Heart racing, he pressed the numbers for Matthew’s room. One ring. Two rings. Ten rings. No one answered.
He let it ring longer. Still no one answered.
Feeling suffocated, David set down the phone. He pressed his back against the wall and strained to keep his knees from collapsing. In his nightmare, the explanation for the lack of response on Matthew’s phone was that Donna had helped Matt get out of bed and walk into the ward so Matt could reach a bathtub in a room around a corner down the hall.
Again David floated.
He couldn’t ignore his terror. He felt so sure of what would happen next that he had to act as if it would happen.
If he was wrong, he’d be grateful beyond belief.
But what if he was right? He didn’t dare dismiss the possibility that he’d been granted the gift he’d prayed for in his nightmare.
To dial back. To retreat in time. To take the knowledge of the future into the past.
Based on what he’d dreamed, given what he’d learned from his experience with Matt in Intensive Care, from conversations with doctors who reconsidered the choices they’d made, from conclusions based on the autopsy report, he had a precious opportunity.
To save his son’s life.
2
The University of Iowa ’s hospital administers to patients not just in Iowa City but throughout the state. There are other hospitals in the area, of course, but few are so well-equipped to deal with extreme diseases, especially those involving children’s cancer. A helicopter is available to fly emergency cases from hundreds of miles away. Other patients-chronically ill but not in imminent danger of death-sometimes spend hours being driven to the hospital for specialized treatment.
Two years before, when the demands of writing assignments had forced David to resign from being a professor of American literature at the university, he and his family had considered moving to another locale. Thanks to the famous character he’d created and the income he received from best-selling novels about other characters, he had the financial ability to live anywhere he wanted. After all, to work he needed only a word processor and a quiet room. He could set up those conditions anywhere. Los Angeles had been a likely place-because of the movie producers David sometimes worked for. New York City (or nearby in Connecticut) had also been an option-because he’d be close to his publishers.
But in the end, as a consequence of the many business trips he had to take, the palm trees he saw in California and the skyscrapers he saw in New York had begun to seem ordinary. Flying home, peering down at the rich black soil and rolling wooded hills of Iowa, he’d gradually decided that the Midwest was as exotic as any of the so-called glamorous sites he’d visited.
A friend had once laughed at David’s choice of word. “Exotic?”
“Well, attractive anyhow, and more important, innocent. The air’s clean. There aren’t any traffic jams. I’ve never had to worry about my children being mugged in the schoolyard. I can get anywhere in town in fifteen minutes. The people are friendly. I like the space, the big-sky feeling. I guess what it comes down to is, I feel at home. I’ve settled. Even on a practical level, the dental and medical care are magnificent.”
Medical care? Another irony, for David could never have guessed how desperate he soon would feel about the medical care he’d so praised or how fortuitous his choice to remain in Iowa City would be. Patients in the farthest reaches of the state had to travel hundreds of miles for their treatment. But David’s desperately ill son could be driven to one of the nation’s finest hospitals within five minutes; the family home was only ten blocks away.
The hospital is huge, much larger than most medical facilities even in major American cities. The complex stretches over blocks and blocks. New buildings are constantly being constructed. And some of the sophisticated diagnostic instruments (a magnetic resonance imager, for example) aren’t available in many areas.
Yes, David thought, if your son gets a rare form of cancer and the tumor lodges where it almost never does-in a rib instead of an arm or a leg… if your son might have the only case of its kind in the nation, it’s a damned wise choice you made in deciding to stay in Iowa City.
These thoughts occurred to him as he pushed away from the kitchen wall. With an unnerving sense of viewing everything from a distance, he staggered downstairs to shower, then stumbled upstairs to his bedroom, where he struggled to dress. Still dizzy, he knew he was risking a traffic accident by driving to the hospital, but the alternative, that of staying in bed till tomorrow as his nightmare had told him he otherwise would, was an unacceptable option.
He had to save Matt’s life.