Household Gods (81 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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“There's this preschool over in Tarzana,” he said. “I was going to take them over this morning, see how they liked it, see how Dawn and I like the setup,” he said. “Woodcrest, that's its name.”
“I've heard of it,” Nicole said dryly. “It's supposed to be good. It's not cheap.”
“So? What is, these days?”
Frank was perfectly willing to spend the money when it was his convenience that was at stake. But would he pay child support while the kids were in Nicole's custody?
Stupid question. Nicole would deal with it in due course. Los Angeles had ways and means that had never been dreamt of in Carnuntum, if she only had the will to use them. She'd let things slide too long. It was time to start cracking the whip.
But not just this minute. “Go ahead and take the kids over to Woodcrest,” she said, not so warmly she'd alarm him into wondering what she was up to, but not as rudely as she could
have, either. “Tell me what you think 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 Cancún 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 both partners. He ripped you off. I've been saying so, too, to everybody who'll listen.”
But he hadn't resigned his own partnership, to open it to Nicole. She'd have been unbearably revolted about that, once. Now she understood. She wouldn't have given it up, either. She didn't know that she'd have had the guts to rock the boat that much, either, not that early in a partnership. “I appreciate that,” she said. “Believe me.”
“It was the least I could do,” Ogarkov said. By Jupiter, Nicole thought: Gary had a conscience. Who'd have thought it?
When he'd hung up, she paused again, but only briefly. Then she called her mother in Indiana. She got the machine, as she'd expected. She left a message: “Mom, it's Nicole. I'm awake, I'm all right. Doctors don't know what happened. I'll be home in a couple of days.” And, after a second's pause: “Love you.”
By now it sounded pat, the words well worn with use, as if she'd been a well-coached witness in court. And yet, even as the words unrolled themselves, she wondered. What if it was all nonsense? What if she'd imagined the whole thing, Liber and Libera, Carnuntum, the people, the privations, the whole smelly, verminous world? It was crazy to think she'd traveled back in time down the helix of her own DNA, and climbed back up along it, to wake in this hospital bed.
And yet, she thought. There was a way to tell. If they ever got around to letting her go …
 
 
She roused herself with a start. A young man in a white coat—a lab tech, she guessed—stood smiling down at her. He had a syringe in his hand, with a needle that looked, from her perspective, as long as her arm. “Hello,” he said cheerily. “My name is Roberto. I'm your vampire for this morning.”
While she gaped at him, he got a grip on her arm, found the vein with practiced ease, slipped the needle in and took what he needed. He was good: she barely felt it. He slapped on a patch of gauze, secured it with adhesive tape—marvels of modern technology, both of them—and went on his way.
Dr. Feldman must have passed him in the hall: she came in as soon as he'd gone out. A nurse followed her, pushing a wheelchair. “Here you go,” the doctor said. “We're going to take you downstairs and see if we can figure out what's going on with you.”
Nicole gritted her teeth on any number of fierce rejoinders. The nurse unhooked her from her banks of monitors, and—thank God—removed the catheter, and eased her into the wheelchair. She didn't need that, but she put up with it. If they wanted to think her weak, let them. Hospital personnel had a way of reducing patients to dependent children in any case.
Dependent children didn't have to sign endless consent forms. Nicole did, dutifully; taking time to skim the wording, as a good lawyer should, before she signed her name to it. She wasn't averse to tests, not in the slightest. She was as eager as the doctor to know if somehow her brains had fried.
They ran an ultrasound. They took a series of ordinary X-rays. Dr. Feldman did a spinal tap—that hurt. It hurt rather badly, but never as badly as having her tooth pulled without anesthetic. She had to hold still, that was the hardest part. But she did it.
They ran a CAT scan, which was claustrophobic, and an MRI, which was both claustrophobic and noisy. It was much like going through a car wash, except for the water, and the hot wax afterwards.

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