Kindle held a hammer in his hand. A sheet of plywood and two pine planks were leaning against one wall.
Matt sat down on the tiled floor, panting. Water ran off him in all directions. He looked at Kindle. “You were about to board up that door.”
“Yup.”
“You couldn’t have waited?”
“It didn’t seem wise.”
“Kind of a vote of confidence, isn’t it?”
Kindle smiled. “Welcome back anyway.”
Abby Cushman met him where the stairs opened into the hospital basement. She briefed him on Paul Jacopetti’s medical crisis and added, “He’s resting easier now, though the pain hasn’t entirely gone away.”
“I’ll look at him. But I need to change into dry clothes first. Do me a favor—make sure Miriam gets dried off, too. Maybe you can find some fresh clothes to fit her.”
“All right.” But Abby hesitated. “Matt—I should tell you, I nearly fell apart when Paul got sick. It was a little embarrassing. Well—more than a little.”
“Abby, you’ve done fine. Without you, we wouldn’t all be here. You can’t handle every crisis that comes along—nobody could.”
“But I could have done better. Matt, I don’t know anything at all about first aid! The most I ever did at home was spray Bactine on scraped knees. Maybe sometime you could give us a short course?”
“I will. Should have done it months ago.”
“We’ve all been busy. But speaking of first aid, Beth was a wonder! She didn’t do anything in particular—mainly convinced Mr. Jacopetti to take his dentures out. But she calmed him right down, and it looked like she knew what she was doing. You have a student there!”
“I taught her CPR. Gave her a first-aid manual to read at home.”
“Well, she’s a quick study, anyhow. Bright young woman.”
“When she wants to be,” Matt said.
In clean, dry denim—and despite the shriek of the ventilator ducts, which Abby had warned him about—Matt felt 100 percent better.
It was his experience that bad weather tended to shrink a room. The basement cafeteria, a cavernously large space, had contracted to circles of light around the battery lanterns. It wasn’t just a room anymore. It was a huddling place, a dry cave.
He spoke to Paul Jacopetti and read his blood pressure, which was slightly but not dangerously elevated.
“Doc,” Jacopetti said.
Matt unwound the sphygmomanometer cuff from Jacopetti’s pale arm. It was always the difficult ones who called you “Doc.”
“Yes, Mr. Jacopetti?”
“Can I put my thucking teece back?”
“Certainly. Beth was worried you might pass out. But that doesn’t seem likely at this point.”
And Matt looked away politely while Jacopetti slipped his dentures into his mouth.
“Everybody says angina,” Jacopetti said. “It’s not a heart attack, it’s angina. Okay, good, but how is that better? It feels like a fucking heart attack.”
“They’re not necessarily different. Angina pectoris is the pain you feel when your heart’s not getting enough blood through the coronary arteries. The heart works harder to compensate, and it simply gets tired—the way any muscle hurts if you overwork it. It’s a symptom of coronary disease, but in your case the heart itself seems to be basically sound. We can treat the angina with drugs called beta blockers, which help the muscle ease up a little bit”
Jacopetti was frowning, trying to digest this information. “How long do I take these drugs?”
Probably the rest of your life, Matt thought. If we can find a supply. And keep them from going bad. It was one of those facts of life he still hadn’t grown accustomed to: no new pharmaceuticals. No more free pencils or coffee mugs from drug companies promoting Tofranil or Prozac. No more Tofranil. No more Prozac. No more insulin, come to that, or penicillin, or measles vaccine… not unless he could locate every ounce of every significant drug and store it somehow, refrigerate it, prolong its active life.
Must get this advice to the Boston and Toronto people, Matt thought. Should have done it sooner.
Christ, everything had gotten away from him these last few months. He had been blinkered by his fear for Rachel, transfixed by her slow evolution. But Rachel was gone. It was past time to pick up the fragments of his life, including his work.
“You’ll probably be on medication for some time,” Matt said, “but I can’t tell you for sure until we do a more thorough workup. Not until the storm passes, obviously.”
“If it ever does,” Jacopetti said. “In the meantime… it still hurts.”
“I’ll go up to the pharmacy and find you something. Lie still while you’re waiting, all right? Don’t exert yourself.”
“I’m not going fucking dancing,” Jacopetti said.
Matt checked in with Abby before venturing upstairs.
She might have fumbled the Jacopetti crisis, but she was doing a fine job as den mother. She had helped Miriam Flett into a dry outfit and settled her onto a mattress with coffee and Oreos. Now Abby was contemplating the possibility of a hot communal meal—“Maybe a little later, if Tom gets his generator working and we can run the microwave. I think that would cheer people up, don’t you? It’s hard enough just keeping track of everybody. Some of us want to move into the hallway—it’s quieter there and closer to the bathroom. Would that be all right?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“People are scattering all over. I don’t know where Beth got to. Or Joey, for that matter. Is the whole basement safe?”
“Oh, probably. But we should encourage people to stay together. And I don’t want anyone running around upstairs.”
“Upstairs is dangerous?”
“It could be. If not now, later.”
“But you’re going up there.”
“Only for a moment, Abby.”
“Matt, you look terribly tired. Maybe you should lie down for a while.”
“Soon. I just have to pick up some pills for Mr. Jacopetti.”
“Poor man. Sick on a night like this. Matt, I had the most terrible thought about him.” She lowered her voice. “I thought he was having a heart attack because it was the best possible way to annoy me. For maybe three seconds, I really thought that! Should I be ashamed of myself?”
“Abby, if I’d been here, I might have had the same suspicion.”
She looked pleased and grateful. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Check in when you come back downstairs?”
He promised he would.
At that moment, the thunder began.
The storm was complex, peculiar—a whole inventory of storms, Matt thought, one layer upon another.
The stairs ran upward through a cinderblock stairwell at the southwestern corner of the hospital. The ground-floor fire exit had been boarded over, but there hadn’t been time to seal the second- and third-story windows. One had broken. A trickle of rainwater ran down the stairs between Mart’s feet.
The thunder, a sudden new presence, was continuous. It had taken Matt a moment to identify it as thunder, not the approach of some mechanical leviathan from the west. With the thunder, lightning. The lightning lit the stairwell from above with a diffuse reddish-purple glow. It flickered but was never wholly absent.
Matt supposed Abby was right, he was tired, mortally tired—too tired, at any rate, to be frightened of this new evolution of the storm. It wasn’t even a hurricane, it was something larger, still nameless. Peak winds in a hurricane were what, 200 miles per hour? Maximum. And in this tsunami of wind currently breaking against the flank of the Coast Range? Three hundred miles per hour around the eye wall? More? And how powerful was that? Powerful enough to level Buchanan, Matt supposed. And drown half of it in the storm surge.