Invasion of Privacy Read Online Free PDF

sorry.”
    “You were saying,” prodded Bennett. “He knew he was in trouble. How’d he know?”
    Mary decided that she’d said enough. “I could just tell,” she fibbed. “He sounded scared. That’s all.”
    “He didn’t say anything specific?”
    “No,” said Mary. “You can listen for yourself later.”
    “If it’s not too much of a problem, I’d like to listen now.” Bennett shifted his eyes over her shoulder. “Well, maybe after. The doc’s here.”
    Mary turned to see a tall man wearing surgical greens approaching from the hall. There was a splash of blood on his lower leg.
    “Mrs. Grant?”
    “Yes.”
    The doctor looked at Bennett for a second too long, then returned his attention to Mary. “I’m Dr. Alexander. Come with me.”

4
    Mary followed Dr. Alexander down the hallway and into the elevator. She listened carefully as he spoke to her of Joe’s injuries and the surgery and his chances for survival. She asked questions. She was the calm, rational wife even as the horizons of her life shrank and her prospects grew bleak, for while she was listening, she was thinking of herself, her past, and how she’d prepared for this moment.
    —
    “Mountains don’t get smaller for looking at them,” the admiral had said.
    Shying away was not an option. But Mary had never shied away from a challenge in her life, or from anything else, for that matter. Her mother liked to brag that Mary lived “with her elbows out.”
    Her youth was a record of plucky survival or divine miracles. She fell off her first pony at age seven. The pony’s hoof caught her in the head, slicing her forehead from port to starboard and leaving her unconscious for God knows how long. When she stumbled into the kitchen, her mother screamed so loudly that the neighbors called 911, certain that someone was being raped, robbed, or tortured with a sharp instrument.
    In the hospital afterward, the admiral pinned one of his Purple Hearts on her hospital gown and admitted he’d never seen so much blood in his life, and that included his time running PT boats up the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.
    Mary’s next brush with mortality came at twelve. While sailing the family Razor on Chesapeake Bay, she misjudged a change in the wind and was knocked clean off the boat by a wild boom. It was December. The ocean was 42° and the current was running strong. By the time she hauled herself back into the boat and returned to the dock, her body temperature had plummeted to 94° and she was shaking like…well, like she was shaking right now. A bout of double pneumonia followed, accompanied by a 106° fever. At some point a priest was brought to her, though Mary had no recollection of any of it. She onlyremembered the Bible she found at her bedside when she woke up, the ribbon placed at the Twenty-third Psalm.
    Later there was a bike accident, a broken leg playing soccer, and concussions playing lacrosse. Mary never considered any of them a big deal. The gash on her forehead was a scratch. The two weeks spent in the hospital, a cold. The priest who came to administer last rites, parental hysteria. She lumped them all together as proof of her invincibility. She’d suffered so much and overcome so many obstacles that she could no longer summon up any situation that might frighten her.
    Queen Mary the Lionheart.
    All that changed with Grace. The past two years had used up all that confidence and then some. There were only so many nights a mother could spend by a bedside, only so many prayers she could utter. Sooner or later even the most stalwart faltered.
    And now Joe.
    This was one challenge too many. One mountain she was not equipped to climb.
    She was not ready to be a widow. Not now. Not with Grace and her illness and Jessie and her attitude, not with so much of life still in front of her requiring her efforts, so many days to be gotten through.
    Stand fast, girl. One hand for the boat and an eye on the horizon
.
    The elevator reached the fifth floor.