SNOW FELL ON THE CITY OF ANGELS. Unprecedented, the shepherd wind drove white flocks out of the dark meadows above the world, gently harried them between ficus trees and palms, along avenues that had never known a snowy Christmas.
Dazzled, Ethan gazed up into the fleecy night.
Abed in his room, he realized that the roof must have been lifted off the house by a prying wind. Snowdrifts would bury the furniture, ruin the carpet.
Soon he would have to rise, go along the hall to his parents’ room. Dad would know what to do about the missing roof.
First, however, Ethan wanted to enjoy this spectacle: Above him, the snowfall hung an infinite crystal chandelier, its beautiful swags of cut beads and beveled pendants in perpetual glittering movement.
His eyelashes were frosted.
Flakes delivered cold kisses to his face, melted on his cheeks.
When his vision fully focused, he discovered that in truth the December night was full of raindrops, to which his troubled eyes had imparted crystalline structures and mysterious hieroglyphic forms.
Once soft, his bed had been spellcast into blacktop.
[170] He felt no discomfort, except that his feather pillow pressed like hard pavement against the back of his head.
The rain on his face fell as cold as snow, imparting an equal chill to his upturned left hand.
His right hand lay exposed, as well, but with it he could not feel the cold or the tap-and-trickle of the rain.
He couldn’t feel his legs, either. Couldn’t move them. Could not move anything other than his head and left hand.
If his roofless room filled with rain, and if he were unable to move, he might drown.
In the pool of dreamy speculation on which Ethan had been drifting, sudden terror darted sharklike through the depths beneath him, rising.
He closed his eyes to avoid seeing a bigger and more terrible truth than that the snowflakes were actually raindrops.
Voices approached. Dad and Mom must be coming to put the roof back where it belonged, to fluff his stone pillow into comfortable plumpness once more, and to set all wrongness right.
He surrendered himself to their loving care, and like a feather, he drifted down into darkness, toward the Land of Nod, not the Nod to which Cain had fled after killing Abel, but the Nod to which dreaming children journeyed to find adventure and from which they woke safely in the golden dawn.
Still descending through the darkness north of Nod, he heard the words “spinal injury.”
Opening his eyes a minute or ten minutes later, he discovered the night aswarm with pulsing-revolving red and yellow lights, and blue, as if he were in an open-air discotheque, and he knew that he would never dance again, or walk.
To the tuneless broken songs of police-radio crackle, flanked by paramedics, Ethan glided through the rain on a gurney toward an ambulance.
[171] On the white van, in red letters trimmed in gold, under the bold word AMBULANCE, glowed the smaller words OUR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL.
Maybe they would give him a bed in Dunny’s old room.
That prospect filled him with a choking dread.
He closed his eyes for what seemed a blink, heard men warning one another “careful” and “easy, easy,” and when he looked again, he had blinked himself into the ambulance.
He became aware that a needle already pierced his right arm, served by an IV tube and a dangling bag of plasma.
For the first time, he heard his breathing—full of wheeze and rush and rattle—whereupon he knew that more than his legs had been crushed. He suspected that one or both of his lungs struggled against the confinement of a partially collapsed rib cage.
He wished for pain. Anything but this terrible lack of feeling.
The paramedic at Ethan’s side spoke urgently to his teammate, who stood in the rain, beyond the open doors: “We’re gonna need speed.”
“I’ll burn asphalt,” the rain-lashed medic promised, and he slammed shut the doors.
Along both side walls, near the ceiling, taut garlands of red tinsel sparkled. At the ends and in the middle of each garland, small silver bells, three per set, dangled brightly. Christmas decorations.
The bells in each group were strung concentrically on the same string. The top bell, also the largest, overhung the middle bell, which overhung the third—which was also the smallest—in the set.
When the door slammed, the tiny bells on each string jiggled against one another, producing a silvery ringing as faint as fairy music.
The paramedic fitted Ethan with an oxygen mask.
As cool as autumn, as sweet as springtime, a rich blend of air soothed his hot throat, but his wheezing did not in the least abate.
[172] Having climbed behind the steering wheel in the front of the ambulance, the driver slammed his door, again causing the red tinsel to shimmer and the bells to ring.
“Bells,” Ethan said, but the oxygen mask muffled the word.
In the process of fitting the binaurals of a stethoscope to his ears, the paramedic paused. “What did you say?”
The sight of the stethoscope inspired in Ethan the realization that he could hear his heartbeat, and that what he heard was ragged, uneven, alarming.
Listening, he knew that he was hearing not just his heart, but also the knock-hoofed canter of Death’s horse approaching.
“Bells,” he repeated, as throughout his mind the doors to a thousand fears flew open.
The ambulance began to move, and as it rolled, the siren found its shrill voice.
Ethan couldn’t hear the bells above the banshee wail, but he could see the nearest three trembling on their string. Trembling.
He raised his left hand toward the dangling cluster but couldn’t reach that far. His hand grasped at empty air.
This terrible intensity of fear brought with it a clouding confusion, and perhaps he was utterly delirious; nevertheless, the bells seemed to be more than mere decorations, seemed mystical in their shiny smoothness, in their glimmering curves, the embodiment of hope, and he desperately needed to hold them.
Apparently the paramedic understood the urgency of Ethan’s need to have the bells, if not the reason for it. He plucked a small pair of scissors from a kit, and swaying with the movement of the vehicle, he clipped the knot that secured the nearest cluster to the garland of tinsel.
Given the string of bells, Ethan clutched them in hi............