In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [6]
He was thinking of his small, immaculate home in Queens. Kind of lived in, a touch worn after four kids. But it was a real home. This was merely a shelter from the storm. A cave.
After that he called Claudia, just to say hi and ask what she was up to. Not that he was controlling or anything, he just liked to know where his family was. Claudia believed it was a spin-off from his job. The Permanent Detective, she called him, with that nice silky laugh of hers.
She would hate this place, he thought as he waited for the elevator. Give her the creeps. It was less like a home than any hotel room, and he wondered again about Ed Vincent, the man. Who he was. And what he was.
7
There was a place between life and death, Ed knew it now. It was called “limbo,” and it was the most frustrating place to be, halfway between earth and heaven. It felt more like hell, with all the worries and problems of life and none of the ease and relaxation of death. How dare they do this to me.
He thrashed wildly in the narrow hospital bed, and the watchful ICU nurse hurried to his side. Her patient was just three hours out of O.R. His status was critical. She checked the ventilator that kept him breathing, checked the drains in his chest and the tubes feeding fluids into his veins. She watched the monitor for a minute, then looked again at her patient. He was still now, though his breathing sounded as labored and raucous as a tractor engine.
He was big, six-four, broad-shouldered, rugged, but right now he looked far different from the great, handsome bear of a man she had seen on TV, at the opening of one of his new Vincent Towers buildings in Manhattan.
She looked at her watch. It was midnight, and the doctor on duty would be doing his rounds soon. Plus, no doubt Mr. Vincent’s own medic, Art Jacobs, would also make an appearance.
She checked her other intensive care patient, a woman just out of the O.R. after an emergency quadruple bypass following a heart attack earlier that evening. Each nurse in ICU had two patients under her care. This second one had gotten a break. She would live. Her first patient, Mr. Vincent, might not be so lucky.
There was nothing else she could do for either of them right now. She walked back to the nurses’ station, where a wall of monitors displayed each patient’s current state, took a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, and sank thankfully into a chair. It was going to be a long night.
Which was just what Ed Vincent was thinking. In fact, he was thinking this might be the longest night of his life. Perhaps, like a drowning man, his life should be passing before his eyes. Isn’t that what was supposed to happen when you were dying? God, it was ironic how all the old sayings and myths just flew into his brain, when the truth was that nobody really knew what happened, because nobody who had died had ever lived to tell the tale.
Zelda, he thought, agonized. Ah, Zelda, you crazy, pixie-faced golden girl.
He’d never met anyone like her. Extroverted, ditsy, outspoken. With Zelda, every entrance was an Entrance. Every meal a Feast. Every meeting a Rendezvous. She had the happy knack of making an Event out of the most ordinary occasion. He figured even brushing her teeth must be a scene from a movie.
“Where’s the real you?” he’d asked her once, bewildered and laughing.
“I wish I knew,” she’d replied serenely. “I’m out there somewhere.”
She certainly was.
She had popped into his life “out of the blue,” you might say. He’d thought she was nuts, then. Still did in a way, but it was her nuttiness that he loved. He loved her seven-year-old daughter, Riley. He even liked that ratty little terrier of hers that bit his ankles every time it saw him.
Zelda was unique. Though of course “Zelda” was not her real name. Only he called her that, because of her Georgia-peach accent and her southern charm. “You’re straight out of Fitzgerald,” he had said, laughing. “They should have called you Zelda.”
She had laughed with him,