Immortal by Bill Clem Read Free Book Online Page A

got the usual run around about confidentiality and patient's privacy rights. But as usual, also, Marty could always find a willing nurse or doctor who felt talking to a news reporter was an obligation. Marty started with the usual questions about the girl's accident, how long she lived afterwards, family's reaction, and any other news-worthy comments they thought might enhance the story. Marty thanked her pigeon for the information and shut off the tape recorder and prepared to leave the hospital. Soon her journalistic bells were going off.
    Then the oddest thing occurred.
    A scrub-clad nurse strode up to Marty and handed her a piece of paper. She hurried away as fast as she'd appeared and vanished down a corridor somewhere. Marty gazed down at the paper. She felt her legs go weak. Then she looked again.
    That's impossible!
    Just then, the sound of a code blue over the loudspeaker system jerked Marty from her thoughts as she stood in the hall just outside the lunchroom.
    * * *
    Slipping quietly away from Bowman's office, Josh navigated the web of hallways across Ford, wondering if he'd come all the way to Arizona for nothing. If he lost his job here, his dreams would be lost, everything he'd hoped for, gone. Ahead of him, he could see the glass enclosure of the operating theater, where he'd envisioned himself making groundbreaking discoveries alongside Lawrence Bowman. Sadly it seemed, that was not to be. The empty hallways seemed to echo with the hollow voices of distant memories. Josh tried to ignore them.
    Don't do this, he told himself. They often haunted him, when he needed someone to talk to. She'd comfort you, the voice whispered. Stopping at a window, he looked out and felt himself reeling backward into oblivion.
    Lori Waters had been his sweetheart in medical school. Christmas was her favorite time of the year. The year after they met, he took her ice-skating in New York on Christmas Eve. When the cashier handed Lori her skates, attached to the front of them was a small box from Tiffany's. Lori understood immediately. With tears in her eyes she simply said, "Yes." Josh Logan was the happiest he'd ever been.
    Filled with hope, Josh graduated the following year, while Lori opted to quit medical school and hopefully start a family. They bought a modest house in Maryland and married the following year.
    Six months later, Lori and Josh were biking along the C&O canal, when Lori began complaining of dizziness and double vision. They ignored it and it seemed fine for a while, but three weeks later, Lori fell while cooking dinner. This time she went and had it checked out.
    In an instant, Josh's ideal life became a living nightmare. Lori was ill. Terminally ill.
    Lou Gehrig's disease. It would slowly rob her of her ability to function and eventually, even to breath.
    Josh consulted numerous doctors and specialists, but the answer was always the same. Three years tops. If she's lucky.
    Almost three years later to the day, Josh found himself sitting next to his dying wife in a stark nursing home room. Before she died, she shocked Josh with an even more devastating revelation. She was pregnant. They had been cautious with their intimacy, but Lori insisted they try to maintain as normal a relationship as they could for the short time they had left. And though she didn't say it, Josh knew Lori was trying to make it her final gift to him. A way to maintain a connection after she wa gone. Though Josh knew, from his own research into the disease, that her odds of giving birth to a healthy baby were practically zero, he didn't have the heart to tell her. In her final months, it was all she had to keep her going.
    On her final day, a mere shell of her former self, Lori pulled Josh close.
    "I'm sorry," she whispered. "It wasn't to be."
    Lori died on a snow covered Christmas morning. Josh Logan felt like a lost soul at the gates of purgatory, not sure which way was up or down. For weeks he wept.
    Get your self together, he finally