“How’s the pain now?”
“Better. Mostly gone.”
“Still having that squeezing sensation?”
“No.”
“Difficulty breathing?”
“Not anymore.”
“The nausea?”
“Gone.”
“All right, good. Just keep still.”
Shelby listened to his lungs again; the faint wetness was barely discernible. His pulse rate had slowed and steadied at 80. He wasn’t sweating any longer, but his forehead, cheeks, and neck felt even cooler than before. At her touch a shiver went through him. And when she ran fingers over his arm, she felt the goose bumps that had formed there.
She dragged a pillow off the bed, hurried with it into the living room. The fire had begun to bank; she fed it quickly, leaving the fire screen open. She managed to shove the heavy couch over close to the fire, then took three more logs from the wood box and set them on the hearth bricks close by.
Back in the bedroom, she asked Jay if he thought he could sit up.
“I can try.”
She helped him into a sitting position. “Any more pain?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s see if you can stand up and walk.”
“Where?”
“Out by the fire. You can’t stay in here—it’s too cold.”
She wrapped the blanket around him, holding it closed with one hand. Got him up off the far side of the bed without difficulty; training, all the running and working out she did, had given her the strength to move and support bigger men than Jay. He was a little wobbly, but he didn’t sag in her grasp.
“Light-headedness? Discomfort of any kind?”
“No.”
She told him to lean on her and take a step, then another. His knees didn’t buckle.
“Slow, now,” she said, “baby steps.”
Out of the bedroom, down the hall, across to the couch. She eased him down on it, arranged the pillow under his head, drew his knees up and tucked the blanket around him. Returned to the bedroom long enough to pull the comforter off the bed, pick up her jump bag and the oximeter and pressure cuff. She covered Jay to the neck with the comforter, leaving one arm exposed, then put the oximeter on his finger and the cuff around his arm and took the readings.
Blood oxygen saturation at 95 percent. Blood pressure at 160 over 80—the nitro tablets had lowered it some but it was still too high. Better go with the cannula. She took it and the Jumbo D and mask from her bag, set the bottle on the floor at the end of the couch farthest from the fire, at the same time running through the litany of questions with him again. The answers he gave were the ones she wanted to hear. She put the cannula on him and started the oxygen flowing.
Stable now—temporarily.
Shelby stood looking down at him, for the first time letting her emotions break through the professional mind-set. A whole conga line of them—cautious relief, compassion, sadness, anger, frustration, tenderness. Love, too, no use denying it. What else would make her eyes start to tear up the way they were now?
You poor damn fool, she thought—and she wasn’t sure if she meant Jay or herself or both of them.
S E V E N T E E N
MACKLIN HAD KNOWN HE was having a heart attack as soon as the pain started. He’d just gotten out of the shower, dried off, and was putting his shirt on over a dry pair of jeans. It wasn’t the hammer blow that would’ve taken him out right away, just that squeezing sensation and the increased difficulty in getting enough air into his lungs. The bed was as far as he got before the worsening pain and the other symptoms sat him down. He’d tried to call out to Shelby, couldn’t seem to raise his voice above a low, feeble cry.
He’d been scared then, still was after all of her ministrations, and yet, strangely, it was a dull, detached kind of fear. He felt disjointed, as if only part of him harbored the anxiety, while the other part was apathetic and resigned. I don’t want to die, he thought. But there was a lack of emotion in it, as though the thought had been: I don’t want to go out in that storm again.
He lay quiet on the couch, taking in oxygen in slow breaths, watching Shelby watch him. Feeling better now, the symptoms all mostly gone thanks to her. If she hadn’t been here when it happened, he’d probably be dead now. He’d never doubted that she was good at her job, but until now he hadn’t realized just how calm and skilled she could be under pressure, in a personal crisis. Quite a woman he’d married. A woman he was probably still going to lose, assuming he survived.
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” Shelby said, “but there’s no other choice. You need to be hospitalized ASAP.”
“Where’ll you go?”
“The Lomaxes. Ask Claire to come stay with you until I can get a medical response unit out here.”
“Those locked gates … he won’t open up for you …”
“Let me worry about that. If he has a chain saw, he ought to be able to cut away enough of the tree to let me drive through.”
“What if he doesn’t have a chain saw?”
Shelby said, “No more talking,” and went to quickly don her raincoat, tie the hood under her chin. “While I’m gone I want you to lie still, be as quiet and comfortable as you can. If the oxygen in the cannula runs out before I get back, use the D bottle on the floor there—you know how it works.”
He nodded.
“If the fire gets too low and you’re feeling well enough, you can get up long enough to toss on another log or two.”
Nodded again.
“I’ll be back as fast as I can,” she said, and in a brief slash of cold air, she was gone.
And he was alone.
He listened to the storm hurl rain on the roof, bludgeon the walls and windows.
The moan of the wind was like a woman in the throes of orgasm. Before long the sense of disjointedness left him and depression moved in in its place, bleak and black. He’d never felt more helpless. Or less of a man. Swaddled up like a baby waiting to be coddled, burped, and diaper-changed.
He almost wished the coronary had killed him—a sudden crushing blow, then straight out of his misery. But no, that would’ve been too easy, too quick. This way he was facing a future filled with hospitals, doctors’ offices, reduced activities, bland food, loneliness if Shelby went through with the divorce and a life of dependency whether she did or didn’t, and no worthwhile job prospect in either case because who’d hire a man with one foot in the grave? Months, years of suffering, causing suffering, until another attack took him out or he took himself out. Hell, why not just get up and run around in circles naked until his heart quit beating from the strain, put an end to it right here and now?
Stupid thought. Selfish. He was a long way from the suicide stage yet; self-preservation was still too strong in him. More important, he couldn’t do a thing like that to Shelby. Not now, after all she’d done and was out there doing to try to save his sorry ass.
Bitterly he found himself thinking back to the week before Christmas. He’d had the arrhythmia and shortness of breath for a while before they finally alarmed him enough to do what Shelby’s urgings hadn’t—send him to his doctor, who had shuttled him on to the cardiologist, Dr. Prebble. A stress test confirmed the diminished capacity in his heart. So then they’d put him in the hospital overnight—he’d called Shelby and lied to her about an all-night poker game at Ben Coulter’s—and administered a bunch of tests, including an echocardiogram to determine the location of the blockage. There’d been some talk about “cathing” him—inserting a minicam in his veins and running it up into the heart to look for other blockages—but the cardiologist had finally determined that the procedure wasn’t necessary.