Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [71]
Shepherd had caught up with her and won, but what he recalled more vividly than the race itself was the electric charge that shivered through him when he saw her spring into action, this lithe creature who was all speed and air and laughter.
He thought of this, watching the hummingbird until it had darted away into a blue haze of distance and he was alone.
Then he went back inside the hospital to tell Ginnie the news. He said it gently, of course, but the truth was sharp-edged, and it could not be softened. When he was done speaking, he held his wife’s hand. Ginnie was silent for a moment, and then she said she wasn’t really surprised.
It looks like I’ll be spending more time in front of that computer than I’d counted on, she added, and incredibly she managed a brief, wan smile.
The smile told Shepherd that things would be all right. His wife’s spirit was intact, even if her body was not. She would recover.
That night, at Ginnie’s urging, he went home to sleep in his own bed. He was exhausted. He’d had perhaps twenty hours’ rest in ten days.
Yet he woke in the middle of the night, his heart racing, a headache inflaming his skull.
And he knew.
Something was wrong.
He threw on his clothes and drove to the hospital. When he got there at 4 A.M., he found a team of doctors and nurses engaged in a frantic rescue operation in Virginia Shepherd’s room.
Later he learned that she had suffered a condition called autonomic dysreflexia, common in cases of spinal cord injury. Despite the antibiotics, her urinary tract had become infected; because she had no sensation in the lower portion of her body, there had been no burning discomfort to serve as a warning of the problem.
Thirty minutes before Shepherd’s arrival, at perhaps the exact moment when he had awakened with a premonition and a pounding migraine, Ginnie’s blood pressure had spiked, stopping her heart, and her cardiac monitor had triggered an alarm at the nurses’ station.
Epinephrine and defibrillators were used to restart her heart, but her blood pressure continued to climb, and again she went into cardiac arrest.
The second time she could not be revived.
At 4:45, Shepherd was informed that his wife had died.
He stood in the hallway, trying to take in this news that was at once so simple and so impossibly complicated.
Did she feel anything? he asked the doctor finally. I mean ... any pain?
The doctor said a sudden, severe headache was normally the only symptom the patient reported.
Shepherd nodded. His own headache, which had blinded him with pain for more than an hour, had gone away at 4:33 precisely.
It was the exact moment when Ginnie had gone away too.
He lived alone now, in the modest brick house in the cul-de-sac off Fort Lowell Road. His friends advised him to sell the place, put the memories behind him, but he wanted those memories, painful though they were.
He had changed nothing in the den where she worked. The computer was still there, untouched in two years. Sometimes he stood in the doorway of the small, untidy room stacked with books and paperwork, and he imagined that he saw her sitting at the keyboard, perhaps in a wheelchair, perhaps not.
The wheelchair didn’t matter one way or the other. Only she mattered, and she was lost to him.
And Timothy Fries?
He was back in an institution, no threat to anyone—at least until some new doctor recommended his release.
Someone would. Because there were too many people with soft hearts. People who didn’t know how to hate.
Shepherd wasn’t one of them, not anymore. He had learned hatred. There might be virtue in forgiveness, but there was no vigilance in it. Those who were quick to forgive, who prided themselves on their tolerance, were the ones who had dropped their guard and let the mad dog Fries out of his pen.