“Has Carl said anything?” Joanna asked.
“He asked to see his wife,” Guadalupe said. “And he said he was hungry, but we can’t give him anything to eat because we don’t have any orders, and we can’t find his doctor. He isn’t answering his page.”
“Has he said anything about the coma?”
She shook her head. “Most coma patients—yes,” she said into the phone. “This is Guadalupe Santos over at Mercy General. I need to talk to Dr. Cherikov. It’s urgent. It’s about his patient Carl Aspinall.” There was a pause. “No,” Guadalupe said, and her tone made Joanna think the nurse had asked if he’d died, like she had. “He’s conscious.”
She cupped her hand over the receiver again and said to Joanna, “Paula went in to check his vitals about half an hour ago. She opened the curtains, and he said, ‘It isn’t dark.’ Scared her half to death—I’ve been
She turned back to Joanna. “Most patients have very fuzzy memories of the time they spent in a semicomatose state, if that.”
And those memories will only get fuzzier with every moment that passes, Joanna thought, glancing in the direction of his room. I need to get in there now. “Can he have visitors?” she asked.
Guadalupe frowned. “I don’t know who’s in with—yes,” she said into the phone. “Harvest?” She grabbed a pen and jotted something down on a prescription pad. “Please have him call me as soon as he gets back.”
She hung up. “Dr. Cherikov is at lunch,” she said disgustedly, reaching for a phone book. “At the Harvest or Sfuzzi’s. He has them both written down on his calendar.” She began searching through the phone book. “Carl’s wife probably went to lunch, too. Harvest, Harvest.”
Joanna glanced toward his room again. She had to get in there and talk to him before his wife and Dr. Cherikov descended, but if they had somebody in there with him, and surely they did, a patient who’d just regained consciousness would hardly be left alone—
The elevator dinged, and Guadalupe and Joanna both looked down at where a nurse’s aide was emerging from the open doors. “Did you find her?” Guadalupe asked.
The aide walked toward them, shaking her head. “She wasn’t in the cafeteria. What about paging her?”
Guadalupe shook her head. “We don’t want to scare her half to death. We just want to get her up here.” She picked up the phone.
“What about the chapel?” Joanna asked.
“Corinne’s checking it,” Guadalupe said. She punched in a phone number, looking back and forth from it to the phone book. “Did you check the gift shop?” she asked the aide.
The aide nodded. “And the vending machines.”
“Did you check—This is Nurse Santos at Mercy General. I’m trying to locate Dr. Anton Cherikov. He’s having lunch there.” Pause. “No, I can’t page him.” Pause. “Well, would you please look? It’s an emergency.” She cupped her hand over the receiver again. “Did you check the solarium?” she said to the aide.
Neither of them was paying any attention to Joanna. She stepped away from the nurses’ station and, when Guadalupe glanced up, pointed to her watch and waved slightly. “I’ve checked everywhere,” the aide said. “I’ll bet she went home.”
“We’ve already called,” Guadalupe said. “She’s not there. I left a message.”
“Won’t that scare her, too?” the aide asked.
Joanna walked rapidly down the hall, on past Carl’s room, till she was out of sight of the nurses’ station. She stopped, waited. “You’re sure he’s not there?” Guadalupe said, and there was the sound of a phone being hung up, and a brief silence. “How do you spell Sfuzzi’s?”
“Sfuzzi’s? I don’t know. What is it?”
“A restaurant.”
More silence. Joanna came quietly back up the hall till she could see the nurses’ station. Guadalupe and the aide were both bent over the counter, looking at the open phone book. Joanna ducked quickly, silently across the hall to Carl’s room.
All I need is a minute, she thought, looking in the door. There wasn’t a nurse in the room. She slipped in. All I need is to ask him whether he was on the
“Hello,” a voice said from the bed. She turned and looked at the gray-haired man sitting up in the bed, wearing blue pajamas. “Who are you?” he asked.
For a long, heart-pounding minute, she thought, I’ve sneaked in the wrong room, and how am I going to explain this to Guadalupe? How am I going to explain this to Richard?
“Did they find my wife?” the man asked, and she saw, like one of those trick pictures shifting suddenly into focus, that it was Coma Carl.
It was not that he looked like a different person. It was that he looked like a person where before he had been an empty shell. His concave chest, his thin arms looked filled out, as if he had gained weight, even though that was impossible, and his face, covered with the same gray stubble, looked occupied, like a house where the owners have suddenly come home. His gray-brown hair, which the aides had kept neatly combed back off his forehead, was parted on the side and fell almost boyishly over his forehead, and his eyes, which she had always thought were gray through the half-open slits, were dark brown.
She was gaping at him like an idiot. “I…” she said, trying to remember what he had asked her.
“Are you one of my doctors?” he asked, looking at her lab coat.
“No,” she said. “I’m Joanna Lander. Do you remember me, Mr. Aspinall?”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember very much,” he said. His voice was different, too, still hoarse, but much stronger, deeper than his murmurings. “I was in a coma, you know.”
“I know,” she said, nodding. “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. What you remember. I’d just like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”
It isn’t all right, she told herself. You need a waiver. The one his wife signed was only good when he was unconscious. You need to have him sign a release form. This is completely against protocol. But there wasn’t time to write one out, to explain it to him. The doctor or his wife could arrive any minute.
Joanna pulled a chair over to the bed, glancing anxiously at the door as it banged against the IV pole, and sat down. “Can you tell me what you remember, Mr. Aspinall?”
“I remember coming to the hospital,” he said. “Alicia drove me.”
Joanna reached carefully into her cardigan pocket for her minirecorder. It wasn’t there. I left it in my office, she thought, when I took the tape down to Records.
“I had a terrible headache,” he said. “I couldn’t see to drive.”
Joanna fished in her pocket for something to write with, but she didn’t even have one of those release forms she hadn’t had him sign. At least she had a pen. She glanced surreptitiously around the room, looking for something to write on, a menu, an envelope, anything. Guadalupe had taken the chart out with her, and there was nothing on the bedstand.
“She was going to take me to the doctor, but my headache kept getting worse—”
Joanna reached in the wastebasket and pulled out a discarded get-well card with a picture of a bluebird on the front. The bluebird had a letter in its mouth. “This get-well message is winging its way straight to you,” the card said on the inside. Joanna turned it over. There was nothing on the back.
“—so she brought me to the emergency room instead, and then…” Carl’s voice trailed away and he stared straight ahead of him. “It was dark.”
Dark, Joanna thought, and her hand shook as she wrote the word.
“Alicia hates driving at night,” he said, “but she had to. It was so cold.” He reached back and touched his neck, tenderly, as if it still hurt. “I remember the doctor saying I had spinal meningitis, and then I remember them putting me in a wheelchair, and then I remember the nurse opening the curtains, and I was surprised it wasn’t dark.” He smiled across at Joanna. “And that’s pretty much it.”
It was Greg Menotti all over again. “Do you remember anything between the wheelchair and the curtains?” Joanna asked.
“No,” he said. “Not between.”
“What about dreams?” Joanna asked. “Coma patients sometimes dream.”
“Dreams,” he said thoughtfully, “no,” and there was no defensiveness in his voice, no avoiding of her eyes.
