The Bird Cage Read Online Free

for ten minutes. I didn’t hear it go off. Didn’t smell the smoke. Nothing.”
    “I was in a chair, no memory of getting to a chair. Nothing,” she whispered. “I don’t know how long I was like that. Just nothing.”
    For a time neither spoke again. Then Trevor rose. “I have to go back to the hospital. I’ll leave a note here for Cody.” He wrote his note on the back of an envelope and stuck it into the wallet so that most of it showed.
    She stood, clutching the chair back. “What if it happens again? While you’re driving? While I’m driving?”
    He looked at her bleakly. Yes, he thought, he believed his mother had had a flashback, too. Like a statue behind the steering wheel, the road ahead gone, everything gone, just a blank, and now she was in intensive care. “We should stay together for now,” he said. “Just for now, until we know what’s going on.”
    “Whoever is driving has to keep talking. If I stop talking or you stop, take the steering wheel, put on the brake, what?”
    “Back streets, no freeway, drive slowly. Grab the steering wheel and the hand brake,” he said hoarsely. Would that be enough? He didn’t know. “Come on, let’s go.”

    Grace watched Edward Markham as he made his way awkwardly to the sofa with its pretty green cushions and sat down. After he was seated, she took one of the comfortable chairs on the other side of the coffee table.
    “He’s stable, no change,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll start the recovery period.”
    “I want to see him as soon as he’s awake,” he said.
    “No, Mr. Markham. He’ll need two days to recover, and after that four to six days, perhaps even a little more time, for the same physical tests he had before the procedure, and the same psychological tests. Until that is done, no visitors, no outsiders will be allowed.”
    “I want to see him! As soon as he can talk.”
    “I won’t permit that,” she said levelly. “This is my field, Mr. Markham, my regimen, and I will decide every aspect of this procedure, which I just outlined. You will not see him until I say so and that will be in from seven to ten days from today.”
    His eyes narrowed, and his pasty complexion darkened. He looked very ill, more so than the previous week, as if his disease was worsening rapidly. He was off his medication, she knew. After looking over his list of medications and supplements she had told him he had to stop taking anything. Too many of them could cause a fatal reaction with the drugs she would infuse when the time came. She had hoped the fear of the consequences of stopping medication would dissuade him.
    She had explained the parameters to him, temperature, medications, infusions of electrolytes, hydration… They could only be changed one by one, not in a cluster. She felt certain the temperature was correct, and changing anything else meant another waiting period for observation of the effects. Minute changes, incremental changes. It had to be the drugs. She knew the effects of temperature change. Too cold, death. Too warm, not enough drop in metabolism, either death from hypothermia or brain damage.
    And he had his own parameters. Stop medications too soon, too abruptly, without supervision, a rapid deterioration in his illness. He had cursed the parameters, hers and his. She hoped he would die before that young man was released back into his life.
    “You’re playing a dangerous game,” Markham said gratingly. “You forget your place here, Dr. Wooten.”
    “I forget nothing,” she said. “He has to be in a totally neutral environment when he wakes up. An environment untainted by any outside influence, by any emotional outburst, or inappropriate questions. We don’t know how vulnerable he will be, how susceptible to fear or intimidation, or demands for answers he may not be able or ready to provide. I can ensure that environment. You cannot.”
    “What fear? What intimidation? I just want to see him, make sure it worked. It’s my life at