Read Online Along the Infinite Sea by Beatriz Williams - Free Book Online

And the heart is such a complicated little organ.”
    A light flashes in the rearview mirror, and Pepper jumps in her seat. Annabelle glances into the mirror and slows the car a fraction. The light grows larger and brighter, resolving into two headlamps, and the drone of an engine undercuts the noise of their own car, their own draft. Annabelle glances again into the mirror and says something under her breath.
    Pepper’s fingernails dig into the leather seat next to her leg. “What is it?” she says.
    There is a flash of bright blue, followed instantly by red, and the shriek of a siren sails above their heads. Annabelle swears again—loudly enough that Pepper recognizes the curse as French—and slows the car.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œWhat else can I do?”
    The car drifts to the shoulder, and the siren reaches a new pitch behind them. The red and blue lights fill the air, throwing a lurid pattern on Annabelle’s cheeks and neck. She brakes gently, until the car comes to a stop. The siren screams in Pepper’s ears. She clenches her hands into balls of resistance against the authority of the roaring engine drawing up behind them, the unstoppable force that has found them here, of all places, in the middle of the night, on a deserted Florida highway next to the restless Atlantic. Two well-dressed women inside a car of rigid German steel.
    The steel vibrates faintly. The lights and the roar increase to gigantic proportion, drenching the entire world, and then everything hurtleson to their left. The siren begins its Doppler descent, and the world goes black again, except for the flashing lights that narrow and narrow and finally disappear around a curve in the road, and the moon that replaces them.
    â€œHoly God,” says Pepper, and she opens the car door and vomits into the sand.

Annabelle
    ISOLDE
• 1935
    1.
    The doctor arrived over the side of the boat just after I laid Stefan out on the deck and loosened the tourniquet.
    â€œWhy did you loosen this?” he demanded, dropping his bag on the deck and stripping his jacket.
    â€œBecause it had been on for well over half an hour. I wanted to save the leg.”
    â€œThere is no use saving the leg if the patient bleeds to death.”
    At which point Stefan opened one eye and told the esteemed doctor he wanted to keep his fucking leg, and if the esteemed doctor couldn’t speak with respect to the woman who had saved Stefan’s life, the esteemed doctor could walk the fucking plank with a bucket of dead fish hanging around his neck to attract the sharks.
    The doctor said nothing, and I assisted him right there on the deck as he dug into the hole and extracted the bullet, as he cleaned and stitched up the wound and Stefan drifted in and out of consciousness,always waking up with a faint start and a mumbled apology, as if he had somehow betrayed us by not remaining alert while the forceps dug into his raw flesh and the antiseptic was poured over afterward.
    â€œYou are a lucky man, Silverman,” said the doctor, dropping the small metal bullet into a towel, and I thought, Silverman, Stefan Silverman, that’s his name, and wiped away the gathering perspiration on his broad forehead.
    The doctor asked for the sutures, and I rooted through the bag and laid everything out on the towel next to Stefan’s arm: sutures, needle, antiseptic. “What’s your blood type, nurse?” the doctor asked as he worked, as I silently handed him each suture, and I said I was O negative, and he replied: “Good, what I hoped you would say. Can you spare a pint, do you think?” and I said I could, of course, of course. I was glowing a little, in my heart, because he had called me
nurse
, and no one had ever called me anything useful before. And because I had brought Stefan Silverman safely to his ship through the dark and the salt wind, and the doctor was efficiently fixing him, putting his leg back together