Winter Moon. By: Dean R. Koontz

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

changing, but there were never fewer than three, as many as six or

seven, male and female officers in uniform, plainclothes detectives.

Other cops’ wives stopped by too. Each of them hugged her. At one

moment or another, each of them was on the verge of tears. They were

sincerely sympathetic, shared the anguish. But Heather knew that every

last one of them was glad it had been Jack and not her husband who’d

taken the call at Arkadian’s service station.

Heather didn’t blame them for that. She’d have sold her soul to have

Jack change places with any of their husbands–and would have visited

them in an equally sincere spirit of sorrow and sympathy.

The Department was a closely knit community, especially in this age of

social dissolution, but every community was formed of smaller units, of

families with shared experiences, mutual needs, similar values and

hopes. Regardless of how tightly woven the fabric of the community,

each family first protected and cherished its own. Without the intense

and all-excluding love of wife for husband, husband for wife, parents

for children, and children for parents, there would be no compassion

for people in the larger community beyond the home.

In the I.C.U cubicle with Jack, she relived their life together in

memory, from their first date, to the night Toby had been born, to

breakfast this morning.

More than twelve years. But it seemed so short a span. Sometimes she

put her head against the bed railing and spoke to him, recalling a

special moment, reminding him of how much laughter they had shared, how

much joy.

Shortly before five o’clock, she was jolted from her memories by the

sudden awareness that something had changed.

Alarmed, she got up and leaned over the bed to see if Jack was still

breathing. Then she realized he must be all right, because the cardiac