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“Go ahead,” urged Corinne. “It’ll hold you up.”
To Judith’s amazement, it did.
“Hooray for modern medicine!” Renie cried, grinning at her cousin. “Go, girl, go.”
Judith didn’t go very far, but she did manage another
step before she felt on the verge of collapsing.
“Hold it right there,” Corinne said, angling the
wheelchair so that Judith could sit down. “That was
very good. Now you can visit the rest of the world.”
Uttering a feeble laugh, Judith gratefully eased
herself into the chair. The nurse pushed her to the
doorway. Judith, who had thought that Corinne’s remark about the “rest of the world” was merely an attempt at hospital humor, realized that for two days
she hadn’t seen anything outside the four walls of
her room. The hallway, with its ebb and flow of
staff, the nurses’ station, the doors leading to other
patient rooms, the flowers on desks, and even Robbie the Robot, who was heading her way, were indeed a brave new world. Until now, Judith had relied
on Renie’s eyes to see beyond the small space outside their ward. Finally Judith was on her own and
felt a strange surge of independence. Jauntily, she
waved at Robbie as he swerved and beeped past her.
“Wow,” Judith said under her breath. “People.
Places. Things.”
“We’ll go down to the end of the hall,” Corinne
said. “There’s a big window there where you can see
out. It’s not snowing, but it’s very cold, down around
twenty, I heard. Almost all of the staff has been staying in the nurses’ former residence halls. Unless you
have chains and know how to drive in this stuff, it’s
much safer to stay put.”
Judith glanced into Mr. Mummy’s room across the
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Mary Daheim
hall, but he wasn’t there. Then she looked into Addison
Kirby’s room. He was there, but was on the phone,
looking frustrated. She passed three more patient
rooms, each of which contained four beds. On her left,
she saw the small area set into an alcove where
Blanche Van Boeck had held her press conference with
KLIP-TV. Then there were supply rooms and six more
patient wards, and finally the staff lounge and what
might have been a small kitchen, judging from the aromas that wafted out into the hall.
The snowscape made Judith catch her breath. “It’s
gorgeous,” she said to Corinne. “I haven’t even been
able to look out the window in our room.”
Judith wasn’t exaggerating. The trees, the shrubs,
the sweeping lawn were covered in a pristine blanket
of snow. The driveway to the entrance had been
shoveled, but there were only a few tire tracks and
footprints in the main parking lot off to the right. Beyond, the rooftops of the surrounding residential
neighborhoods looked like a Christmas card, with
