Earl felt acutely self-conscious. What now? he wondered, turning to look at Kelly.

She studied him a few seconds, then moved closer and took his hand. The wind played with her long hair, and strands of it brushed against his face.

“Earl, whatever happens between us, just remember that my marriage to Chaz is finished.” Her voice sounded as steady and matter-of-fact as if she were giving a case history on one of their patients. “He’s a brute, and I intend to leave him. That mess has nothing to do with you.”

Her face upturned to his, the glitter of the streetlights captured in her eyes, the scent of her – all drew him in. He lowered his head and gently kissed her.

He awoke to find Janet leaning over him, her lips caressing his. “Hi, love,” she said, glancing down to where the covers slipped below his waist. “You seem happy to see me.”

Wednesday, November 7, 2:30 A.M.

Geriatric Wing,

New York City Hospital

Bessie woke up shivering.

God, had they turned the heat off?

She huddled deeper under her blankets, and realized her nightgown was soaked, her skin clammy.

What was going on? She’d never had night sweats before.

And they weren’t welcome, usually being the portent of a serious problem. An infection, some inflammatory condition, even an occult carcinoma – her mind automatically scrolled through the list, until she put a stop to it. No point in getting ahead of herself. The proper thing to do would be to see if they kept recurring, then tell her doctors. A solitary sweat didn’t necessarily mean much. But she should take her temperature. Whether she had a fever, and if so, how high, would be important to know. A big spike would shift the diagnosis toward an infectious cause; low grade, it could signify anything.

But she didn’t feel feverish.

If anything, she was really freezing, as in cool to the touch, not hot the way someone feels when they have a fever with the flu or pneumonia.

And she was hungry. Her stomach seemed clamped in on itself because it was so empty. That was new. Since entering the hospital she’d practically no appetite at all.

She reached for her call button to summon her nurse and ask for a thermometer.

Then hesitated.

The night shift here were often a bitchy bunch. Most were floats, especially on geriatric floors where the mission was custodial, not nursing in the curative sense. Always understaffed, they rarely missed an opportunity to express what a burden the elderly were. Most requests for the simplest of items, like a bedpan or medication for pain, they met with rolled eyes and exaggerated sighs. They saved outright contempt for those who committed the ultimate crime of placing extra demands on them by being sick as well as old.

No, better she not invite the witches to her bedside. Leave everything until morning rather than risk trouble now. Not that she’d tolerate any rudeness from one of those shrews. She felt uncharacteristically aggressive tonight.

Curling into a ball, she drew the covers over her head, trying to conserve body heat.

It didn’t help.

He skin continued to feel slimy. The pain behind her eyes grew worse.

She emerged and reached to where the call button was pinned to her bedding. Her hand shook as she gathered it into her palm and pressed.

“They better not mess with me tonight,” she muttered, staring through the gloom at her closed door, waiting for one of them to arrive.

No response.

Bloody cows!

She pressed again.

The silence of her room became a rushing noise in her ears. The moon outside her window shone unusually bright. It hurt her eyes to look at it, yet the darkness closed in on her, immune to illumination.

She pushed the call button over and over.

It mustn’t be working, she thought, tugging on the end that looped past the head of her bed to where it attached to the wall.

It came freely as she pulled, until the plug itself lay in her hand. Staring at it, she had to make a massive mental effort to realize it wasn’t hooked up anymore. Her thoughts all at once shattered into fragments, and she couldn’t thread them together.

“Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”

No response.

“Come and help me.”

Still nothing.

That’s right, she remembered, her mind working again. People shrieked and yelled all night on this ward, yet no one paid them any heed.

With great effort she kicked off her covers.

The shivering increased, and she could feel her limbs twitch in the cold. Somehow she managed to get them over the edge of the bed.

Now to sit up.

Her vision dimmed, and she became locked in the black confines of her own skull. Then tiny explosions of light, like stars scintillating in space, invaded the darkness. These stars grew taller and wider, becoming squares of white, each encroaching on the night and peeling it away in strips. The experience seemed vaguely familiar, but her mind couldn’t piece her symptoms into a diagnosis. Neither could she see where to plug in the disconnected wire.

She pushed herself erect until she perched on the side of the mattress, her bare feet brushing against the floor, her thinking reduced to shreds of instinct until she felt only the impulse to launch herself forward and walk.

She levered herself off onto the cold tiles and took a step, flailing ahead with her arms like a blind person.

She took another step, and flailed some more, seeking something to lean on.

But she found nothing.

She tottered forward.

And slapped her palms against a wall.

Her thinking cleared enough to remember where the door should be and, feeling her way along, she lurched toward it. When her fingers found the handle she steadied herself, took a deep breath, and pulled it open. “Help me!” she cried, barely able to keep herself upright. “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

Her voice blended in with the howls and shrieks of the senile old crones on the ward, the ones whom a phenothiazine cocktail never seemed to knock out and whose pleas to go home reverberated ceaselessly up and down the halls.

She felt certain that their calls sounded louder tonight. How could she have ignored such cries before, the way the nurses did?

She tried again to make herself heard, yelling as she sank to the floor, half-in, half-out of her room. Her mind vacillated between lucid seconds of frantically attempting to figure out what could be happening to her and timelessly floating through a searing light that she still found familiar – something some patients had once described to her, yet she couldn’t quite remember their disease.

The plaintive wailing grew in volume, closed in and swallowed her.