by Susanne Beck
I was by her side in a heartbeat, tears liberally mixing with the melting snow my knees were pressed into. "Ice?" I asked, brushing the wet hair back from her brow. "Ice? Can you hear me?"
There was no reaction, though I could tell that she was still alive by the faint movement of her chest against my free hand. I clenched the fabric of her shirt in that hand and shook her, angry at her utter stillness. "Damnit, Ice! Wake up! I didn’t come this far with you for you to give up now, so you’d just better damn well wake the hell up or I swear I’ll hunt you down and kill you myself!"
After a moment, her eyes fluttered open, and I’ve never, not even after an entire month of rainy days, been so glad to see the color blue in my life. Her gaze was dazed and glassy and, though she was looking right at me, I could tell she wasn’t seeing me. But that didn’t matter. Not really.
She was alive, and that was all that mattered.
And she’d stay that way if I had anything to do with it.
And, by any god ever worshipped on this planet or any other, I would have everything to do with it.
The skin of her face, the only exposed surface I could see, was pasty white. Water droplets clung there like clear, fat leeches sucking away her vitality. Her lips were the deep purple of ripe berries, and so swollen that I wondered if they weren’t just going to split, right there, to expose the icewater that had replaced the blood in her veins.
Two men joined the third and bundled Ice into warm quilts they’d brought with them. They wore the rough cloth garb of Ice’s rescuers and not the uniforms I was expecting. I looked up, a question in my eyes. As if in response to my silent query, a tall, bespectacled, sandy-haired man squatted down beside me, an apologetic look on his face. "The little boy your friend saved is alive, but barely. The paramedics didn’t want to wait to see if she was gonna make it out of there too. There just wasn’t enough time. Unfortunately, there’s only the one ambulance, so it’s going to take a while before they can make it back here."
I swallowed hard at the news, then nodded, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. Aware or not, Ice needed my strength, not my tears. "Is there anything we can do while we wait?"
Reaching down, I grasped her hand, taking it into my own. God, it was like touching a corpse. Or at least what I thought touching a corpse would feel like, not having had the actual experience myself. Her flesh was chilled, damp and stiff beneath my hand and I shuddered, half in revulsion, half in fear.
"Getting her someplace warm would be a good start. Where do you live?"
"With me," came Ruby’s voice off to my right. The crowd parted like the Red Sea, bearing forth my diminutive neighbor in all her headmistress glory. Taking charge in her typical style, she pointed to two of the biggest men standing with us; bearded giants, both of them. "You and you, bring her up to the house. Carefully. I’ll go draw a bath."
I looked on in awe as the men, without hesitation, simply did as she ordered, lifting Ice’s limp body in their massive arms. A chill ran through me that had nothing to do with the snow I was kneeling in.
Never had I seen my lover looking so small, so helpless, so utterly defenseless.
It was a scene that, if I should live to five times the age I am now, I wish to never view again. At the time, I was sure the scene would haunt my dreams. And, true to my word, it has.
"No, no baths," the man squatting next to me interceded. "Just light a fire and warm some blankets. We’ll need to warm her up slowly or the shock could kill her." Standing, he reached down and helped me to my feet. "I’m Steve, by the way. The town calls me ‘Doc’, so I guess that’s what I am." His smile was charming and I found myself warming up to him.
"I’m Tyler. This is Morgan."
"Well, Tyler, you have a very brave friend. Let’s see what we can do about keeping her that way, ok?"
I nodded, the words stolen from me as I watched the men haul Ice’s body back towards Ruby’s house.
"Let’s go, then."
* * *
The house was overwarm as I entered, shedding my jacket like a snake’s second skin and walking over to the fireplace to be at Ice’s side as she was gently laid on the hearth rug. As the men stepped away, I took their place, grasping her hand once again and looking into eyes that seemed to be staring into eternity. "Stay with me, Morgan. You’re gonna be ok. Just stay with me."
The fire blazed high and hot within its stone confines, sending out a heat which caused beads of sweat to form on my forehead, dripping and stinging my wide, staring eyes. I wiped them away without thought, looking to the doctor who came to kneel beside me as one might a Savior, with bright hope and a subtle sense of doom lurking in the shadows of my heart.
He unbuttoned her jacket quickly, then disposed of her shirt by renting it from hem to collar with one savage tug, and exposing belly and breasts which were as pasty white and marbled as the flesh of her immobile face.
I felt a moment’s discomfort at the action, remembering her dispassionate tale of men who had stripped her and posed her for their own pleasures. Suddenly, I felt the almost overwhelming need to cover her, to preserve a dignity which she had never thought overmuch of, given the rude circumstances of her benumbed youth.
A plush towel dropped into my hands, and I used it as much to dry her as to cover her from eyes which, I felt, had no right to look upon such vulnerability.
As I was drying her upper body, the doctor reached for the button of her jeans. I immediately dropped my hands, easily displacing his on the soaked fabric. "Let me," I said in a voice which brooked no argument.
He looked at me and I swore there was understanding in his eyes before he grabbed my towel and resumed my forgotten task as I worked to undo the frozen zipper.
Within moments, it was done and she was covered with quilts heated by the fire, as warm and dry as we could possibly make her. The doctor withdrew his hand from beneath the quilts, bearing a thermometer which he looked at, brows drawn in a pensive frown, before shaking it down and placing it back in his case.
She lay still as death beneath her vestments of cloth and down, too deep within her own mind to even react to the intimate touches she was receiving from a stranger. My heart hurt looking at her. My guts twisted and roiled inside me as I stared on, helpless.
"Why isn’t she shivering?" I managed to finally get out from between lips which seemed to forget how to form words.
"Her body can’t waste the energy that would take. Everything’s going to keeping her vital organs alive. She was in that water a long time." He turned to meet my gaze. "When she warms up, she’ll start shivering."
When. Not if.
I smiled a little, bolstered by his confidence.
He returned my smile, then turned away, reaching into his medical bag and pulling out an object wrapped in plastic. Opening the wrapping, he removed a long, flexible tube that was closed on one end, open on the other. "What’s that?"
"We need to warm up her on the inside too, but she’s too weak to be able to take anything in by mouth right now, so I’m going to slip this tube into her stomach through her nose and introduce some water that Ruby’s got heating up on the stove. That should help bring her core body temperature up."
The warming up the inside part sounded good. The sticking a garden hose down the nose, however, didn’t. "Will it hurt her?"
The doctor smiled slightly as he lubed up one end of the tube from a foil packet he’d ripped open. "Well, most people gag when it’s going down, but I don’t think we have to worry about that in this case. She’s pretty out of it. It shouldn’t hurt, no."
I looked at him doubtfully, but as he seemed pretty certain of his words, I didn’t argue.
I should have.
After he measured from her nose, to her ear, and down to the tip of her sternum, he tilted her head back and deftly pushed the tube into her right nostril, feeding it through a little at a time.
Ice reacted the way I half expected her to, the way I imagined a wildcat would when trapped in a h
unter’s snare; snarling, twisting her face away from the offending object, and lashing out blindly with both arms.
In her unthinking rage, she managed to crack one muscled forearm hard against the doctor’s cheek and send him flying back toward the fireplace, where only the upraised stone hearth kept him from being pitched headfirst into the flames.
I immediately dove into the fray, trying with all my strength to pin Ice’s arms down to her sides while laying my body atop hers to somehow stop her insane struggling.
She threw me off her body as if I were a child, and a small one at that, but I scrambled back on top of her, forgoing the useless attempt to hold her arms down and instead using my hands to gently cradle her face. "Ice, it’s me. It’s Angel. You need to relax. You’re safe here. No one’s going to hurt you. Please. You need to relax."
My soothing tones seemed to be penetrating the thick fog of her mind, because gradually she began to slow her struggles, her tense body softening beneath my own. Her eyes opened once again, and though her gaze was still dazed, I could see the faintest glimmer of the woman I loved looking back at me.
I smiled with probably more relief than I’ve ever known, before or since. "Welcome back, my love," I whispered, tears sparkling in my eyes once again.
Her arm moved up slowly, but before I could stop her, she ripped the NG tube out of her nose and flung it away, gagging. She turned her head just in time as her chest heaved and a great glut of lake water spilled out onto the towel next to her head.
I clambered off of her and stroked her brow as she continued to retch weakly, gagging until nothing more was left to expel. Then she started to shiver, violently, her tremors so strong that she almost seemed to be having some sort of seizure.
I looked up, alarmed, at the doctor who was just now getting back to his feet and wiping the bleeding cut Ice had given his cheek. "She packs a mean punch," he muttered, shaking his head and coming to kneel beside us both.
Even in her misery, Ice managed to turn her head in his direction and narrow her eyes in a murderous glare before turning back to me, an eternity’s worth of questions in her eyes.
"His name is Steve. He’s a doctor, and he’s here to help." My smile became wider as I gently caressed a cheek which was already becoming warmer. "So don’t go turning him into dog meat just yet, huh?"
She shot him another glare, but remained calm, if still wracked with violent spasms, beneath my hands.
At my nod, Steve came closer, bringing his head into Ice’s field of vision. "I’d ask how you’re feeling, but it’s pretty obvious what the answer’s gonna be, so I think we’ll just skip that one. You’re suffering from severe hypothermia. Your shivering is a good sign, but your body temperature wouldn’t even register on my thermometer, so I’m gonna have to put that tube back down into your stomach so we can warm you up, ok?"
The good doctor had obviously learned a painful lesson on how to respect his patients, if his calm, coherent and logical explanation to my partner was any indication. I couldn’t help an internal smirk. Ice had a way of teaching people things they’d never dreamed of learning. And not always in ways they’d expect to be taught, either.
By some superhuman strength of will, she managed to unclench her jaw and force words out from a raw throat. "N-no t-t-tube."
He smiled then. That patently false "And just where did you get your medical degree" doctor smile that’s issued, I believe, with the diploma and Hippocratic Oath upon graduation from Medical School. Hippocrates himself probably practiced that expression while looking into still pools and waiting for his latest crop of peasants with foot rot to arrive.
I laid a quick hand on his arm, hoping to forestall the storm I could see brewing in Ice’s eyes. Eyes which were becoming more clear and more aware, and yes, more icy as the seconds passed. "Look. It’s probably better if you just ... ."
He raised his eyes to mine. "If there were any other way, I’d use it. But she’s shivering too hard to be able to drink. The tube goes back in."
Then his face paled as an incredibly strong hand clamped down on his wrist. He tried to pull away, but to no avail.
"No. Tube." She didn’t even look at him. Just continued to clamp down on his arm while the rest of her continued to shiver violently.
Oh boy.
I looked from one to the other, surprised that I wasn’t more surprised that a woman who was dying moments ago could be more than holding her own against a strong and apparently healthy man.
After all, the woman in question was Ice.
"Ok!" I said brightly. "It seems we’re in a bit of a standoff here." And I was the resident expert on standoffs, having endured several during my time in prison. Of course, expertise didn’t help when I felt my head nearly being seared off by two sets of scorching glances sent my way.
I smiled. Broadly. Then chose the pair of eyes to look into that didn’t stand the best chance of incinerating me where I knelt.
"She doesn’t want a tube shoved down her nose. You don’t want your arm broken. I think we’ve got a little common ground to work with here, don’t you?"
After a long, tense moment, he nodded. I think he was in too much pain to speak. I know I would have been.
"Good. Then here’s my idea. You go into the kitchen and ask Ruby to change the water she’s warming into a weak tea. Then we’ll see if she can drink it. But if she chokes, or even sputters just once," and here I took a chance and looked down at Ice, "the tube goes back in. Deal?"
When Ice closed her eyes in resignation, I knew the war was won. Almost as an afterthought, I turned my attention back to the doctor, who was looking at me with a mixture of pain and amazement in his eyes. "Deal?"
When he finally nodded, I reached down and gently grasped my lover’s hand, carefully prying her fingers loose from the doctor’s wrist. "C’mon, Ice," I murmured, my lips close to the frozen shell of her ear. "You need to let go so he can get your tea, ok?"
After several long seconds, I had her grip loosened enough so that Steve could remove his arm, which he promptly did, rubbing it and looking at both of us as if he’d never seen us before. Smiling up at him, I gestured with my eyes his path to the kitchen, and when he got the hint and left us alone, I lowered my head the rest of the way and pressed a kiss to my lover’s lips, hoping to warm them with my own. "Thank you," I whispered, smiling into her eyes.
She blinked once, in acknowledgement I thought, then rolled away from me and toward the fire, curled up into a fetal ball of shivering misery.
Unable to stand seeing her that way, I lifted up the covers and joined her beneath them, pressing my front against her back and slipping one arm around her waist, melding, as best I could, our bodies together.
The chill of her bare flesh was intense against the inadequate shielding of my T-shirt, and the violence of her shivering caused my own teeth to chatter.
It was like trying to hold onto an avalanche.
But hold on I did, as the voice of an old science teacher I’d had once filtered through my mind, telling me that skin on skin contact was one way to combat the ravages of hypothermia. Pulling away slightly, I yanked my T-shirt up and over my head then cuddled back down, wincing as my warm flesh came into contact with her icy skin. I resisted the urge to pull away, instead forcing myself to move closer, wrapping my arm once again around her waist and hanging on for dear life as the tremors of her body went through both of us.
Placing my head against the back of her neck, I hummed something nonsensical and off-key, doing my best to let her know that I was there and wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. At least not without her.
It seemed to work, or maybe my mind was just telling me something my heart needed to hear, truth or not, but her spastic tremors seemed to calm somewhat the longer she lay in my arms. Was her flesh just the slightest bit warmer, or was it my body that was so numb that it only felt that way to me?
Either way, I held on, prepared to do so for an eternity if that’s what it took.
Ruby came out into the den, followed by the doctor. Both were holding two mugs in their hands and bearing identical, concerned expressions on their faces. Ruby’s eyes narrowed as she took in my position beneath the blankets with Ice, and I swore I could see the little computer in her mind clacking away and filing this new bit of information for further use.
At any other time, I might have felt some concern over this, but as things were then, I just couldn’t give a rat’s hindquarters what she thought, as long as she helped Ice recover. There’d be time enough for tap dancing around the issue later.
Much later.
"How’s she doing?" Steve asked, coming to stand beside us.
"I don’t know. I think she might be a little warmer, but I’m not sure."
e squatted down. "Well, I kept my part of the bargain, for all the good it’ll do. Here’s the tea. How do you suggest we get her to drink it?"
To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that. Especially not with the slight sheen of condescension I could see shining in his eyes.
Well, Mister small town, know it all, got my license to practice medicine from K-Mart, I’ve stood up against a whole ocean of fish bigger than you.
Biting the inside of my lip for a second, I hit upon an idea that I hoped would work and rolled up to a sitting position, keeping a firm grip on Ice’s waist as I did so. For being a woman without an ounce of fat on her, Ice was very heavy, especially now, trembling and dead weight as she was in my arms. Still, wanting to rub someone’s face in their own mess makes for good motivation, and with a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I managed to bring her up to a semi-reclining position against my chest.
Even if someone had offered me, right then, a million dollars, I couldn’t have kept the smirk off my face at the expression on the doctor’s.
Take that, you little two-bit know it all.
Of course, the hard part was still ahead. Ice was still shivering so violently that the clacking of her teeth was easily heard over the roaring of the fire. Just how she was supposed to drink tea with a jaw that was vibrating like an overused car engine I hadn’t the first clue.