Winter Moon

playing five hundred rummy."
        "You're not betting, are you?"
        "Just pretzel sticks."
        "Good. I wouldn't want to see you bankrupt a good friend like Mae,"
        Heather said, and the boy's giggle was sweet music.
        To be sure she didn't interfere with the nurses, Heather leaned against the wall beside the door that led out of the I.C.U. She could see Jack's cubicle from there. His door was closed, privacy curtains drawn at the big observation windows.
        The air in the I.C.U smelled of various antiseptics. She ought to have been used to those astringent and metallic odors by now. Instead, they became increasingly noxious and left a bitter taste as well.
        When at last the doctors stepped out of Jack's cubicle and walked toward her, they were smiling, but she had the disquieting feeling they had bad news. Their smiles ended at the corners of their mouths, in their eyes was something worse than sorrow-perhaps pity..Dr. Walter Delaney was in his fifties and would have been perfect as the wise father in a television sitcom in the early sixties. Brown hair going to gray at the temples. A handsome if soft-featured face.
        He radiated quiet authority, vet was as relaxed and mellow as Ozzie Nelson or Robert Young.
        "You okay, Heather?" Delaney asked.
        She nodded. "I'm holding up."
        "I don't know if you've heard the latest news," Emil Procnow said, "but the man who shot up the service station this morning was carrying cocaine and PCP in his pockets. If he was using both drugs simultaneously… well, that's psycho soup for sure."
        "Like nuking your own brain, for God's sake," Delaney said disgustedly.
        Heather knew they were genuinely frustrated and angry, but she also suspected they were delaying the bad news. To the surgeon, she said,
        "He came through without brain damage. You were worried about that, but he came through."
        "He's not aphasic," Procnow said. "He can speak, read, spell, do basic math in his head. Mental faculties appear intact."
        "Which means there's not likely to be any brain-related physical incapacity, either," Walter Delaney said, "but it'll be at least a day or two before we can be sure of that."
        Emil Procnow ran one slender hand through his curly black hair. "He's coming through this really well, Mrs. Mcgarvey. He really is."
        "But?" she said.
        The physicians glanced at each other.
        "Right now," Delaney said, "there's paralysis in both legs."
        "From the waist down," Procnow said.
        "Upper body?" she asked.
        "That's fine," Delaney assured her. "Full function."
        "In the morning," Procnow said, "we'll look again for a spinal fracture. If we find it, then we make up a plaster bed, line it with felt, immobilize Jack from below the neck all the way past the filum terminale, below the buttocks, and put his legs in traction."
        "But he'll walk again?"
        "Almost certainly."
        She looked from Procnow to Delaney to Procnow again, waiting for the.rest of it, and then she said, "That's all?"
        The doctors exchanged a glance again.
        Delaney said, "Heather, I'm not sure you understand what lies ahead for Jack and for you."
        "Tell me."
        "He'll be in a body cast between three and four months. By the time the cast comes off, he'll have severe muscle atrophy from the waist down. He won't have the strength to walk. In fact, his body will have forgotten how to walk, so he'll undergo weeks of physical therapy in a rehab hospital. It's going to be more frustrating and painful than anything most of us will ever have to face."
        "That's it?" she asked.
        Procnow said, "That's more than enough."
        "But it could have been so much worse," she reminded them.
        Alone with Jack again, she put down the side railing on the bed and smoothed his damp hair back from his forehead.
        "You look beautiful," he said, his voice still weak and soft.
        "Liar."
        "Beautiful"
        "I look like shit."
        He smiled. "Just before I blacked out, I wondered if I'd ever see you again."
        "Can't get rid of me that easy."
        "Have to actually die, huh?"
        "Even that wouldn't work. I'd find you wherever you went."
        "I love you, Heather."
        "I love you," she said, "more than life."
        Heat rose in her eyes, but she was determined