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ARE THEY ALLoutta here?”
As Daniel spoke up from his recline against the pillows, Lydia had an urge to pull some covers to his chin. Bring him chicken noodle soup. Go for the Tylenol and maybe the Nyquil. The way he was lying there, so still, his breathing shallow and uneven, suggested he was uncomfortable and determined not to give in to how bad he was feeling.
How she wished this were only a cold. The flu. Food poisoning.
“Yes, they’re gone.” She hesitated at the foot of the bed, wondering if she should shift the duvet over his legs. “Do you want to eat—”
“You’d have thought the closed door would have stemmed the tide.”
“The doctors are just trying to help.”
Sitting down next to him, she took his cold hand and rubbed it in her own as she glanced around the bedroom suite they’d been sharing since the spring.The accommodations were slick and luxurious, but they were a hotel room, really, nothing personal anywhere, the sophisticated, but stark, decor nothing she would have chosen, nothing she could have afforded. She wished they had a proper home, filled with things collected over time, and permanently placed because the two of them had no intention of moving. Rocking chairs that creaked by the fire. Quilts that had been handmade to curl into on cold nights. Copper pans in the kitchen, braided rugs to cushion the feet, plants nurtured in sunny spots flaring green and lush.
And yet this austere four walls and a ceiling had become a safety blanket of sorts.
When they were here, if something happened medically, there were people who could help, ready at a moment’s notice.
Who needed 911 when you had an entire team and a state-of-the-art medical facility thirty feet underneath you.
“Do you want something to eat?” she asked again.
Daniel’s lean face scrunched up with distaste, his half-mast eyes nearly disappearing. “God, no.”
On reflex, she measured the distance to the marble bathroom. As they’d come in, getting him to lie down had been the most important thing, so he was on her closer-to-the-door side of things. But if he was going to be sick? The trip around the baseof the mattress to get to the loo was going to add a couple of yards. Which was no big deal. For most people.
For Daniel? It might as well have been a fifty-mile trek uphill at a dead run.
Fear crept up her spine and tightened the base of her neck. “I can get Dr. Lipsitz back if you’re going to throw up? You can have a—what do they call it?”
God, her brain was just shorting out all over the place.
“Antiemetic. And no, thanks.” Daniel stretched his opposite arm over his head and arched his back, as if he were trying to make room for the nausea in his abdominal cavity. Like it was a tangible object he’d swallowed. “I’ve had it with the poke-and-prodding—hey, you know what C.P. needs to make next?”
“What.”
“That scanner thing Bones had onStar Trek. He’d just move it up and down over the person and know everything.” He resettled the limb at his side and closed his eyes completely. “I still remember the little electronic whirring sound it made. I can’t tell you how much I’m into noninvasive now. Did you ever watchStar Trek?”
She traced his gaunt face with her eyes, and was relieved that there was a little color in his cheeks—until she remembered the ride up the Northway and the squall of snowflakes. It was likely windburn.
“Is that the one with Darth Vader?” she mumbled as she told herself to stop counting his frailties.
“No, Captain Kirk. James Tiberius. The starshipEnterprise? Does that ring a bell?”
When the doctors and nurses had been examining him, they’d made him take off his jacket, sweatshirt, and t-shirt, and there were so many bones showing through such thin skin—and then there was the bruising and the puckered scar from his Hickman line’s removal on his upper pec. They’d taken the access out how long ago? After the chemo didn’t work? Things should have healed by now.
“My grandfather didn’t have a TV in our house,” she said numbly. “And C.P. goes by Cathy now, I think.”
“She’s still C.P. to me.”
“Me, too.”
There was a long period of silence. Then he squeezed her hand. “Lydia.”
“Yes?” She was afraid to meet his stare for fear everything she was thinking was in her eyes. “Are you going to be sick—”
“You know they’re not going to find anything at that condo.”
Oh, what a great change of subject. Something to lighten the mood.
