Walking Through Fire by Sherri Cook Woosley

Author:Sherri Cook Woosley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Talos
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Exhausted from hiking, Rachel ate dinner, checked that Adam was still sleeping, and fell into bed. She didn’t know what time the screaming started, the sound reverberating in her head. A mother’s call to duty: illness in the night. She tripped in the darkness, made it out of the bedroom to the couch. Adam’s forehead seared her hand.

“Oh, hold on, honey. Let me light a candle.”

“Mooom,” he moaned, writhing on the couch. “Don’t leave me.”

“Alright, baby, alright.” Panic beat in her chest, but Rachel kept a low, soothing voice. She stretched out beside him on the couch, balanced on the edge, listening to Adam whimper, watching him move, unable to get comfortable. It took almost a minute for the wave of pain to ebb.

“I’m going to get the oxycontin, okay? Give me a second.”

Rachel eased off the couch, not wanting to shake it, and felt her way to the lantern on the mantel of the fireplace, lit it, and brought the orange plastic bottle and a cup of water to the couch.

He swallowed the pill—years of training.

“Give it a couple minutes to work. I need to look when it doesn’t hurt so much.”

Adam held out his arm. The affected area had expanded—almost up to the shoulder and down to an inch below his elbow—but now it was swollen as well as red, and the black blob had grown from the size of a pencil eraser to a penny, puffy with irregularly shaped edges. Rachel used the tip of her finger to probe. Adam’s arm felt dense. The black blob seemed to pulse. She imagined the black breaking off, replicating cells, killing her son.

His eyelids drooped, but his cheeks were red, his breathing labored. He looked so young as he cradled his hurt arm. Rachel wanted to smooth away the parentheses of pain that shouldn’t be around an eleven-year-old’s mouth. Instead, she kissed his forehead then set the lantern on the coffee table and walked to the window. Pulling back the curtain, Rachel wondered if Tamaki was asleep in the Empress Paulownia. Outside there was an eerie high-pitched screech. Rachel felt more than saw a black shape wheel across the navy sky with no stars. Too large to be a bat.

“Hey, Jude,” she whispered.

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