The Last Hour (Thompson Sisters) by Sheehan-Miles, Charles (reading well .txt) 📕

Her eyes darted to her leg, still hideously swollen under the blanket. “Yeah,” she said. Her voice was grim. She shifted her position just a little, letting out a small cry, then reached for the cord hanging next to her bed. She pressed a button on it several times and said in a bleak voice, “I guess it’s not time yet. They said the dosage is regulated.”

I swallowed. “Do you want me to go talk to the nurse?”

“Not yet,” Sarah said, her voice strained. “I think it’s only a few more minutes.”

“Can I get you anything?”

She shook her head. And then she said, “Carrie?”

“Yeah,” I replied softly.

She said, “I dreamed about Ray. When I was ... before I woke up. I ... this is going to sound crazy, but it felt like he helped me come back. I just wanted you to know.”

I blinked my eyes, trying to push back tears, and bit my knuckle.

She looked at me, concern in her face, and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

I forced myself to smile through the tears and said, “You didn’t make me sad, Sarah. I’m ... I’m really glad you dreamed that.” I sniffed.

“I think I need to sleep a little,” she said.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

“Will you? Please? I don’t want to be alone.”

It was almost a relief to switch off the light and close her curtains so she couldn’t see me. I sat in the dark, in the corner of her room, and let my tears run freely as she finally got relief from the morphine pump and drifted off to sleep.

What she had said ... it sounded so much like Ray. No matter how frustrated he’d been over the investigation and court-martial, he’d never stopped supporting me, never stopped doing everything he could to help me. My thoughts drifted back to the day Moore finally called me in to be questioned.

It was a small panel, but it couldn’t have been more awkward. Gerald Smart, from HHS, attended, but the teeth were Doctor Moore, Lila Renfield and, thankfully, Lori Beckley. Unlike the Army’s relatively open process, this was conducted behind closed doors, and Ray couldn’t attend with me, so he waited, pacing outside the room, all day long. Piece by piece, they went through my research and lab notes, documentation, photographs, and logs for our field work.

Lila, of course, never missed an opportunity to get a dig in. “The two of you shared a tent?” she asked. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Not at all,” I replied. “We had a tremendous amount of equipment to carry up into the mountains.”

“It just strikes me as odd,” Lila said.

My mouth got ahead of me at that point, because I fired back, “Surely you don’t sleep with every man you work alone with?”

Moore’s eyes had flown open wide, and Lori had stifled a laugh. After that, the day was almost anticlimactic. The fact was, other than the complaint from Nikki, there was nothing there, and everyone in the room knew it. Moore had finally called the day to a close at four in the afternoon, and the moment I stepped outside, Ray had swept me into his arms.

I wanted him here with me now.

At 9:00, I switched off with Julia. I needed to take a walk and get some clarity before I met with the doctors. I was getting impatient. Impatient to know how he was doing. Impatient to know what they were doing to help him recover. I was frustrated with being stuck in the hospital: I wanted to move on. Move on to the part where Ray woke up and recovered from this accident, move on to a place where we could be together.

When I got out to the waiting area, I stopped and said, “I need to get some air. Can I borrow someone’s phone? And call me if anything changes?”

Dylan looked up from the chair he was slumped in and said, “Why don’t I walk with you? Alex can call us.”

He wasn’t looking so good. “Okay,” I said. “But I’m not in a talkative space.”

One side of his mouth curled up in a grim looking smile. “I’m not either.”

He leaned over and kissed Alexandra, and stood. The two of us set out, taking the elevator to the ground floor, and I walked outside. The August heat hadn’t hit yet: it was still relatively cool out, the sky cloudless. A perfect day to go floating down the Potomac, or have a picnic, or lay in the sun beside a pool. Dylan walked beside me in silence, his hands in his pockets. His limp was more pronounced than I’d seen it in a long time. Probably the fatigue.

We walked as far as Constitution Avenue. Along the way, we walked by the State Department on our left. I remembered receptions there when I was a girl. Dad’s appointment as Ambassador to Russia, and how kind Secretary of State Powell had been when we were introduced.

Past the State Department, across Constitution, I could see the Lincoln Memorial, the trees swaying in the wind, and far to our left, crowds already forming around the Washington Monument. Directly across from us and to the left, nestled amidst the trees and invisible from the road, was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: a black slash in the ground, sunken below the surrounding ground level, memorializing the names of all the fallen from that war.

“Do you think they’ll have a memorial for your war here one day?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. It’s not over yet.”

I didn’t look at him ... just kept staring across the street at the trees. And I swallowed, trying to spit out what I needed to say.

“Listen, Dylan.”

He nodded.

“You’ve been ... a good friend to Ray. And to me. You’re like a brother. And I know this is just as hard on you as it is on me.”

I heard his teeth grind together, and he looked away from me.

“I just wanted you to know that whatever happens, we’re in