Winter Moon

At last Heather met his eyes again.

He said, "A bullet or fragment struck the spinal cord. There's

bruising of the spine, but we don't see a fracture."

"Bruising. Is that serious?"

"It depends on whether any nerve structures were crushed."

"Paralysis?"

"Until he's conscious and we can run some simple tests, we can't

know.

If there is paralysis, we'll take another look for a fracture. The

important thing is, the cord hasn't been severed, nothing as bad as

that. If there's paralysis and we find a fracture, we'll get him into

a body cast, apply traction to the legs to get the pressure off the

sacrum. We can treat a fracture. It isn't catastrophic. There's an

excellent chance we can get him on his feet again."

"But no guarantees," she said softly.

He hesitated. Then he said, "There never are."

CHAPTER SIX.

The cubicle, one of eight, had large windows that looked into the staff

area of the I.C.U. The drapes had been pulled aside so the nurses could

keep a direct watch on the patient even from their station in the

center of the wheel-shaped chamber. Jack was attached to a cardiac

monitor that transmitted continuous data to a terminal at the central

desk, an intravenous drip that provided him with glucose and

antibiotics, and a bifurcated oxygen tube that clipped gently to the

septum between his nostrils.

Heather was prepared to be shocked by Jack's condition--but he looked

even worse than she expected. He was unconscious, so his face was

slack, of course, but the lack of animation was not the only reason for

his frightening appearance. His skin was bone-white, with dark-blue

circles around his sunken eyes. His lips were so gray that she thought

of ashes, and a Biblical quote passed through her mind with unsettling

resonance, as if it had actually been spoken aloud--ashes to ashes,

dust to dust. He seemed ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when he had

left home that morning, as if his struggle for survival had taken place

over a week, not just a few hours.

A lump in her throat made it difficult for her to swallow as she stood

at the side of the bed, and she was unable to speak. Though he was

unconscious, she didn't want to talk to him until she was sure she

could control her speech.

She'd read somewhere that even patients in comas might be able to hear

people around them, on some deep level, they might understand what was

said and benefit from encouragement. She didn't want Jack to hear a

tremor of fear or doubt in her voice--or anything else that might upset

him or exacerbate what fear and depression already gripped him.

The cubicle was unnervingly quiet. The heart-monitor sound had been

turned off, leaving only a visual display. The oxygen-rich air

escaping through the nasal inserts hissed so faintly she could hear it

only when she leaned close to him, and the sound of his shallow

breathing was as soft as that of a sleeping child. Rain drummed on the

world outside, ticked and tapped against the single window, but that

quickly became a gray noise, just another form of silence.

She wanted to hold his hand more than she'd ever wanted anything. But

his hands were hidden in the long sleeves of the restraining jacket.

The IV line, which was probably inserted in a vein on the back of his

hand, disappeared under the cuff.

Hesitantly she touched his cheek. He looked cold but felt feverish.

Eventually she said, "I'm here, babe."

He gave no sign he had heard her. His eyes didn't move under their

lids. His gray lips remained slightly parted.

"Dr. Procnow says everything's looking good," she told him. "You're

going to come out of this just fine. Together we can handle this, no

sweat. Hell, two years ago, when my folks came to stay with us for a

week? Now, that was a disaster and an ordeal, my mother whining

nonstop for seven days, my dad drunk and moody. This is just a bee

sting by comparison, don't you think?"

No response.

"I'm here," she said. "I'll stay here. I'm not going anywhere. You

and me, okay?"

On the screen of the cardiac monitor, a moving line of bright green

light displayed the jagged and critical patterns of atrial and

ventricular activity, which proceeded without a single disruptive blip,

weak but steady. If Jack had heard what she'd said, his heart did not

respond to her words.

A straight-backed chair stood in one corner. She moved it next to the

bed. She watched him through the gaps in the railing.

Visitors in the I.C.U were limited to ten minutes every two hours, so

as not to exhaust patients and interfere with the nurses.

However, the head nurse of the unit, Maria Alicante, was the daughter

of a policeman. She gave Heather a dispensation from the rules. "You

stay with him as long as you want," Maria said. "Thank God, nothing

like this ever happened to my dad. We always expected it would, but it

never did. Of course, he retired a few years ago, just as everything

started getting even crazier out there."

Every hour or so, Heather left the I.C.U to spend a few minutes with

the members of the support group in the lounge. The faces kept