was still in the hospital, then wheeled Lindsey down the hall to 518.
Nyebern was there, red-eyed and rumpled. The sheets on the bed nearest
the door were not turned back, but they were wrinkled, as if the doctor
had stretched out to rest at least once during the night.
By now Lindsey had learned enough about Nyebern-some of it from him,
much of it from the nurses to know that he was a local legend. He had
been a busy cardiovascular surgeon, but over the past two years, after
losing his wife and two children in some kind of horrible accident, he
had devoted steadily less time to surgery and more to resuscitation
medicine.
His commitment to his work was too strong to be called mere dedication.
It was more of an obsession. In a society that was struggling to emerge
from three decades of self-indulgence and me-firstism, it was easy to
admire a man as selflessly committed as Nyebern, and everyone did seem
to admire him.
Lindsey, for one, admired the hell out of him. After all, he had saved
Hatch’s life.
His weariness betrayed only by his bloodshot eyes and the rumpled
condition of his clothes, Nyebern moved swiftly to pull back the lacy
curtain that surrounded the bed nearest the window. He took the handles
of Lindsey’s wheelchair and rolled her to her husband’s bedside.
The storm had passed during the night. Morning sun slanted through the
slats of the Levolor blinds, striping the sheets and blankets with
shadow and golden light.
Hatch lay beneath that faux tiger skin, only one arm and his face
exposed. Although his skin was painted with the same jungle-cat
camouflage as the bedding, his extreme pallor was evident. Seated in
the wheelchair, regarding Hatch at an odd angle through the bed railing,
Lindsey grew queasy at the sight of an ugly bruise that spread from the
stitched gash on his forehead. But for the proof of the cardiac monitor
and the barely perceptible rise-and-fall of Hatch’s chest as he
breathed, she would have assumed he was dead.
But he was alive, alive, and she felt a tightness in her chest and
throat that presaged tears as surely as lightning was a sign of oncoming
thunder.
The prospect of tears surprised her, quickening her breath.
From the moment their Honda had gone over the brink and into the ravine,
through the entire physical and emotional ordeal of the night just
passed, Lindsey had never cried. She didn’t pride herself on stoicism;
it was just the way she was.
No, strike that.
It was just the way she had to become during Jimmy’s bout with cancer.
From the day of diagnosis until the end, her boy had taken nine months
to die, as long as she had taken to lovingly shape him within her womb.
Every day of that dying, Lindsey had wanted nothing more than to curl up
in bed with the covers over her head and cry, just let the tears pour
forth until all the moisture in her body was gone, until she dried up
and crumbled into dust and ceased to exist. She had wept, at first.
But her tears frightened Jimmy, and she realized that any expression of
her inner turmoil was an unconscionable self-indulgence. Even when she
cried in private, Jimmy knew it later; he had always been perceptive and
sensitive beyond his years, and his disease seemed to make him more
acutely aware of everything. Current theory of immunology gave
considerable weight to the importance of a positive attitude, laughter,
and confidence as weapons in the battle against life-threatening
illness. So she had learned to suppress her terror at the prospect of
losing him. She had given him laughter, love, confidence, courage and
never a reason to doubt her conviction that he would beat the
malignancy.
By the time Jimmy died, Lindsey had become so successful at repressing
her tears that she could not simply turn them on again. Denied the
release that easy tears might have given her, she spiraled down into a
lost time of despair. She dropped weight-fifteen, twenty-seven pounds,
until she was emaciated. She could not be bothered to wash her hair or