I.O.U by Pickard

Author:Pickard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 1991-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

12

“JEN? HONEY? JENNY!”

A face with a halo around it floated in front of me. My, they had handsome angels in heaven. But oh, how I wished it would hold still. It made me so sick and dizzy just to look at it. I closed my eyes again.

“Jenny!”

Ohhh. I was going to throw up.

“Here, honey, here’s the pan, do it here.”

“Ohhh. Goddd.”

I remembered a time when I was a teenager and a couple of friends and I had decided it would be a great adventure to cross the United States by Greyhound bus. And of course it was. Except that the bus fumes made me sick. Regularly. There had been one time in particular when we were all three standing outside of the L.A. downtown bus station waiting for one of our relatives to pick us up, and he’d been late and the bus fumes had been as thick as—

“Oh, God, I feel so incredibly sick.”

Smog flu, he’d called it.

“Your system’s full of carbon monoxide, that’s why.”

Is that what I had this time, smog flu?

One of the voices I’d been hearing in heaven—the deep, worried, gentle one that I took for St. Peter—was, I realized now, my husband’s. He was the one saying honey and Jenny. The other one was unfamiliar to me, a woman’s that was sharp and high-pitched, and when I opened my eyes again I discovered her to be a nurse. A nurse? I was lying in a hospital room? Must be one hell of a case of smog flu. Over a horrible new wave of nausea, I asked her, “Why’ssyt’mfull’oxide?”

She didn’t respond to my question.

I heaved into a gold plastic, kidney-shaped pan again, and she helped me to wash off my lips and chin. Only then did I open my eyes once more, focus them on my husband’s face, and try like anything to smile at him, though I pretty much failed to do it. One thing I definitely didn’t want to do was to breathe on him. Love has its limits, and I thought that might breach his. The room, I managed to see, was painted a bilious mauve. Geof was leaning toward me from a chair made of chrome and vinyl that was a sickening brown color. The television set, which stuck out of the wall opposite my feet, was turned on to an afternoon Western adventure. Even with the volume turned low, the sound of every bullet pierced my eyes and made me feel like Wyatt Earp’s last name. The nurse returned from the bathroom where she had taken my gold pan. Give me back my pan! She set it next to me on the bed. I felt so relieved to have it back.

“I wish I were dead.”

Geof nodded sympathetically.

But the nurse retorted, senselessly, it seemed to me, “No, you don’t. You’re a very lucky girl to be alive at all. I don’t want to hear any of that silly talk. We’ve worked too hard on you to put up with that kind of

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