"I'm sorry," she said. "Whatever happened, he shouldn't have taken a punch at you."
Mark felt his face burning with shame. What did she think he was, some kind of little kid who couldn't even defend himself? As he wordlessly turned away and hurried down the driveway, he remembered what had happened on the night whenhehadn't been able to defend himself.
But today had been different. Today, even after Robb had taken a swing at him, he hadn't tried to run away.
This time he'd stood his ground and fought back.
And for a moment, after he'd landed the blow to Robb's belly, it looked like he might have won the fight. Of course, Robb had already been recovering from the blow when Mrs. Harris had come out, and he might yet have taken a pounding.
But still, at least he'd tried this time.
In fact, he'd sort of enjoyed the fight, he realized as he started home.
The feeling of pleasure in physical combat was something he'd never experienced before.
It had certainly never before occurred to him that he might like it.
Chapter Seventeen
It had been a quiet morning in the county hospital, and when Susan Aldrich glanced up at the clock suspended on the wall above her desk behind the admissions counter, she was surprised to see that it was only nine-thirty. That was the problem on the quiet days, she reflected-time seemed to crawl. She glanced out at the waiting room, then smiled almost ruefully when she saw that it had already been cleaned up. Nor could she fill a few minutes by setting up a fresh pot of coffee, either, for she had seen Maria Ramirez heading for the kitchen only a few moments ago.
Maria had become a fixture in the little hospital, and as the endless days of sitting next to the bed close by her son had turned into weeks, Maria had slowly begun developing a routine of her own. It had started with the simple housekeeping of Ricardo's room, but slowly she had expanded her domain, never asking if anything needed to be done, but simply watching the duty nurse and the orderlies as they went about their chores, then quietly relieving them of some of their tasks. At first Susan had tried to assure Maria that she needn't bother with the work she had cut out for herself, but she had only smiled at the nurse.
"You do so much for my son," she had replied. "And if I can't help him, at least I can help the people who can." So Susan, like Karen Akers and the other members of the staff, had left Maria alone to fill her time as she saw fit. By now, much of the routine work of the day shift-and the evening shift, too-was being expertly done by the slim and graceful woman whose dark eyes never seemed to miss anything.
Susan had come to realize that, in a way, Maria was helping her son as well, for all the staff had taken to dropping into Ricardo's room several times a day, sometimes simply standing next to his bed for a moment, at other times taking a few minutes to talk to him, even though all of them were privately certain that he was oblivious to their presence. Mickey Esposito-the day orderly, many of whose duties had quietly been usurped by Maria-had fallen into the habit of bringing a book to work and spending several hours quietly reading aloud to the inert form held motionless in the Stryker frame. The first time MacMacCallum had stopped in while Mickey was reading to Rick, the orderly had looked up guiltily and closed the book, but Mac had told him to go on. "None of us knows what's going on in his mind," he'd assured Mickey. "We don't think he can hear us, but we don't know. And if he can, he must be eternally grateful for what you're doing."
Ricardo's room had become the focal point of the hospital. The small staff no longer gathered around the Formica table in the kitchen on their breaks, but gathered at Ricardo's bedside instead. Now, with a few extra minutes on her hands, Susan automatically wandered down the hall to look in on the boy. Her eyes, as always, quickly scanned the monitors over his bed, and she frowned. His heartbeat, always so perfectly regular, was fluctuating madly, and his eyes, which had remained closed and still since the moment he'd been brought into the hospital, were moving spasmodically behind his closed lids.
Even as she stared unbelievingly at the screen, an alarm bell sounded outside the room, alerting the tiny hospital to a Code Blue. Within a few secondsMacCallum appeared, followed by two orderlies and Maria Ramirez.
"What is it?" Maria asked, her voice fearful, her eyes locked on the still form of her son. Then his eyes moved again, and Maria gasped. "He's waking up!"
She pushed close to the bed and leaned down just asMacCallum turned to Susan Aldrich and began snapping out orders for emergency equipment to be brought in. Maria looked up, the eagerness that had filled her eyes a moment ago now replaced with fear. "What is it?" she asked. "Is something wrong?"
MacCallum'slips tightened. "He's going into cardiac arrest," he said.
Maria's eyes widened and her face went ashen. Then she looked down at Rick again, and as she watched, his eyes suddenly blinked open and his mouth began to work. A sound-faint and rasping-rattled in his throat. Maria leaned closer, her hand closing on her son's. "I'm here, Ricardo. It's going to be all right."
Ricardo blinked then, and once more his lips moved. Maria pressed her ear close. Even as an orderly hurried into the room with a cart bearing the equipment to apply electro-shock to Ricardo's heart, she thought she heard her son breathe a single word.
"Good-bye…"
For a split-second Maria wasn't certain she'd heard the word at all, but then, asMacCallum moved her aside so he could rip the gown from Ricardo's chest and press the electrodes against the boy's skin, she made up her mind.
"No!" she said sharply, her voice echoing oddly in the small room.
Everyone around the bed stopped what they were doing and stared at Maria.
"But he's going to-"MacCallum began. He stopped as Maria nodded.
"He's going to die," she said softly. "I know it. He knows it. We must let him go."
Susan Aldrich gasped, andMacCallum himself flinched at Maria's words. He glanced at the monitors once more. Ricardo's blood pressure was dropping rapidly and his heartbeat was coming only spasmodically now. "Are you sure?" he asked.
Maria hesitated only the barest fraction of a second. Her eyes were flooded with tears, but she nodded. "I'm sure. We must let him go. He has said good-bye to me, and so I must say good-bye to him." Then, as the others watched in silence, she leaned down and gently kissed Ricardo's lips.
Susan Aldrich took one of the boy's hands in her own, and Mickey Esposito took the other. MacMacCallum reached down to lay his hand on the boy's forehead. Though all of them knew that Ricardo was totally incapable of any kind of speech, none of them was willing to take Maria's single consolation away from her. A moment later Ricardo Ramirez's eyes opened once more and appeared to come into brief focus.
What might have been only a spasmodic twitching-but could also have been the barest trace of a smile-worked at the corners of his mouth.
Then his eyes closed once more. The line on the heart monitor went flat. And a single steady note-almost like a dirge-began to sound.
Ricardo Ramirez was dead.
Half an hour later MacMacCallum sat in his office, numbly staring at the completed death certificate. Like the rest of the staff at County Hospital, he had been taken completely by surprise by the boy's sudden death. Like the others, Mac had also taken to dropping by Rick's room several times each day-not because there was anything specific that needed to be done for the boy, but simply because even in his comatose condition, there was something about the boy that reached out to him. He, too, had come to regard Rick as more than simply a patient. Quite simply, even though he and Rick had never exchanged so much as a single word, MacMacCallum had come to regard him as a friend.