The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [110]
“I thought I told you fifty-five—forty-five.” Petito’s gaze was steady, his opinion firm.
“Yeah, you did. You know, I was feeling okay this morning, up in physical therapy,” Stefanovitch said. “Now, I’m kind of spacey. Rubbery legs. My adrenaline is mainlining.
“Listen, Sarah.” He smiled, only his brown eyes were mostly glazed and vacant. “I think I need something to motivate me. Would you, uh…why don’t you stand over there. Would you stand right there by the door?”
“Don’t be so bossy. Just because you’ve been laid up doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be cranky,” Isabelle Stefanovitch said. Sarah had watched her operate over the last few months. She could make Stef toe the line; at the same time she was communicating the most touching affection for him.
“I’ll let him boss me around today.” Sarah smiled. The smile felt like a mask being pulled down over her face. She was having difficulty talking.
“You give him an inch, Sarah, he’ll take a mile,” Nelson said from across the room. “He’s always been that way. That’s how he got to be quarterback in high school. Not on his talent. Not with that chicken arm of his.”
The mood in the hospital room was better than it had been moments earlier. Even Dr. Petito smiled at the Stefanovitch clan’s amazingly wrongheaded but healthy defense mechanisms.
“I’m going to stand right here by the door,” Sarah said, as if she’d just thought of it herself.
“If I fall over, let me go,” Stefanovitch said in between deep breaths. He was propped against the edge of his bed now. Some pressure and weight were already being applied to his legs. There was so much going on inside his head that it was overwhelming.
Suddenly, with characteristic stubbornness, he pushed off hard from the hospital bed, almost as if that were the only way to make his family stop talking. “I love all of you,” he whispered as he let go.
Stefanovitch took his first step in more than three years, with the help of a badly quivering aluminum walker. He’d only recently been fitted for the four-legged walker up in physical therapy. He figured it made him look about eighty years old.
He pushed the strange, awkward-looking walker one more step, the pain inscribed all over his face.
He took a third halting step. The pain and exhilaration seemed to be balancing a little better.
There was nothing but the noise of the clanking metal walker echoing inside the room. Not a sound came from Sarah or his family. Then Stefanovitch reached out one arm for Sarah.
Sarah couldn’t have explained or described what it was like to hold him, to grab onto Stef at the end of his miracle walk. She didn’t know which one of them was trembling more.
She wasn’t sure where his body stopped, and hers began. Nelson and his father were right there to help, in case he actually did start to fall at the very end.
Stef didn’t fall, though. His body shook very badly, but he didn’t fall. He wouldn’t let himself go down.
If he had had any energy left, he would have screamed out in joy. Instead, he whispered to Sarah, “I would scream, only I can’t make it happen. Not enough strength.”
The doctors in physical therapy had promised that in another six months he’d be able to use the walker competently. In sixteen to eighteen months, the chief therapist told Stef, he would walk with a severe limp, and the assistance of a bulky metal cane.
“In six months, I’ll be dancing,” Stefanovitch said. No cane. No walker. No nothing. He made the promise to all of them, but especially to Sarah.
105
Isiah Parker; Harlem; Several Months Later
IT WAS A cold and snow-blown evening, a few days into the new year. Isiah Parker finally left the Nineteenth Precinct station house around eight-thirty. To his surprise, he had returned to his detective duties with energy and dedication missing since before his brother’s death.
He walked down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, listening to a pleasing cacophony of early evening traffic sounds. Certain physical things about the neighborhood made him think back to his youth. The aboveground