Household Gods

21

Nicole wound slowly back toward consciousness. She lay with her eyes closed. The mattress under her was hard and lumpy and uncomfortable. A sigh, her first willed breath of the morning, hissed out through her nostrils. Another day in Carnuntum. Another day to get through without too many disasters. Another day to pray with all her heart that she could somehow, someday, without dying first, get out of there.

She rolled over. The mattress wasn’t any more comfortable on her side than on her back. It crinkled and rustled, shifting under her, jabbing into a rib. What the —?

Her own mattress, such as it was, was stuffed with wool. It didn’t rustle when she rolled over on it. Was she sick again? Had Julia or someone moved her onto a straw pallet while she was delirious?

She opened her eyes. She was looking out an open doorway into a hall.

But she’d shut the bedroom door the night before, shut and barred it, as she always had, ever since she came to Carnuntum.

The doorway was taller, wider. Its edges weren’t indifferently whitewashed wood. They were — painted metal? And that shimmer close to her eyes, so close she had to shorten focus, almost cross her eyes, to see it, was a railing, bright silver — aluminum.

She was dreaming. She drew in another deep breath. And smelled — nothing. No city stink. No reek of shit and garbage and smoke and unwashed humanity. In their place was… not quite nothing, after all. A faint, tingling, half-unpleasant smell. Floor wax and — disinfectant? Yes.

She rolled onto her back again. This was a wonderful dream, realistic to the point of pain. She didn’t want ever to wake up.

She drank in every detail. The mattress under her, with its crinkly plastic cover. The sheets, white and faintly rough on her skin, but smoother than anything she’d known in Carnuntum. The ceiling: no hand-planed boards fitted together unevenly, but acoustic tiles, each one exactly like the one beside it, machine-made, perfect; and a frosted-glass panel over a pair of fluorescent tubes. Their pale, purplish-white glow was the brightest thing she’d seen, except for the sun itself, in well over a year.

Nicole shivered. Part was wonder. Part was chill. She’d got used to being chilly in Carnuntum, where fires and braziers didn’t do nearly enough to fight the cold.

She was in Carnuntum, then. As vivid as the dream was, as real as it felt, the cold was unmistakable.

Or else… it was air-conditioned to a fare-thee-well. She looked down at herself, at her body lying in the bed. Crisp white sheet, industrial strength. On top of it, a baby-blue blanket better dyed than the one she’d had in Carnuntum, but only about half as thick, and not wool, either. On top of the blanket, her arm.

Her arm. She needed a moment to recognize it. She hadn’t seen it in a year and a half. Pale, on the fleshy side, manicured fingers — no, this wasn’t Umma’s work-hardened arm. This one, without question, belonged to Nicole Gunther-Perrin. It had something — probably the lead for an IV — taped to it. There were other discomforts, wires, leads taped here and there, connected to monitors that beeped and whistled when she moved. And one niggle that mounted to annoyance, which felt like the worst bladder infection she’d ever had, and was — had to be — a catheter.

All of which meant, which had to mean -

She lifted the sheet and let out a startled snort of laughter. The white cotton gown, or front of a gown, was even less prepossessing than the grimy wool tunic in which she’d first awakened in Carnuntum. But the body it so halfheartedly concealed was hers, slightly flabby tummy, heavy thighs, and all.

A tall black woman in a nurse’s uniform strode into the room, alerted probably by the changes in the monitors. At sight of Nicole half sitting up, staring at her, she stopped. Her eyes went wide. “You’re awake,” she said.

Nicole swallowed against a sudden and completely involuntary surge of terror. The same terror with which she’d faced every morning in Carnuntum.

Would today be the day? Would she finally, somehow, blow her cover, and let the whole world know that she wasn’t anything like what she seemed?

She took refuge, and warmth, in a small flash of temper at the nurse’s belaboring of the obvious. “Scilicet vigilans sum. Sed ubi sum?’’

The woman’s eyes widened even further. “Say what, honey?” Under her breath, she muttered something that sounded like, Possible brain damage?

Nicole opened her mouth to snap at her: What are you, deaf? Didn’t you hear me? But she stopped. She’d been speaking Latin. It had come out that way automatically, as it had for the past year and more. But the nurse had spoken plain, ordinary, wonderful, familiar English.

Nicole had to kink her brain a bit to remember how the words went. When they came back, the vowels were flavored still, a little, with Latin. “I said, of course I’m awake. But where? I know this is a hospital. Which one?” The last of it came out in the harsh Midwestern accent she’d tried to soften since she moved to California, but it was better than the mock-Italian of the first few words.

“West Hills Regional Medical Center, ma’am,” the nurse answered her. That was the closest hospital to Nicole’s house; she’d taken Kimberley and Justin to the ER there a time or two.

The nurse frowned, wondering, maybe, if she’d really heard gibberish from this patient after all. “Do you know your name, ma’am?” she asked.

“Nicole Gunther-Perrin,” Nicole said — biting down hard on the temptation to answer, Umma. She rattled off her address for good measure, with satisfaction entirely out of proportion to the achievement. Street number. Street name. Zip code. All the lovely architecture of the modern identity.

The nurse glanced at the card at the foot of the bed, then nodded. Nicole had got it right. She hadn’t known she was holding her breath till she let it out. She asked the question she’d been working her way up to, the one that truly mattered: “How long have I been here?”

She held her breath again, consciously this time. She’d been in Carnuntum a year and a half. If she’d been gone so long, Kimberley would hardly know her. Justin — Justin wouldn’t remember her at all. And the bills she would have run up! The law firm’s medical coverage was more than decent, but a year and a half in the hospital? She’d be as broke as if she’d stayed in Carnuntum.

Or — She froze. What if it was even worse? What if she’d been in a coma for five years? Ten? Twenty? What if —?

The nurse cut off her thoughts before they spiraled into hysteria. “Honey,” she said in her warm Southern drawl, “you’ve been here six days.”

Nicole nearly collapsed with relief. She stiffened herself as best she could, and looked down at her hands — her hands. Yes, that was the nail polish she’d put on last, badly grown out and somewhat chipped, but definitely her own.

Six days. Thank God. No — thank gods.

Now the next question, much less painful, but she had to know. “How did I get here?”

But the nurse held up a hand. “You just stay right there, Ms. Gunther-Perrin. I’m going to call Dr. Feldman. She’ll tell you everything you need to know. She’ll want to run some tests on you, too, I bet.”

“Wait!” Nicole cried. “Just let me ask about my childr — “

But the nurse had already whipped about and gone. Fled, Nicole almost thought, except that nurses were often like that. They didn’t want to get involved, and for sure they didn’t want to assume the responsibility of treating the patient like a human being instead of a piece of furniture.

She stayed where she was, drinking in the sight of that bare and sterile room. The other bed in it, nearer the window, was empty. Beyond it, through glass, actual glass without bubble or waver or crack, she saw blue, faintly hazy sky and the sun-baked, brush-covered hills that said, distinctly, California. They had never looked so good in all the years she’d lived there.

A different nurse, Hispanic or maybe Filipina, appeared in the doorway. She stared at Nicole. “Could you bring me this morning’s Times, please?” Nicole asked, taking care to speak English.

The nurse looked more startled than ever, turned and fled. What was wrong with them all? Hadn’t they ever had a person in a coma wake up before?

Probably not sitting up, talking, and demanding the latest news. Nicole lay back on the crackly bed. She couldn’t exactly luxuriate in it, but it was clean. That alone was well worth wallowing in.

She was still not entirely sure she wasn’t dreaming. Pinching herself didn’t help. She could dream that sharp little pain, couldn’t she?

Even the little things were wonderful. The blank face of the TV hung from the ceiling: she couldn’t find the remote, and wasn’t inclined to hunt for it. Just knowing it was there, somewhere, was enough. The IV on its rack, and the different monitors. All that plastic and metal and glass, none of it even imaginable to a mind raised in the second century.

She lay for a long while staring at the clock on the wall. What a marvel it was. Time measured out in hours and minutes and seconds. No need to rely on the sun, or to remember whether it was summer or winter, whether the hours were longer or shorter depending on the length of the day.

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?

It wasn’t likely Nicole would ever learn the answer to that. She couldn’t afford to dwell on it. Not in front of this dangerously perceptive woman. She put on a brisk front. “Since I am here and conscious again, how do I go about getting out?” she asked.

Dr. Feldman frowned. “You’ll stay for at least another day or two. We’ll want to run more tests on you, to make sure there is no risk of a recurrence.”

“How do you propose to do that, when you don’t know what caused the trouble in the first place?” Nicole wanted to know.

The doctor looked stubborn. Nicole’s teeth clicked together. The last thing she needed was for Dr. Feldman to think she was questioning anybody’s competence. And — if Nicole hadn’t known what had happened to her, she would have been demanding tests, not complaining about them.

“All right,” she said. “I suppose you’d better. But could I have some breakfast first? And I’ll want to get on the phone, let people know I’m okay.”

“I don’t see either of those things being a problem,” Dr. Feldman said. She looked pleased with herself, now that she’d got her own way, and subtly reassured, now that Nicole was acting like what she was: a brisk young lawyer and single mother. “I’m going to order you the soft breakfast, since you’ve been on intravenous fluids since your admission. If you handle it without upset, you can have a normal lunch. Let me phone Dietary, and it should be up in half an hour or so. It’s very good to have you back with us.”

“It’s very good to be back,” Nicole said, most sincerely.

The neurologist prodded her and poked her and listened to her heart and checked her reflexes and peered into her eyes and nose and mouth and ears. “Everything seems to check out,” she said, sounding almost reluctant to admit it. “But if everything is as normal as it looks, what happened to you?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Nicole said. Breakfast came up just then, right on the half-hour: oatmeal, a medium-boiled egg, and a square of blue hospital gelatin, industrial strength like the sheets, thicker and tougher than she would ever have made at home. Nicole had no idea what flavor it was supposed to be. She didn’t care. She inhaled it. She inhaled every scrap on that white plastic plate, and would have inhaled the plate if she could have got away with it. There was only one bobble: forgetting, and trying to eat with her fingers. She covered for it quickly, picked up the spoon and dove into the oatmeal.

Dr. Feldman watched her with a good measure of bemusement. “How does that feel?” she asked.

“Wonderful!” she answered, wiping her mouth — on the napkin, at the last instant, and not on her arm. She felt like asking for another tray just like this one. But she didn’t think Dr. Feldman would let her have it. She’d been this hungry in Carnuntum, and more. She kept quiet.

Dr. Feldman said, “I’m going to set up another CAT scan and MRI and some more diagnostic procedures for you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin. While I’m doing that, you can go ahead and use the telephone.”

In the way doctors have, she spoke as if she were granting a great boon. Which she was. She had no idea how great it was. She took it all, all the technology, the tests, the telephone, completely for granted. Nicole didn’t, not anymore. How long would it be, she wondered, before the novelty palled? Dr. Feldman went out as she’d come in, brisk, bright, and competent. With a sigh of pure pleasure, Nicole picked up the phone. Its smooth plastic was cool in her hand, its shape familiar, its weight, the buzz of the dial tone as she held it to her ear.

She sat for a long while with the receiver to her ear. Number — what was the number? She held down panic. It was somewhere in her mind, unused, filed away. But she hadn’t forgotten it. Of course she hadn’t.

There. There it was, right in her fingertips. She punched in the numbers, and held her breath. If she’d remembered it wrong, or forgotten it altogether, and had to ask — they’d start doubting her sanity again. She couldn’t have that. She’d never slipped up enough to get in real trouble, back in Carnuntum. There was no way she was going to slip up here.

The first ring startled her half out of her skin. Her fingers clenched on the receiver before she dropped it.

The ringing went on. After the fourth ring, the answering machine would pick up. But just at the end of number four, the ring broke off. A breathless female voice said, “Hello?”

Nicole’s mouth twisted. She’d been expecting Frank, if she didn’t just get the machine. But of course it would be Dawn.

Well, no help for it. “Dawn?” she said. “Dawn, this is Nicole. I’m calling from the hospital.”

“Nicole!” Of all the things Nicole had expected, she hadn’t expected this rush of gratitude and relief. “I’m so glad to hear your voice. How are you?”

She really did sound glad, and not just, or not entirely, because if Nicole was awake and making sense, it got her off the hook with the kids. A home-wrecker without a mean bone in her body? A girlfriend who honestly cared that the first wife was all right? Nicole would have laughed at the thought, six days or a year and a half or eighteen centuries ago.

Actually, she sounded a great deal like Julia. The same kind of voice, breathy and light, the kind men went for and women tended to regard with disgust. A Marilyn Monroe sort of voice. The sound of it stabbed Nicole with guilt so sudden she almost gasped. She’d never apologize to Julia now for being so childishly unreasonable. She’d never make it up to Julia. Julia was lost at the other end of time.

That stab of guilt was like a shaft of sun in a dark place. She could see something she’d never have seen before, or wanted to see. Julia had been, not to put too fine a point on it, a slut, but she’d never been either stupid or mean. And neither, Nicole admitted to herself, was Dawn.

She’d think the rest of it through later, when she wasn’t supposed to be holding up one end of a tense and rather awkward phone conversation. “I’m all right,” she said. “At least I think I am. Nobody has a clue as to what happened to me.” Except me. But she wouldn’t say that. “How are the kids?”

“They’re doing all right,” Dawn answered. “They miss you. They keep asking when you’ll be coming back. I haven’t known what to tell them.”

“If I check out all right, it’ll be another day or two,” Nicole said. An entirely different and even more powerful wave of guilt washed over her. She’d done far worse than let her last words to Julia be the end of a quarrel. She’d abandoned her life, her family, her kids — No time now. She had to be glad that she’d only been gone six days. Still, she said something she never would have said if she’d truly been gone for less than a week: “I’m sorry I messed up your trip.”

Yes, she was having trouble working up a good head of loathing for Dawn. Perspective? Maybe just distance? It just didn’t seem to matter as much as it used to. After war, plague, and famine, a little adultery seemed almost unremarkable.

“Don’t worry about our trip,” Dawn said cheerfully, as unperturbed by the ways of the world as ever. “We’ll get away again soon.” Maybe, Nicole reflected, that talent for letting things be explained how she put up with Frank. Why she did was another question, but Nicole wasn’t likely to get an answer for that.

And speaking of Frank… She braced herself. “Let me talk to Frank, would you please?”

“Why, sure,” Dawn said. Her voice faded as if she’d turned away from the phone. “Frank? It’s your ex. She’s awake.”

And, fainter yet, a male voice, with sarcasm that came through loud and clear: “I never would have guessed.”

Nicole’s own thoughts were running on much too similar lines. If I weren’t awake, would I have called? She caught herself with a snap. She wasn’t that much like Frank. Was she?

Then his voice came on the line, with the sarcasm carefully screened out of it. “Nicole? How are you doing?” Was he actually diffident, or was he just playing at it?

She decided to play it calm, be polite, and see if that shocked him. “I think I’m all right,” she said. “I woke up this morning, that’s all, just as I always have.” At this end of time, that is. “The doctor’s still trying to figure out what happened.”

“Yeah, I talked with the neurologist,” Frank said in that faintly snotty tone that always pissed her off. If for any reason he’d been unsure of himself, he’d got his equilibrium back. “No, she has no idea what it was. When I got the call in Cancun, I thought you were so pissed at me, you’d OD’ed on pills just to screw up my vacation. But she says you didn’t. So you didn’t. I’m glad you’re feeling better. “

Good old Frank, just as charming as ever, and just as convinced the world revolved around him. It was like him to make sure she knew what he’d thought, but it was also like him to believe Dr. Feldman when she’d told him it wasn’t so. Nicole had to give him that much.

Now, if he’d just give her what she had coming to her… But this was not the time. It would come, she promised herself, but not yet. First things first.

“Let me talk to the kids,” she said. “I want them to know I’m all right.”

“I’ll get them,“ Frank said. “I haven’t known what to tell them. I’ve said you’re sick, that’s all, and I hoped you’d be well soon.”

That was adequate, Nicole thought. She started to say something more, it didn’t matter what — Good-bye or Thanks or Just put the kids on, will you? But before she could begin, Kimberley’s voice shrieked in her ear: “Mommy!” And, close enough behind it to make it a chorus: “Mommy-mommy-mommy!” Justin must have been swinging on the phone cord, from the way his voice came and went.

Telephone conversations with preschoolers range from incoherent to downright surreal, but Nicole managed to assure both Kimberley and Justin — fighting at top volume over who got the phone — that she loved them, that she was feeling better, and that she would see them soon. Her throat kept locking up, which was annoying. As fond as she’d become of Lucius and Aurelia, as much as she’d mourned Aurelia’s death, these were her babies. Her children. If she’d had any chance at all of getting away with it, she’d have left the hospital right then and there, and gone straight home, and hugged them both so tight they squealed in protest. Even their shrieking, which she’d done her best to train out of them — God, she hated screaming kids — was a blessed thing, because it was theirs.

She hated to let them go, but they were getting overexcited. She heard Dawn round them up, a soft murmur that sounded more than ever like Julia taking Lucius and Aurelia in hand. Then Frank came on the line. “How soon are they letting you out?” he demanded.

Trust Frank not to miss the essentials. “Another day or two,” she answered, “if everything looks good.” Something tugged at her awareness. Something she should be remembering. Some crucial thing about the kids.

Yes. That awful day on top of too many awful days, when she’d prayed to Liber and Libera, and to her lasting amazement, been answered, there’d been one crisis that she couldn’t let slip from her mind. “I’m going to have to look for a new daycare provider,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’ve heard all about Josefina — the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’ve been looking for someone to replace her.”

“You have?” Nicole was flat astonished. Frank, exerting himself for anything of that relentlessly mundane sort?

Well. Frank was an asshole, but he wasn’t stupid. If Nicole was going to be incapacitated for some unspecified time, he’d want to get on with his life. He’d been perfectly happy to kick back and let her handle the kids. If they were suddenly thrown into his lap — cold-bloodedly efficient was the term that came to mind. “Any luck finding a new provider?” she asked.

“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 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 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.

Being silly helped. So did just being — being here, in this world and time, where pain was seldom worse than a brief discomfort, and where everything was so very clean.

It was the middle of the afternoon before she got back to her room. She was exhausted, and she was starving. It was well past the lunch hour, but Dr. Feldman was ready for that: she called Dietary, and the kitchen sent up a tuna-salad sandwich, a plate of orange heavy-duty Jell-O, and an oversized chocolate-chip cookie. The bread was soft and wonderfully free from grit, though it didn’t have a tenth the flavor of her own baking in Carnuntum — but Umma’s shoulder and elbow had ached endlessly from working the quern.

But even better than the bread was the cookie. Until she bit into what was, really, an indifferently good cookie grudgingly flecked with poor-quality chocolate, she’d forgotten just how much she missed that dark sweetness. No chocolate in Carnuntum. No food of the gods. Even knowing how much better it could be, she savored each bite. God, it was good.

When she’d eaten her lunch in blissful solitude, she hunted around for the remote and turned on the TV news. There was plenty of local crime, but there were also New York and Moscow and Angola and the Persian Gulf, right in the room with her. She could find out what was going on in any of those places more readily than she could have learned what was happening in Vindobona, twenty miles up the Danube from Carnuntum. What a wonder of a world this was!

She reined herself in before she got too giddy. She should calm down or she’d get into trouble, but it was rather wonderful to be so very much aware of all the things she’d taken for granted. It made her feel more alive; more in the world.

She was still thinking about half in Latin, till she ran into concepts that needed English. Or she thought it was Latin. If she’d hallucinated a year and a half in Carnuntum, she could just as easily have hallucinated a language to go with it. She’d been at a party once, one of Frank’s academic mill-and-swills, in which she’d overheard one of the guests telling another about a colleague who’d apparently gone around the bend: “He claims he’s been channeling one of Alexander the Great’s historians — in Greek, no less.”

“And is it real Greek?” the other had asked.

“Well,” said the first with a touch of scorn, “it is Greek — but it’s much too archaic for the place and the time.”

At the time she’d laughed, thinking how very academic that conversation was. They weren’t disturbed by the channeling, but channeling in too archaic a dialect — that was very bad form.

Now she wondered. What if..?

No. It was preposterous. And yet…

Somewhere between the international scene and the financial report, a nurse brought in a plastic bag filled with clothes. Frank hadn’t wasted any time sending them. Neither had he taken the time to come up and visit. He wasn’t that considerate.

Then again, maybe he was. They couldn’t stay in the same room without squabbling. It was a great deal easier on her nerves if he stayed in his place and she stayed in hers.

The day could have dragged, but she had the TV and the remote, and she entertained herself with relentless channel-surfing. Soap operas, game shows, movies old and almost new, kids’ programming, women’s programming, talk shows, reality shows, the entertainment report, the news, sports, Discover, PBS, the Learning Channel… She was as drunk on images as she’d once been on wine.

Dinner came on time: frozen fried chicken, frozen peas, mashed potatoes with the same gluey gravy she remembered from her high-school cafeteria, and in place of tough Jell-O in colors never seen in nature, a scoop of gelatinous tapioca pudding. The novelty was wearing off: she was starting to think that hospital cuisine left a bit to be desired. But the styrofoam cup held real coffee. How on earth had they let that through Dietary?

She didn’t care how, just that it was there. She sighed with pleasure over every lukewarm sip.

Just about two sips from the bottom of the cup, Dr. Feldman strode into the room, not quite so springily as she had in the morning. Her face wore a distinctly sour expression.

She didn’t linger long in small talk of the good-evening-how-are-you? variety. “I’ve been going over your new tests,” she said.

Nicole’s heart thudded. She was glad the monitor was disconnected: it would have brought a nurse at the run. “Yes?” she prompted when the doctor didn’t go on.

“And,” Dr. Feldman said, looking more sour still, “as far as they go, you seem to be a normal, healthy specimen. Except that normal, healthy specimens aren’t in the habit of lapsing into six-day comas. Something went wrong in there. We just can’t determine what it was.”

“But I’m all right now?” Nicole asked.

“So far as we can determine, yes. “ Dr. Feldman didn’t sound happy at all.

Nicole pounced on the important thing. “Then will you let me go home tomorrow?”

The doctor frowned. “If your insurance will cover it, I’d really like to keep you here for another day of observation. You wouldn’t want to lose consciousness again as you were driving home, would you?”

“No,” Nicole said. She wasn’t enthusiastic about going to sleep, either. She’d gone up to her bedchamber in Carnuntum every night hoping, praying, she would wake up in L.A. If she fell asleep here, would she wake up in Carnuntum again? Had that journey been real, and was this the hallucination?

She was going to go crazy unless she could get an answer to that. But this neurologist all too obviously, and all too unhappily, didn’t have one.

Best to do as she was told. If she didn’t wake up in the second century, the hospital wasn’t so bad a place. And if she didn’t wake up at all…

“My insurance will cover an extra day,” she said.

“Good,“ Dr. Feldman said. “That’s wise. And while you’re resting, I’ll see if I can come up with more tests for you. I do want to get to the bottom of this if I possibly can.”

“I understand,” Nicole said.

The doctor left, still frowning, still obviously unhappy to have no answers. Nor was Nicole about to give her any, even if she’d had one that a modern medical scientist would accept.

The evening wound down between primetime television and the ringing of the telephone. Her mother called from Bloomington, with interpolations from the elder of her two sisters and the kids. Nicole gave them an expanded version of the official story, and got the expected hammering of questions for which she had no credible answers. She might still have been fending off “But why? Why were you out like that for a week? Don’t tell me the doctor doesn’t know! So get a new doctor! ‘ right through the change of nursing shifts at eleven o’clock, and never mind what time it was in Indiana, if a nurse hadn’t come in to take her pulse and temperature and meddle generally with her arrangements.

After the nurse went to harass the next patient, Nicole took refuge in television. That was what it was, a refuge. She’d fled to it every night when she came home from the office, used it as a pacifier to wind down from the stress of the day. And yet, if you’d asked her what she thought of television, she’d have come out with a whole canned rant against it, complete with assertion that she would never, no, never, use it as a babysitter for her children.

And all the while they’d be parked in front of it while she got her head together after a hard day at the firm, and when she’d put them to bed, she’d park there herself till she fell asleep. The Emperor, she had to admit, had no clothes.

And yet, she thought, she’d met an Emperor, and he most definitely was not blind to his own faults. Quite the opposite: he’d gone in search of them so that he could get rid of them.

Of all the things she’d found in the second century, Marcus Aurelius was the one the twentieth couldn’t match. If he turned out to be a dream or a hallucination, she’d be more than sorry. The world was a better place, by a little, for that he’d been in it.

At eleven o’clock, a nurse marched in and turned off the television. “We do have to get some rest,” he said primly.

What do you mean, we? Nicole refrained from saying. She was wide awake and in fine shape. And she did not want to sleep. She did not want to wake in that tavern in Carnuntum.

The nurse couldn’t know that, nor would he have cared if he had. He turned out the light in the room and laid the bed down flat. His air of superior virtue made Nicole want to kick him.

She lay in the not-quite-dark, dim-lit by the lights in the hallway and the flicker of the heart monitor that the nurse had hooked up again — Making sure I don’t sit up and turn the TV back on, she thought sourly. The mattress was not what she’d have called comfortable, and yet it was thicker and softer than the one she’d slept on above the tavern.

They’d told her she’d been asleep six days. It was sleep, the doctors had admitted grudgingly, though right on the edge of true coma. No dreams. She’d asked. She’d stayed in the deepest level of sleep throughout. “As if there was nobody home,” one of the nurses had said between tests. Dr. Feldman had said the same thing.

So she didn’t need more sleep now, did she? And she’d had coffee with dinner. She would stay awake. She would. Even if she yawned. Even if..

Nicole’s dreams were muddy, confused. Sometimes she was in Carnuntum, but no one could see or hear her; she ran here and there, trying to get Julia to listen, then Gaius Calidius Severus, then — and by this she knew it was a dream — Titus Calidius Severus. He smiled at her and said, “Welcome back among the dead, Umma.”

Then she was in West Hills, trying to get a much younger Justin to eat his prunes, but Kimberley kept tugging at her to go and feed the “other baby,” except it wasn’t a baby, it was Lucius in a blue bunny bib and a toga.

She woke with a start, suddenly and fully aware, and grimly determined not to open her eyes. There was light beyond her eyelids, she couldn’t escape that. And — she breathed deep. Nothing. No complex reek of Roman city.

Her eyes opened. She was in West Hills Medical Center, in the bed in which she’d fallen asleep. Had anyone ever been so happy to wake up in a hospital?

Reality came crashing in as soon as she sat up and set the heart monitor off again. There was breakfast, sponge-bath — though she could perfectly well have bathed herself, they weren’t letting her — and, when she was cleaner, even by this sketchy method, than she had been in a year and a half in Carnuntum, a nurse with the stack of paperwork. The deductibles were going to strain her to the limit, but just then she didn’t care. She’d manage. And Frank, she thought with a slow smile, was going to help. It was time he paid up.

After paperwork came more tests, and more frustration for Dr. Feldman. There wasn’t one anomalous thing anywhere, no matter how often she repeated her tests, or how many variations she tried. At last she flung up her hands and sent Nicole back to her room. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” she said as the nurse settled Nicole in the obligatory and unnecessary wheelchair, “even now we have much less knowledge of the brain and its functions than I wish we did.”

What about the functions of the brain under the influence of two Roman gods? Nicole thought. But she nodded, and held her tongue.

That afternoon, faced with a wasteland of TV soap operas, Nicole determined to give herself a gift she’d yearned for since the day she arrived in Carnuntum. After consulting with Dr. Feldman, the nurses let her get away with it.

She took a long, hot, wonderful shower. With soap. And shampoo. And towels that, while not exactly luxurious, were thick enough and soft enough to be a pleasure on her clean skin. It was an almost orgasmic delight to be so clean. Her body still felt strange, as if it didn’t quite fit. Its skin was too pale, its middle too thick and soft. And yet there wasn’t a louse or a fleabite on it. For that alone she loved it.

Then, when she’d showered, she rummaged in the bag Frank had sent and found the little blow dryer she’d bought a long time ago for traveling — and a small makeup kit that had to be Dawn’s contribution; she couldn’t imagine Frank thinking of such a thing.

It was a brand-new Nicole Gunther-Perrin who came out of the steamy bathroom and settled again in the bed. She was more than ready for her dinner. And when, after the tray had been taken away, Dr. Feldman appeared in the doorway, Nicole greeted her almost happily.

The doctor’s expression was as sour as ever. She wasn’t at all pleased to say, “I can’t see any valid medical reason for keeping you here past tomorrow morning. You are, as far as any test can determine, perfectly normal and healthy. I wish I could tell you if your syndrome will recur, but I can’t.”

Nicole bit her tongue. She could guarantee a longer stay by telling the doctor exactly what, as far as she could tell, had happened to her during those six days. For that matter, she could talk herself right into a nice long stay in a padded cell.

No, thank you. “We’ll just have to hope it was a one-time thing, won’t we?” she said.

“Hope is just about as much as we’ve got,” Dr. Feldman said. “I’d like to see you in my office next week — it’s right across the street.” She handed Nicole a business card. “Call and make an appointment, and I’ll see you then.”

“I’ll do that,” Nicole said. She meant it. If, as she was increasingly convinced, she really had traveled in time by the offices of a pair of antique gods, it wasn’t bloody likely she’d ever do it again. But if it kept the doctor happy, and if it made her look like a normal, baffled, honestly concerned victim of an unknown syndrome, then she’d do it and welcome it.

“Please do come and see me,” the doctor said. “Just because I can’t find anything now doesn’t mean nothing happened. People don’t lose consciousness for six days for no reason at all.”

“Yes,” Nicole said. “I understand. It’s like when the car is acting up, and you take it to the mechanic and it’s working just fine.”

“Just like that,” Dr. Feldman said with the flicker of a smile.

They parted on good terms, all things considered. Nicole settled down in front of the TV feeling surprisingly unsettled. She was sure — but she wasn’t. Before she went home, she decided, she was going to make a stop. If she turned out to be wrong… If she turned out to be wrong, she’d need that appointment with the neurologist. And she’d be just as eager as Dr. Feldman to get to the bottom of whatever had happened.