A January Chill. Rachel Lee

heart stopping in his chest as he realized that his mother was no longer breathing. Caught in a vise of fear, he lifted his gaze to her face. Then, just as he was reaching for the call button, she drew a long, ragged breath. Then another. The tortured tempos of life resumed.

      He waited breathlessly for a long time, but Barbara seemed to have taken a firm grasp on life once more. The tightness in his chest eased a little, but as it did, he felt the burn of unshed tears in his eyes.

      “Hang in there,” he heard himself tell her in a rough whisper. “Hang in there, Mom.”

      Even as he spoke the encouragement, he wondered why. Maybe she was as tired of it all as he sometimes felt. As he felt right now. Sometimes it just didn’t seem worth the effort.

      But he wasn’t ready to lose her yet. He probably never would be, but she was only fifty, and he figured he shouldn’t have to be losing her for a good long while yet.

      As soon as he had the thought, bitterness rose in him, burning his throat like bile. Karen had been too young, too. Only seventeen. Life and death didn’t care about things like youth.

      But Barbara kept breathing, difficult though it was, and the heart monitor kept recording her steady, too-rapid beats. He watched the lambda waves form on the display, one after another in perfect rhythm, checked the digital readouts and saw that her blood pressure was steady, her pulse a constant eighty-five. Too fast, but strong. Strong enough. Not like it had been with Karen.

      For a few seconds he was suddenly back in the ICU twelve years ago, watching the monitor, all too aware despite his lack of knowledge that the ragged pattern of Karen’s heartbeats wasn’t a good sign. Aware that the rattling unsteadiness of her breathing was terrible. Aware that those low numbers on the blood pressure monitors were dangerous.

      Aware that no one was doing anything for her just then. Wondering why, ready to go grab someone and demand they help her. Sensing that they had done all they could.

      Then Witt had come into the cubicle behind him.

      “Get out!”

      He jerked, as if the words had been spoken behind him right now instead of twelve years ago. He came back to the present with the feeling of someone who had just taken a long, rough journey. His heart was pounding, and his face was damp with sweat. God!

      There was a rustle, and the curtain was pulled back. Delia Patterson entered, giving him a slight smile and a nod as she approached the bed. She checked the IV and made a note on a clipboard.

      “How is she?”

      Delia, a slightly plump woman with the champagne-blond hair that a lot of older women adopted to cover the gray, looked at him. She’d known Hardy all his life. “You can see for yourself.”

      “Delia…”

      She shook her head. “I can’t make any promises. And I’m not the doctor. But…” She hesitated. “We might see some difference by morning. Maybe. The doctor put her on some pretty powerful antibiotics, Hardy. But no one can say for sure, understand?”

      He nodded, hating the uncertainty. He’d always hated uncertainty, but life seemed to deal out very little else.

      “You staying all night?” she asked.

      “I plan to.”

      “That waiting-room couch is mighty hard.” She glanced at her watch. “And you’ve been in here longer than the allowed ten minutes.”

      “For God’s sake, I’m just sitting here holding her hand.”

      She nodded. “Okay, I’ll give you another ten.”

      “Thanks.”

      On the way out the door she paused and laid her hand on his shoulder. “If she’s more alert in the morning, she’s going to need you then, Hardy. You might consider getting some serious sleep tonight.”

      “I want to be here. In case.”

      She nodded. “But I can call you if…anything changes. You could be here in ten minutes.”

      “That might be too many minutes. Thanks, Delia, but I’m staying.”

      “And probably catching pneumonia, too.” She shook her head. “We’re overflowing into the hallways. Have you been immunized?”

      “Who, me?”

      She shook her head, muttered something and walked out. Hardy felt a faint smile curling the corners of his mouth, but it faded as he turned back to his mother. She was fighting for her life, and if she could summon the energy to do that, then he could damn well stick it out with her.

      After ten more minutes Delia kept her word and banished him to the ICU waiting room. Much to his relief, there were only two other people there. Given Delia’s description of patients overflowing into the halls, he’d figured the waiting rooms would be getting full, too.

      There was one couch. It didn’t look too healthy, as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time, and it didn’t offer any extra padding for comfort. In fact, he thought minutes after he’d stretched out on it, the floor was probably more comfortable.

      So what? He could handle it for forty minutes until Delia would be obliged to let him back into the ICU.

      But as soon as he closed his eyes, Joni Matlock filled his mind’s eye. Everything was determined to torture him, it seemed. There couldn’t be a worse possible time to start thinking about the Matlocks. Thinking about Joni inevitably led him to thinking about Karen, and tonight he didn’t want to remember how the best medical treatment in the world hadn’t been able to save Karen, not with his mother at death’s door.

      But good time, bad time, right time, wrong time, it didn’t make a bit of difference. His thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone, and they seemed bound and determined to focus on Joni.

      Okay, he told himself. Think about Joni. Think about her until you’re bored and your mind decides to go somewhere else.

      So he thought over their conversation earlier. It had been brief. He figured she’d picked up on the fact that he really didn’t want to talk to her. She’d been polite, concerned the way any stranger would be. Nothing more. Nothing to get all bent about.

      Except that he couldn’t forget those blue eyes of hers. It wasn’t just that they were pretty, though they certainly were. It wasn’t just that they were as arrestingly blue as a clear mountain-morning sky. It was the way they seemed to speak to him. They’d only talked for three minutes, if that, but when he’d walked away, he’d had the feeling they’d shared an entire subtext, her eyes to his.

      But those eyes had always made him feel that way. They’d always drawn him and spoken to him. If life had treated them all differently, he might have gotten to know her better. Instead, he avoided her the way he avoided Witt. Because some things were better left buried, and there was no way he could talk to Joni Matlock without remembering Karen Matlock.

      As easy as that, his thoughts turned on him and began to twist into dark corridors. Swearing under his breath, he sat upright and forced himself to remember where he was. He had to stop beating himself up over the past. He knew that. It was done, and he couldn’t change any of it.

      But when it got dark, on nights when he couldn’t sleep, he could still hear Karen’s scream as the other car swerved straight at him, could still remember her screams as they lay in the mangled wreckage of his car. Could still remember Witt looking at him out of cold, dead eyes and saying, “You killed her, boy. You killed her.”

      The sounds and smells of the ICU had brought it all back to the surface, bubbling up like explosive gases in the swamp of his brain. His hold on the present, he realized, was getting mighty tenuous.

      Shoving himself to his feet, he went out into the brightly lighted corridor to pace. But that, too, was familiar, and he realized with a sickening plunge of his stomach that yesterday and today were starting to fuse in his weary brain. He wasn’t sure from one minute to the next which