Joana was alive.
Chapter 3
Somebody finally shut off the record player to kill the blaring disco sound. The young people gathered quietly around the still form of Joana Raitt at the side of the swimming pool. The colored lights still gave a jarring look of gaiety to the apartment recreation deck.
One of the girls who lived in the apartment held Joana's head in her lap. She braced it with her hands to keep it from rolling from side to side. Glen Early was on his knees beside her. Repeatedly he bent forward and put his mouth over Joana's to force his breath into her lungs, trying to give her life. Then he would raise up and count slowly to five while the air sighed back out of Joana's mouth along with a trickle of water from the pool. She was pale and cold, and there was no sign she would breathe on her own.
Joana, come back! Glen cried in his mind. He could not let this unthinkable thing happen. Breathe into her mouth, count five, breathe, count five. He would keep it up as long as he had breath of his own to give her. Breathe, count five, breathe. Glen was blind and deaf to everything going on around him. His whole being was focused on the pale form lying there on the grass.
Somehow, without Glen really being aware of it, this girl had come to be a vital part of his life. The mundane things that happened to him every day on his job were transformed into amusing adventures merely by the telling of them to Joana. The pleasures of his life were so much richer shared with Joana. He could not lose her now. He would not allow it to happen.
As Glen worked on, the people around him talked in short, excited bursts.
"Did anybody call an ambulance?"
"The paramedics are coming."
"I don't know what good they can do."
'Isn't anybody here a doctor?"
"There's one living in the apartment."
"That's right, Dr. Hovde."
"What unit is he in?"
"Number 12. It's over on the other side by the tennis courts."
"Come on, let's go get him if he's in."
On the far side of the apartment complex, away from the swimming pool and the party deck, Dr. Warren Hovde heard the thump of the disco music suddenly stop. He pulled out a thin gold pocket watch and consulted the delicate hands. It was only a little after ten, much too early for a Marina Village party to shut down, even a mid-week party like this one.
Maybe they blew out an amplifier, the doctor thought hopefully. Whatever the cause, he leaned back to savor the relative quiet while it lasted.
Warren Hovde was fifty-five, which made him one of the senior residents of the Marina Village complex. He wore Brooks Brothers suits in the daytime and he liked classical music, two peculiarities that did not fit in with the local life style. But it was not for the life style that Dr. Hovde chose his furnished one-bedroom unit in the Village. He had taken it because it was convenient to his Santa Monica office and the hospital in West Los Angeles where he put in two afternoons a week. His attorney had found it for him last month when he and Marge decided on the divorce.
He missed the spacious ranch bungalow in Encino, but that would go to Marge, of course, along with the furniture. Also the Mercedes, both the kids, and O'Hara, the Irish setter. Warren came out with the VW Rabbit, his record collection, and an apartment on the Marina where everybody but him seemed to be engaged in a perpetual party.
Warren Hovde had had his fill of parties in Encino. There the whole purpose seemed to be to get drunk enough to get it on with somebody else's wife. Since Warren only wanted to get it on with his own wife, he was considered an old bore. At the Marina Village he was considered merely old.
Lord, was he really middle-aged? He didn't feel middle-aged. Wasn't it just the other day he had turned thirty and could dance all the steps of the cha-cha like an expert until the bars closed? Where the hell did the years go, anyway?
Dr. Hovde sighed and pushed the melancholy thoughts to the bottom of his mind. From a rack on the floor he selected a Mozart record that always made him feel better. He set it gently on the turntable, being careful not to fingerprint the grooves, the way Marge had taught him.
He settled back on the vinyl sofa and put his feet up on the Formica coffee table and let the astringent harmonies of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik cleanse his mind.
Someone rapped urgently on the sliding glass door that opened out onto the tennis courts. The courts were uncommonly empty tonight, with the party going on around by the pool. Warren swung his feet reluctantly to the floor as the rapping continued.
A voice called from outside. "Dr. Hovde, are you home? There's been an accident."
Oh, Lord, he thought, not another OD. At a party last week one of the guests arrived freaked out on angel dust and tried determinedly to put his head through a cinder-block wall. It took three strong young men to hold him down while Dr. Hovde pumped a tranquilizer into him. Last he heard, the kid was in a private sanitarium, still blasted out of his skull. Fortunately, the parties here ran to booze and grass, and maybe a little coke.
Dr. Hovde slid open the glass door. Outside stood a young man and woman, their faces tight and anxious.
"It's a girl, doctor," the young man said. "She was in the pool. She looks drowned."
"What's been done for her?"
"Her boyfriend is giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation."
"All right, let's go." The doctor took his compact emergency case from the end table where he kept it and hurried out, the strains of Mozart fading behind him.
He followed the young people at a jog around the building and into the courtyard where the recreation deck and pool were located. A cluster of people stood on the strip of grass beside the pool.
"Here's the doctor," called the young man. "Let him through."
The people gave way and Dr. Hovde saw the still form of the girl lying on the grass. Another girl held her head while a young man the doctor recognized as Glen Early breathed into her mouth. He looked up dazedly as the doctor came through the crowd.-
"Keep it up," Hovde said, and Glen picked up the resuscitation without missing a count.
Hovde took hold of the girl's icy wrist and felt for a pulse. He could find none. He peeled back an eyelid and grimaced when he saw the dilated pupil. The girl's skin was unnaturally white. The doctor feared he was too late.
He snapped open the case and filled a hypodermic syringe from a vial of digitalis. Sometimes a massive shot directly into the heart muscle could get things started again. From the looks of the girl, it was not going to work this time, but he was a doctor, and the people expected him to do something.
The girl coughed.
Dr. Hovde knelt with the hypodermic syringe in his hand and stared at her unbelievingly.
Glen Early pulled his head back from hers and spat out pool water and phlegm. The girl rolled her head to one side and coughed again and again. Water sprayed from her lungs. The girl who had been holding her head began to cry.
Glen Early buried his face in his hands. "Joana," he cried, "Ah, Joana!"
Dr. Hovde snapped back to his senses. "Get her inside," he said. "Wrap her in blankets to keep her warm."
"We can take her into my place," said Glen. "I'm right over there."
Three of the young men made a cradle of their arms and gently carried the girl across the recreation deck to Glen Early's apartment. Dr. Hovde picked up his bag and followed slowly. His mind clicked like a computer, searching for a medical explanation for what he had just seen.
For Joana the fragments of sound coalesced slowly into voices. Real voices this time, not words being spoken inside her head the way it was in the other place. Gradually she could make out what was being said.