Page 18 of Seasonal Fears

The car lurches a little as Harry nearly loses control—but there are no trees nearby for him to have slammed into, so she supposes he’s managed to keep his word—and then he gets the car back on the level, and laughs.

“Very funny, Mel. You have to have a heartbeat. If you didn’t have a heartbeat, you’d be dead.”

“Yeah. Very funny.” Her phone is ringing, tucked away inside the little clutch purse she bought to match her dress. She busies herself with opening it and pushing past the welter of pill bottles and emergency medications to answer. “It’s my dad. I have to take this.”

“Already?” Her father is notorious for checking up on her during their dates, like he doesn’t trust Harry to keep himself from ripping her clothes off if he leaves them alone for more than fifteen minutes. Still, he normally waits until they at least have time to get where they’re going.

Melanie lifts the phone to her ear, forcing herself to smile. Her father will hear it if she doesn’t. “Hi, Daddy! What’s going … Really? Right now? Are you sure?” She pauses, and Harry hears a whole story in that silence. He’s heard it before.

But what he hasn’t heard is the pager in her purse going off. That would mean her name had finally come up on the transplant list. He’d run out on his own birthday party if her name had come up on the transplant list.

“All right, Daddy,” says Melanie, and drops the phone back into her purse.

“Should I turn around?”

She doesn’t reply.

“Mel, am I supposed to be taking you home?”

She turns her head, so that she’s looking out the window at the moon-drenched streets outside the car. The silence stretches like taffy, and when it finally snaps, she appears to come to a decision of some kind. He just doesn’t know what kind it is.

“Pull over,” she says.

“Melanie, what are you—”

“Pull over, and I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything I can. Or take me home, and I don’t think you’ll ever see me again.” She turns back to him. “It’s up to you.”

Where the Sidewalk Begins

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

Harry doesn’t hesitate before he pulls over, easing the car up to a stretch of curb he’s never stopped at before. They’re in a residential neighborhood, too close to several houses for this to be a good make-out spot, too far from home for it to be a good place for him to drop her off. He’d never tell her this, but he doesn’t like to let her walk home alone when he can help it. Maybe it’s presumptive and chauvinistic of him, since he knows she can take care of herself, but he’s the kid with the dying girlfriend. He’s allowed to be a little overprotective.

Melanie waits until he kills the engine before she twists and thrusts her arm toward him, still-bare wrist tilted upward. “Take my pulse,” she commands.

“I have a pulse oximeter in the glove compartment,” he says. Her father insisted he get one when he started driving her around, said they needed to be able to check her heart rate and oxygen saturation levels accurately no matter what the situation was. They’ve only used it a handful of times, and she carries one of her own in her purse.

Melanie’s expression, what he can see of it in the shadows, is relieved. “And you trust that no one’s tampered with it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Yes or no, Harald?”

“Yes, Mel, I trust that no one has broken into my car solely to tamper with my pulse oximeter. You’re being really weird tonight.”

“I know.” She smiles, shadows rendering her painted lips black against the white of her skin. “Get it out and put it on me.”

It’s one of the finger-clip models, designed to slip over her index finger and turn on with the press of a button. It’s not exact enough to be a true diagnostic tool, but it can put them close enough to the ballpark to keep everyone calm and get her to help if she needs it. Harry places it on her hand and presses the button.

Melanie says nothing, just keeps breathing normally, letting the little machine work its magic. After about thirty seconds it beeps, and she turns her hand, holding it up to show him.

Her blood oxygenation is 100%, which is high for her—she normally averages around 95% when she’s having a good day, and dips a little lower on a bad one. 90% means he’s supposed to take her straight home. Anything lower than 90% means he’s supposed to call her father immediately. He’s had to do that twice, and he hated it both times. So seeing that 100% is pleasantly reassuring. He likes it.

He doesn’t like the number on her heartrate line. If this were one of the fancier models, like the one in her purse, it would probably be sounding some sort of an alarm right about now, telling them both that something was seriously wrong. It has to be, for her to be showing an impossible result. “Your heartrate can’t be zero,” he says, crossly. “You’d have to not have a heartbeat for it to be zero.”

“Because right now, I don’t have a heartbeat,” says Melanie. She takes the pulse oximeter off, hands it back to him. “Try it on yourself.”

Harry frowns and attaches the small machine to his hand. Another thirty seconds pass before he gets his answer: 98% pulse oxygen, heartrate 62 beats per minute. That’s a little lower than it usually is, which doesn’t make much sense, since his girlfriend is telling him she’s some sort of zombie. But then, nothing about this night makes sense.