yesterday, which seemed pointless, while her cousins described them to her. She’d pretended to be delighted so they wouldn’t worry about her state of mind.
Still not quite able to believe what had happened, she’d tried to check her eyes during the night to make sure they were open, but she’d encountered the bandages. Maybe she’d hoped she was waking from a bad dream and that only the night was black, but it wasn’t to be.
Everything was black to her. Day, night, it made no difference in her encapsulated world.
And never would.
Fear rolled over her in waves of nausea. She fought for control. The ophthalmologist called in on her case had been optimistic, but he had cautioned her that sometimes, when one eye was injured, the other, although medically okay, would sometimes act as if it, too, had been wounded.
Sympathetic ophthalmalia, it was called. There was a fifty-fifty possibility she would be blind, not just in the injured eye, but in both eyes.
Panic swept through her, pushing at her self-control like a log carried on a flash flood. She took deep breaths and willed it away.
The doctor had also said her right eye could be as good as ever. Or there could be a period of blindness, then the gradual regaining of her sight and that it could happen in both eyes.
So, there was nothing to fear but fear itself. Someone great had said that. President Roosevelt?
Relief eased the fear. She could remember things. People’s names. Stuff she’d learned in school. Incidents from the past. She’d pestered Megan and Kate on their visits, making them test her so that she would know her mind was functioning normally.
A mind is a terrible thing to lose.
A slogan for an anti-drug campaign, she recalled. They didn’t know the half of it. Brain damage. It was a thought that frightened her even more than blindness. However, her mind appeared okay.
It had been a week and two days since the shoot-out. If she really did lose her sight… She tried to imagine it, to see herself coping, tapping her way through life with a white cane. The blackness seemed to darken more. She would be a burden, dependent on others the rest of her life.
But it was too early to think like that, the doctor had assured her. There was a chance. Fifty-fifty. Not bad odds for a person who’d been shot in the head.
Tears filled her eyes and spilled into the bandages. She willed them away. Crying did no good whatsoever.
Hearing a man’s voice in the hall, she wondered where Brad was. He hadn’t visited, or even called.
What man in his right mind would tie himself to someone who might be blind for life? a cynical part of her asked.
The man who loved her, came the answer from her never-say-die counterpart.
A hopeless romantic, she had always believed a couple could make it through any tragedy, but it took strength and dedication from both of them. If she and Brad had married, would they have made it through this crisis?
Maybe. If he had loved her. If she had loved him.
Love was the key. She had thought that was a possibility with Brad, but now…
The expectation faded into mist, like dreams barely recalled when dawn came. She felt the loss deep within, a nostalgia for what might have been, rather than what actually was. She had longed for a great love. Without it, life would be lonely.
Inhaling carefully, as if the slightest movement might cause her to shatter, she thought of her guardian angel, the one who had comforted her and eased the fear with his cool touch. He hadn’t been real, but that didn’t stop her from clinging to the memory or the dream of him or whatever it had been. Maybe she would meet a man like that.
Riding that small raft of comfort in the troubled sea of darkness that was now her future, she drifted toward sleep once more.
Rory stood outside the door of room 212. He glanced at the pot of poinsettias he’d brought. They seemed pointless now, after he’d spoken with Shannon’s cousin in the parking lot. Shannon wouldn’t be able to see them. Both her eyes were bandaged. The doctors didn’t know the outcome yet. She might be blind.
He pictured her in her police uniform, swinging across the street with a bouncy step. Her hat had sat at a jaunty angle on her head, and she’d been leading a group of children across the street. The Pied Piper of Wind River, he’d thought in amusement at the time. The later picture, the one of her shot and bleeding, didn’t seem real.
A funny ache tapped behind his sternum as he went into the room. He wasn’t, he saw, the only one who’d thought of flowers. Vases and baskets of them covered nearly every surface and overflowed onto the floor, filling the corners of the room with lush color that reminded him of spring.
The patient was asleep.
He set the flowerpot on the windowsill, then stood beside the bed and studied her face. Beneath the massive bandages covering her head like a turban, he could see bruises along her left cheek. The rest of her face was pale.
Except for her lips. They were pink and full.
Her mouth wasn’t wide, but it had an appeal that made a man want to lean forward and experience for himself the taste of those dewy lips. For some reason he’d wanted to do the same thing at the parade that night.
Frowning, he drew back. He’d seen his share of attractive women… But there was something very appealing about this particular female—when she wasn’t arguing the opposite side of an issue with him. Maybe it was because she was asleep. A man just naturally wanted to wake her with a kiss.
Cynically amused at his own thoughts—Prince Charming he wasn’t—he stepped back from the bed and took in the whole array of medical equipment. The lady cop had been seriously wounded. If he’d been seconds later in arriving, the outcome could have been much different.
It certainly seemed to be an odd case, still of interest to the local news media, although the story hadn’t made it to national broadcasts.
The other two victims had been released from the hospital. The store owner couldn’t remember anything about the incident. The customer couldn’t identify the robber, who, he said, wore surgical gloves and a stocking over his face. Walking in on the robbery, he had struggled over a gun after the crook had shot the officer and the store owner and gotten himself shot as a reward for his efforts.
No gun or identifiable fingerprints had been found at the crime scene. There had been no trace of the perpetrator at the shoot-out, as the media had dubbed the incident due to the number of shots fired. Six in all, four from the robber’s gun, two from Shannon’s. If she ended up blind, then she wouldn’t be able to identify the perp, either, assuming the cops ever found the guy.
Rory didn’t know how much of the story was true. All his information came from the local paper.
He paused in his ruminations when Shannon shifted restlessly. Her lips moved in a murmur. Although his practice didn’t extend to the human animal, he checked her pulse anyway. It was fast. When she became more and more agitated in the grip of her nightmare, he debated ringing for the nurse and asking about a sedative.
As he hesitated, the sun emerged from
