Harvest Read Online Free PDF Page A

home - with a woman. But now, as she felt Mark holding her, supporting her, she could not imagine living with, or loving, anyone else.
    "Poor baby," he murmured, his breath warm in her hair. "Brutal, isn't it?"
    "I'm not cut out for this. What the hell do I think I'm doing here?"
    "You're doing what you always dreamed about. That's what you told me."
    "I don't even remember what the dream was any more. I keep losing sight of it."
    "I believe it had something to do with saving lives?"
    "Right. And here I am wishing that drunk in the other car was dead." She shook her head in self-disgust.
    "Abby, you're going through the worst of it now. You've got two more days on Trauma. You just have to survive two more days."
    "Big deal. Then I start Thoracic--'
    "A piece of cake in comparison. Trauma's always been the killer. Tough it out like everyone else."
    She burrowed deeper into his arms. "If I switched to Psychiatry, would you lose all respect for me?"
    "All respect. No doubt about it."
    "You're such a jerk."
    Laughing, he kissed the top of her head. "Many people think it, but you're the only one allowed to say it."
    They stepped off on the first floor and walked out of the hospital. It was autumn already, but Boston was sweltering in the sixth day of a late-September heat wave. As they crossed the parking lot, she could feel her last reserves of strength wilting away. By the time they reached her car, she was scarcely able to drag her feet across the pavement. This is what it does to us, she thought. It's the fire we walk through to become surgeons. The long days, the mental and emotional abuse, the hours of pushing onward while bits and pieces of our lives peel away from us. She knew it was simply a winnowing process, ruthless and necessary. Mark had survived it; so would she.
    He gave her another hug, another kiss. "Sure you're safe driving home?" he asked.
    "I'll just put the car on automatic pilot."
    "I'll be home in an hour. Shall I pick up a pizza?" Yawning, she slid behind the wheel. "None for me."
    "Don't you want supper?"
    She started the engine. "All I want tonight," she sighed, 'is a bed."
    CHAPTER THREE
    In the night it came to her like the gentlest of whispers or the brush of fairy wings across her face: I am dying. That realization did not frighten Nina Voss. For weeks, through the changing shifts of three private duty nurses, through the daily visits of Dr. Morissey with his ever-higher doses of furosemide, Nina had maintained her serenity. And why should she not be serene? Her life had been rich with blessings. She had known love, and joy, and wonder. In her forty-six years she had seen sunrise over the temples of Karnak, had wandered the twilight ruins of Delphi and climbed the foothills of Nepal. And she had known the peace of mind that comes only with the acceptance of one's place in God's universe. She was left with only two regrets in her life. One was that she had never held a child of her own.
    The other was that Victor would be alone.
    All night her husband had maintained his vigil at her bedside, had held her hand through the long hours of laboured breaths and coughing, through the changing of the oxygen tanks and the visits of Dr. Morissey. even in her sleep she had felt Victor's presence. Sometime near dawn, through the haze of her dreams, she heard him say: She is so young. So very young. Couldn't something else, anything else, be done?
    Something! Anything!That was Victor. He did not believe in the inevitable.
    But Nina did.
    She opened her eyes and saw that night had finally passed, and that sunlight was shining through her bedroom window. Beyond that window was a sweeping view of her beloved Rhode Island Sound. In the days before her illness, before the cardiomyopathy had drained her strength, dawn would usually find Nina awake and dressed. She would step out onto their bedroom balcony and watch the sun rise. Even on mornings when fog cloaked the Sound, when the water seemed little more than a silvery