Riptide

Becca said from the doorway, “I’m happy to announce that Adam asked me to marry him and I accepted. However, he was hurting a lot. Maybe he won’t remember when he wakes up. If he doesn’t, why, I’ll just have to ask him.”

“My boy will remember,” his father said, a man Adam resembled closely. He grinned at her. “One of the first things Adam told us when he could talk was that he is going to have that second bathroom on the top floor of his house redone so you wouldn’t turn him down due to ugly green tile on the counters.”

“Well, that certainly shows commitment,” she said. “Tell you what, I’ll pick out the new tile and then we’ll see how fast I can get him to the altar.”

She left them laughing, a very nice sound, and now they could do it more easily since their son would be all right. They seemed to like her, which was a relief. His mom was something else. She owned a Volvo dealership in Alexandria and was an auctioneer on the side. His father, she’d been told by one of Adam’s older brothers, owned and operated a stud farm in Virginia.

Well, her father was alive, but that was all he needed to be, thank you very much. Actually, she wasn’t at all certain what he did for a living, but who cared? She thought briefly of his house, where her mother had spent time. Now it was gone, just a shell left. It didn’t matter. Her father was alive.

She took the elevator up to the sixth floor, to the ICU. She could make that trip in her sleep, she’d gone back and forth so many times now.

Thank God the hospital administration had managed to keep the media away from this area. The doctors and nurses nodded to her. She walked into the huge room with its hissing machines, its ever-present mixture of smells that was overlaid with a sharp antiseptic odor that reminded her of the dentist’s office, and the occasional groan from a patient.

An FBI agent sat by her father’s cubicle.

“Hello, Agent Austin. Everything all right?”

“No problem,” he said and a grin kicked in that was positively evil. “You’ll like this. One enterprising reporter managed to get this far, and then I nabbed him. I decked him, stripped him naked, and the nurses and doctors tossed him in a laundry cart and wheeled him down to the emergency room, where they left him, his hands and feet tied with surgical tape, his mouth gagged. Ah, since then, no one else has tried it.”

“I just heard about that,” she said, rolling her eyes. “One of the doctors told me he’d never before been surrounded with such laughter in the emergency room. Well done, Agent. Remind me to stay on your good side.”

He was still chuckling when she eased around the light curtain surrounding her father’s bed and sat down in the single chair. He was asleep, not unexpected, and it didn’t matter. He was on powerful medications and even when he was awake, his mind couldn’t focus. “Hello,” she said, watching him breathe slowly, in and out through the oxygen tubes in his nostrils. “You’re looking wonderful, very handsome. I might have to give your hair a trim though, maybe in a couple of days. Adam will be all right as well, but maybe he’s not quite as good-looking as you are. He’s sleeping right now. Oh yes, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that we’re going to get married. But you won’t be surprised, will you?” White bandages covered his chest. Tubes stuck out of him, and like Adam, he seemed to have a score of needles in his arms. He lay perfectly still, but he was breathing evenly, steady and deep.

“Now, let me tell you again what happened. Mikhail shot you in the chest. You have a collapsed lung. They did what’s called a thoracotomy. They cracked open your chest to stop the bleeding and put a chest tube in between your ribs. It’s hooked up to suction. That thing’s called a pleuravac and you’ll hear bubbles in the background. Now, when you wake up the tube will hurt a bit. There are two IVs in place and you’ll have this oxygen tube in your nose for a while longer. Other than that, you’re just fine.”

He was breathing slowly, smoothly. The bubbles sounded in the background. “The house is gone and I’m very sorry about that,” she said. “They couldn’t save anything. I’m sorry, Dad, but we’re alive, and that’s what’s really important. I just realized that not everything is gone, though. After Mom died, I put all of her things in a storage facility in the Bronx. There are photos there, and a lot of her things. Maybe there are even letters. I don’t know, because I couldn’t take the time to go through her papers. We’ll have those. It’s a start.”

Did his breathing quicken a bit?