A Love Story with a Little Heartbreak
Page 30
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sometime in the middle of that night, in a room that was very dark, but for a sliver of light that was under the door to her room but too small to provide any illumination, Connie woke up. She felt herself—whatever it was that she was—and she was no longer feeling nothing. She felt alive again. She breathed deeply. She could feel her heart beat. She could feel her fingers. She wasn’t sure she wiggled her toes, although she tried. She couldn’t see them, and they didn’t feel particularly part of her. Not everything felt right, but she felt right in a way that she hadn’t felt forever.
Then she opened her eye.
She cast her vision around the darkness of her room. She felt hollow in the same place on the left side, and her bandage in that location seemed to reach into the center of her head. Her right eye absorbed the darkness, all of it. She looked around and locked onto a very faint outline, a pin stripe of soft light around the room’s door. She could see. She could see what she knew was light, although it was barely discernible. She knew that the rectilinear halo on the door was created by the light in the hallway, the hallway of the hospital she was in. Earlier, in searing light, she had recognized Dr. von Hoerner when he’d stood over her. This meant she must be in St. Agnes in Fond du Lac. She could see a different darkness, framed by the outline of the frame of the room’s only window.
Yes, this was a different kind of darkness, the darkness of night, but she could see it. She could make out small soft shadows moving outside her window, swaying… leaves? Leaves! She could see they were leaves of trees!… That didn’t make sense. It was winter… the middle of December. But—no—it couldn’t be December. Those were certainly leaves, caught in the moonlight or… or maybe burnished by a streetlamp that was beyond the window’s view. “Winter must be over,” she concluded. “Was it spring? Was it summer?” In so much darkness, it was hard to tell much of anything. She wasn’t scared by the darkness—any of it. She could see it, and it meant she was alive.
“But,” a memory suddenly broke into her thoughts, coming to her like a bolt of lightning, “… but… but… my baby?” she asked herself. What, she wondered, was the answer to that question? Despair moved in under the blanket of the darkness of the room. It was ponderous, and it parked on her bed, weighing tons and big and threatening, like a truck about to run her over. And there was nothing she could do about it.
“Mind, be still,” she told herself over and over again, “I don’t know anything for sure. I just don’t know. Maybe I’ll learn something in the morning. I can wait. Yes, I can wait till the morning.” She closed her eye and then, with the help of the sedatives being fed through a tube into her system, she drifted off to sleep, as the truck drove away and disappeared into the darkness.
The hope that was once so infinitesimally small, like the flicker of a distant candle, was growing, and now the flame’s heat could be felt for the first time in a long time. The cold of the emptiness was gone.
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