green light from a cardiac monitor. The woman was barely visible.
He wondered if he should try to wake her, and was surprised when she
spoke: “Who’re you?”
He said, “I thought you were asleep.”
“Can’t sleep.”
“Didn’t they give you something?”
“It didn’t help.”
As in her husband’s room, the rain drove against the window with sullen
fury. Jonas could hear torrents cascading through the confines of a
nearby aluminum downspout.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“How the hell do you think I feel?” She tried to infuse the words with
anger, but she was too exhausted and too depressed to manage it.
He put down the bed railing, sat on the edge of the mattress, and held
out one hand, assuming that her eyes were better adapted to the gloom
than his were. “Give me your hand.”
“Why?”
“I’m Jonas Nyebern. I’m a doctor. I want to tell you about your
husband, and somehow I think it’ll be better if you’ll just let me hold
your hand.”
She was silent.
“Humor me he said.
Although the woman believed her husband to be dead, Jonas did not mean
to torment her by withholding his report of the resuscitation. From
experience, he knew that good news of this sort could be as shocking to
the recipient as bad news; it had to be delivered with care and
sensitivity.
She had been mildly delirious upon admission to the hospital, largely as
a result of exposure and shock, but that condition had been swiftly
remedied with the administration of heat and medication. She had been
in possession of all her faculties for a few hours now, long enough to
absorb her husband’s death and to begin to find her way toward a
tentative accommodation of her loss. Though deep in grief and far from
adjusted to her widowhood, she had by now found a ledge on the emotional
cliff down which she had plunged, a narrow perch, a precarious stability
from which he was about to knock her loose.
Still, he might have been more direct with her if he’d been able to
bring her unalloyed good news. Unfortunately, he could not promise that
her husband was going to be entirely his former self, unmarked by his
experience, able to reenter his old life without a hitch. They would
need hours, perhaps days, in which to examine and evaluate Harrison
before they could hazard a prediction as to the likelihood of a full
recovery. Thereafter, weeks or months of physical and occupational
therapy might lie ahead for him, with no guarantee of effectiveness.
Jonas was still waiting for her hand. At last she offered it
diffidently.
In his best bedside manner, he quickly outlined the basics of
resuscitation medicine. When she began to realize why he thought she
needed to know about such an esoteric subject, her grip on his hand
suddenly grew tight.
In room 518, Hatch foundered in a sea of bad dreams that were nothing
but disassociated images melding into one another without even the
illogical narrative flow that usually shaped nightmares. Wind-whipped
snow. A huge Ferris wheel sometimes bedecked with festive lights,
sometimes dark and broken and ominous in a night seething with rain.
Groves of scarecrow trees, gnarled and coaly, stripped leafless by
winter. A beer truck angled across a snow-swept highway. A tunnel with
a concrete floor that sloped down into perfect blackness, into something
unknown that filled him with heart-bursting dread. His lost son, Jimmy,
lying sallow-skinned against hospital sheets, dying of cancer. Water,
cold and deep, impenetrable as ink, stretching to all horizons, with no
possible escape. A naked woman, her head on backwards, hands clasping a
crucifix…
Frequently he was aware of a faceless and mysterious figure at the
perimeter of the dreamscapes, dressed in black like some grim reaper,
moving in such fluid harmony with the shadows that he might have been
only a shadow himself. At other times, the reaper was not part of the
scene but seemed to be the viewpoint through which it was observed, as
if Hatch was looking out through the eyes of another-yes that beheld the
world with all the compassionless, hungry, calculating practicality of a