Final Breath

Sydney kept telling herself the boy would have died if she hadn't broken his fall.

Eleven-year-old Aidan Cosgrove had it even worse than she did. In addition to his crippling back injuries, he suffered second- and third-degree burns on his arms, torso, and neck. After two days, they moved him from Swedish Hospital to the University of Washington Burn Center at Harborview.

It turned out that Aidan's mother had also been in that fourth-floor apartment. Sydney remembered calling to him and asking if anyone else was in there; but he'd shaken his head. She figured the poor kid was probably confused--and terrified. He probably hadn't even heard what she'd been saying to him.

According to The Seattle Times and the local TV news, the fire had started in the mother's bedroom. Miraculously, Rikki Cosgrove survived, and her burns were minor. But she'd sustained respiratory damage from smoke inhalation. An unemployed single mom on government assistance, Mrs. Cosgrove admitted to the press that she might have fallen asleep with a cigarette going.

Only two other apartments in the building were damaged by the inferno, and no one else was injured. Yet the fire made national news. One passerby had a video camera with him. He'd caught Sydney's valiant rescue on tape. It was just the kind of harrowing, dramatic stuff the public ate up.

'Mom and Dad cry every time that home video is played on TV,' Kyle told her during a visit. 'So that means they've cried like--seventy-eight times just this week. It's a regular waterworks at home. Don't you feel sorry for me, having to put up with it? You can't possibly know my anguish. I'm really suffering.'

'Huh, I'll pray for you.' Sydney murmured. Lying in the hospital bed, she cracked a smile. 'Don't make me laugh, you dip-shit. It hurts too much.'

Kyle had visited her every day, but this was the first time she was lucid for more than just a few minutes. 'Seriously, when are you getting out of here?' he asked. 'The phone hasn't stopped ringing. You're all over the newspapers and TV. I taped the programs for you and saved the clippings. Anyway, you're famous, Syd. About a zillion people want to interview you. In fact, someone from Oprah even called us this morning. They want you on the show. So I repeat, when are you busting out of this joint?'

The doctors told her it would be at least six weeks. Sydney surprised them all by getting around in her 'touch-control' wheelchair by the second week. She'd made up her mind not to feel sorry for herself. There were so many people in this hospital who were worse off than her. The fifteen-year-old girl in the room next door had fallen off her bicycle and landed headfirst in a ditch. Her name was Carol, and she would spend the rest of her life a paraplegic. Next to her, Sydney's shattered dreams seemed like pretty small potatoes--at least, she told herself that. She spent a lot of time visiting Carol and others in the intensive care unit.

Updates on her remarkable recovery made the news. Someone on the hospital staff leaked that she spent time boosting the morale of other patients, and the press ate it up. All the attention embarrassed Sydney. The reports made out like she was Mother Teresa or something. The truth was, she visited her fellow patients to forget her own pain and agony and to help boost her own morale. It must have worked, because she was healing a lot faster than the doctors had expected.

Sydney's story became an inspiration for others. While still in the hospital, she had three different publishers wanting to handle her autobiography--with the help of a ghostwriter, of course. If one more agent described her tale as a 'lemonade from lemons' saga, Sydney thought she'd throttle them with her crutches. At first, she turned down all the offers.

But her parents had gone into debt paying her trainers, and her medical bills were already staggering. So Sydney finally accepted one of the publishers' deals. They wanted a rush job, because a quickie, unauthorized biography was already in stores, selling quite well: Picking Up the Pieces: The Sydney Jordan Story.

Her advance was $125,000, and Sydney donated $25,000 of it to Aidan Cosgrove and his mother. After a while, Rikki Cosgrove became a real pain. She seemed to be a strong believer in the old Chinese proverb that once you save someone's life, you're responsible for them. She was forever asking Sydney for favors and hitting her up for money. And Rikki wasn't exactly Mother of the Year either--as the ghostwriter for Sydney's autobiography discovered while doing her research. But none of it was included in the book.

Sydney discovered that publishing a book meant making a lot of compromises and concessions. She loathed the title the marketing people came up with: Making Miracles: My Own Story. But the book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. A made-for-TV movie was quickly thrown together.

By the time Making Miracles: The Sydney Jordan Story aired on Lifetime, Sydney was out of the hospital and walking with a cane. Hired to do color commentary for a televised figure-skating event, she made such a great impression that the network put her in their broadcast booth for other women's sports tournaments. Sydney ended up going to the Olympic Games in Lillehammer after all.

She won raves from viewers and critics for the short films she put together and narrated about certain athletes, coaches, and even the people working at the event (a woman who ran a concessions stand in the main auditorium, a maid at a nearby hotel, and the man who operated one of the scoreboards). Pretty soon, the network assigned her to make her video shorts about interesting people for their nighttime news magazines. That was how Movers & Shakers got started.

One of her Movers & Shakers pieces was about a handsome young, Chicago cop named Joe McCloud. While off duty and on his way to a Cubs game, he'd restrained a man who had gone berserk on the El. The man had shot his girlfriend in front of dozens of horrified commuters on the train. He had then taken a child hostage and threatened to execute her--as well as everyone in the car. 'I thought we were all going to die,' one middle-aged woman commuter testified in Sydney's video short. 'People were crying and getting sick. And then this--this good-looking guy stepped up and started talking to the gunman, and he distracted him...'

Joe McCloud managed to overpower the deranged man. He even gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the man's wounded girlfriend, saving her life.

Joe was six feet, three inches tall, with straight blond hair and soulful green eyes, and Sydney was smitten. On top of everything else, he was a hero. During the interview, he confessed something to Sydney: 'When the network said they wanted to interview me, I told them okay--as long as they sent you to do it.'

'Why me?' she asked.

With a crooked little grin, he shrugged. 'Well, ever since I first saw you on TV about a year ago, I've had a little crush on you.'

Her parents weren't crazy about her marrying a cop, and it meant her moving away to Chicago. But they ended up falling in love with him, too. It was just the kind of story they would have had her cover for Movers & Shakers: the handsome hero cop and the semicelebrity correspondent who profiled him were now getting married. Photos of their wedding ran in People magazine.

The doctors had warned her that the spinal injuries might cause some fertility problems. So finding herself pregnant five months after they were married took Sydney by surprise. Oddly, she had trouble conceiving after Eli. Joe helped her get through the huge disappointment when the doctors said her chances for another child were less than five percent. Sydney really leaned on Joe again when her father died in 2002, and then again when her mom passed away three years later.

Sometimes Joe caught flack at work from certain fellow cops, because his wife was on TV. 'Mr. Sydney Jordan,' they called him.

'Oh, they're just jerks,' Joe said. 'They don't bother me.' At least, that was what he told her.

Eli openly hated it when Sydney's Movers & Shakers stories took her on the road for days at a time, and so did she. Joe didn't hold it over her head that he often had to be mom and dad to Eli while she was away. Sydney kept busy on these trips, running herself and her crew ragged during the day. Yet she'd still have a tough time falling asleep alone in her bed at the Hyatt, Marriott, or Red Lion. She missed having Joe beside her, spooning her. She was always worried something might happen to him while she was on the road. As a policeman's wife, Sydney knew she had to prepare herself for the possibility that she could lose him at any time and without any warning.

But she didn't lose him that way. It didn't happen that way at all.

As she lay alone under the covers, Sydney figured she might as well have been in a strange bed at the Hyatt,