Alan lay in the darkness for a long time — it seemed like forever. Pain hazed his vision, slammed him with every movement of his chest. Something was breathing for him, and it hurt. He wanted it to stop.

He could remember things. Impossible things. The ghostly dreams of a dying man. They hadn’t meant anything, had they? Had they been real? Had any of it been real?

He’d thought at first that Chick had come back to him. He’d thought that his future held some promise.

But the darkness went on, and on, and on, and with it the pain, and he waited for voices that should have been there — and for one voice in particular that had been the reason he thought he’d come back from death. That voice never came.

Maybe I’m still dead, he thought. Maybe this is hell.

But it was a hell with familiar sounds. Nurses titrating drips, rattling carts, turning off beeping monitors, talking to each other as if they alone existed in this dark little universe of pain.

Sometimes they would talk to him, but it was always in that awful we-don’t-think-you-can-hear-us-but-we’re-doing-this-anyway voice that made him think he was a lost cause.

Then he realized he could see light, and after a while he could make out shapes, and the fact that he had his eyes open generated a lot of excitement. But not from the right people. Only from nurses. And doctors, but not doctors he knew. Not anyone he knew.

Where was he? When was he?

And he remembered with sudden horror his attempt to kill a man on a dock, but in the haze that surrounded him, he couldn’t remember much else. He was a doctor, though. Doctors weren’t supposed to be murdering big men out in the middle of...

Storms.

He tried to focus on the storm, because there was something there that was helping this come back to him — storms and boats and knives.

“Up his morphine — he’s thrashing again and he’s going to rip all those tubes out and if he does he’ll bleed out before we can do a goddamn thing.”

That made sense in a disconnected way. He might have said such a thing once.

He faded back into darkness.

When he woke again, the pain was sharp and focused, and he was breathing on his own.

His throat hurt like hell. His mouth was dry and tasted like weasels had being partying and raising their young in there for a year or two. His chest blazed in agony, accompanied by the symphony of fire that was his back.

“Hey,” he tried to yell, and it came out as a strangled cough.

He was in an ICU. In a bed with side rails. One of those rails would have a nurse call button somewhere on it — but he could hear frantic noises somewhere down the corridor: people crying and being shooed from the room, nurses moving heavy equipment, the whump of defibrillator paddles.

Code going on, he thought, and realized he was going to be by himself until that was over.

He remembered everything, though. The drugged haze they’d been keeping him in had bled away, replaced by the sort of pain that would snap a corpse to attention.

He knew a lot of what had been going on around him; much more than he would have expected to know. He remembered being shot. He remembered Phoebe doing CPR on him, telling him over and over that she loved him, begging him to live, reminding him that he had promised her they would get through the hell of Michael and his evil. He remembered Chick, though he couldn’t be sure that was a real memory. He wanted it to be. It had been so sad, but at the same time so full of hope.

But Phoebe hadn’t been in to see him. Not once. Some part of his mind had been listening for her, had been holding on desperately to the last things he’d heard her say to him. “I love you... I love you... I love you...” Because he had wanted so much to believe it.

She hadn’t been to see him.

Neither had Brig.

Neither had Morrie.

He could vaguely remember his mother’s voice. His father’s. His brothers’.

He was grateful for those memories — but he wanted to know what had happened, and only Brig and Morrie and Phoebe could tell him that.

He wanted to know if Chick had been right. If he had a future.

He wanted to know if that last encounter with Chick had been real — and he knew he could never know, but he was getting the feeling that it had been the wishful thoughts of a dying brain.

He wanted so much.

“Call it,” he heard a doctor say. “Nothing else we can do here.”

Down the hall the code had ended — badly.

People moved into the halls again — heavy steps — some of the nurses, checking down the rooms. The doctor, chart in hand.

One of the nurses poked her head in his room, and he croaked, “Hey!” and still sounded like the voice from the grave in some horror film.

“Hey!” she answered. “You’re awake.”

She came in, started poking and prodding him, checking dressings, making him breathe, swabbing out his mouth, giving him little sips of ice because she said technically he was still NPO but maybe she would be able to get that order changed so that he could have some clear liquids as soon as his doctor had a chance to come in to see him.

He had a hard time getting a word in edgewise, or getting her to understand it when she finally stopped for breath.

“How... long?”

“You’ve been here for four days. You were in surgery once for the...” She paused, looking worried. ”Do you remember what happened?“

“Yes. Gunshot.”

She looked relieved. She was too young — when did they start putting twelve-year-olds in uniform and turning them loose in the ICU on unsuspecting patients? “Yes. That’s right. You were in surgery for fourteen hours for the gunshot wounds. You’ve been on a ventilator for two days following that, on a morphine drip and some other things so that we could keep you in twilight sleep while you stabilized. We weaned you off as quickly as we could — you have done remarkably well, by the way. And here you are.“

“I... hurt.”

“Yeah. You’re going to. You’ve had ribs stretched and cracked and everything put back together. You might as well have had elephants dancing the mambo on your chest with everything your doctors did to get you put back in one piece and working again. I’ll let Dr. Fletcher give you all the details.” She smiled at him, a smile far too cheerful, and said, “But you’re going to pull through.”

“Can you... bring me... my wallet?” he asked her. Because part of the dying dream had been about the wallet. About the stone. Chick’s translucent white lucky stone, which would have been a perfect skipping stone, Chick’s stone, with its faded blue forget-me-not painted on one side.

He’d seen that stone in his last dream of her. He remembered handing it to her. Promising her that he would let it go. Let her go.

But that had been in a dream.

The nurse said, “As soon as I let Dr. Fletcher know that you’re back with us.” She bounced off. He almost expected her to skip.

Alan wanted to hold the stone. He could look at it and try to find the truth of the dream, if there was any truth in the stone’s smooth surfaces. Maybe he should give it up in real life the way he had when Chick had asked him for it.

His mother came in while he was lying there thinking. She looked tired. Worn. He’d never actually seen her look so old. And he thought, That’s my fault. I did this to her.

But she smiled at him. “Your brothers are both in the waiting room, and so is your father. They’ll be in soon, but when the nurse told me you were awake, I claimed first visit by myself.”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“I can say the same thing. I know a lot of what happened, Alan — the what. The how. But I don’t know why. I have tried to understand how you ended up being on that dock with those two people. I understand that you’re a hero — that you are the reason that woman is alive right now. But... why you?”

He wanted to say, “I don’t know.” He wanted to say that he had done a foolish thing, that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, that nothing that had happened meant anything more than just him on a dock in the rain because he was That Kind of Guy. Because That Kind of Guy wouldn’t have his heart broken when, after all the hell was over, the heroine never called him back.

But he clearly wasn’t That Kind of Guy, because he opened his mouth and said, “I was in love with her, Mom. I would have done anything for her. Would have died for her.”

His mother smiled. Actually smiled. “Really? In love? I’d so hoped...”

“Don’t hope. Phoebe hasn’t been here since this happened. I’ve heard everyone’s voices, even when I couldn’t answer. And she hasn’t been here.”

His mother stared at him. “Of course she... Wait. You haven’t heard... Well, no — I don’t suppose anyone has told you.” She took a deep breath, and her face went bleak.

Alan shivered, that goose-on-the-grave feeling that sent his pulse skittering. “Told me what?”

“Phoebe couldn’t have come here. She almost died saving your life. Something happened to one of her legs, and she ignored it, kept doing CPR on you until help arrived, and she nearly bled to death. She’s still in serious condition over at your hospital right now.”

His hospital. “Where am I, then?”

“Mount Sinai. Northridge didn’t have the specialists they had to use to put you back together.”

He digested that for a moment. He was glad there’d been specialists who could do what had to be done — but he wasn’t thrilled to know it had been such a big deal.

“How’s Phoebe now?”

“Well... they were going to amputate her leg because it would have been less expensive and apparently she doesn’t have any money. But we told your hospital that we would cover any costs that you couldn’t — to save her leg if they could. We figured she’d saved your life. We owed her that much. We didn’t know about the two of you.” And his mother smiled again. “You’re really in love with her? I’m so happy. I thought after Janet and Chick...” And she faltered, tears in her eyes. “I didn’t think you would ever find anyone again.”

“I don’t know that I have, Mom. I’ve never told her how I feel about her. I can’t swear that she feels about me the way I feel about her. I think she does. But, it... wasn’t something we talked about.”

Somewhere else in the unit Alan heard a flurry of activity: hurrying of feet, voices speaking low and fast and urgent, the movement of heavy equipment, the ward secretary going from room to room, closing doors and asking visitors to leave.

“They have another code, Mom,” he said. “You’d better go.”

She kissed him. And smiled. And said, “Believe, Alan.”

And then she was gone, leaving him to consider all the things he might possibly believe in.