Household Gods

of the place. Can you bring the children by to see me tonight?”

“I’ll take the kids to the school,” he said, “but I can’t bring them to you. Hospital rules. No one under six anywhere but in Maternity. That’s hard and fast. We already tried it.”

“Oh, did you?” Careful; don’t sound too skeptical. Maybe he had. In which case, she had to give him credit.

Push on. Focus on realities, the daily details, the things she’d never needed to think about while she was a tavernkeeper in Carnuntum. “Look, if you get a chance, will you park my car in the hospital lot? Bring my purse, too, and some clothes. I’ll drive myself home.”

“I’ll take care of that,” he said. She’d expected he would. It saved him trouble, and saved him having to deal with her face to face. It was cold and rather inconsiderate on the face of it, but it was just as she preferred it. All in all, a decent way of arranging things.

“One last thing,” she said. “Did you call any of the family?”

“I called your mother,” he said. “She’d have come out here, but one of your sisters is pregnant again, and her oldest one needs new braces, and I forget what else — your mother does go on a bit. She didn’t offer to take the kids.”

Nicole suppressed a sigh. Her mother was preferable to Atpomara by a wide margin, but it had been clear ever since Nicole left Indiana for Los Angeles, and particularly since the divorce, that charity began closer to home. Nicole’s sisters had stayed right in the city, married a nice Indiana boy and a nice Polish boy, and proceeded to populate the world with little Johnsons and Kursinskis. They needed a grandmother more, it had been implied, than Nicole’s infant Angelenos.

Even a coma hadn’t been enough to get her mother out of Indiana. If she’d died — would that have done it?

There was absolutely no point in dwelling on it. This was the life Nicole had made for herself. Some of it she’d chosen, some had been forced on her. Now more than ever, she appreciated both the cost and the rewards.

Frank would never understand. Nobody would. But that didn’t matter, not really. She was home. That was what mattered.

“Thanks for everything,” she said. Keep it polite, keep him off balance, till you drop the hammer, “I have to go now. Give the kids a kiss for me.”

“I’ll do that,” Frank said. “Take care of yourself.”

Why, she thought, Frank was trying, too. Not too hard, but harder than she remembered. Maybe it took a solid scare, and six days of unmitigated parenthood, to teach him a little basic civility.

Frank had hung up without giving her a chance to say good-bye — which was more his usual style. Nicole shrugged and cut the connection at her end. She sat with her finger on the button. The dial tone sang in her ear.

The only number from the firm of Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng she could remember was her own, and she wasn’t too sure about that. But when she dialed, hesitating on the third digit — was it four or five? Oh, hell, five — it was picked up on the second ring. And there was her secretary’s voice, crisper on the phone than in person, but still unmistakable: “Ms. Gunther-Perrin’s office.”

“Cyndi,” Nicole said, not taking much trouble to hide how glad she was to hear that voice.

“Nicole!” Cyndi’s exclamation was more heartfelt than professional. It made Nicole feel wonderful.

There were other people in the background, too, a babble of questions, exclamations, even a muted cheer. That wasn’t for Nicole, surely. Someone must have won the betting pool on whatever sport was in season this week.

Cyndi pressed on through the babble. “Nicole! How are you? What happened?” She hesitated slightly there. Was she wondering, as Frank had, if Nicole had attempted suicide?

Maybe Nicole had, in a way, not really knowing she was doing it. She gave Cyndi the edited, and official, version: “I don’t know what happened. Neither do the doctors. I went to sleep, I woke up six days later in a hospital bed, and I feel fine. All the tests are negative. They’ll do some more, now that I’m awake. If those are normal, they’ll let me go home.”

“They couldn’t find anything?” Cyndi sounded as if she couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t meant for an insult, or to imply anything about Nicole’s mental state. Not at all. People in this place and time trusted medical science. They expected it to work, and they were astonished when it didn’t.

How different from Carnuntum. How very, very different.

Nicole found that she was running her tongue over her teeth. The whole mouthful, filled, capped, crowned, and not a single gap or twinge of pain. “They didn’t find a thing,” she said.

“That’s terrific,” Cyndi said, and relayed the news to the noisy crowd that, now Nicole stopped to listen, must be clumped around the desk. When she spoke again into the receiver, she didn’t even bother to lower her voice. “I just want you to know, Ms. Gunther-Perrin, there’s been a lot — I mean a lot — of rumbling in the undergrowth about the way you got passed over for partner.”

“Has there?” Nicole said. At the time, it had felt like the end of the world — just like that, she remembered. That she’d still had a job as a salaried employee had given her no comfort at all.

After a year and a half as a tavernkeeper in Carnuntum, she didn’t find the job, even the dead-end, no-future thing that it was, anywhere near so intolerable. Her basis of comparison had changed. And because it had been a year and a half in a world so alien it might as well have been another planet, rather than six days of oblivion, she could stand apart from the reality of it. The pain was gone, scabbed over long ago, and long since healed. She barely even felt the scar.

Just a second or two later than she should have, she said, “So people care what happened to me. I had no idea.”

“They do care,” Cyndi said. “A lot of people are upset about it.”

They had to be, if she’d say so in front of a crowd of people. Nicole needed to think about that; to fit it into her view of the world. She’d been so alone the night before she woke up in Carnuntum. Or she thought she had been. No friends, no family but a couple of sick kids, no daycare for the kids, a bastard of an ex cavorting in Cancun with his late-model floozy. It seemed she had friends, maybe even a few she hadn’t known she had.

She was sniffling again, as she had been when she talked to the kids. She managed to speak through it. “I’ll be back as soon as the doctor says I can. I don’t even want to think what my desk must look like.”

“It’s not really so bad,” Cyndi said. “Everybody’s been chipping in when they have the chance. There are things that need doing, but you’ll be able to catch up. You just take it easy till you’re all better.”

A small jab of paranoia caught her by surprise. Easing me out? Giving me the kiss-off? Is that what’s happening?

No. This was honest goodwill. “Thank you,” Nicole said, and she meant it. “I’ll be in as soon as I can. Say hello to everybody, will you?”

“Everybody says hello to you,” Cyndi replied. “You take care of yourself, all right? We want you back.”

Cyndi didn’t want to hang up. Nicole was touched, but there were other calls she had to make while she still had the stamina, and before she got much hungrier. She eased Cyndi off the line with the same trained smoothness she’d use on a client, and hung up. She needed to pause, to get her breath a bit. Her mind was wide awake, but her body had lain in a coma for six days. It needed to rest.

She lay back, gazing out across the empty bed to the window, to the clear California sky and the dry brown hills. This was home. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t terrible, either. She knew what terrible was, now.

She ran fingers through her hair. It felt oily, stringy, but it was as clean as Umma’s had ever been. And no lice. Not one single itching, crawling creature. By God, she was clean.

The ring of the phone startled her, and sent the heart monitor jumping. She needed a moment to get herself together, and two more rings, before she reached for the receiver.

“Nicole?” a man’s voice said. “It’s Gary.”

“Gary,” she said, groping for a split second. “Gary, hello! It didn’t take you long to get my number.”

“I already had it,” Gary Ogarkov said. “I’ve been calling every day, trying to get someone to tell me how you are. Do you know what they said? Stable. they said. Christ, when you’re dead you’re stable!”

Nicole couldn’t help but laugh. “Gary, that was really nice of you. But — “

He kept right on, as if she hadn’t spoken: “I want you to know, I thought Mr. Rosenthal was going to make us