Household Gods

Forty-five minutes and sixteen seconds after the black nurse fled, a woman strode briskly into the room. She was short and very thin, the sort of person who crackles with nervous energy. Her hair was brown and wavy and beginning to go gray. She didn’t seem to take much notice of it; it was pulled back in a bun, out of sight and out of 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 – Justin – is two.” Lucius was gone, eighteen hundred years dead. But he’d fathered someone who’d fathered or borne someone who… Nicole shut the thought away. She missed him suddenly, fiercely, and altogether unexpectedly. She – yes, she mourned him.

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.”

You have no idea how true that is. It was just as in Carnuntum: no one else understood the irony of the situation, and no one could know. It was too crazy. “Wherever I was,” she said, “I’m back. Have you ever seen a case like mine before?”

“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?