A small hospital with limited but dedicated resources, Alistair watched as they did their best for the three patients. Within thirty minutes, his former prisoner had been given immediate emergency care, than bundled into a helicopter for transport to the trauma center in Oklahoma City. He sent a deputy with B.J. Harris to take her to the city, having seen to it that her daughter who lived there had been contacted to meet her.
In spite of everything the aging woman was bearing up better than anyone had a right to expect and he guessed that as long as Nolan continued his fight to live, she would stick by his side.
Serena and Dr. Hudson-Lawrence were with Bobbi and he felt sure he could trust them to see that she got the best of care, probably at some facility a whole lot more sophisticated than a small western Oklahoma hospital.
Now he sat by his wife’s side while her fever climbed and her lungs clouded, whispering to her softly as she struggled against pneumonia.
He’d forgotten to notify her brother of her condition, but word got around the county quickly and by that evening Tommy had joined him at her bedside, looking genuinely worried and not bringing up the subject of money even once.
Exhausted as he was he resisted the doctor’s urging that he accept a bed for a few hours of sleep, dozing in his chair, only to waken fearfully, relaxing only slightly when he saw that Hart was still there and still breathing, even though it was with the help of an oxygen mask.
He forgot that Tommy or anybody else was there as he sat in the intensive care unit and willed her to live and get better. You can’t leave me, he told her silently. Don’t abandon me, my only love.
Even under a heavy weight of fever and delusion, Hart heard her husband’s voice more clearly than if he’d spoken aloud. ‘Trying,’ she sent the message, hoping that at least he would hear and know her effort. It was so hard to breathe. She’d given of every ounce of her strength during that long night by the river and it would be so easy to surrender now and allow herself to sink into nothingness and whatever God had for her on the other side.
But she had no sense of release. She saw no long tunnels, or dazzling lights, no relatives from the other side greeted her.
She had things to do yet and her husband called to her, promising her a future worth living and, only a little further away, the nagging, rather annoying voice of the child Bobbi interlaced with Hart’s, telling her they were so lost and confused they couldn’t find their way out.
This was the woman who had saved her life in old Medicine Stick and the child descended from her own Larkin family, both of them pleading for help only she could give.
She saw only one way out for them. Surely she was in no condition to make this choice, but she was certain if she didn’t they would dissolve into madness. Somehow she and Hart had learned over time, in all their years of growing up, to live with this, but Bobbi, child as she was had been brought into it too suddenly. She was terrified and drowning.
‘Leave, Hart,’ she whispered in her own brain. ‘Leave her alone. It’s the only way.’
The message received, she heard a deep quiet and then knew Bobbi rolled over in her hospital bed to fall into dreamless sleep.
She managed to lift her own lashes and looked into the face of her husband. Big, strong Alistair Redhawk had tears in his eyes as he smiled down at her and from somewhere beyond him she heard her brother’s voice saying gladly, “Look, Alistair, she’s awake.”
Epilogue
They celebrated the news with a backyard barbeque. Alistair broiled steaks, Hart baked potatoes and made a huge salad and B.J. brought her famous dessert of homemade banana cake.
Hart looked around thinking it was one of those rare June days when the weather was everything it should be. She kissed Nolan Jeffers to his obvious embarrassment and then he took the chair in the shade closest to the house. B.J. was getting him out more these days, but he still wasn’t wild about open spaces and plenty of that was available out here on the Redhawk place where the backyard rolled down to a cottonwood lined creek and on the other side to miles and miles of scenic vista, made dramatic by the purple-hazed granite mountains in the distance.
B.J., who still thought she knew this Hart a whole lot better than was actually possible, patted the top of her head and put her gorgeous cake down on the table and asked in her usual spritely fashion who else was coming.
“Hart’s brother and his family,” Alistair answered from where he worked at the grill, “and the deputies who have this afternoon off and their families.”
“His friends from work,” Hart added with a grin. “We’re both so busy all the time; most of our friends are the people with whom we work.” She glanced at her husband. “But he wouldn’t let me invite my friends from work.”
“I couldn’t get them out of prison for the party,” Alistair added wryly.
“Except me,” Nolan spoke up. “They finally sprung me.”
He looked pale and thin, Hart thought, though whether because he was still recovering from his gunshot wound or because of all the years he’d spent incarcerated, she wasn’t sure.
One thing she was certain of as she watched him and B.J. hold hands was that from now on he would have the best of loving care.
Her goal these days was for both her and Alistair to live as long as Nolan and B.J. and still be holding hands every chance they got.
She passed around tall glasses of iced tea and listened as B.J. asked what news she had of Bobbi Lawrence.
“She texts me now and then, but she’s so busy in her new school that she doesn’t have much time for somebody so far outside her peer group. But her grandmother writes regularly and she says Bobbi’s doing fine, has a boyfriend that none of her adult relatives can stand, and has become impertinent and mouthy.”
“A normal teenager,” B.J., who had raised two daughters, commented. “Tell her not to worry. When they hit about twenty, then you become their friend again. It’s surprising how much wisdom you gain when they’re all grown up.”
Hart laughed. “Something we’ll learn for ourselves over the years,” Alistair announced grandly.
Nolan smiled and B.J. exclaimed, “A baby! That’s what this is all about. You’re going to have a baby.”
Lovingly Hart allowed the proud father to tell all the news about the birth expected about Christmas time and watched indulgently while he passed around the evidence of the sonogram, their baby’s first picture.
She suspected she had a smug smile on her face as their other guests drove up out front and came around carrying potluck dishes. She watched Deputy Long’s wife greet B.J. who was a longtime friend and said hello to Cully, their waitress friend from Pizza Plus, who had come as young Deputy Joey Harding’s date. She chatted with one guest after another as she directed them to the food and watched as Alistair distributed the steaks.
When she finally settled in her chair, she looked up to see down near the creek a handsome old Kiowa gentleman who bore a strong resemblance to her husband riding past on a big black and white paint.
Others were looking in that direction, admiring the scenic creek with its cottonwood, but nobody else seemed to see the man and his horse.
He lifted one hand silently and she greeted him with a slight nod. As he rode on, he glanced back to where his grandson stood by the fire.
The End
Barbara Bartholomew became intrigued with the notion of time travel when she was a little girl and listened to her grandfather talk about the possibility that time was itself a separate dimension and discuss Einstein’s theories on the subject. Her first published short story was “Wheel of Fire” in Analog magazine, which saw a traveler venturing into Elizabethan times, and in the 1980s she wrote the time travel trilogy for young adults, The Time Keeper, Child of Tomorrow and When Dreamers Cease to Dream after an editor asked her what she would write if her choices were wide open. Now as an independent writer, she has made the same choice and likes to explore lasting relationships against a backdrop of a constantly changing fant
asy world.
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Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) Page 16
