Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

to get to his wife, but he wasn’t quick enough. There was a sound of rustling cloth, then a hollow thud, perhaps her head hitting, and she lay on the floor unconscious.

Mickelsson was the first to reach her after Garret. “Stay back,” he commanded, pushing away whoever or whatever pressed over him, “give her room!”

“Is there a hospital around here?” Garret asked gravely. Already he was lifting her in his arms.

“What happened?” Edie Bryant called. “I didn’t see it!”

“I bet it’s low blood pressure,” Ruth Tillson said. “I used to have that.”

Hardly aware that he was doing it, Mickelsson moved Ruth out of the way with one arm, then helped Garret carry his wife into the livingroom, then into the kitchen, heading for the back door, the quickest route to where the cars were parked. Tillson had managed to get ahead of them to hold the door open. Jessie ran after them with an afghan. In the starlight her skin seemed stretched over her skull, elegant and alarming. “Wrap this around her, Pete. It’s cold out.” She draped the afghan over Mickelsson’s shoulder. “I’ll call ahead and make sure the doctor’s there.” He nodded.

“It’s all right,” Garret was saying loudly, over and over, to his unconscious wife, to himself, to the friends around them. “You people stay here. We’ll call from the hospital, let you know what we find out.” Then, to Mickelsson: “We’ll take my car, it’s behind the others. I’ll give you the keys after we get her in.”

“I’ll bring your coat,” Miss Orinsky told Garret, then ran back to the house.

“Alan, you come with us,” Mickelsson said quietly, catching Blassen-heim’s eye. “Help Tom hold her while I drive.”

Blassenheim nodded, one startled jerk of the head, then hurried around them to open the back door of Garret’s Plymouth. When they had her inside, her head on Garret’s lap. Garret fished the keys from the overcoat Miss Orinsky had just given him and handed them to Mickelsson.

“Be careful!” Jessie said at the car window, bending down to look in. Her skin was waxy gray in the dim light draped from above the back door. For an instant her high-cheekboned, wide-mouthed face subsumed the world. On the dark lawn beyond her, snow was falling. The Blicksteins and Bryants stood half in, half out of the kitchen, their visages dramatic—Edie above all, drawn to her full height, solemn, gray and white, like a death god. The others were at the window to their left, pressing against the glass like children. Mickelsson got the engine started and realized only now that he wished Jessie were going to be there to help. As he backed out, she was already on her way into the house to phone the hospital.

“What do you think happened?” Mickelsson asked as they reached the dark, icy trees at the edge of town.

No answer came from the back seat, and he glanced into the rear-view mirror. Garret was looking straight ahead. If he’d heard Mickelsson’s question, he showed no sign.

For half an hour Mickelsson and Alan Blassenheim sat leafing through magazines in the chilly, dimly lit waiting room at the end of the Emergency Room hallway, an enlarged section of the hallway itself, listening to night sounds inside and outside—faraway footsteps, the clicking of fluorescent lights, distant trucks, voices of strangers. Except for a dark-bearded, early-middle-aged man in a brown coat and brown trousers who kept flipping through magazines in a distraught, bewildered way, licking his thumb each time he turned a page, they were alone in the waiting room—practically alone in the hospital, for that matter: there was the stocky, sixty-year-old nurse who’d met them at the door, chattering and solicitous—“Poor little thing! Wait here, please”—and the blond young doctor who’d come ten minutes later—“Tom Mowry,” he said, holding out his hand. They saw no one else. “People complain that the hospital’s not adequately staffed,” the doctor said. He pulled his coat off and hung it on a coatrack. “They don’t know what we go through just to keep up what we’ve got. Three of the doctors here have pacemakers. If they had any brains they’d be retired.” Then, rubbing his hands together like a craps shooter, he went into the room where the nurse had put Mabel—conscious now, lying with her eyes closed, her husband seated beside her—nodded a quick, apologetic dismissal to Mickelsson and Alan, then closed the door behind him. They heard voices, and after a few minutes the nurse came out, went down the hall to a room at the far end, then returned to the room where the doctor and the Garrets were. Mickelsson called his house and talked with Gretchen Blickstein, then briefly with Jessie, telling them what little news there was, that Mabel was conscious and the doctor was examining her. Everything was fine at the house, Jessie said. The party was going ahead full-steam, the guests all still in the diningroom. Then Mickelsson sat in the waiting room again, fallen out of time, as he always felt in hospitals—half reading, occasionally glancing down the hall, the rest of the time half listening to voices in his mind, memories or dreams.

Once or twice when he looked up he saw that, in the darkest corner of the waiting room, the man in brown was looking at him, his mouth slightly open, in his eyes a puzzled, troubled look, as if he were thinking of asking Mickelsson some question. Then, changing his mind, the man would straighten his black, coarse hair with his fingers, and look at his knees.

Alan Blassenheim sat bent forward, a Sports Illustrated open in his lap, clearly a magazine of no interest to him, though apparently the others were even worse. Each time he turned a page he did it with an irritable slap, then grabbed the edge of the next page as if to turn that too, but on second thought went on reading. Whenever Mickelsson shifted in his chair, however slightly, Alan would look up to make