"I don't know, honey. I'll be here awhile. Probably after you're in bed."
"Will you bring me something from Dad's room?"
"What do you mean?"
"Something from his room. Anything. Just something was in his room, so I can have it and know there's a room where he is."
The chasm of insecurity and fear revealed by the boy's request was almost more than Heather could bear without losing the emotional control she had thus far maintained with such iron-willed success. Her chest tightened, and she had to swallow hard before she dared to speak.
"Sure, okay, I'll bring you something."
"If I'm asleep, wake me."
"Okay."
"Promise?"
"I promise, peanut. Now I gotta go. You be good for Mae."
"We're playing five hundred rummy."
"You're not betting, are you?"
"Just pretzel sticks."
"Good. I wouldn't want to see you bankrupt a good friend like Mae,"
Heather said, and the boy's giggle was sweet music.
To be sure she didn't interfere with the nurses, Heather leaned against the wall beside the door that led out of the I.C.U. She could see Jack's cubicle from there. His door was closed, privacy curtains drawn at the big observation windows.
The air in the I.C.U smelled of various antiseptics. She ought to have been used to those astringent and metallic odors by now. Instead, they became increasingly noxious and left a bitter taste as well.
When at last the doctors stepped out of Jack's cubicle and walked toward her, they were smiling, but she had the disquieting feeling they had bad news. Their smiles ended at the corners of their mouths, in their eyes was something worse than sorrow-perhaps pity… Dr. Walter Delaney was in his fifties and would have been perfect as the wise father in a television sitcom in the early sixties. Brown hair going to gray at the temples. A handsome if soft-featured face.
He radiated quiet authority, vet was as relaxed and mellow as Ozzie Nelson or Robert Young.
"You okay, Heather?" Delaney asked.
She nodded. "I'm holding up."
"I don't know if you've heard the latest news," Emil Procnow said, "but the man who shot up the service station this morning was carrying cocaine and PCP in his pockets. If he was using both drugs simultaneously well, that's psycho soup for sure."
"Like nuking your own brain, for God's sake," Delaney said disgustedly.
Heather knew they were genuinely frustrated and angry, but she also suspected they were delaying the bad news. To the surgeon, she said,
"He came through without brain damage. You were worried about that, but he came through."
"He's not aphasic," Procnow said. "He can speak, read, spell, do basic math in his head. Mental faculties appear intact."
"Which means there's not likely to be any brain-related physical incapacity, either," Walter Delaney said, "but it'll be at least a day or two before we can be sure of that."
Emil Procnow ran one slender hand through his curly black hair. "He's coming through this really well, Mrs. Mcgarvey. He really is."
"But?" she said.
The physicians glanced at each other.
"Right now," Delaney said, "there's paralysis in both legs."
"From the waist down," Procnow said.
"Upper body?" she asked.
"That's fine," Delaney assured her. "Full function."
"In the morning," Procnow said, "we'll look again for a spinal fracture. If we find it, then we make up a plaster bed, line it with felt, immobilize Jack from below the neck all the way past the filum terminale, below the buttocks, and put his legs in traction."
"But he'll walk again?"
"Almost certainly."
She looked from Procnow to Delaney to Procnow again, waiting for the.rest of it, and then she said, "That's all?"
The doctors exchanged a glance again.
Delaney said, "Heather, I'm not sure you understand what lies ahead for Jack and for you."
"Tell me."
"He'll be in a body cast between three and four months. By the time the cast comes off, he'll have severe muscle atrophy from the waist down. He won't have the strength to walk. In fact, his body will have forgotten how to walk, so he'll undergo weeks of physical therapy in a rehab hospital. It's going to be more frustrating and painful than anything most of us will ever have to face."
"That's it?" she asked.
Procnow said, "That's more than enough."
"But it could have been so much worse," she reminded them.
Alone with Jack again, she put down the side railing on the bed and smoothed his damp hair back from his forehead.
"You look beautiful," he said, his voice still weak and soft.
"Liar."
"Beautiful"
"I look like shit."
He smiled. "Just before I blacked out, I wondered if I'd ever see you again."
"Can't get rid of me that easy."
"Have to actually die, huh?"
"Even that wouldn't work. I'd find you wherever you went."
"I love you, Heather."
"I love you," she said, "more than life."
Heat rose in her eyes, but she was determined not to cry in front of him. Positive thinking. Keep the spirits up.
— His eyelids fluttered, and he said, "I'm so tired."
"Can't imagine why."
He smiled again. "Hard day at work."
"Yeah? I thought you cops didn't do anything all day except sit around in doughnut shops, chowing down, and collect protection money from drug.dealers."
"Sometimes we beat up innocent citizens."
"Well, yeah, that can be tiring."
His eyes had closed.
She kept smoothing his hair. His hands were still concealed by the sleeves of the restraining jacket, and she wanted desperately to keep touching him.
Suddenly his eyes popped open, and he said, "Luther's dead?"
She hesitated. "Yes."
"I thought so, but I hoped "
"You saved the woman, Mrs. Arkadian."
"That's something."
His eyelids fluttered again, drooped heavily, and she said, "You better rest, babe."
"You seen Alma?" That was Alma Bryson, Luther's wife. "Not yet, babe.
I've been sort of tied up here, you know."
"Go see her," he whispered. "I will."
"Now. I'm okay. She's the one needs you."
"All right."
"So tired," he said, and slipped into sleep again.
The support group in the I.C.U lounge numbered three when Heather left Jack for the evening-two uniformed officers whose names she didn't know and Gina Tendero, the wife of another officer. They were elated when she reported that Jack had come around, and she knew they would put the word on the department grapevine. Unlike the doctors, they understood when she refused to focus gloomily on the paralysis and the treatment required to overcome it.
"I need someone to take me home," Heather said, "so I can get my car.
I want to go see Alma Bryson."
"I'll take you there and then home," Gina said. "I want to see Alma myself."
Gina Tendero was the most colorful spouse in the division and perhaps in the entire Los Angeles Police Department. She was twenty-three years old but looked fourteen. Tonight she was wearing five-inch heels, tight black leather pants, red sweater, black leather jacket, an.enormous silver medallion with a brightly colored enamel portrait of Elvis in the center, and large multiple-hoop earrings so complex they might have been variations of those puzzles that were supposed to relax harried businessmen if they concentrated totally on disassembling them.
Her fingernails were painted neon purple, a shade reflected slightly more subtly in her eye shadow. Her jet-black hair was a mass of curls that spilled over her shoulders, it looked as much like a wig as any Dolly Parton had ever worn, but it was all her own.
Though she was only five three without shoes and weighed maybe a hundred and five pounds dripping wet, Gina always seemed bigger than anyone around her. As she walked along the hospital corridors with Heather, her footsteps were louder than those of a man twice her size, and nurses turned to frown disapprovingly at the tock-tock-tock of her high heels on the tile floors.