knew, without having to be told, that her inability to feel the bitter
night air was an indication of physical deterioration.
fast forward…
She was being moved on a stretcher. They were heading along the
riverbank. With her head toward the front of the litter, she could look
back at the man who was carrying the rear of it. The snow-covered
ground reflected the flashlight beams, but that soft eerie glow was only
bright enough to reveal the basic contours of the stranger’s face and
add a disquieting glimmer to his iron-hard eyes.
As color less as a charcoal drawing, strangely silent, full of dreamlike
motion and mystery, that place and moment had the quality of a
nightmare. She felt her heartbeat accelerate as she squinted back and
up at the almost faceless man. The illogic of a dream shaped her fear,
and suddenly she was certain that she was dead and that the shadowy men
carrying her stretcher were not men at all but carrion-bearers
delivering her to the boat that would convey her across the Styx to the
land of the dead and damned.
Fast forward…
Lashed to the stretcher now, tilted almost into a standing position, she
was being pulled along the snow-covered slope of the ravine wall by
unseen men reeling in a pair of ropes from above. Two other men
accompanied her, one on each side of the stretcher, struggling up
through the knee-deep drifts, guiding her and making sure she didn’t
flip over.
She was ascending into the red glow of the emergency beacons. As that
crimson radiance completely surrounded her, she began to hear the urgent
voices of the rescuers above and the crackle of police-band radios. When
she could smell the pungent exhaust fumes of their vehicles, she knew
that she was going to survive.
Just seconds from a clean getaway, she thought.
Though in the grip of a delirium born of exhaustion, confused and
fuzzy-minded, Lindsey was alert enough to be unnerved by that thought
and the subconscious longing it represented. Just seconds from a clean
getaway? The only thing she had been seconds away from was death. Was
she still so depressed from the loss of Jimmy that, even after five
years, her own death was an acceptable release from the burden of her
grief?
Then why didn’t I surrender to the river? she wondered. Why not just
let go?
Hatch, of course. Hatch had needed her. She’d been ready to step out
of this world in hope of setting foot into a better one. But she had
not been able to make that decision for Hatch, and to surrender her own
life under those circumstances would have meant forfeiting his as well.
With a clatter and a jolt, the stretcher was pulled over the brink of
the ravine and lowered flat onto the shoulder of the mountain highway
beside an ambulance. Red snow swirled into her face.
A paramedic with a weather-beaten face and beautiful blue eyes leaned
over her. “You’re going to be all right.”
“I didn’t want to die,” she said.
She was not really speaking to the man. She was arguing with herself,
trying to deny that her despair over the loss of her son had become such
a chronic emotional infection that she had been secretly longing to join
him in death. Her self-image did not include the word “suicidal,” and
she was shocked and repulsed to discover, under extreme stress, that
such an impulse might be a part of her.
Just seconds from a clean getaway .
She said, “Did I want to die?”
“You aren’t going to die,” the paramedic assured her as he and another
man untied the ropes from the handles of the litter, preparatory to
loading her into the ambulance. “The worst is over now. The worst is
over.”
Half a dozen police and emergency vehicles were parked across two lanes
of the mountain highway. Uphill and downhill traffic shared the third
lane, regulated by uniformed deputies. Lindsey was aware of people
gawking at her from a Jeep Wagoneer, but they vanished beyond shatters
of snow and heavy plumes of crystallized exhaust fumes.
The ambulance van could accommodate two patients. They loaded Lindsey