Black Swan Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

as if looking for something. I followed his gaze and saw my father’s old service revolver lying under the kitchen table. He had probably dropped it when the burglars shot him.
    “Oh, Dad,” I said, stroking his head. “You should have left the gun upstairs. Maybe they wouldn’t have hurt you.”
    My father shook his head again, his mouth working to tell me something. I leaned down closer so he wouldn’t have to work so hard.
    “Dybbuk,”
he said at last. It seemed to take all his energy to spit out the word. His eyes rolled back in his head and he lost consciousness. I felt his pulse stutter under my fingertips. Frantically, I moved my hands from his wound to his heart and pressed all my weight down—once, twice, three times—trying to remember what CPR looked like in the movies. I kept it up until an EMT knelt beside me and peeled my hands away. I hadn’t seen him come in, and yet the kitchen was suddenly full of people. Uniformed police officers, EMTs, a man in a gray trench coat dripping rain on the hardwood floors. They formed a moat around my father, pushing me back. I felt as I had in my dream when I stood on the shore of the lake watching the swan gliding toward its death, as if I were somehow floating above everything. The man in the trench coat was next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him over the beating of the swan’s wings.
    “What?” I said, turning to him and looking into his eyes.
    “I said you look pale. You should sit down.”
    I nodded, acceding to the man’s good sense, but as in my dream I could already feel myself falling into the lake, the shining water enveloping me in a blast of white light that felt—I had just time enough to think—oddly familiar.
    I awoke in the ambulance.
    “You passed out,” the EMT told me when I sat up. “So we put you in here with your father.”
    “How is he?” My father’s face was covered with an oxygen mask and his eyes were closed.
    “He’s lost a lot of blood and his BP’s low. Does he have a history of heart problems?”
    “Angina. He had an angioplasty a year ago. Will he . . . is he . . . ?”
    “He has a good shot . . . no pun intended. The bullet went in just above the heart, but there’s an exit wound a few inches higher in his shoulder. I think it missed the heart, so you could say he was lucky. The shooter must have been lower down . . . crouching or something. Did he surprise the burglars?”
    “I suppose so. I came in after he was shot. One of the burglars was kneeling on the floor . . . he could have been the one who shot him.”
Then where was the gun?
The only gun I’d seen had been my father’s. “He was running down the stairs. He nearly ran into them.”
    “The running and the shock have put a lot of stress on his heart, and he hit his head when he fell, but he sounds like a tough old guy—chasing after the bad guys!” The EMT looked up, a grin on his face that faded when he saw my face. “You don’t look so good, though. You’d better lie down. I don’t want you falling and hurting yourself. You would’ve banged your head hard if that detective didn’t catch you.”
    I followed the EMT’s advice. I still felt, as I had right before I fainted, as if I weren’t completely tethered to my own body, as if I were floating above myself watching the ambulance speed toward St. Vincent’s Hospital, watching myself following my father’s supine body into the emergency room and holding his limp hand while his shoulder was stitched and he was hooked up to an IV.
Who is that calm woman?
I wanted toshout aloud. It couldn’t be me because inside my nerves were sizzling like firecrackers and my heart was beating to a wild drumbeat. Apparently the calm façade didn’t fool everyone; when the nurse noticed my color, he sent an orderly to get me a chair.
    “I don’t want you passing out on my watch,” he scolded in a lilting West Indies accent that felt like a warm breeze wafting through the