Lightning That Lingers (11 page)

I’m a penguin. I don’t mind cold weather.

She looked up suddenly and saw it. Lily Hill.

Still distant, it rose from the hilltop, a hard forbidding silhouette. Faint light glowed from etched-glass windows on either side of a grand formal entrance. In the flat moonlight it appeared
huge, institutional, charmless. There must be someone home there. There must be. Relations, servants, Doberman pinschers.… People didn’t leave their mansions unprotected, did they? Her mind fastened on
Upstairs Downstairs
, cataloguing episodes, examining habits of the rich.

The rich didn’t strip. Why did he do it? Rebellion? Hard times? How hard could times be if you owned a mansion?

All at once, the snow heaved under her feet. She toppled through an underlying brittle ice crust into two feet of water. The pristine surface had hidden a spring-fed brook.

Like frigid poison, the icy water bled through her clothes, lacerating her raw flesh, washing her in agony, convulsing her muscles. She tried to struggle up, but her burning wrists buckled and she slapped back into the water, her face filling with ice.

When she stood at last, she could hear herself weeping. Pain came in racking paroxysms beyond any threshold she could have imagined. Winded, her body heaving with shudders, she tried to aim her clumsy steps toward the mansion and for the first time, she dazedly realized that she might die. Death. She rarely thought about it. It seemed like something removed from her mundane life, an exotic adventure. But if she didn’t get help, she really might die. Her picture would be in the newspapers and people with busy lives would scan the article beneath and say “how sad, she was so young.” But dumb. So dumb to have locked her keys in her car on a night when the chill factor was sixty below zero.

There was no exact moment when she realized
that her intellect had begun to malfunction. But distantly, she knew. Her actions pierced her awareness in sharp disconnected detail. Sorcery seemed to transport her from place to place.

She was pounding her fists on the mansion door.

She was trying to break in a window.

She was walking down a country road looking for a mechanic to haul her car out of the ditch.

I’m freezing to death, she thought. Me. Jennifer Hamilton. Won’t everyone be surprised.… She tried to cudgel her mind into coherency. She tried to recall whether she had actually knocked on his door. She tried to think. But thoughts vanished as though someone was plucking them like feathers from her mind.

Where was she? A pretty night waved around her like a diorama in counted cross-stitch: black sky, airy starlight, trees moving in time to a wind that rang like clear crystal.

He almost decided not to come home.

Michele called him to the phone just after he came offstage from the second show. The caller was from his security service with the news that they were picking up an intrusion alarm from his house and asking if he wanted them to notify the police. He told them no, because most of the time it was something innocent. He didn’t want the police to have to be chasing around on his property every time the wind tossed a branch on his roof or a wild owl heard Chaucer and went into a territorial frenzy against the kitchen window pane.

He was tired, and sweaty, and tense, and in no
mood to rush outside in arctic temperatures to hunt down a false alarm. But what if it was a group of kids, breaking into the abandoned west wing to party? A commotion would rub Chaucer the wrong way and when roused, the little owl was quite capable of descending, razor-sharp talons poised, on a threatening stranger. Could you live with it, Brooks, if a kid on a lark lost one of his eyes because you didn’t want to go out in the cold to check out an alarm?

He arranged for a stand-in and put himself in the car.

The first thing he saw was the ditched Volkswagen, keys in the dead ignition, doors locked, the headlights faded to the pencil-beams of twin flashlights. It could have belonged to anyone. But somehow he knew it was Jennifer’s.

The wind’s savagery had nearly destroyed the slight dents of her footprints leading up his drive. Fear nourished his impulse to break out in a run, following them. But he made himself get back into the station wagon; he made himself go slowly up the drive to be sure the dim trail didn’t lead off into the trees. He had spent years learning to decipher tracks, and as though she had left a story for him in copperplate, he could see each stumble, each time she had rested or paused in confusion. The pressure of an accelerating pulse stabbed his throat; his heartbeat became militant, electric. The phrase, his phrase “come see me—you know where to look” came back at him like a whip. Where had he expected her to come? The Cougar Club?

Her waifish figure finally appeared in his headlights, limping in a ragged ellipse about twenty
yards from his front door. He floored the accelerator and spun up the drive, slamming the transmission into park, running up to her.

Frost covered her in sparkling dust. It rimmed her eyes with blue-white lashes. It was imbedded into her clothing like mica in a sidewalk. When he lifted her face, her pansy petal eyes stared up at him unknowingly.

“I’m looking at …” She squinted at the shining ice crystals on her sleeve. “Snowflakes.” Her voice was hoarse, small and slurred.

Shock? Delirium? He tried to remember everything he knew about hypothermia. His mind threw up a blank screen. His shooting heartbeat set the rhythm for his instinctive response. He swept her up in his arms and began racing with her toward the house. In his adrenalized state, she was no heavier than a toy.

Her arms came sloppily around his neck, falling like broken pieces of stick candy. “I’m a penguin.” Her head flopped hard onto his shoulder. “I like cold weather.”

Jenny. Jenny. Hang on, darling. Hypothermia. What do I know about hypothermia? In warmblooded animals, enzymatic reactions take place properly only within a set range of temperatures. When prolonged chilling forced the body’s temperature down too long, the chemical processes began to misfire. Muscles grew lax—the heart was a muscle.…

Supporting her limp weight in one hand, he dragged open the front door and lifted her inside. She murmured incoherently as he carried her upstairs through the blocks of indigo moonlight on the landing. He booted open his bedroom door
and set her down on his bed where she lay on his yellow quilt like a broken doll. His hand slipped under the muffler to touch her cheek. It might have been ice.

He grabbed the receiver of his bedside phone and dialed rapidly, forcing the dial. When it began to ring he tucked it into his shoulder and started to pry at the ice-encrusted zipper of her coat. Her clothes, moisture saturated, had frozen to rigidity. An anonymous voice came on the phone and informed him, after he asked, that Dr. Campell wasn’t available. He’s with a woman, Philip thought. He snapped out that this was Philip Brooks and an emergency. The bland voice advised him glumly that he would be connected.

In the extended delay, he unwrapped the frosty muffler from her face and realized that it was his. Staring at it, he had the utterly stupid feeling that he might begin to cry.

Jack’s voice. “I don’t know who the hell this is but it better be important.”

“Jack, this is Philip. Can you come over?”

“Philip?” The voice sharpened. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“Yes. Jenny’s with me. I found her outside. She looks like a snow cone.”

Even more sharply, “Is she conscious?”

“Semiconscious.”

“Other symptoms?” Jack snapped out.

“Ataxia, dysarthria, disorientation. And her damn zipper is frozen shut.”

“Steady. All right? What’s her pulse?”

He dragged off her mitten and found her wrist.

“Dear God, I can’t find one.”

“Be calm, Philip.” The voice became deliberately
healing, stern, sustaining. “If she’s semiconscious she’s alive and she’s got a pulse. Maybe it’s thready, but you’ll find it. I’ll be there in a minute. Pull her clothes off and put her under a blanket.
Don’t
put her in a hot tub.
Don’t
put her in a heating blanket, or you may throw her into shock. Did you catch all that?”

“Yes. What about an ambulance?”

“We’ll decide when I get there.” The line went dead.

The thawing zipper broke free and as he brought it down past her waist, he saw her wide-set eyes focus on him with sudden lucidity.

“What’s ataxia?” The words were quite clear, but very hoarse.

“Jenny? Sweetheart, this is Philip. Do you know me?”

“Ataxia,” prompted the blue lips softly.

“It means loss of coordination,” he told her gently.

“Thanks.” The barely audible word was sardonic. She seemed to be trying to smile. “Dysarthria?”

“Slurred speech.”

“Why do you know those words?”

He raised her shoulders enough to drag her coat off. “I’m a biologist.”

“Biologist. Biologist.” She gave the word various amazed inflections.

He had a moment to be elated over that evidence of rationality before her eyes closed and she seemed to drift again. She shivered so pitifully it wrenched his heart. He would have given everything to be able to take her pain.

All the way to his fingertips he could feel the
pressure of his emotions as he began to open her blouse. Her dazed husky whisper startled him.

“Philip … Are you going to make love to me?”

“Yes, God help us both.” He touched a shaken kiss to her cold brow. “When you’re better.”

Her heavy lashes dropped, her fist curled drowsily near her cheek as he undressed and dried her. She seemed to have fallen into a light sleep under his wool blanket when he carried her damp clothes to the bathroom. He returned to find her wandering around his bedroom with the blanket wrapped around her, trailing it behind her like a besotted monk.

“I have to find a mechanic,” she rasped softly, gazing vaguely around the room. “I have to get my …” She thought about it for a long time—“my ’wagon fixed.”

He smiled for the first time since he had walked away from her in the library, and scooped her up, a droll, weightless bundle, depositing her back on the bed, nuzzling his face in her damp hair. “I’ll fix your wagon but good if you don’t stay still.”

For Jennifer, consciousness returned at broken intervals as though the world were a thing seen through erratically swinging shutters.

Distantly she saw herself clinging to Philip’s arm and heard her own excited rambling. “Philip, I was lost in the freezing cold. I had an adventure.… I faced
death.
” Someone was trying to put something in her mouth. “I knew it wasn’t dark, because you told me about all the light in the night sky—besides the moon and the stars
there’s air glow … all the light from outside the galaxy—faint stars, interstellar dust.…”

Her jaw was taken in a firm grip and she found herself staring into a vaguely familiar face, with amused gray eyes and tousled curls. She was told sternly, “Oral temperatures are unreliable enough in your condition. Either keep this under your tongue, young lady, or it’s going in your rear end. No matter what Philip says.”

Pained tears spilled, she found the comfort of Philip’s chest, the thermometer went under her tongue. She drifted.

She woke once with warm hands feeling her pulse, stroking her hair. The hand that led her to consciousness was gentle, as was the voice calling her name, but it hurt to be awake. The light in the room was dim. But even that stung her eyes.

A soft voice said, “She’s adorable. Lucky you. Have you made her a happy woman yet?”

“I’ve made her a confused woman. I’ve made her a frightened woman. As you see, I’ve made her a very ill woman. But no, I haven’t made her a happy woman.”

“All these years I’ve known you, and here I’ve always thought nothing got to you except injured wildlife. You were so well vaccinated against women by the time you were fifteen. Personally, I’m in favor of anyone who can make you feel like a human being again. What do you think it’s doing to the people who love you, watching you cut yourself off like this?” The attractive male voice developed a sudden impatience that seemed rooted in pain. “All right, I understand why you wouldn’t take the vice-presidency in your uncle’s company. But when you know I’d give you all kinds of
money … Don’t give me that look of yours. I’m not going to resurrect that hopeless battle.”

A silence grew and stretched.

Two minutes or two hours later she opened her eyes. Her field of vision was blurred, distorted. An ornate plasterwork ceiling swung above her head. The walls were lovely, elaborate with gilt touches. There was a massive carved marble hearth with a stuffed owl on it. She had the strangest feeling that she had been transported back in history like the heroine in a time travel romance. This room came straight out of the Victorian era.

The detail of the owl bothered her. It seemed incongruous. She closed her eyes again, experiencing a wash of nauseating discomfort. Her skin felt as though it had been seared. Every muscle, every joint in her body cried out for mercy. And her head throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.

“I’ll listen to her heart again if you promise not to accuse me of trying to feel her up,” came a man’s voice.

Philip’s soft laugh answered the voice. “Never. I know they wean you off all those inconvenient desires in medical school.”

“That’s a myth and a half.” A chair sighed under shifting weight. “If you could see the luscious body I just left unsatisfied …”

“Really? Then you did finish things before I called?”

The first man responded with quiet appreciative laughter and threw something—a pillow.

Jennifer felt the bedclothes shift over her and the robe—she realized she was wearing a robe now—gently rearranged. The hard circle of the stethoscope pressed beneath her breast. She
opened her eyes again, gazing beyond dark curls at the stuffed owl on the mantel. This time, though, it seemed to have its head turned to the side. She closed her eyes with an inward moan.

“Beautiful heartbeat,” said the voice from the dark curls. “I kiss my fingers to it. Come and listen. You’ll feel much better.” The stethoscope rattled as it came away from his ears. “What did I tell you? She’s young and healthy. She probably won’t even catch a cold on you.”