David fished Jantzen’s BlackBerry out of his pocket again, called Gary, and got his voice mail. “I’m in a cab,” David said, “and on the way.” Hanging up, he simply stared blankly at the phone. What if he was already too late? Nothing he had read suggested that the Medusa could reanimate the dead. It could bestow eternal life, but it could not return it to those already gone. He reached into his shirt just to feel its presence on his chest. The silver was cold, the silk backing slick. That was strange, he thought. It did not absorb any of his body heat. It remained unaffected, oblivious to its surroundings, as if in a vacuum of its own. His fingers traced the contours of the Gorgon’s face. He knew every tendril of its hair, every furrow of its snarling brow, but for the first time since acquiring it, he feared it, too. What great transgression was he about to attempt?
The cab slowed down, and David said, “Can’t you go any faster?”
“Not on the ice,” Zach replied, “and I’m not about to total the damn car.”
But something told him that Sarah was still alive. Some intuition, some sixth sense. The bond they had was so strong, and had always been so unbreakable, that if it had been severed, he’d have known. He’d have felt the break, no matter how far away he’d been, like a punch in his stomach.
Little cyclones of snow were whipping across the highway, and the wind was battering at the windows. Automated signs warned of delays up ahead and a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. A Hummer, its warning lights flashing, had slid right into a traffic divider.
“Get off at Dempster,” David said. “It’ll be faster.”
Zach did as he was told, and David steered him toward several shortcuts to get to the hospital complex more directly. But every time Zach tried to engage him in conversation, David shut him down. He didn’t want him talking, he wanted him driving.
At the hospital complex on Central Street, David quickly scanned the various driveway signs and arrows for the one leading to the Hospice Care Unit. It turned out to be a separate one-story building, with a broad, covered driveway in front.
“Good luck, man,” Zach said, as David charged out of the limo, his backpack hanging from one hand, and into the revolving door; it was one of those doors that turned at its own speed, but David was shoving at the bar, anyway.
A nurse behind the counter looked up as he arrived, panting, and said, “Whoa there, partner. Slow down. This is a hospital zone.”
David dropped the backpack, and said, “Sarah Franco.”
The nurse looked uncertain.
“Sorry. I mean Sarah Henderson.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice now taking on a more solicitous tone. “She’s down the hall, in Room 3. And you are?”
“Her brother,” David said, already moving on.
“Hold on,” the nurse said, as one hand reached for the phone. “I have to notify her caregiver. She might be sleeping.”
What difference did that make? He was here to wake her up.
Outside her door, he saw Gary, in a flannel shirt and jeans, pacing the hall.
“Thank God,” Gary said. “I had my phone on vibrate, and just picked up your message.”
“How is she?” David said.
“One of the nurses is in with her now.” He looked at David with enormous relief, tempered with a bit of reproach. “She’s been waiting for you. I told you she would.”
“I was counting on it,” he said, even as he swiftly circumvented Gary—who looked startled—and headed straight into Room 3.
“David, you might want to wait a minute!”
But that was the last thing he wanted to do.
The nurse, an African-American man with gray hair and a gentle face, was just adjusting an IV line. He turned and said, “You must be her brother. She’s been waiting for you. I’m Walter.”
But David’s eyes were fixed on Sarah, or what was left of her. In the time he’d been gone, she had changed from a woman hanging on to life, however weakly, to a woman already in the embrace of death. Her hands on the blanket were mottled and blue, her cracked lips were slick with Vaseline, and her face was a hollow mask. Even on seeing him, she showed none of the joy he had expected; her expression, instead, was querulous and uncertain. He wasn’t even sure she recognized him.
“We just upped her Halperidol,” Walter said, sotto voce. “In a few minutes, she may be more lucid.”
David had thought he’d been prepared for anything … but now he knew that he hadn’t.
“Can we be alone?”
“Sure,” the nurse said. “I’m here if you need me.”
David dragged a chair to the bedside and took her hand in his. The skin was cold and the fingers felt like twigs.
“Sarah, it’s David. I’m here.”
But she didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy and staring off into space, her bare skull covered by a paisley silk scarf.
He waited, wondering what to do next.
“Remember that day at the skating rink?” he finally said. “When you told me you’d give anything, anything at all, for the chance to see Emme grow up?”
A humidifier hummed quietly in the corner.
“I’m going to give you that chance.”
Whether he was imagining it or not, her fingers seemed to stir in his grasp.
But how, he wondered, was he going to get this done?
The wind howled at the window, and it was then that he noticed the birch trees outside, in the little garden, and the frozen pond … glimmering dully in the moonlight.