“Maybe a sandwich.”
“Tuna?”
“Fine.”
Sarie hurried toward the kitchen.
David ate the sandwich, drank a glass of milk, and went to sleep.
Or pretended to, because he’d never swallowed the pill. Instead he’d tucked it along a cheek, and when Sarie went to the kitchen, he’d removed the pill and hidden it.
He lay in the murky bedroom, kept his eyes closed when Sarie came in to check on him, and struggled to control the swirling in his mind.
Can’t go to sleep.
Mustn’t let myself.
Don’t dare to.
He heard dim voices, indistinct music, the television set downstairs. He glanced at the glowing numbers of the digital clock on the bedroom bureau. Ten-fifty-five.
Sarie, get tired! Go to bed!
Waiting was agony. Groggy, he felt himself drifting.
Hovering?
No! He concentrated on Matthew, on his son’s scarred shrinking body, on the septic shock that would start at four-thirty-six tomorrow afternoon.
At midnight, he said a prayer of relief, hearing Sarie turn off the television. She came upstairs, tiptoed into his bedroom to check on him again, then went to her own room.
He heard her door snick shut.
At 1:00 A.M., he took his chance. Off-balance, he staggered from bed, managed to dress, and peered from his room down the hallway toward Sarie’s door. No light gleamed beneath it. He crept in the opposite direction down the shadowy hallway. Carpeted stairs muffled his footsteps. He slowly unbolted the front door, inched it open, stepped into the dark, and eased the door shut.
8
The night was unusually warm for June, heavy with humidity. Streetlights glistened off dew in the grass. Except for a distant car, the only sound David heard was the screech of crickets.
Sarie’s Fiesta was parked beneath her window in the driveway. He couldn’t risk using his spare key to start it, for fear of waking her. He had no choice. He had to walk. Under normal circumstances, the ten blocks to the hospital would have been effortless, an easy jog for a man with a twenty-year habit of running four miles each day. But at the moment, those ten blocks might as well have been ten miles through knee-deep snow.
Nonetheless he had to do it.
Get started, he told himself. You lazy bastard.
He stumbled across the lawn, across the street, and past the grade school his son had attended. Despite the swirling in his brain, his thoughts were lucid. At least, he hoped so.
Staggering the way I am, a police car might stop me, he thought. I look like I’m drunk or on drugs. I have to use sidestreets, the darker the better.
So what should have been ten blocks turned out to be farther as he took a zigzag route from one murky street to the next. He felt lonely, helpless, and desperate, but terribly determined. His chest heaved from the pounding of his heart.
At last, he saw a glow in the sky. Not the morning sun. Even with his plodding gait, it was far too early for sunrise. No, what he saw was the gleam, reflected off clouds, of the sprawling complex of the hospital. Here, streetlights were unavoidable. He paused beneath a lamppost to study the blur of his watch.
Twenty minutes to three. Normally, he could run a mile in nine minutes, and now it had taken him an hour and forty minutes just to walk it. On the verge of collapse, he leaned against the chain-link fence of a university tennis court and studied the hospital, narrowing his vision toward the seventh floor of a brightly lit section to his right. The Bone Marrow Ward. Matthew. And if his nightmare was correct, a second chance.
For salvation.
To reverse the greatest loss of his life.
Suddenly bolstered, he released his grip on the fence and walked stolidly forward.
Matthew.
Fireflies.
Power chords. He marched to their rhythm.
9
He studied the parking ramp. Few cars. Insects swarmed around arc lights surrounding the hospital. No one was in the area.
David’s six months of coming and going here had taught him how deserted the hospital could be at night, with the patients asleep, their visitors gone home, and the staff reduced. It was possible to walk down corridor after corridor and never see anyone.
That happened now. Inside the complex, the grand-piano room was deserted. Smothered by silence, David considered taking elevator E, but the pressure behind his eyes warned him not to. He opened the stairwell door beside the elevator. Continuing to respond to the rhythm of the power chords, he proceeded step after relentless step up the stairwell, no longer needing his daughter’s support. Driven by his nightmare, he climbed higher. Third floor. Fourth floor. The numbers were fuzzy, but he kept climbing. Sixth floor.
Seventh floor.
10
At last he stopped and took a deep breath. Had to. From exhaustion. He wanted to slump on the stairs. And sleep.
How much he wanted to sleep!
Not yet. Time enough for sleep when his duty had been completed. Forty years from now. Tonight.
He opened the stairwell door and entered a corridor. Ten paces farther, turning right, he proceeded toward the Bone Marrow Ward.
Passing through one door, then along a corridor and through a second door, he entered it.
Softly. Silently. Seeing no one.
In most wards, a nurses’ station would have been the first thing a visitor saw. But in the Bone Marrow Ward, the nurses’ station was out of view, around the corner to the left. That corner was ten feet farther ahead than the corner to the right. And Matthew’s room was just around the nearer right corner.
That made it possible-
David had calculated, had depended on this-
made it possible-
if a nurse didn’t happen to prowl-
for him to shift unseen around that right corner and ease into Matthew’s room.
It was after 3:00 A.M. Often at this hour, Matthew woke from nightmares and needed to talk to whichever parent was sleeping in the room with him, to express his fears and ease his apprehensions. Some of David’s most intimate and heartbreaking conversations with Matt had occurred at this time of night.
But this afternoon, when David had last seen his son, Matt had been so weak it was doubtful he’d waken from his stupor tonight. David had depended on that as well. So much depended on faith.
The room was dark. Matt lay motionless in bed. Donna slept on a cot in the corner, breathing restlessly, enduring her own nightmares.
David shut the door till only a crack allowed light to enter from the outside corridor. Responding to habit, he almost went to the sink to wash his hands, but he froze, realizing he couldn’t make a sound.
When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he stepped toward Matthew’s bed. Two IV stands supported bottles from which a dark liquid (probably platelet concentrate to give Matt’s impaired blood the ability to clot) and a clear colorless liquid (probably saline solution to keep him from dehydrating) were pumped through tubes into IV connections implanted in his chest. Beside the bed was a cart upon which full syringes lay in a row: medications that Matt would need in case of an emergency.
David took the syringes one by one to the light that came through the crack in the door and studied their labels. Though he knew he shouldn’t have been able to recognize their arcane names and understand the effect of each drug, he could do so now, and that made him more convinced that he was right, that his nightmare was more than just a fainting spell.
The first syringe he examined was labeled “carbenecillin.” The term, so close to “penicillin,” obviously named an antibiotic, but intuition controlled him, for somehow he knew it wasn’t the particular antibiotic that Matthew needed.
He examined another syringe. Gentamicin. That too was an antibiotic, he realized, but again he had the certain knowledge that it wouldn’t be effective against strep and staph.
Vancomycin. He’d found it. Though why he was sure, he didn’t know, except for the memory of his nightmare.