someone’s luggage, then shimmied past the girl whose guitar case was being given the once-over-“Yeah, I packed it myself,” she was reciting, “and it hasn’t been out of my sight”-and then raced down the concourse, past the big plate-glass windows where people were waiting to spot their visitors, and out toward the taxi stands.
The line was interminable, passengers huddled against the biting wind, stamping their feet to keep warm as the cabs were slowly motioned forward by the dispatchers, loaded up, and sent on their way.
But David had no time to spare on this, and renting a car would take even longer.
Across several lanes, in the section reserved for unloading private car service clients, he saw a maroon Lincoln parked, and the driver-a young guy with a soul patch-was helping an elderly couple to wrestle their bags onto a trolley. David loped across the lanes, dodging the cars that of course could not even see him, and while the driver was settling up, he slipped into the backseat and took off the garland.
For a second or two, as nothing happened, he feared he’d done himself some irreparable harm. But then, he felt a tingling in his toes, the same feeling he’d get when he’d been out skating too long and the blood had slowly started to return. His boots reappeared, drumming on the floor of the car. Then the sensation coursed up his legs, and they, too, gradually became visible.
But the driver got in sooner than David had expected, jumping into the seat to count his bills.
David prayed he wouldn’t look into the rearview mirror yet.
Reaching for the radio mike, he said, “Car 6, calling in.”
“Hey, Zach.”
“I’ve just made the drop-off at Air France.”
David felt the rippling sensation moving up his torso. Glancing down, he saw his coat coming into view, and then his chest. His arms prickled, as if each hair was standing on end, and he flexed the muscles gratefully.
“You got another pickup for me?” Zach asked.
“Looks like it,” the dispatcher replied. “Alitalia.”
“Cancel that,” David interrupted, and the driver whipped around in his seat. David hoped that the crown of his head wasn’t still missing.
“What the hell?” the driver said, dropping the mike. “Where’d you come from?”
David held up a fistful of bills. “Do it, and they’re all yours.”
Zach looked very confused.
“Hey, Zach,” the radio dispatcher said, “let me give you the name.”
“Tell ’em you’re busy,” David urged.
“Those are euros,” the driver mumbled to David.
“Zach, you still there?”
“True,” David said. “That means they’re worth more than dollars.” He leaned forward and handed over the whole wad of them.
“I do know that,” Zach said, as he thumbed through the bills. “I’m in grad school.”
“Then you can figure out how to get to Evanston hospital.”
Satisfied with the windfall, Zach pleaded engine trouble over the radio, then shut off the mike for the breakneck trip to the suburbs.
David fished Jantzen’s BlackBerry out of his pocket again, called Gary, and got his voice mail. “I’m in a cab,” David said, “and on the way.” Hanging up, he simply stared blankly at the phone. What if he was already too late? Nothing he had read suggested that the Medusa could reanimate the dead. It could bestow eternal life, but it could not return it to those already gone. He reached into his shirt just to feel its presence on his chest. The silver was cold, the silk backing slick. That was strange, he thought. It did not absorb any of his body heat. It remained unaffected, oblivious to its surroundings, as if in a vacuum of its own. His fingers traced the contours of the Gorgon’s face. He knew every tendril of its hair, every furrow of its snarling brow, but for the first time since acquiring it, he feared it, too. What great transgression was he about to attempt?
The cab slowed down, and David said, “Can’t you go any faster?”
“Not on the ice,” Zach replied, “and I’m not about to total the damn car.”
But something told him that Sarah was still alive. Some intuition, some sixth sense. The bond they had was so strong, and had always been so unbreakable, that if it had been severed, he’d have known. He’d have felt the break, no matter how far away he’d been, like a punch in his stomach.
Little cyclones of snow were whipping across the highway, and the wind was battering at the windows. Automated signs warned of delays up ahead and a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. A Hummer, its warning lights flashing, had slid right into a traffic divider.
“Get off at Dempster,” David said. “It’ll be faster.”
Zach did as he was told, and David steered him toward several shortcuts to get to the hospital complex more directly. But every time Zach tried to engage him in conversation, David shut him down. He didn’t want him talking, he wanted him driving.
At the hospital complex on Central Street, David quickly scanned the various driveway signs and arrows for the one leading to the Hospice Care Unit. It turned out to be a separate one-story building, with a broad, covered driveway in front.
“Good luck, man,” Zach said, as David charged out of the limo, his backpack hanging from one hand, and into the revolving door; it was one of those doors that turned at its own speed, but David was shoving at the bar, anyway.
A nurse behind the counter looked up as he arrived, panting, and said, “Whoa there, partner. Slow down. This is a hospital zone.”
David dropped the backpack, and said, “Sarah Franco.”
The nurse looked uncertain.
“Sorry. I mean Sarah Henderson.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice now taking on a more solicitous tone. “She’s down the hall, in Room 3. And you are?”
“Her brother,” David said, already moving on.
“Hold on,” the nurse said, as one hand reached for the phone. “I have to notify her caregiver. She might be sleeping.”
What difference did that make? He was here to wake her up.
Outside her door, he saw Gary, in a flannel shirt and jeans, pacing the hall.
“Thank God,” Gary said. “I had my phone on vibrate, and just picked up your message.”
“How is she?” David said.
“One of the nurses is in with her now.” He looked at David with enormous relief, tempered with a bit of reproach. “She’s been waiting for you. I told you she would.”
“I was counting on it,” he said, even as he swiftly circumvented Gary-who looked startled-and headed straight into Room 3.
“David, you might want to wait a minute!”
But that was the last thing he wanted to do.
The nurse, an African-American man with gray hair and a gentle face, was just adjusting an IV line. He turned and said, “You must be her brother. She’s been waiting for you. I’m Walter.”
But David’s eyes were fixed on Sarah, or what was left of her. In the time he’d been gone, she had changed from a woman hanging on to life, however weakly, to a woman already in the embrace of death. Her hands on the blanket were mottled and blue, her cracked lips were slick with Vaseline, and her face was a hollow mask. Even on seeing him, she showed none of the joy he had expected; her expression, instead, was querulous and uncertain. He wasn’t even sure she recognized him.
“We just upped her Halperidol,” Walter said, sotto voce. “In a few minutes, she may be more lucid.”
David had thought he’d been prepared for anything… but now he knew that he hadn’t.
“Can we be alone?”
“Sure,” the nurse said. “I’m here if you need me.”
David dragged a chair to the bedside and took her hand in his. The skin was cold and the fingers felt like twigs.
“Sarah, it’s David. I’m here.”
But she didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy and staring off into space, her bare skull covered by a paisley
