Rushing Waters by Danielle Steel Page B

with a dog. He said he was in the water with a friend, but they brought him in alone.” Juliette nodded somberly. It was easy to spot him down the hall, with the black Lab lying next to the gurney, and she could see that Peter had been crying when she stopped next to him and smiled. They had put heated blankets on him to keep him warm. The OES had gotten a series of generators working for them a short while before. Peter was shaking violently from the cold water and the shock.
    “How are you feeling, Peter?” she asked him gently. He was badly shaken, very pale, his lips were blue, and they had treated him for shock in the ambulance and when he came in. Like everyone else she’d seen since the hurricane hit the city, he had been through a lot, and from his appearance, so had the dog. She examined Peter’s arm and decided it didn’t need stitches, and his vital signs were better than she’d expected. He had youth on his side. Anyone older than he wouldn’t have been able to survive and resist the powerful force of the water. He told her about Ben while she examined him, and she told him Ben might have been taken to another hospital, depending on where he’d been found, and by whom, and she asked about the dog. Peter was in fairly decent condition, all things considered, but she wanted to keep him for a few hours to observe him, possibly overnight, to make sure he didn’t have any more serious secondary reactions from nearly drowning. And he told her he was a junior at NYU.
    “Would you like us to call your parents?” she offered, and he shook his head.
    “They’re in Chicago, and it’ll just scare them. I’d rather call them myself and tell them I’m okay. My mom was worried about the hurricane.” He felt for his cell phone, but it was no longer in his pocket, and his wallet was gone too. It made him realize that Ben might have lost his too, and if he was injured or unconscious, they wouldn’t know who he was. He said something about it to Juliette, and she promised to let him know if a young unidentified male came in, in the next few hours, and he thanked her. He told her what Ben looked like, and then she asked him if he’d mind if she put Mike somewhere out of harm’s way, in case one of the patients objected to him, or was scared of him, although he was very well behaved.
    “There’s a supply closet with a couple of cots in it that the ER docs have been using to get some sleep. I’ll put him there and give him something to eat,” she promised, and Peter sat up and watched as she led him away. Mike didn’t seem to object, and she came back a few minutes later and told Peter she had given Mike half a turkey sandwich and a bowl of water, and he seemed peaceful and was lying down. Peter smiled and lay down on the gurney and thought of Ben again, and drifted off to sleep.
    When he woke up, Juliette asked one of the nurses to bring him a phone so he could call his parents. He was already crying before they answered. He told his mother where he was and what had happened, and she burst into tears. He was sobbing as he listened to her. Getting through the water was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and just thinking of it now made him shake harder. He knew he had come close to dying in the water.
    “I don’t know where Ben is, Mom. He was right behind me, and I grabbed on to Mike. But I didn’t see Ben anywhere, and they didn’t find him when they picked me up. They said he might have gotten ahead of me, but he was behind me when we left the house.” He couldn’t stop crying, nor could his mother, and his father had burst into tears the minute his wife had signaled that it was him. It had been an agonizing wait for word of him.
    “He’s probably okay, and they took him to another hospital,” his mother tried to comfort him. It was what Juliette had said to him too.
    “I hope so. It sounded like the house was going to collapse, so we got out.” He tried to explain to her, and she didn’t blame