What’s wrong?” Nate asked, pulling himself from the bed.
His wife’s screams were so loud they sounded almost as if they were right beside him. But she wasn’t in her usual spot on their bed. Her calls were coming from down the hall in their daughter’s room. “Nate, come quick. Angel’s having a seizure!”
Without even flipping a light switch, his bare feet hit the cold wooden floor as he raced down the hall and ran through the door to his daughter’s room. Beverly was trying her best to keep Angel’s trembling body calm, but the girl’s eyes were rolled back in her head and her arms and legs were jerking in every direction. He’d seen seizures before, but none as severe as this one.
As Nate touched his daughter’s forehead, he noted her ragged, shallow breathing. She looked as if she were drowning.
“We have to get her to the hospital,” Beverly whispered. “She can barely breathe!”
“Wrap her up in a blanket,” he ordered. “I’ll throw on some clothes and get the car out and warmed up.”
After hurriedly tossing on pants, a wrinkled dress shirt, shoes, and a topcoat, Nate raced to the garage. Opening the door, he was rudely greeted by a fierce north wind and a blanket of snow. While he’d slept, blizzard conditions had come to Chicago. Looking beyond the front yard, he noted that the streets were already packed by at least half a foot of the white powder. No one had predicted this.
Stepping into the car, he pushed the gas pedal four times, pulled out the choke, and punched the starter. As the six-volt battery delivered a burst of power to the starter, the engine slowly turned over, but it didn’t catch. Taking a deep breath, Nate pumped the gas pedal two more times and once more hit the starter. The results were the same.
“Come on, baby, don’t let me down now!”
He’d just finished sweet-talking the car when the passenger door flew open and Beverly eased in with Angel in her arms. Her worried eyes looked to her husband as she slid across the seat toward him. “What’s wrong? Why haven’t you gotten it started?”
“It’s a cold night,” he explained, “the oil is thick.”
“But, Nate?” She moaned, trying to keep the shaking child in the safety of her arms. “We’ve got to go now. I think she’s dying.”
“I’ll get it started,” he assured her as he pressed the gas pedal two more times and hit the starter. The old motor wheezed. It coughed twice more as Nate continued to press the starter; then it finally caught and began to purr.
“Let’s go,” Beverly urged.
“It’s has to warm a bit, or it’ll kill when I let the clutch out.” He looked at the instrument panel, silently pleading with the engine to heat up. After a minute of idling and the temperature needle still registering cold, he pushed in the clutch and backed the car out of the garage and across the snow-covered lane. In spite of the fact that the snow was up to the running board, the Packard’s wheels steadily propelled the family to the street.
She pulled Angel even closer to her body. “Can we make it?”
As the car gained traction and eased forward, Nate grimly smiled. “The car’s heavy,” he explained. “And the motor is powerful. If I keep it in first and second and we don’t have to stop much, I think it will get us there. Just say a few prayers.”
The words had no more cleared his lips than Angel began to shake even more violently in Beverly’s arms. After staring at his daughter in the dim illumination of the dash lights, he glanced down at the car’s clock. It was two thirty-five. Even on a good day, the drive to the hospital would take ten minutes. How long would it take tonight?
As he eased down the street, the wipers couldn’t keep up with the falling snow. They did their best to push the slush off the glass, but still Nate could only see for a few seconds at a time and then the world was white again until the blades moved back the other direction. Thankfully there was no traffic, so Nate could aim the car right down the middle of the empty streets and ignore all the stop signs. Still, because the snow was so deep and visibility so poor, the best he could do was a top speed of fifteen miles an hour. Even at that speed he felt as if he were trying to control a sled flying down a mountain trail.
Block by block they fought their way through the raging blizzard. Twice the car slid toward a curb only to have Nate reverse the steering wheel, slow down, and regain traction. All the while, Angel continued to shake uncontrollably. A mile became two and then three and finally four and five. What seemed like days was less than half an hour, and somehow Angel managed to hang on.
It was just past three when Nate finally saw the four-story brick hospital through his almost completely snow-covered windshield. He slid like a boat into port into the emergency room’s driveway. But pulling up the slight incline caused his wheels to spin for at least thirty seconds. He thought he was going to have to stop the car, grab his little girl, and race the last one hundred yards on foot. Just as he was about to shift into neutral and set the emergency brake, the Firestone tires caught and the Packard jerked forward. They were going to make it! He had just eased in front of the hospital’s doors when Beverly’s words caused his heart to stop.
“She’s not breathing,” she cried out. “Nate, she’s not breathing!”
Nate said nothing. With no explanation, he reached over and grabbed Angel from his wife’s arms, pushed open his car door, and raced through the snow up the ramp and into the hospital. Charging up to the desk, he screamed, “My baby’s not breathing. You’ve got to do something!”
A middle-aged nurse, dressed in a starched white uniform, got up from her chair, glanced down at the child, ran her hands over Angel’s face, and then gently took her. She barked some instructions to another nurse who was sitting across the room at another desk. That woman grabbed a phone and called for a doctor to come down immediately.
“She’s got a mass on her brain,” Beverly explained as she came up behind Nate. “Dr. Hutton has been treating her.”
The nurse nodded, her kind brown eyes catching the couple’s for a moment as she quickly moved across the room. “We’ll do what we can,” she assured them. “You stay here, and I’ll get her into the emergency room.” Just before she disappeared into a side room she glanced over her shoulder and called out, “When did she stop breathing?”
“Just as we drove up,” Beverly said.
“Good.”
A second later, the nurse and Angel were gone, leaving the two frantic parents alone in the waiting room. Nate pointed toward the chairs, wrapped his right arm around his wife’s back, and gently guided her toward a seat.