Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  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.