Winter Moon by Dean Koontz Page B

in her throat made it difficult for her to swallow as she stood at the side of the bed, and she was unable to speak. Though he was unconscious, she didn’t want to talk to him until she was sure she could control her speech. She’d read somewhere that even patients in comas might be able to hear people around them; on some deep level, they might understand what was said and benefit from encouragement. She didn’t want Jack to hear a tremor of fear or doubt in her voice—or anything else that might upset him or exacerbate what fear and depression already gripped him.
    The cubicle was unnervingly quiet. The heart-monitor sound had been turned off, leaving only a visual display. The oxygen-rich air escaping through the nasal inserts hissed so faintly she could hear it only when she leaned close to him, and the sound of his shallow 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 ICU 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 ICU 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