Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
As Gus stayed quiet, his mouth parted and he breathed shallowly. He was clearly drifting off again, and she had a spear of fear that this was it, the final surge of life before he passed. Weren’t things always most vivid right before death? She had read that somewhere. That the mortally wounded, the mortally diseased, had a second wind right before the grave came for them.
Would she have one? she wondered. Would he be there for her when she did?
Trying to find solace in the monitoring machine’s steady rhythm and lack of alarms, she reminded herself that they were surrounded—literally—by doctors and nurses. All she had to do was open that door and shout down the hall to that great open area of workstations.
The cavalry would come running—
The knock was quiet, and she didn’t look away from Gus’s face as she answered it with a Come in. Out of the corner of her eye, two people registered as they entered, but she was too consumed by the eyelashes that curled up tightly from Gus’s shut lids.
Also, she was willing him to reopen his eyes.
“Did he wake up or something?”
At the astonished male voice, she jerked to attention. “Oh… hello. Welcome.”
As if she were a greeter at Home Depot.
Daniel and Lydia were standing at the foot of the bed, all kinds of shock showing on their faces—this time, for a good reason.
“Yes, he’s back,” Cathy said to the person they all cared so much for. “Aren’t you, Gus. Gus?”
When he didn’t respond, toxic terror clawed her in the throat—but then his head nodded up and down on the flat pillow.
Daniel said something. Lydia said something. But the syllables bled into a sound salad she didn’t bother sorting into its components…
She was not a God person. The whole Christian tradition she’d been raised in hadn’t survived her eighteen-year-old emancipation as she’d left that small town for college, and the further and further into the sciences and pharmaceutical business she’d gotten, the more and more of a secularist she’d become.
Yet as her eyes roamed around Gus’s misshapen face, she found herself thanking… someone up above. The fact that he was alive after what had been done to him?
Miracles go… and miracles come. Back.
As her hand went to her lower abdomen, the hollow loss was in her uterus, and in her heart, profound and deep as any void in the galaxy. But there was a rejuvenation, too. A lifting of the spirit that came when life, previously thought of as unrelentingly unfair, proved that there was more balance than one had assumed. Straddling the two extremes of hope and mourning was a split of emotions that consumed her, and maybe that was why she was thinking about God. Believing in some guy in a white robe standing in a set of pearly gates was easier to handle.
Easier to reconcile.
“When?” Lydia asked. “When did he come around?”
“Just a minute ago.” Cathy touched the top arch of his Afro. There was debris in it and she wanted to wash his hair for him. “And only for a moment, but he’s in here. He’s still with us.”
In the back of her mind, some kind of ringer went off—and glancing over at the couple, she focused on Daniel. She had something she needed to tell… one of them. She looked at Lydia. Or was it both of them?
“Ah…”
As she just stared stupidly, Daniel frowned. “You want me to go get a doctor?”
“He is one.” Cathy went back to focusing on the bed. “He’s the best doctor.”
Then again, it was entirely possible that if the guy had talked about a plumber, she’d have maintained that Gus was an expert at PVC pipe installation. Electrician? In the union. Librarian? Worked in the congressional one.
“Is there anything we can get you?”
She lost track of who was talking, but then one of them said it was time to go—
“Wait,” she heard herself interrupt.
When the couple looked at her with concern—like they were both thinking of hitting the call button on her behalf—she put her hand to the side of her head. And then… she remembered.
“Will you stay with him for a minute?” she asked the wolven. “Please?”
By way of answer, Lydia pulled a chair up and sat right down like she was prepared to wait out a century if that’s what was required.
“Thank you,” Cathy said.
“Anything. For him… for you.”
Cathy put her hand over her heart. And then she indicated the door with an incline of her head, and Daniel followed her out, the panel closing behind them. The hall they were in was private—in the sense that there was no one in it. But percolating down from the open area, there was all kinds of talking and walking across the concrete floors. Phones ringing. Machines whirring.
The lab was very much alive. For now.