by Lou Cadle
When the nurse came back, she shook her head at herself. “I’m sorry. I should have done this a few minutes ago.” She loosened the straps around Holly’s arm. “All better, right?” she said. “The doctor should be in soon,” she said to Greg.
He moved back to the bed.
When Holly lifted both her arms, his heart swelled. “Hugs,” he managed to say, what she said when she wanted to be held, and he leaned over and drew her up as far as the machine wires would let him, holding her in his arms for the first time since the wind had snatched her away.
I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I should have held on to you tighter.
“Da,” came the voice in his ear.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s me, honey.”
“Hunry,” she said, her voice rough with disuse, the word slurred.
But it was a word! He tried not to cry in relief as he pulled back and eased her down to the bed. “You’re hungry? We’ll see what’s on the menu here, okay?”
“Ba—” She stopped and frowned, and then he could see her concentrate and try to make her mouth work like she wanted. “Antate.” She frowned again. “Pantate.” Her little face went red with frustration.
He wanted to laugh aloud in joy. “Pancakes,” he said. “Cakes,” he said again, speaking clearly.”
“Cates,” she said, and then her face turned even redder.
“Flapjacks,” he suggested.
“Fatjats.” Her face scrunched up in a look he knew well from a few years back, a pre-tantrum look. She started breathing hard.
“I understood you, honey. And I’ll try and get you some —” he sought a synonym that might be pronounceable but couldn’t think of one. “Pancakes, if they have them, okay?”
She began to cry.
He felt so helpless. “Sweetie, it’s okay. Everything will be okay, I promise.” He leaned in to gather her up in a hug, but she pushed him away, with weak arms. “Okay, okay. I’m right here.” He watched her cry out her frustration. It only lasted five minutes, and then she seemed worn out by it.
He hit the call button then. When the nurse came in he explained what had happened and asked if she could eat.
“We have to wait for the doctor. But he already said we can try water this morning.” She poured a glass of water with a straw, and handed it to Greg. “Take it slow.” She backed off and watched him bring the straw to Holly’s mouth. She tried to hold on to the glass, but her hands bounced uselessly off it.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “Just have a sip.” He guided the straw to her lips. She drank, and then she started coughing immediately.
“Not to worry,” said the nurse. “She’ll get the hang of it again in no time.”
He followed the nurse out of the room. “So she has to relearn everything? Even to swallow?”
“I doubt that’ll take more than two or three tries. It’s just timing the sucking and swallowing. She’s coming along. Really, don’t tear yourself up with worry until we see how the day goes.”
Easier said than done.
The doctor came in, did his series of tests, and when he pinched her this time, she said, “Ow!” in an indignant tone.
“I know,” said the doctor. “Last time today, I promise.” He jotted down notes and then motioned Greg out of the room. “We’ll have to talk out here from now on,” he said. “She’s clearly picking up what’s happening around her.”
“She wants food.”
“And I want her to eat. But we need to put that off until tomorrow. Today, we’ll work on getting her to take water. Then juice. By noon or supper, a liquid meal replacement.”
“So she’s going to improve today?”
“Yes, she will. I’ll come by more times today and check her progress.”
“What can I do? She seems so frustrated by it.”
“Understandably. The PT will be in soon, and she’ll explain the most useful ways you can interact with her, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And I’d like you to talk to a counselor here. I know you’re going through horrible times—have been, and you’ll be continuing to have emotional upsets in the days to come. It’s good to have someone to talk to. Tell them everything bad, and then you can turn to your daughter and help her more. You understand?”
“I do. I just don’t…. I mean, I never talked to a psychologist before.”
“It can be clergy, if you’d prefer.”
“No, not really.”
“Just someone with professional skills, and experience in this, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll have the nurse give you a handout.”
“I appreciate it. And everything you’ve done.”
“You’re a good father,” he said. “You’re going to be really good with her recovery, I can tell.”
Greg nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He shook the doctor’s hand again. He was still suffering guilt from letting this happen in the first place. Then the light bulb went off—oh, maybe talking to someone about that would make sense. Someone who wouldn’t just say, “Don’t feel that way.”
His mother came in soon after, and chatted to Holly for a few minutes. “I brought you a bagel,” she said to Greg. “Should I have gotten two?”
He shook his head. “Tomorrow, they say.” He took his mother out of the room and explained what the nurse and doctor had said. As she was starting to ask a question, a tall woman with black hair in a loose ponytail came up to them, checked the room number, and said, “Parents of Holly Duncan?”
Greg introduced himself and his mother, and she said, “Good. Let’s go in—both of you, too—so you can see what you’re going to be doing these next few days.”
Holly was obviously scared, but Greg explained to her that the woman was going to help her be able to go back to school and play again faster.
“Taut?” said Holly.
It took him a second. “Help you talk better again?”
The PT said, “Speech therapy. That starts tomorrow, a very nice man named Alfonse. You’ll like him—he’s funny.”
“Jotes?”
“Yes, he likes jokes a lot,” said the PT. “Let’s start getting you better, okay?”
For a half-hour, the PT manipulated Holly’s limbs and showed Greg and his mother what to do. She left them with a handout that showed it all again, illustrations, with blanks that said “Every ____ hours,” for each exercise. She had filled them in by hand.
“I guess we have our work cut out for us,” said his mother, reading them over.
“Work.” It reminded him. “I have to call in. Can you stay with Holly?”
His mother nodded, engrossed by the handouts.
Greg went back and called in to talk to Rosemary. “Can I have the day off?”
“Let me call you back after lunch. I’m working on the schedule now, and trying to get you some time off. Do you need it?”
“I could use it, definitely. There’s all this physical therapy to do, and I’d rather be doing it myself.”
“Call you back after one,” she said, and hung up.
Greg and his mother worked all morning at stimulating Holly’s body and mind. His mother went out for a half-hour and came back with a stack of well-used picture books. “We can read to her, do you think she’d like that?”
“Ask her,” Greg said.
“Holly, would you like your gran to read you a book?” She held up each book and let Holly look at the cover. Holly raised her hand to point to the third one. “This one? You bet.”
He watched his mother read to his daughter and caught a fuzzy memory of her reading to him, many, many years ago. Doctor Seuss. Shel Silverstein. It was soothing to sit and listen. It was good to take a break. He had a sense of the work that was going to be involved in getting Holly better. He’d do the work, of course. But it wouldn’t be easy. And somehow, in there, he had to earn a living, and look for a new place to live, and fill out insurance forms for his house and car and belongings. There’d p
robably be government forms, too. He’d need birth certificates for both of them, no doubt.
Luckily, his wallet had been with him. Imagine trying to do all that without so much as a driver’s license.
After the doctor’s midday visit, his mother sent him down to the cafeteria to eat, and he had the first sit-down meal he had had since the tornado. It wasn’t gourmet food, but it was hot. He looked around the cafeteria, saw all the faces lined with worry, and realized he wasn’t entirely alone. Or, rather, he was, and no one could ease his own burden, but a lot of other people had his pain and fear right now. Some of those worried faces belonged to parents, others to spouses, others to children of the patients.
Somehow, this made him feel a fraction better. Like he was a member of a community of suffering, of worry, of love.
Rosemary called just when he was leaving the cafeteria. He went outside to take the call and look at the world again. In the distance, storm clouds were building, and he felt a chill of fear at them. It’d be a long while before thunder and lightning and black clouds on the horizon made him feel anything else.
“I’ve put you on a weekend relief schedule, if you can manage that. So two days’ work, twelve hour shifts, and then the rest of your time can be spent with your daughter.”
“I. Thank you, that’s generous.”
“I’d give you compassionate leave if I weren’t so short-handed.”
“I can manage this. I have my mother and aunt to help, so it’s doable.”
“Good. How’s your daughter?”
“Awake. Talking a little. Doing physical therapy.”
“That’s good to hear! People have been asking, so I’ll pass it along.”
“Thank you.”
“Get back to your kid. I’ll be in this weekend, so I’ll see you then.”
*
At suppertime, Greg watched as a nurse fed Holly a few spoonfuls of PediaSure and talked him through what she was doing. She let him take over and watched over them to make sure he didn’t do anything wrong. She nodded her approval, took the empty glass away, and left Holly and Greg alone.
“Your aunt Sherryl will be here in an hour or so,” Greg said.
“Wan’ smash potatoes,” she said, her clearest sentence yet.
He smiled at it. “Tomorrow, the doctor says. I’ll get you anything he says you can have.”
“Huds,” she said, reaching for him.
The machines were all unhooked now, and he was able to take her entirely into his arms. He rocked her, soothing them both. When he went to put her back down, she said, “Don’ wet go.”
He hung on to her, remembering again the wind snatching her away. “Never. Baby girl, I won’t let you go ever again.”
The End
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My volunteer proofreading team of Peg, Cathy, Liz, Becca, and Suzanne are very much appreciated. And thanks to Guy, retired law enforcement, for answering questions about being torn between family and duty in an emergency. And thank you to Deranged Doctor Design for the striking cover.
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Keep reading for the opening to my post-apocalyptic novel series, Gray.
Gray
Lou Cadle
Chapter 1
The midmorning sun lit her way as Coral pulled in near the cave’s entrance. She parked, climbed out of the cab of the motor home, and looked around the small clearing. An evergreen forest stretched down the slope ahead of her and back up to the distant mountain ridges. The woods were eerily still, not a bird singing or insect buzzing.
She shook off a vague sense of unease as she walked over a pad of fallen pine needles to the cave’s entrance. She could see inside to curved walls marked by horizontal striations, carved patterns of water cutting through the rock in centuries past. Beyond the first few feet, the darkness of the cave beckoned.
Returning to her brother’s aging 20-foot motor home, which he kept for hunting getaways and had reluctantly let her borrow for this trip, Coral found a flashlight in the glove box, shoving it into the daypack she always kept ready on the passenger seat for spontaneous hikes. Hauling the pack with her, she crawled back between the bucket seats to the living area. In the propane-powered mini refrigerator were two one-liter bottles of cold water. She made sure the cap of one was tight and tossed it in the pack, then, thinking better of it, grabbed the other, too. From the closet, she pulled her gray sweatshirt off a hook and tied it around her waist.
She had nowhere to be and no one to report to until July 1, when her summer job started. Over the past ten days, she had lost track of days and calendar dates, a loss she found made her nearly giddy with relief after the past year of a rigid and packed freshman schedule at the University of Michigan. She was pre-med, and the classes were tough. This month was her well-deserved reward for a freshman year spent working while most of her friends had spent theirs partying.
At the cave’s low entrance she stooped to peer inside. The floor was flattened by time and wear. She hesitated. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of small spaces. And the website had said it was a safe beginner’s cave, right? But caving alone, she knew, was a risk. Maybe she should leave a note on the windshield of the motor home, with the date and time she went in.
Then something—not a sound, but some other sense—made her look up into the sky.
A dense black cloud was boiling up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Deadly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun.
What the—? She stood and gaped. The menacing cloud was nothing like any Coral had ever seen before. Nothing natural. Four mule deer crashed through the clearing, running to the west. They disappeared, and Coral stood alone again, staring at the coming blackness.
She had no idea what it was. It looked like some Renaissance vision of the world’s end. It looked like death itself coming, silent and swift. And damned fast, she realized. Coral’s shock turned to fear. Logical thought fled. She stooped and dove into the cave’s maw.
The sky outside went dark. Blackness covered all the world around her. A hissing wind whipped through the clearing, whistling at the cave entrance.
She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms. Her bare arms were stung by tiny pricks as pebbles rained down outside and bounced inside. Coral scrambled away from the barrage and farther back into the cave, scuttling like a beetle. She escaped the rain of rocks and curled into a tight ball, her eyes shut, hoping desperately she was having a bad dream.
Her panic may have lasted only a minute. It might have been as long as ten. When she forced herself to raise her head and look around, the world to her right was a bit lighter than to her left. The cave’s entrance was barely visible.
Groping to the sides, she touched a rock wall, rough and cool to her fingertips. That reassured her. Anything solid—anything normal—was reassuring. The outside world had just gone crazy, or maybe she had just gone crazy, but rock walls in a cave were a comforting link to the real world.
She dug out her flashlight, flipped the switch, and a thin beam of LED light came out, enough to illuminate the ground before her feet, to see the sloping ceiling. She crept toward the entrance, shining the beam outside. The flashlight beam reflected back at her, like headlights bouncing off fog.
Black, menacing fog.
What was going on out there? A memory pushed its way forward—a television show on Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980, clouds of ash, a downwind town turned to twilight at midday.
Was that what this cloud was? A volcano had erupted to the southeast? Something dark and solid was falling in the sky—hanging there and falling both. Not rain. Not hail. So ash?
But the Cascades, the on
ly collection of volcanoes in the lower forty-eight states, were far to her west. What, then, was this black cloud that had come from the southeast? Yellowstone was due east of her, so it couldn’t be that. Her mental map of the country didn’t have any volcanoes in the right direction. But couldn’t new volcanoes pop up? Maybe, but she didn’t think they popped up like this. Not in an instant, without warning, and not this vast.
…to keep reading, click here
Also by Lou Cadle
Gray, a post-apocalyptic series
Gray, Part I
Gray, Part II
Gray, Part III
Stand-alone natural disaster novels:
Erupt
Quake
Storm
Dawn of Mammals:
Saber Tooth
Terror Crane
Hell Pig
(and more coming)
