mind. She wore little makeup — next to none by Roman standards. Under the white coat, she wore a plain linen shirtdress in a shade of beige that didn’t exactly suit her. No jewelry, no wedding ring. Stethoscope around neck, clipboard in hand: she was as little like a Roman physician as it was possible to be.
Her voice was as brisk as her gait, firm, no nonsense in it. “Good morning,” she said. “My name is Marcia Feldman. I’m a neurologist here at West Hills Medical. I understand you’re back with us again?”
“I think so, yes,” Nicole answered a little dryly.
“So,” Dr. Feldman said. Her quick eyes had settled, fixed on Nicole’s face. “Suppose you tell us what happened.”
“You don’t know?”
That was almost insolent. Dr. Feldman didn’t bridle at it, but maybe she stiffened very slightly. “No,” she said, “we don’t. Anything you can tell us will help.”
Nicole lowered her eyes, shamed into politeness. “I don’t know. I went to bed — six days ago, the nurse said. Next I knew, I was here.” That was the official story, the one she’d stick to. Anything else would get her the rubber room. “How did I get here? The nurse wouldn’t tell me.”
“Your older child came in to wake you. When she couldn’t, she dialed nine-one-one.” Dr. Feldman frowned at a line on her clipboard, and tapped her pen on it. “Could you give me the child’s name, please?”
“Kimberley,” Nicole answered promptly. “She’s four. Her brother L —
No. Think of the living children — of her own continuance, and her own future. Whom she hadn’t seen in a year and a half. Whom suddenly she missed with a sensation like pain. “Are they all right?”
The doctor made a note on the chart, and cast a flicker of a smile at Nicole. “Yes, they’re fine. They’re with your ex-husband and his — girlfriend?”
Of course they would be. Nicole couldn’t rise to anger at Dawn now, or at Frank for falling for her. “That’s right,” she said. “Thank you.” Above all, she must convince this doctor that she was sane. She had to convince herself, too, if in a different way. Had she, could she have, dreamed it all in six days of coma?
Not now. Convince the doctor, then worry about the rest. “Doctor, what happened to me?”
“We’re still trying to determine that. You’ve been completely unresponsive from the time you were admitted till a few minutes ago.” Dr. Feldman tapped the chart again. “I understand you suffered a disappointment at work the day before your daughter discovered you unconscious and unrousable.”
“Oh. The partnership.” To Nicole, it felt as if it had happened a year and a half before, not a week. She’d been through so much since, and so much worse since, that, while it still rankled, it didn’t seem so very catastrophic anymore. Then, perhaps more slowly than she should have, she got Dr. Feldman’s drift. “You think I tried to kill myself.”
Dr. Feldman nodded. “That certainly crossed my mind, yes. But I must say the evidence supports your denial. No drugs, no alcohol, no excess carbon monoxide, no gas. No trauma, either, nor any brain tumor or injury or aneurysm or anything of that sort. But no responses, not above the reflex level.” She grinned suddenly, wryly. Nicole liked her just then, liked her a great deal. “Layman’s language lets me put it best, Ms. Gunther-Perrin: the lights were on, but nobody was home.”
“Complete loss of consciousness without apparent causation?” Rather to Nicole’s surprise, Dr. Feldman nodded. “Once, years ago,” she said. “I was just completing my residency. We ran every possible test. We never did find out why he… just stopped. I kept track of him after I began my own practice. Two years later, he simply died. We never knew why, or how. It happened, that was all.”
She didn’t like it, either, though she clearly tried to be objective. No scientist was fond of uncertainties.
Nicole shivered. If she’d been killed in Carnuntum, what would have happened to her here? Would she have gone on indefinitely in that vegetative state?
And where was Umma? Had she been here? Had she awakened and, finding herself in a different body, in a world so strange as to be incomprehensible, simply gone catatonic?
It wasn’t likely Nicole would ever learn the answer to that. She couldn’t afford to dwell on it. Not in front of this dangerously perceptive woman. She put on a brisk front. “Since I am here and conscious again, how do I go about getting out?” she asked.
Dr. Feldman frowned. “You’ll stay for at least another day or two. We’ll want to run more tests on you, to make sure there is no risk of a recurrence.”
“How do you propose to do that, when you don’t know what caused the trouble in the first place?” Nicole wanted to know.
The doctor looked stubborn. Nicole’s teeth clicked together. The last thing she needed was for Dr. Feldman to think she was questioning anybody’s competence. And — if Nicole hadn’t known what had happened to her, she would have been demanding tests, not complaining about them.
“All right,” she said. “I suppose you’d better. But could I have some breakfast first? And I’ll want to get on the phone, let people know I’m okay.”
“I don’t see either of those things being a problem,” Dr. Feldman said. She looked pleased with herself, now that she’d got her own way, and subtly reassured, now that Nicole was acting like what she was: a brisk young lawyer and single mother. “I’m going to order you the soft breakfast, since you’ve been on intravenous fluids since your admission. If you handle it without upset, you can have a normal lunch. Let me phone Dietary, and it should be up in half an hour or so. It’s very good to have you back with us.”
“It’s very good to be back,” Nicole said, most sincerely.
The neurologist prodded her and poked her and listened to her heart and checked her reflexes and peered into her eyes and nose and mouth and ears. “Everything seems to check out,” she said, sounding almost reluctant to admit it. “But if everything is as normal as it looks, what happened to you?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Nicole said. Breakfast came up just then, right on the half-hour: oatmeal, a medium-boiled egg, and a square of blue hospital gelatin, industrial strength like the sheets, thicker and tougher than she would ever have made at home. Nicole had no idea what flavor it was supposed to be. She didn’t care. She inhaled it. She inhaled every scrap on that white plastic plate, and would have inhaled the plate if she could have got away with it. There was only one bobble: forgetting, and trying to eat with her fingers. She covered for it quickly, picked up the spoon and dove into the oatmeal.
Dr. Feldman watched her with a good measure of bemusement. “How does that feel?” she asked.
“Wonderful!” she answered, wiping her mouth — on the napkin, at the last instant, and not on her arm. She felt like asking for another tray just like this one. But she didn’t think Dr. Feldman would let her have it. She’d been this hungry in Carnuntum, and more. She kept quiet.
Dr. Feldman said, “I’m going to set up another CAT scan and MRI and some more diagnostic procedures for you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin. While I’m doing that, you can go ahead and use the telephone.”
In the way doctors have, she spoke as if she were granting a great boon. Which she was. She had no idea how great it was. She took it all, all the technology, the tests, the telephone, completely for granted. Nicole didn’t, not anymore. How long would it be, she wondered, before the novelty palled? Dr. Feldman went out as she’d come in, brisk, bright, and competent. With a sigh of pure pleasure, Nicole picked up the phone. Its smooth plastic was cool in her hand, its shape familiar, its weight, the buzz of the dial tone as she held it to her ear.
She sat for a long while with the receiver to her ear. Number — what was the number? She held down panic. It was somewhere in her mind, unused, filed away. But she hadn’t forgotten it. Of course she hadn’t.
There. There it was, right in her fingertips. She punched in the numbers, and held her breath. If she’d remembered it wrong, or forgotten it altogether, and had to ask — they’d start doubting her sanity again. She couldn’t have that. She’d never slipped up enough to get in real trouble, back in Carnuntum. There was no way she was going to slip up here.
The first ring startled her half out of her skin. Her fingers clenched on the receiver before she dropped it.
The ringing went on. After the fourth ring, the answering machine would pick up. But just at the end of number four, the ring broke off. A breathless female voice said, “Hello?”
