Free The Night Season by Chelsea Cain Page A

visited those photographs again and again that year when she was fourteen.
    It was something to do, when she wasn’t sneaking cigarettes in the children’s cancer garden.
    An announcement crackled over the intercom, pulling Susan back to the present.
    Emergency room. Code Blue.
    Henry.
    Susan ran for the elevator.

CHAPTER
    14

    Crash carts, up close, looked like Craftsman auto supply tool chests. Take away the IV pole, the green oxygen tank, and that’s what you were left with—a sturdy, waist-high red metal chest of drawers, each drawer tidily labeled. But instead of SOCKET WRENCHES and HEX BOLTS , these drawers were labeled BREATHING and CIRCULATION .
    Susan wasn’t crying. It surprised her. She would probably cry later. But right now she just felt a shattering sense of dread.
    The door to Henry’s room was wide open, but Claire wasn’t looking. She was outside the door, in the hallway, her back against the wall, turned away from Henry, both hands over her mouth. Why did people do that? Susan wondered. Were they trying to keep their emotions in, or keep the world out?
    Archie was in the hall, next to Claire. He had his hand on her upper arm. He was just standing there with her, in his blue-and-white gown and white robe, his bare calves and hospital slippers. Susan envied their closeness. They looked like they were holding each other up. She hugged her own arms across her chest.
    Claire. Henry. Archie. They had known each other so long, been through so much. Susan felt like an interloper, like maybe she should go. Who was she to them, anyway? She still couldn’t figure out exactly what Archie thought of her.
    But while Claire didn’t seem to be able to bring herself to look, Susan couldn’t bring herself to look away.
    There were things that Susan wished she didn’t know. Details she’d picked up through the years of writing stories that haunted her still. The ingredients in movie theater popcorn butter, for instance. The amounts of fecal matter that can be found in most bowling ball finger holes. And how long a bedbug can live between feedings (one year).
    Right now Susan was wishing that she hadn’t done the story about defibrillation. Because she knew that patients rarely survived if they needed more than three shocks.
    And Henry had already had two.
    She looked over at Archie and Claire again. They were sharing some private moment, heads close. Were they praying? Susan had never asked Archie about religion. She figured that if he had any, he’d given it up in that basement with Gretchen Lowell.
    Susan didn’t know how to pray. She couldn’t think of a single prayer. She wondered, if she Googled one on her phone, if it would count. Probably not. She should have taken that theology class in college. Most of her religious education came from playing Mary Magdalene in a high school production of Jesus Christ Superstar . That’s where growing up with hippies got you.
    When her father died, her mother read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead:

Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest.
    Susan still didn’t know what it meant.
    Henry’s mouth opened and closed, like a fish gasping for water on dry land. His tongue pushed past his lips, then retracted. His elbows were bent and his arms writhed slowly at his sides.
    But he wasn’t alive.
    It was muscle spasms, from the first two shocks.
    It was better that Claire and Archie didn’t see this.
    “Stand clear,” the automated external defibrillator said. “Do not touch the patient. Analyzing rhythm.” The computerized female voice sounded like one of those GPS navigation ladies. Calm. Competent. Bossy.
    Defibrillators had come a long way since they’d tried to revive Susan’s father with panels that looked like a pair of travel irons.
    Henry’s hospital gown was open and his