I Regret Loving You for Five Years novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Night Watch

Harriet folded the denial in half and handed it back to me.

"Put it in your drawer," she said. "With the others."

I did.

Then I came back and sat on the stool by her bed, because there was nothing else to do but watch her heart.

***

By ten that night, the monitor had started skipping.

Little runs of wide, ugly beats, three in a row, then five.

Each one made my own heart drop into my stomach.

The physician assistant and I took turns at the screen.

Harriet hated all of it.

"I'm not sleeping," she announced at eleven.

"You should sleep."

"If this thing's going to stop, I want to be awake for it." She turned her head on the pillow. "Boone. Talk."

Boone was in the plastic chair in the corner.

He'd fixed the ward heater an hour earlier when it cut out, lying on his back under the counter with a flashlight in his teeth.

There was still black grease in the creases of his knuckles.

"About what?"

"Anything. The stupidest thing you ever did on the Ice."

He thought about it.

"Second winter," he said. "I drove the D8 into the old fuel arch to win a bet."

"Into it?"

"The door was narrower than I'd measured."

Harriet started to laugh and then stopped herself, pressing her hand to her chest.

"How much was the bet?" I asked.

"Five bucks."

He kept going.

The time the cook set the pizza oven on fire making a birthday cake.

The time a scientist lost a glove outside and Boone found it in the spring, frozen.

His voice was low and even and never once in a hurry.

I'd been up for thirty-nine hours.

My eyes kept closing.

Boone got up without stopping his story, took his old wool sweater off the back of his chair and put it over my shoulders.

It was gray and full of holes and smelled like diesel and him.

I put my arms through the sleeves.

I didn't take it off again.

***

At twelve-forty, Harriet stopped talking in the middle of a word.

The monitor went from beeping to one long, jagged scribble.

Ventricular fibrillation.

Her eyes rolled back.

"Boone, out of the way."

I tore open her gown and slapped the pads on her chest.

The pads Boone had soldered at three in the morning in February.

The AED talked in its flat calm voice.

Analyzing.

Shock advised.

"Everybody clear," I said.

The physician assistant lifted his hands.

Boone backed against the wall.

I pressed the button.

Harriet's whole body jumped on the bed.

The machine said: Shock delivered.

For one second the line on the monitor was flat.

Then it bumped.

Bumped again.

A narrow, ordinary beat. Then another.

Harriet coughed and opened her eyes.

"What the hell was that," she said.

"You died a little."

"Don't do that again."

"You don't do that again."

Boone was standing very still against the wall.

His eyes were wet.

He looked at the AED on the bed.

***

The rest of the night she held.

I gave her the drugs from my own Christchurch boxes that would steady the rhythm.

By two the skipped beats had faded to almost nothing.

Her color came back, a little.

At two-ten she looked up at the three of us standing over her and frowned.

"Get out," she said.

"Harriet."

"Both of you. Doc, you look like a corpse. Boone, you look worse. The PA can watch a screen. He does crosswords. He's got the attention span of a hawk."

The physician assistant sat down on the stool and picked up his pager.

"I'll page you if a single beat moves," he said to me.

"Every beat."

"Every single beat. Go."

***

Boone and I walked out into the hallway.

The station was dead quiet.

Neither of us went toward our own rooms.

We stopped under the hallway light.

He looked down at me in his sweater.

"You should sleep," he said.

"So should you."

He didn't move.

Neither did I.

"Thea." His voice was rough. "I said a door with a lock."

"I remember."

"Mine's in B1. It's a closet with a bunk in it."

"Does it lock?"

"It locks."

I put my hand on the front of his thermal shirt.

His heart was going fast under my palm.

I'd spent all night listening to one heart.

I wanted to listen to this one.

"Then yes," I said.

"Yes?"

"Yes. Say it back."

"Yes," he said. "God, yes."

He took my hand.

We walked down the long hallway to B1, not fast, his fingers laced through mine the whole way.

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