Calhoun found himself staring helplessly into the brown liquid. At first he saw nothing. Then something shimmered inside its depths, coalesced, and took shape, utterly convincing in its verisimilitude, a tall man in a white coat.

Walker.

He had Calhoun’s keys in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was in the ER, locking the door. His mother was right. It had been Walker all along.

You know that can’t be right, it was Snow, he—

That voice, urgent but still rational, was overwhelmed by a hot, sunburned feeling that crawled across his scalp, a feeling he was unaccustomed to managing, rage, yes, and a newfound sense of purpose.

He brought the bottle to his lips and took a long, burning drink.

CHAPTER 35

35.

Flashlight balanced behind him, Mike pushed aside a stack of X-rays and lab reports and found a yellowed newspaper clipping in the bottom of the jacket.

He read the headline: “Miracle Boy” Comes Out of Coma.

He skimmed the first few paragraphs. After recapping the accident that had landed Snow in Pediatric ICU, the article told how the Pediatric ICU team had “heroically” brought the boy from “the very brink of death.” The local reporter’s efforts at journalistic objectivity hadn’t lasted much longer than his opening sentences.

“We got lucky with this one,” one doctor, who spoke under conditions of anonymity, told this reporter yesterday. “Everyone here knew that the prognosis for this boy was not at all good. But this is a reminder that every once in a while, you win one.”

And, farther down:

The modesty of the Tanglewood staff hardly fits the facts of what happened to Franklin Snow. Other clinicians concur that, due to the horrific trauma of the accident, the boy’s body had already ceased to function, and his odds of surviving, let alone staging this kind of dramatic recovery, were virtually zero. Already there is talk in medical circles of the ICU team’s “miracle-worker” approach….

As he put the article down, Mike noticed there was another part of the clipping, folded over backward. He lifted it up and stared at it for a long time.

It was a photo.

The right side of the picture showed a man that, Mike realized with a start, had to be Dr. Walker. Walker didn’t just look thirty years younger: he looked an entire lifetime younger, his face fresh and bright without a single line on it. Whatever had passed through his life between then and now had done more than cut into Walker’s face, it had completely reshaped its entire landscape into something infinitely older and more tired. Drained it.