Mortality Bridge by Steven R. Boyett Read Free Book Online Page A

Atlantic, anyway.” She blew to cool the coffee.
    “Same thing.”
    Water gurgled on the hull.
    They opened a brown paper sack and ate thick bearclaws and washed them down with strong fresh coffee. They floated without speech or navigation as they ate and drank and watched the sun burn off the mist.
    “So,” he finally said, “here we are.”
    Jem looked away from the rumpled shoreline drawing slowly past. She seemed a little disbelieving she was here, like someone recovering her memory in the midst of a vacation. “Here we are. I swore I wouldn’t.”
    “I know.”
    She watched him and he looked steadily back. “But you really do seem changed. Since—” She gestured vaguely.
    “You can say it. Since the accident.”
    She nodded but said nothing. Niko took her napkin and put it with his in the paper sack that had held the bearclaws and folded the sack then crumpled it.
    They floated.
    “I wish I could’ve met your brother.”
    Now Niko made his own vague gesture and looked out at the fractured mirror of the lake. “Yeah.”
    “It saved you, didn’t it?”
    “I guess it did. That’s a hell of a price for going clean.” Her eyes teared as she nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
    He gave a little helpless shrug.
    A fish chopped water near the boat and they both jumped. Jemma smiled a little and glanced at the case between them and they both knew it was time. He unlatched it and pulled out the Martin and tuned it and thought how he could play before a screaming thousand without a second thought yet here with Jemma astonishingly returned to his life and all between them fragile and uncertain he felt his palms grow damp.
    Niko played.
    Jemma watched him close his eyes and rock with their boat’s rocking. She listened to his music, the morning birds, the water lapping on the hull. She thought of how he loved to watch her sleep.
    The final notes had disappeared across the morning before he opened his eyes to find her watching him. He lowered the guitar. “Long time since I had to audition.”
    Jemma took a deep breath. “I think you got the gig.”
    They should have met each other in the middle of their little boat but they did not. They swayed and turned upon the water. They were laughing by the time he brought the boat back to the rental dock. It looked unfamiliar and Niko asked the old guy watching them if they were at the wrong dock. “Hell, you’re at the wrong shore,” the old man said, and pointed them back across the lake. They laughed harder and gunned the engine and fractured the lake’s glassy surface heading back as the sun burned off the last of the mist.
    It was the happiest day of Niko’s life.
     
    HE OPENED HIS eyes as if awaking from a dream but the playing continued and the dream went on. Slowly rocking back and forth. Jemma in the sunlight in her sunglasses with the IV pole beside her. Vamping along with him, slow blue notes robbed of the authority that had been their trademark. But the feeling was there. Their faint duet a fragile elegy on this beautiful California day. A motionless dance.
    He struck a final open chord and set the guitar aside. She nodded and said, “I think I’m ready.”
    Back upstairs he helped her to the bathroom and then removed her slippers and tucked her in and reattached the IVAC monitor and turned it on. The nurse had taught him how. Complicit in their understanding. He got her yet another bottled water and gave her her meds and asked if she wanted anything else. She shook her head and he hugged her and got up and turned down the lights. Just as he was leaving he heard her say, “Did I get the gig?”
    “You’ve always had the gig,” he said, and closed the door on their last good day together.
     
    TWO DAYS LATER Dr. Abkagian called. I’m afraid her latest labs show elevated BUN and creatinine. There’s no doubt at this point. There’ll be a kind of domino effect as her systems start to fail. Days at best. I’ve written scrips for morphine and your nurse