In All Deep Places Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sound of his brother’s sleepy voice.
    Luke began to speak, without so much as a stray thought about the startling revelation he had less than an hour before while he sat in his Lab with a cat on his lap.

Three
    L uke sat with his mother in a room off the nurse’s station as dawn peeked through nearly closed mini-blinds behind them. She was asleep, leaning into him on a borrowed pillow. He had dozed off, too, sometime in the middle of the night. They had been encouraged by the night nurse to get a decent nights rest at a nearby hotel. She had even recommended one, but neither Luke nor his mother wanted to leave the hospital. They had both felt compelled to stay close by, as if they expected Jack Foxbourne to suddenly awaken from his strange stupor and ask where his family was.
    Luke yawned and stretched, and then felt his mothers small frame stir beside him. She lifted her head.
    “What time is it?” she asked groggily.
    Luke raised an arm and looked at his watch. “A little after six.”
    She was silent for a moment.
    “I can’t believe this has happened,” she said softly. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up. But I am awake. And this is real.”
    Luke involuntarily flinched when she said the word “real,” remembering for the first time since he’d learned of his father’s stroke that he had his own set of hurdles looming ahead.
    “I’ve always known life can change in an instant,” she continued.
    “I’ve seen it happen to other people. I see it happen to people in Halcyon all the time. I saw it happen to the little Janvik boy in front of my very eyes . But I just never considered it might happen to us.”
    Luke put an arm around his mothers shoulder and she let her head fall into the place on his chest his movement created.
    ‘Tm afraid he’s gone, Luke,” she whispered.
    “Don’t…” he replied. But he could say nothing else.
    When Luke had finally arrived at the hospital the evening be fore, it was nearly six-thirty. Jack Foxbourne’s face had been expressionless when Luke first saw him lying on layers of white, but his father’s eyes seemed to glisten with fear as Luke made eye con tact with him, as if his dad knew exactly what was happening and it scared him to death. A thick, bright-white bandage was taped above his right eye, evidence he had hit something hard and unfor giving when the stroke had felled him.
    The emergency-room doctor had told them the stroke had occurred on the left side of Jack Foxbourne’s brain, disabling the speech center and paralyzing his right side.
    “But he will recover, right?” his mother had asked.
    The doctor had paused before telling Luke’s mother she really needed to talk with the stroke-rehabilitation doctor, whom Jack would see for the first time later today, about her husband’s recovery.
    “Why can’t you tell me?” she had said, sounding very young and afraid.
    “Recovering from a stroke is sometimes very slow and difficult, Mrs. Foxbourne. And it can be different for everybody. The most significant recovery will happen in these next thirty days. And most stroke victims continue to recover for several months. Usually by six months, though, whatever recovery is going to take place will have taken place. Some of the skills he has lost he will recover, some he probably won’t. He will need to learn to adapt to his new limitations. And you need to know it takes time to learn to compensate for skill deficits.”
    “What deficits? What do you mean?”
    “Well, your husband may need to learn how to hold a fork differently, or walk with a cane or a walker, or button a shirt with one hand. He may need to relearn how to read and write. When the brain is damaged, we enter into a whole new realm of unknowns, I’m afraid.”
    I’m afraid, too, Luke had wanted to say.
    The doctor had said nothing else, and Luke and his mother had spent the rest of the evening and night wondering what awaited them. For Luke’s mother, it was a fresh set of troubles.