The House of Thunder Read Free Page B

she disliked having to depend on anyone but herself, and she was virtually terrified of being helpless. Now Viteski was telling her that she had spent twenty-two days in a state of utter helplessness, totally dependent on others, and that realization deeply disturbed her.
    What if she had never come out of the coma?
    Or worse yet—what if she had awakened to find herself paralyzed from the neck down, condemned to a life of utter dependency? What if she’d had to be fed and dressed and taken to the bathroom by paid attendants for the rest of her life?
    She shivered.
    “No,” she told Viteski. “I can’t have lost that much time. I can’t have. There must be some mistake.”
    “Surely you’ve noticed how thin you are,” Viteski said. “You’ve dropped fifteen pounds or more.”
    She held up her arms. Like two sticks. Earlier, she had realized how frightfully thin they looked, but she hadn’t wanted to think about what that meant.
    “You’ve been getting fluids intravenously, of course,” Dr. Viteski said. “Otherwise, you’d have died of dehydration long ago. There’s been some nourishment in the fluids you’ve gotten, primarily glucose. But you’ve had no real food—no solid food, that is—in more than three weeks.”
    Susan was five-foot-five, and her ideal weight (considering her delicate bone structure) was about a hundred and ten pounds. At the moment she weighed between ninety and ninety-five, and the effect of the loss was dramatic. She put her hands on the blanket, and even through the covers she could feel how sharp and bony her hips were.
    “Twenty-two days,” she said wonderingly.
    At last, reluctantly, she accepted the unacceptable.
    When she stopped resisting the truth, her headache and her extreme weariness returned. As limp as a bundle of wet straw, she fell back against the pillows.
    “That’s enough for now,” Viteski said. “I think I’ve let you talk too much. You’ve tired yourself unnecessarily. Right now you need plenty of rest.”
    “Rest?” she said. “No. For God’s sake, I’ve been resting for twenty-two days!”
    “There’s no genuine rest when you’re in a coma,” Viteski said. “It isn’t the same thing as normal sleep. Rebuilding your strength and stamina is going to take a while.”
    He picked up the control switch, pushed one of the four buttons, and lowered the head of the bed.
    “No,” Susan said, suddenly panicky. “Wait. Please, wait a minute.”
    He ignored her protests and put the bed all the way down.
    She hooked her hands around the rails and tried to pull herself into a sitting position, but for the moment she was too exhausted to lift herself.
    “You don’t expect me to go to sleep, do you?” she asked, although she couldn’t deny that she needed sleep. Her eyes were grainy, hot, and tired. Her eyelids felt as heavy as lead.
    “Sleep is precisely what you need most,” he assured her.
    “But I can’t.”
    “You look as if you can,” he said. “You’re plainly worn out. And no wonder.”
    “No, no. I mean, I don’t dare go to sleep. What if I don’t wake up?”
    “Of course you will.”
    “What if I slip into another coma?”
    “You won’t.”
    Frustrated by his inability to understand her fear, Susan gritted her teeth and said, “But what if I do ?”
    “Listen, you can’t go through life being afraid to sleep,” Viteski said slowly, patiently, as if he were reasoning with a small child. “Just relax. You’re out of the coma. You’re going to be fine. Now, it’s quite late, and I need a bite of dinner and some sleep myself. Just relax. All right? Relax.”
    If this is his best bedside manner, Susan thought, then what is he like when he isn’t trying to be nice?
    He went to the door.
    She wanted to cry out: Don’t leave me alone! But her strong streak of self-reliance would not permit her to behave like a frightened child. She didn’t want to lean on Dr. Viteski or on anyone else.
    “Get your rest,” he said.