Read Online My Soul to Keep by Melanie Wells - Free Book Online Page B

whole TV-preacher, slain-in-the-Spirit routine—and return Nicholas to his mother right this minute. In mint condition. I reminded the Almighty of my reasonably good behavior in recent months. I promised a lifetime of devotion to the entire Trinity, even though we all knew I couldn’t deliver. And then I screamed obscenities at Peter Terry, ordering God in the next breath to flatten him without mercy and to doom him to suffer cruelly for all eternity.
    God has a tendency to not follow my orders, a niggling little policy of His I find quite maddening. After all this time, He still refuses to budge.
    By the time I parked my truck in the lot at Children’s Medical Center and threaded my way through the ER, Christine and I had both calmed down. She was alert and placid, lying there in her hospital bed, blinking in the fluorescent light and clutching a white blanket.
    Liz was still hysterical, however. I pulled aside an ER doc and asked her to prescribe some Xanax for Liz. Two hours later we were all in a room on the seventh floor, limp and exhausted.
    They’d removed Christine’s breathing tube in the ER, though she was still tethered to an IV and a breathing monitor. She had so many drugs in her system at that point that she slept like a stone through that long, brutal night as nurses walked in and out of the room, flipping on lights and checking her monitors.
    After they’d settled Christine into her room, I went downstairs to the cafeteria. I don’t usually drink coffee, but there was no tea in sight. Coffee would have to do. I ordered some for Liz and me, and I brought a little cardboard tray back up with two steaming cups, complete with sugar packets and that crummy fake cream in the little plastic thimble cups with the peel-off foil tops.
    I handed Liz a steaming cup and offered her a plastic straw to stir her coffee with.
    Her eyes were swollen and red, her nose stuffy.
    “My head’s killing me,” she said.
    “Want some aspirin?” I asked. She nodded. I got up and felt around in my bag for Sudafed and aspirin. I found a box of Kleenex in Christine’s bathroom.
    Liz took a sip of hot coffee, wincing as she tried to force the pills down her throat. She plucked a Kleenex out of the box, swallowed again, and closed her eyes. “You saved her life.”
    “The paramedics saved her life.”
    She dabbed her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”
    I looked down at my coffee and didn’t say anything.
    “I took CPR,” she said. “But I couldn’t think. I panicked.”
    I scooted my chair away from an unwelcome blast of air conditioning and blew on my coffee. “You’re not beating yourself up, I hope.”
    “No. I can’t go there. I just … I’m grateful. That’s all. Thank you.”
    I held up my foam cup. “To survival.”
    “To survival.”
    The coffee wasn’t too bad. I guess they splurge for the parents ofsick kids. We sat silently for a moment, listening to the beeps and bangs of a busy hospital in the nighttime and gazing at Christine, who was breathing peacefully, her thumb in her mouth. She slept deeply, her cheeks still sticky with tears.
    “How did you know?” I asked.
    “Hmm?” Liz asked. I’d jolted her out of a daze.
    “How did you know she’d stopped breathing?”
    “The rabbits.”
    “Come again?”
    “The rabbits woke me up.”
    “Eeyore and Melissa?”
    She nodded.
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “I am absolutely not kidding you. I heard this thump, and then they both started squealing and scratching the floor. I tried to shush them, thinking they’d wake Christine. But they wouldn’t shut up. I got out of bed to find them and put them in their hutches. I didn’t turn on the light because I didn’t want to wake her. She’s had so little sleep the past few days.”
    I realized I was listening with my mouth open. It was a mouth-open kind of story.
    “I kept trying to catch them, but they were too quick. I could feel them hopping up onto her chest. I kept grabbing for them, but