look after her complexion or press her clothes. Convinced that she had
failed Jimmy, that she had encouraged him to rely on her but then had
not been special enough to help him reject his disease, she did not
believe she deserved to take pleasure from food, from her appearance, a
book, a movie, music, from anything. Eventually, with much patience and
kindness, Hatch helped her see that her insistence on taking
responsibility for an act of blind fate was, in its way, as much a
disease as Jimmy’s cancer had been.
Though she had still not been able to cry, she had climbed out of the
psychological hole she’d dug for herself. Ever since, however, she had
lived on the rim of it, her balance precarious.
Now, her first tears in a long, long time were surprising, unsettling.
Her eyes stung, became hot. Her vision blurred. Disbelieving, she
raised one shaky hand to touch the warm tracks on her cheeks.
Nyebern plucked a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and gave it to
her.
That small kindness affected her far out of proportion to the
consideration behind it, and a soft sob escaped her.
“Lindsey Because his throat was raw from his ordeal, his voice was
hoarse, barely more than a whisper. But she knew at once who had spoken
to her, and that it was not Nyebern.
She wiped hastily at her eyes with the Kleenex and leaned forward in the
wheelchair until her forehead touched the cold bed railing.
Hatch’s head was turned toward her. His eyes were open, and they looked
clear, alert.
“Lindsey .”
He had found the strength to push his right hand out from under the
blankets, stretching it toward her.
She reached between the railings. She took his hand in hers.
His skin was dry. A thin bandage was taped over his abraded palm. He
was too weak to give her hand more than the faintest squeeze, but he was
warm, blessedly warm, and alive.
“You’re crying,” Hatch said.
She was, too, harder than ever, a storm of tears, but she was smiling
through them. Grief had not been able to free her first tears in five
terrible years but joy had at last unleashed them. She was crying for
joy, which seemed right, seemed healing. She felt a loosening of
long-sustained tensions in her heart, as if the knotted adhesions of old
wounds were dissolving, all because Hatch was alive, had been dead but
was now alive.
If a miracle couldn’t lift the heart, what could?
Hatch said, “I love you.”
The storm of tears became a flood, ohgod, an ocean, and she heard
herself blubber “I love you” back at him, then she felt Nyebern put a
hand on her shoulder comfortingly, another small kindness that seemed
huge, which only made her cry harder. But she was laughing even as she
was weeping, and she saw that Hatch was smiling, too.
“It’s okay,” Hatch said hoarsely. “The worst is over. The worst is …
behind us now.
During the daylight hours, when he stayed beyond the reach of the sun,
Vassago parked the Camaro in an underground garage that had once been
filled with electric trams, carts, and lorries used by the
park-maintenance crew. All of those vehicles were long gone, reclaimed
by creditors. The Camaro stood alone in the center of that dank,
windowless space.
From the garage, Vassago descended wide stairs-the elevators had not
operated in years-to an even deeper subterranean level. The entire park
was built on a basement that had once contained the security
headquarters with scores of video monitors able to reveal every niche of
the grounds, a video control center that had been an even more complex
high-tech nest of computers and monitors, carpentry and electrical
shops, a staff cafeteria, lockers and changing rooms for the hundreds of
costumed employees working each shift, an emergency imlrmary, business
offices, and much more.
Vassago passed the door to that level without hesitating and continued
down to the sub-basement at the very bottom of the complex. Even in the
dry sands of southern California, the concrete walls exuded a damp lime
smell at that depth.
No rats fled before him, as he had expected during his first descent