The Wizard's Dilemma

by Diane Duane

  "She collapsed as she was leaving the store," her father said, staring at the table. "I thought she was kneeling down to look at one of the plants in the window, you know how she would always fuss over the display not being just right. She just seemed to kneel down... and then she leaned against the doorsill. And she didn't get up."

  "What was it?" Dairine cried. "What happened to her?"

  "They're not sure. She just passed out, and she wouldn't wake up. The ambulance came, and we took her over to the county hospital. They did some physical tests, and then they X-rayed her chest and her head, and put her in the ICU..." Her father trailed off. Nita saw the frightened look in his eyes as he relived some memory that terrified him. "They said they'd call when they had some news."

  "I'm not waiting for that!" Dairine said. "We have to go to the hospital. Right now!" She turned as if intending to go get her jacket.

  Her father caught hold of her. "Not right now, honey. The doctor told me that they need a few hours to get her stable. She's okay, but they need to do some tests, and—"

  "Dad," Nita said.

  He looked at her.

  The terror in his eyes was awful, worse than what Nita was feeling. She wanted to grab him and hold him and pat his back and say, "It's going to be all right." But she had no idea whether it was going to be all right or not. Nita settled for grabbing him and holding him, and Dairine, too.

  Then they began to wait.

  The time until they went to the hospital passed in a kind of horrible disturbed silence, most of the disturbance coming from the phone, as it rang and rang and rang again, and every time, Nita's father lunged for it, hoping it was the hospital, and every time, it wasn't.

  There were always people on the other end who'd heard from someone they knew about Nita's mom or had seen the ambulance at the shop. Every time Nita's dad had to explain to someone what had happened, he got more upset.

  "Daddy, stop answering itl" Nita cried at one point.

  "They're your mother's friends" was all he would say. "And mine. They have a right to know. And besides, what if the hospital calls?" And there was no arguing with that.

  "Let us answer it," Dairine said.

  "No," said their dad. "Things are hard enough for you two. You let me handle it." The phone rang again, and he went to answer it.

  After that, it seemed that the phone just went on ringing all evening.

  Nita was terrified. She wasn't used to not knowing what was happening, not being able to do anything— and her shock was such that she wasn't even able to make any kind of plan about what to do next. Dairine paced around the house like a caged creature, her face alternately frightened and furious, and she wouldn't talk to anybody, not even Spot, who crouched mutely near one of the chairs in the living room and simply watched her go back and forth. Nita felt actively sorry for it but didn't know what to do; Spot's relationship was exclusively with Dairine, and she didn't know how it would take to being comforted by someone else.

  If comforted is even the word, Nita thought, because I wouldn't know what to say or do to make it Saturday Evening

  comfortable... any more than I know what to say to Dairine. Or Dad. That was the worst of it: not being able to do anything for either of them. Again and again, after her dad hung up the phone, that deadly quiet would descend, emphasizing the voice that was not there, all of a sudden. And then the phone would ring into the silence again... and Nita felt certain that if it rang once more, she'd scream.

  But finally the hospital called. Nita watched her father answer, his face naked in its changes, shifting every second between fear and uncertainty and greater fear. "Yes. This is he. Yes." He paused, turning away from where Nita sat at the dining-room table.

  "She is?"

  Nita's heart seized. "Uh, good."

  She breathed again. And I don't even know why; I don't even know what's happening! "Yes...sure we can. About half an hour. Yes. Thanks."

  He hung up, turned to Nita. Dairine was standing there by the living-room door, as intently as Nita had been. "She's still in intensive care," her dad said, "but they say she's stable now, whatever that means. Let's go."

  Shortly, Nita found herself walking into a setting entirely too familiar to her from too many TV shows: all the people in pastel uniforms with stethoscopes hanging around their necks and shoved into their breast pockets, all the white jackets, the metal beds and the stretcher-trolleys in the corridors, people going places in a hurry and doing important but inexplicable things. What the TV shows had never gotten across, and what now struck itself deeply into Nita's mind, was the smell of the place. It wasn't a bad smell. It was clean enough... but that cleanliness was cold, a chilly distancing scent of disinfectant and other chemicals. The faces of the people working there were kind, mostly, but a lot of them had a strange preoccupied quality, unlike the faces of the actors on the TV shows. These people weren't acting.

  Nita and Dairine stuck close to their father as they made their way through the hospital corridors and to the reception desk, where someone could tell them where to go. "They've moved her out of ICU, Mr. Cal-lahan," the lady at the desk said. "She's over in Neurology now. If you go down that hall and turn right—"

  Her father nodded and led them off down the hall. About three minutes' walking brought them through swinging doors and up to a nurses' station.

  One of the nurses there, a large, cheerful-looking lady in a pink scrub-style uniform, with her brown hair pulled back tight in a bun, looked up as they approached. "Mr. Callahan?"

  "Yes."

  "The doctor would like to see you—that's Dr. Kashiwabara, she's the senior neurologist. If you can go into that room across the hall and wait for a few minutes, she'll be with you shortly."

  They went into the plain little room—white walls, beige tile floor, noisy orange sofa that was also literally noisy, with plastic-covered cushions that wheezed when you sat down on them—and waited, in silence. Nita's dad put an arm around her and Dairine, and Nita hoped she didn't look as stiff with fear as she felt. 7 can't believe this, she thought, bizarrely angry with herself. I'm so scared, I can't even think. I 'wasn't this afraid when I thought a shark might eat me! And this isn't even about me. It's someone else—

  But that makes it worse. That was true, too. There'd been times when Kit was in some bad spot, and the terror had risen up and had nearly choked the breath out of her. And that was just Kit—

  Just! said the back of her mind in shock. Nita shook her head. Kit was so important to her... but he wasn't her mother.

  The door opened, and the sound made them all jump. "Mr. Callahan?" said the little woman in the white coat who was standing there. She was extremely petite and pretty, with short black hair, and had calm, knowledgeable eyes that for some reason immediately put Nita more at ease. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. These are your daughters?"

  "Nita," said Nita's dad, "and Dairine."

  "I'm pleased to meet you." She shook their hands and sat down on the couch across from them. "Doctor, how's my wife? Is she any better?"

  "She's resting," said the doctor. "I don't want to alarm you, but she had several minor seizures after we admitted her, and sedation was necessary to break the cycle and allow us to find out what's going on."

  "Do you know?"

  The doctor looked at the chart she was carrying, though she didn't open it. "We have some early indications, but first I want to talk to you about some things we didn't have time to discuss while we were admitting Mrs. Callahan. Has she been having any physical problems lately?"

  "Physical problems—"

  "Double vision, or problems with her sight? Headaches? Any trouble with coordination—a little more clumsiness than usual, perhaps?"

  "She's been saying she needed to get reading glasses," Dairine said softly.

  Nita looked at her dad. "Daddy, she's been taking a lot of aspirin lately. I didn't realize until just now."

  Their father looked stricken. "She hadn't mentioned anything to me," he s
aid to the doctor. "The hours I've been working lately, sometimes the kids have been seeing more of her than I have."

  Dr. Kashiwabara nodded. "All right. I'll be going over these issues with Mrs. Callahan myself when she's more lucid. But what you've told me makes sense in terms of what we've found so far. There's been time to do an X ray, anyway, and there seems to be a small abnormal growth at the base of one of the frontal lobes of her brain."

  Nita swallowed.

  "What kind of growth?" her dad said.

  "We don't know yet," said Dr. Kashiwabara. "I've scheduled her for a PET scan this evening, and an MRI scan tomorrow morning; those should tell us what we need to know."

  "This is a brain tumor we're talking about," said Nita's father, his voice shaking. "Isn't it?"

  Dr. Kashiwabara looked at him, then nodded. "What we need to do is find out what kind it is," she said, "so that we can work out how best to treat it. What we do know at this point is that the tumor seems to have grown large enough to put pressure on some nearby areas of Mrs. Callahan's brain. That's what caused the seizures. We've medicated her to prevent any more. She's going to be pretty woozy when you see her; please don't be concerned about that by itself. For the time being, while we run the tests, she's going to have to stay very quiet to keep excess pressure from building up in her skull and brain. It means she needs to stay flat on her back in bed, even if she feels like she's able to get up."

  "For how long?" Dairine said.

  "Depending on how the tests go, it may be only a couple of days," Dr. Kashiwabara said. "We'll do the scans that I mentioned, and then there'll have to be a biopsy of the growth itself—we'll remove a tiny bit of tissue and test it to see what kind it is. After that, we'll know what our next move needs to be."

  The doctor folded her hands and rubbed them together a little, then looked up. "I'll be doing that procedure myself," she said. "I don't want to trouble your wife about signing the permissions, Mr. Callahan. Maybe we can take care of that before you leave."

  "Yes," Nita's dad said, hardly above a whisper, "of course." "I want you to call me if you have any questions at all," Dr. Kashiwabara said, "or any concerns. I may not be able to get back to you immediately—I have a lot of other people to take care of—but I promise you I will always call you back. Okay?"

  "Yes. Thank you."

  "All right," said the doctor, and got up. "Why don't you go see her now? But, please, keep it brief. The seizures will have been very fatiguing and confusing for her, and she won't be fully recovered from them until tomorrow. Come with me; I'll show you the way."

  They walked down the corridor together, and Dr. Kashiwabara led them into a room where there were four of those steel beds: two of them empty, the third with a cloth curtain pulled partway around it, under which they could see a nurse in white shoes and pink nursing sweats doing something or other. In the fourth bed, beyond the partway-pulled curtain, their mom lay under light covers, with one arm strapped to a board, and an IV running into that arm. She was in a hospital gown, and someone had tied her hair back and put it up under a paper cap. Her eyes suddenly looked sunken to Nita; it was the same tired look she had been wearing this morning, but much worse. Why didn't I notice? Nita's heart cried. Why didn't I see something was wrong?!

  "Mrs. Callahan?" said Dr. Kashiwabara.

  It took Nita's mom's eyes a few moments to open, and then they seemed to have trouble focusing. "What... oh." She moistened her lips. "Harry?"

  It was as if she couldn't see him properly. "I'm here, honey," he said, and Nita was astonished at how strong he sounded. He took her hand and sat in the chair by the bed. "And the girls are here, too. How're you feeling?"

  There was a long pause. "Like... bats."

  Nita and Dairine looked at each other in poorly concealed panic. "Baseball bats," their mother said. "Very sore."

  "Like somebody was hitting you with baseball bats, you mean?" Nita said. "Yeah."

  From the seizures, Nita thought. Her mother turned her head toward her, across from her dad. "Oh, honey...," she said, "I'm sorry..."

  "What're you sorry for, Mom? This isn't your fault!" Nita said. And even as she said it, she knew exactly whose fault it was.

  There was only one of the Powers Who at the beginning of things had insisted on inventing something never contemplated before in the universe: entropy, disease... death. That Lone Power had been her enemy more than once, but suddenly it seemed to Nita that she hadn't done It nearly as much damage as she should have.

  Dairine, next to Nita, leaned over the bed. "Mom, why didn't you tell us your head was hurting you?"

  "Honey, I did." She shook her head on the pillow. "I thought... I thought it was stress." She smiled. "Seems I miscalculated..."

  She drifted off then, her eyes closing. Nita and Dairine exchanged a glance. Nita took her mom's hand and closed her eyes, trying something she had never tried with her mother. She slipped her consciousness a little way into her mother's body, gingerly, carefully. Without a wizardry specifically built to the purpose, she could get nothing clear—just a fuzzy, muzzy feeling, a faint vague pain at the edge of things, an odd sense of dislocation...

  ... and one other thing. A small something. A lot of small somethings that were not her mom. They were all gathered together into something little and hot and strange, burning against the cooler, "normal" background: something alien... and malevolent.

  Nita gulped, and opened her eyes. / could be wrong. I didn't do that exactly by the book. But boy... will I, later.

  Her mother opened her eyes. "I don't want you to worry," she said, very clearly.

  Her dad actually managed to laugh. "Listen to you," he said. "Worrying about us, as usual. You concentrate on getting rested up, and help these people do whatever they need to do."

  "Don't have much choice," Nita's mother said. "Got me outnumbered." She closed her eyes again.

  Nita met her dad's eyes across the bed. "We should go," he said softly. "Sleep's probably the best thing for her."

  "Mom," Dairine said, "we'll see you tomorrow, okay? You have a nap." " 'nt to extremes... to get one," her mother whispered. "Sorry."

  They sat there for a few minutes more, saying nothing. Finally one of the nurses looked in the door at them, put his finger to his lips, then gestured out into the hall with his head and raised his eyebrows. Nita got up, bringing Dairine with her. "Dad...," she said.

  His eyes had been only for their mother's face. Now he turned, saw the nurse, who looked at their dad and tapped his watch. Nita's father nodded, got up. It was hard for him to let go of their mom's hand. Nita had to look away from that, as she felt the tears welling up in her. I'm not going to cry here, she thought. The whole world can hear me, and Dad—

  She headed for the door. Behind her came her dad and Dairine, and they stood lost for a moment in the hall. There was nothing they could do but go home.

  It was dark, it was late, when they got back. Where did the evening go? Nita thought as her dad locked the back door. Somehow hours had fleeted by as if in a few minutes, leaving only pain and a feeling of having been cheated of time, somehow... not that Nita wanted that particular slice of time back. Going through it once was enough. Dairine apparently agreed; she went upstairs to her room, and Nita heard the door shut.

  "Daddy," Nita said.

  He was sitting in his chair in the living room, with only one lamp on, everything else in shadow, his face rigid and stunned-looking in the dim light. "What?"

  "Daddy...what they told us," Nita said softly, "it's scary, yeah... but maybe it's not what you were thinking."

  He didn't ask how she knew. "Nita," her father said, reluctant, "you didn't see them when they first brought her in, after the X ray, before I came back. I saw the doctor looking at the X ray. I saw her face..."

  Nita swallowed. Her dad put his face in his hands, then raised it again. His cheeks were wet. "They're being careful," he said. "They're right to be: They have to do the tests. But I saw the doctor's face." He shoo
k his head. "It's not... it's not good."

  Then he clenched his fists. "I shouldn't be frightening you," he said. "I could be wrong."

  "You always say we have to tell each other when we're scared," she said. "You have to take your own advice, Dad."

  He was silent for a long time. "It's stupid," he said. "I keep thinking, 'If I hadn't been working so hard, this wouldn't have happened. If she hadn't been working so hard on the accounts, this wouldn't have happened.' It's like it has to be all my fault, somehow. As if that would help." He laughed, a short, bitter sound. "And even when I know it's not... I feel like it is. Stupid."

  Nita swallowed. "I keep thinking," she said, "I should have seen it, that she wasn't feeling okay." "So do I."

  Nita shook her head. "But I guess that...when someone's been there forever... you stop looking at them, some ways. It's dumb, but it's what we do."

  Her father wiped his hands on his pants and looked up at her with an expression that was considering, and full of pain. "You know," he said, "you sound a lot like your mom sometimes."

  It was the best thing he could have said to her. It was the worst thing he could have said to her. When the shock wore off, all that Nita could say was "You should try to get some sleep."

  Her father gave her a look that said, You must be kidding. But aloud he said, "You're right."

  He got up, gave her a hug. "Good night, honey," he said. "Get me up at eight." He went off to the back bedroom and closed the door.

  Nita went to bed, too, but there was nothing good about her night at all. She lay awake for hours, rerunning in her mind all kinds of things that had happened the previous week, especially conversations with her mother—trying to see what had gone wrong, what could have gone differently, how she could have predicted what had happened today, how she could have prevented it somehow. It was torment— and she didn't seem able to stop doing it—but it was better than going on to the next set of thoughts that Nita knew was lying in wait for her. The past, at least, was fixed. The only alternative was the future, in which any horrible thing could happen.