15

Gradually my hearing returned, pale voices in the distance coming nearer until I understood that it was someone bending over me. Daniel, as radiant as an archangel, ap-peared above me. The sight of him was baffling, and I felt an incredible urge to put a hand to my forehead, like a movie heroine recovering from a swoon, murmuring, Where am I? I was probably dead. Surely, hell is having your former spouse that close again… flirting with a nurse. Ah, I thought, a clue. I was in a hospital bed. She was standing to his right, in polyester white, a vestal virgin with a bedpan, her gaze fixed on his perfect features in profile. I'd forgotten how cunning he was at that sort of thing. While he feigned grave concern for me, he was actually casting backward with his little sexual net, envel-oping her in a fine web of pheromones. I moved my lips and he leaned closer. He said, "I think she's conscious."

"I'll get the doctor," the nurse said. She disappeared.

Daniel stroked my hair. "What is it, babe? Are you in pain?"

I licked my lips. "Asshole," I said, but it came out all garbled and I wasn't sure he got the drift. I vowed, in that moment, to get well enough to throw him out. I closed my eyes.

I remembered the flash, the deafening bang, Olive flying past me like a mannequin. She had looked unreal, arms crooked, legs askew, as lumpy as a sandbag flung through the air, landing with a sodden thump.

Olive must be dead. There wasn't any way to mend the parts of her turned inside out by the blast.

I remembered Terry with the blood gushing down his face. Was he dead, too? I looked at Daniel, wondering how bad it was.

Daniel sensed my question. "You're fine, Kin. Every-thing's okay. You're in the hospital and Terry's here, too," he said. And after a hesitation, "Olive didn't make it."

I closed my eyes again, hoping he'd go away.

I concentrated on my various body parts, hoping that all of them could be accounted for. Many treasured por-tions of my anatomy hurt. I thought at first I was in some sort of bed restraint, but it turned out to be an immobiliz-ing combination of bruises, whiplash, IV fluids, painkillers, and pressure dressings on the areas where I had suffered burns. Given the fact that I'd been standing ten feet away from Olive, my injuries turned out to be miraculously in-significant-contusions and abrasions, mild concussion, su-perficial burns on my extremities. I'd been hospitalized primarily for shock.

I was still confused about what had happened, but it didn't take a 160 IQ to figure out that something had gone boom in a big way. A gas explosion. More likely a bomb. The sound and the impact were both characteristic of low explosives. I know now, because I looked it up, that low explosives have velocities of 3,300 feet per second, which is much faster than the average person tends to move. That short trip from Olive's front porch to the tree base was as close to free flight as I was ever going to get.

The doctor came in. She was a plain woman with a good face and sense enough to ask Daniel to leave the room while she examined me. I liked her because she didn't lapse into a slack-jawed stupor at the sight of him. I watched her, as trusting as a child while she checked my vital signs. She must have been in her late thirties, with haphazard hair, no makeup, gray eyes that poured out compassion and intelligence. She held my hand, lacing her cool fingers through mine. "How are you feeling?"

Tears welled up. I saw my mother's face superimposed on hers, and I was four again, throat raw from a tonsillectomy. I'd forgotten what it was like to experience the warmth radiated by those who tend the sick. I was satu-rated by a tenderness I hadn't felt since my mother died. I don't take well to helplessness. I've worked hard in my life to deny neediness, and there I was, unable to sustain any pretense of toughness or competence. In some ways it came as a great relief to lie there in a puddle and give myself up to her nurturing.

By the time she'd finished checking me, I was some-what more alert, anxious to get my bearings. I quizzed her in a foggy way, trying to get a fix on my current state.

She told me I was in a private room at St. Terry's, having been admitted, through Emergency, the night be-fore. I remembered, in fragments, some of it: the high keening of sirens as the ambulance swayed around cor-ners, the harsh white light above me in the Emergency Room, the murmurs of the medical personnel assigned to evaluate my injuries. I remembered how soothing it was when I was finally tucked into bed: clean, patched up, pumped full of medications, and feeling no pain. It was now mid-morning of New Year's Day. I was still groggy, and I discovered belatedly that I was dropping off to sleep without even being aware of it.