Household Gods

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.