Blood Work полностью

“It’s hard for me to put it into the words I want. I just know what I’m feeling. It makes sense to me.”

Fox had a resigned look on her face.

“Look, I know what you’re going to want to do. You’re going to want to help this lady. But you’re not ready. Physically, no way. And emotionally, after hearing what you just said, I don’t think you’re ready to investigate even a car accident. Remember what I told you about the equilibrium between physical and mental health? One feeds off the other. And I’m scared that what you have going on in your head now is going to affect your physical progress.”

“I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do. You are gambling with your own life here. If this goes south, if you start getting infection or rejection, we’re not going to be able to save you, Terry. We waited twenty-two months for that heart you have now. You think another one with matching blood work is going to just pop up because you messed up this one? No chance. I’ve got a patient down the hall on a machine. He’s waiting on a heart that isn’t coming. That could be you, Terry. This is your one chance. Do not blow it!”

She reached across the bed and placed her hand on his chest. It reminded him of what Graciela Rivers had done. He felt its warmth there.

“Tell this woman no. Save yourself and tell her no.”

THE MOON WAS LIKE a balloon being kept aloft by children poking at it with sticks. The masts of dozens of sailboats stood raised beneath it, ready to keep it from falling. McCaleb watched it hover in the black sky until it finally escaped by slipping behind the clouds somewhere out over Catalina. As good a hiding spot as any, he thought, as he looked down at the empty coffee cup in his hand. He missed being able to sit in the stern at the end of the day with an ice-cold beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But cigarettes had been part of the problem and were gone for good now. And it would be a few months before the medication therapy would relax enough to allow a dose of alcohol into the mix. For now, if he had just one beer, it might give him what Bonnie Fox called a fatal hangover.

McCaleb got up and went into the boat’s salon. First he tried sitting at the galley table but soon got up, turned the TV on and started flipping through the channels without really looking at what was on. He turned the tube off and checked the clutter on the chart table but found there was nothing for him there, either. He moved about the cabin, looking for a distraction from his thoughts. But there was nothing.

He moved down the stairs into the forward passageway and into the head. He took the thermometer from the medicine cabinet, shook it and dipped it under his tongue. It was an oldstyle glass tube instrument. The electronic thermometer with digital reading display the hospital had provided was still in its box on the cabinet shelf. For some reason he didn’t trust it.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he pulled open the collar of his shirt and studied the small wound left by the morning’s biopsy. It never got a chance to heal. There had been so many biopsies that the incision was always just about covered with new skin when it was opened up again and the artery probed once more. He knew it would be a permanent mark, like the thirteen-inch scar running down his chest. As he stared at himself, his thoughts drifted to his father. He remembered the permanent marks, the tattoos, left on the old man’s neck. The coordinates of a radiation battle that served only to prolong the inevitable.

The temperature reading was normal. He washed the thermometer and put it back, then took the clipboard with the temperature log sheet off the towel hook and wrote the date and time. In the last column, underTEMPERATURE, he drew another dash indicating no change.

After hanging up the board, he leaned into the mirror to look at his eyes. Green flecked with gray, the corneas showing hairline cracks of red. He stepped back and pulled the shirt off. The mirror was small but he could still see the scar, whitish pink and thick, ugly. He did this often, appraised himself. It was because he couldn’t get used to the way his body looked now and the way it had so fully betrayed him. Cardiomyopathy. Fox had told him it was a virus that could have been waiting in the walls of his heart for years, only to bloom by happenstance and to be nurtured by stress. The explanation meant little to him. It didn’t ease the feeling that the man he had once been was gone now forever. He sometimes felt when he looked at himself he was looking at a stranger, someone beaten down and left fragile by life.