The Cowboy's Shadow Part 22

"Family only in ICU. They let me in briefly because they know me. I gave the secretary your name, but when she mentioned it to Whit's mother, Mamma said 'Who?' Hadn't Whit told his folks about you?"

"I don't suppose there's been time," Kyla said. She sat down on a vinyl-covered chair, too firm to be comfortable, because it pressed on her bruises. Had she driven all this way in a panic, her rear end hurting, only to have Whit kept in isolation? "Who gets in?" she asked.

"Blood relatives and spouses. Five minutes an hour, but they don't set the timer running too strictly if the patient's blood pressure and heart rate remain stable."

Kyla dropped her head in her hands. Would it help if she fell on her knees in front of the doctor? A karate chop to bring down the harridan who guarded the door?

"Fiancee?" she asked, watching Judith's reaction through spread fingers. "He asked me to marry him." She jumped to her feet, her bruises crying out against the sudden straightening of her legs. "Marry! We're in Nevada. No waiting, no blood tests. I'll -- "

"I hate to disillusion you, but both parties to the marriage must appear to get a license," Judith said wryly. "Whit's still groggy, and they've put his leg in a frame that rather restricts his movement."

Kyla sank down, this time with care. Tears kept piling up right behind her eyes.

She needed to curl in the shadow of Whit's warmth, go to sleep, wake to find none of this had ever happened. "I'll ask about fiancees," Judith said in what for her pa.s.sed for a whisper.

The conversation drifted from the hall. "I sympathize," the nurse said. "We see it all the time, the couples who pooh-pooh marriage. 'It's just a piece of paper,' they say. Then something like this happens, and they have no more rights than a stranger who walks in off the street. She can talk to the doctor when he comes by this evening. Let me write down her name. Jenny what?"

"Not Jenny," Judith boomed.

"But that's the name he kept saying."

Kyla grabbed her purse, slid past Judith in the doorway.

"Tell him I was here," she gasped.

Her eyes remained dry all the long way up the mountainside. Not until she threw herself across the bed in the motel room in Lake Tahoe did she cry. Surprising, how much body motion sobbing created, and how far down it could hurt.

Whit first noticed, in a truly wide-awake sense, the nurse. She did not wear white, like any self-respecting professional, but a blue smock printed with Teddy bears and hearts. She must be a nurse, however, because she stuck a cold stethoscope against his chest and pressed her fingers on his wrist.

How long had he been in this place?

He had a vague recollection of being on a plane, but no memory at all of landing or traveling in an ambulance to the hospital. He recalled Doc Temple playing around with a needle, and next thing he knew someone leaned close, saying, "Mr.

Whitaker" in an impatient tone.

Then a smiling doctor, who had not bothered to tell him how much of his leg he had cut off, only, "You're gonna be fine." Hours had pa.s.sed before he screwed up his courage and asked the nurse, and she a.s.sured him the lump at the end of his leg was his foot. He had lifted his head once, saw some steel rods, decided he could wait until later to ask. After they let Ky in. She would tell him the truth.

Stiff boots. And to think he had almost stopped wearing them, because they rubbed his little toe. The moment they let him out he would drive to Carson City and buy another pair just like them.

A nurse -- not Teddy bears -- stuck her head around the curtain. "Would you like some company?"

"Yes. By the way, what day is it?"

"Wednesday."

"What time?"

"About five-thirty."

"In the evening?"

"Yes."

Tuesday he and Ky had driven to Fellows Canyon, so it was only twenty-four hours ago that he had been trapped in the nook of rocks. The cave had saved his life and Ky's. And now she was here. He practiced smiling. Judith rounded the curtain.

"Feeling better?" she asked.

"More awake," he said. Not better. Actually terrible. But he should not expect Ky to be in Reno yet. She had been in the cave, too, had gone to fetch help, and stayed up through the night. Maybe they had put her in the hospital in Argentia.

Judith squeezed his left hand.

"Kyla came by. She says hi." He tried to lift himself on his elbows, but from that angle he could see the thing that was his foot, so he lay back down.

"I want to see her."

"Can't. Family only in intensive care. Your mother deputized me as family until they arrive."

"Tell the nurse I want to see Ky."

"She went home." Whit closed his eyes. Impossible. Ky would not simply leave.

Unless -- "She's hurt?" he blurted, and a pain stabbed, letting him know he had moved his leg. "Something happened to her up on the mountain, and you're not telling me."

Judith stared into s.p.a.ce. Deciding whether she should give me the bad news, Whit thought. "Please," he whispered. "What's wrong?"

"She left after the nurse called her Jenny."

"Jenny?" That made no sense at all. "Why should the nurse call her Jenny?"

"That's the name you kept saying, so they a.s.sumed of course that the woman who claimed to be your semi-fiance -- "

"Go find Ky. I can explain."

"She's on the road. Someplace between here and San Francisco."

Now what? A lousy time to have to think hard. He set about organizing bits and pieces of brain fodder that whirled around like wind-blown snow. Deep down, something had to make sense. He retreated into the core of his mind, beyond the blizzard.

"I love her," he said.

"Have you told her?"

"When they brought me out of the rocks, she leaned over me and I told her. I looked for her in the ambulance and the plane, to tell her again, but she wasn't there."

His strength seeped away. He closed his eyes.

"Whit, prepare yourself for some straight talk. No woman likes to be confused with her predecessor. She wants to be loved for herself. You've known Kyla for a week -- "

"Ten days."

"-- She's already tired of Jenny. Jenny the perfect, Jenny the angel, Jenny who'll never grow old or dispute you or disappoint you."

"It's not like that."

"How is it then?" He felt too weak to argue, but did manage to catch a thought as it drifted by. "There's war in my head." Judith squeezed his hand, brushed hair off his forehead. The touch reminded him of Ky in the rocks. "Ever since I met Ky, there's been a war in my head."

"Who's winning this war?" Judith asked gently.

"Ky's already won. Afternoon...poplar trees...Remington. Find her, tell her."

"I'll tell her you want to see her. The rest you'll have to manage yourself."

Hopeless, trapped in this bed. Ky at home, other men. He didn't even know her phone number.

"You've got several quiet days ahead," Judith said. "You'll have time to consider how you truly feel. May I make a suggestion?"

"You never hesitated at giving advice before," he said bitterly. "Why ask now?"

She laughed "There's the spirit! If you and Jenny had married, just about now's when you'd be going through the divorce."

"Divorce?"

"How long would Jenny have put up with life on a ranch twelve miles out of Argentia, Nevada? How many miners' picnics and church socials before the bright lights of Los Angeles became irresistible, and she went home to art galleries and the theater? You're feeling a virtual war in your mind simply trying to break the hold of her memory. Think of the war of words -- actual, hard words -- you've been spared, and count your blessings."

"It was going to be 'happily ever after.'"

"Certain events lay in the future, whether Jenny lived or not. Rod would have come to your ranch, he would have contracted hantavirus, you would have rushed him to the hospital, and who would be standing there?"

"I didn't meet Ky at the hospital. She came into the coffee shop." He closed his eyes, remembering, and felt better. "If Jenny had been at home, Ky and I wouldn't have...become intimate."

"If things were not pleasant at home, who's to say what you might have done."

Whit tried to imagine explaining an extramarital affair to Jenny. The prayerful apologies to her ghost had been bad enough.

"Whit, the time comes when we let other people take over the roles of the one who died. We stop tending the shrine. And it's painful."

He shook his head against the pillow. "There's no shrine. I've never had many of Jenny's things."

"The house, Whit. That huge, empty house, never marred by one stick of furniture, outside of your bedroom. You saved the place for your Jenny, the stage where she would act her part."

He mentally walked through the vacant rooms, across the tiled, echoing entry hall. The table, the bronc rider, the couch where he and Ky -- "Not empty now," he whispered. "Ky and I bought a couch and coffee table, because there had to be a place for the statue to stand."

"I'm glad to hear it. Maybe you've already started climbing out of the abyss."

"Abyss? I never thought of -- "

"Your friends have. We've all tried lowering ladders and you kept shoving them aside. Kyla's succeeding where we failed."

"Find her. Ask -- beg her to come see me."

"I'll call her sister. My time's up. You rest. I'll come back this evening."

Kyla punched the b.u.t.ton on her answering machine. Ten messages. She opened her suitcase, listening with half her mind as she sorted clean clothes from dirty.

Very few clean. A business-like voice notified her that a pair of slacks she had ordered a month ago had come in. The slacks she had planned to take on vacation, arriving now, only a couple weeks late. A friend from school asked her to dinner to celebrate the end of the term. Neil's voice on five separate messages, in varying degrees of breathless frustration.

"Kyla, this is Judith. Please phone me when you get in." She stared at the machine, willing it to say more. Whit had taken a turn for the worse? Or Judith would beg her to come back and pretend it made no difference that Whit confused her with a dead woman. She jumped when the phone rang.

"Kyla? Judith."

"I just got home, just played your message. Whit's not -- "

"Fine. Sometime today they're moving him to a regular room."

"Perhaps I can drive over on Sat.u.r.day or Sunday."

"Come right now. He loves you."

"He might tell me himself, not pa.s.s it through a third party. But that d.a.m.n Jenny -- "

"Is fading. He claims he told you he loved you there in the canyon, after they got him out of the rocks."

Those unintelligible words. Duh duh duh duh. Kyla gripped the cordless phone, her thumb hit a b.u.t.ton, the line went dead.

"Judith," she yelled, punching vainly.

Would she be listed under Judith Harris or Dewfeathers? The phone buzzed in her hand. Thank goodness, Judith had called back.

"Kyla. Neil here, in the car on the Bay Bridge at this instant. Looked up your address, near 7th. Meet you at that coffee shop on the corner. Buster Bronco.

Twenty minutes should do it. Only have an hour. Appointment at the hospital at two."

She hated Buster's faux western decor. "I'd love to, but -- "

"Bring your calendar, we'll go over the schedule." Click.

She flipped through the phone book, searching for the Reno area code. "The number is..." Busy. Judith must be trying to callher . Kyla punched redial.

"Dewfeathers."

Kyla wanted to dive into the phone. "I didn't know what he said, Judith. The only thing I understood was 'Hi.'"

"He wants to see you. Frantic to see you. I told him I'd pa.s.s on the message, and the rest was up to him. I'm too busy to do his courting for him."

"Did he say my name?" Kyla asked, wavering between wanting to know and the feeling that ignorance might be bliss. "He wasn't under the impression that Jenny had been waiting at the bottom of that ravine?"