Hideaway

upstanding citizen—a respected antique dealer, they said—married to an artist of some reputation, whose name Jonas recognized. A good artist had to be sensitive, perceptive, able to see the world more clearly than most people saw it. Didn't she? If she was married to a bad man, she would know it, and she wouldn't remain married to him. This time there was every reason to believe that a life had been saved that should have been saved.
    Jonas only wished his actions had always been so correct.
    He turned away from the bed and took two steps to the window. Five stories below, the nearly deserted parking lot lay under hooded pole lamps. The falling rain churned the puddles, so they appeared to be boiling, as if a subterranean fire consumed the blacktop from underneath.
    He could pick out the spot where Kari Dovell's car had been parked, and he stared at it for a long time. He admired Kari enormously. He also found her attractive. Sometimes he dreamed of being with her, and it was a surprisingly comforting dream. He could admit to wanting her at times, as well, and to being pleased by the thought that she might also want him. But he did not need her. He needed nothing but his work, the satisfaction of occasionally beating Death, and the—
    “Something's … out … there …”
    The first word interrupted Jonas's thoughts, but the voice was so thin and soft that he didn't immediately perceive the source of it. He turned around, looking toward the open door, assuming the voice had come from the corridor, and only by the third word did he realize that the speaker was Harrison.
    The patient's head was turned toward Jonas, but his eyes were focused on the window.
    Moving quickly to the side of the bed, Jonas glanced at the electrocardiograph and saw that Harrison's heart was beating fast but, thank God, rhythmically.
    “Something's … out there,” Harrison repeated.
    His eyes were not, after all, focused on the window itself, on nothing so close as that, but on some distant point in the stormy night.
    “Just rain,” Jonas assured him.
    “No.”
    “Just a little winter rain.”
    “Something bad,” Harrison whispered.
    Hurried footsteps echoed in the corridor, and a young nurse burst through the open door, into the nearly dark room. Her name was Ramona Perez, and Jonas knew her to be competent and concerned.
    “Oh, Doctor Nyebern, good, you're here. The telemetry unit, his heartbeat—”
    “Accelerated, yes, I know. He just woke up.”
    Ramona came to the bed and switched on the lamp above it, revealing the patient more clearly.
    Harrison was still staring beyond the rain-spotted window, as if oblivious of Jonas and the nurse. In a voice even softer than before, heavy with weariness, he repeated: “Something's out there.” Then his eyes fluttered sleepily, and fell shut.
    “Mr. Harrison, can you hear me?” Jonas asked.
    The patient did not answer.
    The EKG showed a quickly de-accelerating heartbeat: from one-forty to one-twenty to one hundred beats a minute.
    “Mr. Harrison?”
    Ninety per minute. Eighty.
    “He's asleep again,” Ramona said.
    “Appears to be.”
    “Just sleeping, though,” she said. “No question of it being a coma now.”
    “Not a coma,” Jonas agreed.
    “And he was speaking. Did he make sense?”
    “Sort of. But hard to tell.” Jonas said, leaning over the bed railing to study the man's eyelids, which fluttered with the rapid movement of the eyes under them. REM sleep. Harrison was dreaming again.
    Outside, the rain suddenly began to fall harder than before. The wind picked up, too, and keened at the window.
    Ramona said, “The words I heard were clear, not slurred.”
    “No. Not slurred. And he spoke some complete sentences.”
    “Then he's not aphasic,” she said, “That's terrific.”
    Aphasia, the complete inability to speak or understand spoken or written language, was one of the most devastating forms of brain damage resulting from disease or injury. Thus affected, a patient was reduced to using gestures to communicate, and the inadequacy of pantomime soon cast him into deep depression, from which there was sometimes no coming back.
    Harrison was evidently free of that curse. If he was also free of paralysis, and if there were not too many holes in his memory, he had a good chance of eventually getting out of bed and leading a normal life.
    “Let's not jump to conclusions,” Jonas said. “Let's not build up any false hopes. He still has a long way to go. But you