Chill Factor

Just thinking the name jerked a sob from her constricted chest. She was outraged over her own culpability. With self-scorn she thought of how easily she’d fallen for his rare combination of ruggedness and sensitivity that day on the river, of how she had pined these last months over the sacrificed opportunity to see him again.

From the start, he had seemed too good to be true.

Take note, Lilly: What seems that way, usually is.

She was a little old to be learning that valuable lesson, and unfortunately she wouldn’t have an opportunity to apply it to her own life, but it was worth noting anyway, wasn’t it? Maybe she should leave it etched into the cabinet as well, the way prisoners leave moral messages on the walls of their cells for future occupants.

But now she didn’t have the strength even to hold the paring knife. Bouts of mucus-producing coughing had left her so weak she could no longer sit up. She was out of energy, to say nothing of time.

There was one advantage to dying. Imponderable questions were finally answered. For instance, she now knew with certainty that one wasn’t propelled into the afterlife in a blaze of dazzling light. On the contrary. Death stole over one like a softly gathering dusk. The darkening was gradual, the shrinkage of vision almost imperceptible, until only a pinpoint of light and life remained.

And then that too was swallowed by the blackness that was absolute and all encompassing.

Desperately she looked for Amy in the impenetrable darkness, but she couldn’t see her. She couldn’t see anything. Her ears quickened, though, at the sound of a voice coming to her from far away.

It was her daddy. He was calling her home from where she was playing in the next block.

“Lilly! Lilly!”

I’m coming, Daddy.

She could envision him standing on their porch, hands cupped around his mouth, calling anxiously until she called back and told him that she was on her way home.

“Lilly!”

He sounded afraid. Frantic. Panicked.

Couldn’t he hear her? Why couldn’t he hear her? She was answering him.

I’m on my way home, Daddy. Can’t you see me? Can’t you hear me? I’m here!

• • •

“Lilly! Lilly!”

Tierney tilted her upper body over his forearm and thumped her hard on the back. A glob of m

ucus was expelled onto the blanket covering her lap. He struck her between the shoulder blades again, forcing out more mucus, which dribbled from her mouth. When he released her, she flopped back lifelessly onto the sofa, her head lolling to one side.

He tore off his gloves and slapped her cheeks, arguing with himself that her face was warm. It was his hand that was cold, not her gray skin.

“Lilly!”

He worked his hand inside her coat, beneath her sweater, and pressed his palm against her chest. When he felt her heartbeat, an involuntary cry issued from his raw, dry throat.

Rapidly he unzipped the coat pocket in which he’d placed her pouch of medications. It was a green silk bag with crystal beading decoration, just as she’d described. When he opened it, the bottle of pills fell onto the floor and rolled out of sight, but it was the inhalers he was after. He scanned the labels. They might just as well have been written in Greek.

One, he remembered her telling him, was used to prevent attacks. The other was to provide immediate relief to a patient suffering a severe attack. But he didn’t know which was which.

He shoved one of the short nozzles past her bloodless lips, worked it between her teeth, and depressed the canister. “Lilly, breathe.”

She lay perfectly still, unresponsive, gray as death.

He slid his arm under her shoulders and lifted her up again, shaking her viciously. “Lilly, breathe! Inhale. Please, please, please. Come on, take a breath.”

And she did. The drug did as it was supposed to do, instantly relieving the muscle spasms that had closed her airways and, by doing so, reopened them.

She drew in a whistling breath. Another. As she exhaled the third, she opened her eyes and looked at him, then clasped her hands around his where they still held the inhaler inside her mouth. She depressed the canister again. Her inhalations were gurgling, wheezing, awful noises.