by Judith Tarr
“I said,” Nicole said more pointedly, “knock. It. Off.”
Kimberley kept right on going — with a glance at Nicole that invited Nicole to do something about it. Nicole was delighted to oblige. She was beside her in two long strides. Before Kimberley knew what was happening, Nicole had swatted her on the fanny.
It wasn’t anywhere near as hard a whack as she’d often had to administer to Lucius — he’d required a wallop just to get his attention. It wasn’t even hard enough to make Kimberley cry. She stared, open-mouthed, too astonished to say a word.
“When I tell you to stop something,” Nicole said evenly, “I expect you to stop it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Mommy,” Kimberley said in a subdued voice. Nicole knew an instant’s guilt, but she hardened herself against it. If there was one thing she’d learned in Carnuntum, it was that kids needed understanding — but they also, occasionally, needed the application of palm of hand to seat of pants.
Kimberley wasn’t cured of het habit of teasing Justin. That would take a miracle. Fifteen minutes, an hour at most, and she’d be back at it. Still, she was a good kid. She wouldn’t need too many lessons. Justin, now — Well, Justin was only two. Maybe, when he got to Lucius’ age, she wouldn’t have to correct him with a two-by-four. Maybe.
Life settled to a routine that was wonderful in its very dullness. Get up, shower (oh, that delicious hot water!), get kids up, get kids dressed, feed breakfast, and so on through the day. Sometimes she went to the supermarket — which was an experience in itself. So many things to buy. So much to take home in her car, as much as she could use. And no haggling over prices; though the price of lettuce was downright near gouging, and chicken had gone through the roof. She’d have haggled over that if she could.
Frank called every day to ask if she was all right. He had little to say when he did call, but that didn’t matter. She had little to say to him, either. If they’d had more to say to each other, they might have stayed married.
She wondered what he talked about with Dawn. Then, even more to the point, she wondered how long they would go on talking about it.
It was not, thank God, her problem. She didn’t waste much time feeling sorry for Dawn. Dawn was likable, after all, but she was one of those women who always landed on their feet, and always with a man in the bag.
The strangest thing of all, stranger than being as clean as she wanted to be, and even stranger than driving to the supermarket and buying as much as she needed and being able to pack it all home, was sleeping in her own bed at night. Not that it wasn’t comfortable — after the tavern and the hospital, it was wonderful — but because whenever she lay there in the dark, listening to the hum of the air conditioning and the whoosh of cars on the street outside, she kept feeling that Liber and Libera were watching her. She’d turn on the lamp — marveling as she did it that she could produce light, and such light, clear and bright as day, with the simple flick of a switch — and state at the god and goddess on the plaque.
They’d stare straight ahead with empty limestone eyes.
Sometimes she turned off the lamp, then turned it on again very quickly, hoping to catch Liber and Libera at whatever they were up to. But they hadn’t moved. They weren’t up to anything — or, if they were, they weren’t about to let her catch them at it.
She kept the kids through the weekend this time, by agreement with Frank. He’d had enough of them while she was in Carnuntum, and she couldn’t get het fill of them. It was a nicely mutual arrangement.
On Monday morning, the alarm blasted her awake. She woke as she had so many times before, face to face with the god and goddess. She got up, she got moving, she got the kids up. That, for once, wasn’t even hard. She had the magic words: “Today’s the day you go to your new preschool.”
Woodcrest was on Tampa, a few blocks south of Victory — east of her office, yes, but not even half as far as Josefina’s house. The parking lot the preschool shared with several small businesses and, she was most interested to note, an attached elementary school, was cramped and awkward, but for once she had good parking karma: there was a spot right near the entrance.
Kimberley and Justin, full of themselves because they’d been there before and their mother hadn’t, were delighted to serve as guides. “It’s this building, Mommy — right through this door,” Kimberley said, tugging at her arm. “Come on! You don’t want us to be late, do you?” She sounded so much like Nicole in a hurry that Nicole could hardly rebuke her, even when she started off at a run across the lot. Nicole got a solid grip on her hand and let her tow the rest of them along.
The building was standard California stucco. It already hummed with activity. There were more kids outside than in, running through the yard and climbing on apparatus and playing in sandboxes filled with bark chips instead of sand. A plumpish woman of about forty stood amid the chaos like an island of calm. Kimberley dragged Nicole right up to her and announced, “Mommy, this is Miss Irma: my teacher.”
Miss Irma smiled at Kimberley, but her warm brown eyes rested on Nicole’s face. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I showed your — ex-husband, is it? — around last week. I’m very glad you’re feeling better.” She didn’t sound dismayed by the fact of divorce, or because Nicole had been ill. Nothing would ever dismay her, Nicole suspected. That had to serve her very well in the middle of this horde of preschoolers — anyone with a nerve in her body would have had a coronary inside of a week.
Nicole thanked her for her sentiments. She’d done that more often since she came back to herself than in the year before that, she was sure. Somehow, in Carnuntum, she’d learned the art of gratitude. “Frank’s my ex, yes,” she said.
“Ah,” said Miss Irma. She smiled again, and took Nicole in hand. “Here, now, I walked him through it all, but I’m sure you’ll want your own tour, yes?”
Nicole nodded — good; she didn’t have to ask. Under Miss Irma’s capable tutelage, she met Miss Dolores, who would be Justin’s teacher: another comfortable, early-middle-aged woman, Hispanic this time, who also had that nothing-fazes-me look in her eye. She nodded approval at the kits Nicole had made up with changes of clothes, instruction sheets, medical releases, and everything else that the children were likely to need — Frank, ever efficient, had left the school’s literature with the bills on the kitchen counter, for Nicole to find and read. Evidently not every parent did: she won points for having the full kit. It was a small thing, but it made her feel good. In this world, by damn, she knew how to cope.
Miss Dolores, good preschool teacher that she was, asked The Question: “And how well are they trained?”
“Very well, I think,” Nicole answered. “Kimberley hasn’t had an accident in months.” She preened at that, too, and stood tall, as a big girl should. “Justin’s still learning.”
“That’s about right,” Miss Irma said. “He’s just a little fellow — aren’t you, Justin?”
“Big!’’ Justin countered, as contrary as any two-year-old worth his training pants.
Miss Irma laughed. “Big, then. But you’re still learning about going potty, aren’t you?”
“Go potty!” Justin replied.
“Now?” Miss Dolores asked.
“Now,” he said firmly.
She held out her hand. He took it. Nicole felt a tug as he trotted away, but she didn’t try to call him back.
Kimberley stayed with Nicole and Miss Irma through the rest of the daily procedure: the sheet on the door of each class on which each child was signed in and out, and the cubbyholes, each labeled, for the child’s work and for communications from the school. It was all very clear, very ordered, very — yes — efficient. Nothing like Josefina’s casual arrangements. Maybe that was as well. It wouldn’t remind the kids too forcibly of what they’d lost.
Just as Miss Irma finished showing Nicole where everything went, Justin came hurtling down the hallway. “Kiss, Mommy! Kiss!” Nicole caught him on the ricochet, whirled him around, and planted a loud, smac
king kiss on his cheek. His answering kiss was sloppy enough to smear the powder on her cheek; she’d repair the damage when she got to the car. For now, it didn’t matter.
He was already wriggling to get down. She let him go, and scooped up the waiting Kimberley, whose kiss was a fraction more demure. Then Kimberley too was ready to make the break. For Nicole it was like ripping Velcro, but they seemed quite unfazed.
At the entrance to the yard, Nicole looked back. Kimberley was already playing with another girl about her age. Justin had found a ball and was chasing after it, yelling at the top of his lungs. They both seemed to have forgotten she existed.
She should have been pleased that they were so independent. She felt like crying.
The turn back onto Tampa from that miserable parking lot was a challenge, to put it mildly, but when she finally did get out to the street, she was only ten minutes’ drive from her office. This, I could get used to, she thought as she turned into the lot and found her space vacant as it should be. She’d almost wondered if it would be given away — as if she really had been away a year and a half.
Even before she got to the elevators, the wave of welcome had started. She gave up trying to find variations on Thank you. I never felt better, and settled for that one, canned line.
She’d more than half expected to feel depressed about returning to the place that had relegated her to a dead-end job, but the familiar spaces, the people she’d known for the whole of her working life in L.A., even the sight of her own cubby of an office and her secretary sitting in front of it, gave her a sense of being home again — just as she’d been in her house. This was her life, too, no matter how badly it had treated her.
Cyndi bounced up from her desk to give Nicole a giant hug. “It’s great to have you back,” she said.
“It’s good to be back,” Nicole answered. “You have no idea how good it is.” And isn’t that the truth? “Now let’s see if I remember anything about the law.”
Cyndi laughed, as anyone would who’d welcomed a lawyer back to work after a little over a week off. But Nicole meant it. She’d been away a lot longer than anyone knew.
Still, if her memory had gaps in it, she had her books and she had a computer. She might not be so quick with an answer as she’d been before, at least not at first, but the answers she gave would be the right ones. If law school had taught her nothing else, it had given her a solid grasp of combat research skills.
There was a small silence, which Nicole became aware of somewhat after Cyndi did. Cyndi broke it a little abruptly. “Everyone was upset about the way things happened,” she said. “Very upset. “ She hesitated. Then she went on, “I’m really glad you didn’t…” She paused again, looking for a safe way to say it. At length, she found one: “… you didn’t do anything foolish.”
You have no idea what a foolish thing I did. I had no idea what a foolish thing I was doing. “Not making partner isn’t the end of the world,” Nicole said from the perspective of a year and a half in another world and time. God knew, she hadn’t felt that way when Sheldon Rosenthal pulled the rug out from under her.
Cyndi nodded vigorously. Her curls were elaborately styled and piled, but by no means as elaborately as the styles the wealthy Roman matrons had affected. Those had looked as immovable as marble curlicues on a monument. These bounced as she moved, in a way that was pure modern America, and pure Cyndi. “I should say it’s not the end of the world,” she said, “especially compared to losing your health.”
Like people in Carnuntum, she was putting her own spin on Nicole’s words, making them fit into patterns she found familiar. It was the human way of doing things. Nicole was glad of it, too: it made life easier for those who didn’t fit those patterns. If she even approximated one of them, the people around her filled in the rest.
Not that Cyndi was wrong in this particular instance. Nicole said, “I was never so surprised in my life as when I woke up in that hospital bed.” That wasn’t exactly wrong, either, though it was only about an as’ worth of an aureus of truth: certainly less than a cent on the dollar.
Nicole didn’t linger too long, and Cyndi didn’t try to keep her, though Nicole could tell she’d have been glad to babble on indefinitely about everything and nothing. The office was waiting. Nicole had to face it now or not face it at all.
It didn’t look anything like the cluttered cubicle she’d left. It was jammed full of flowers and get-well cards, arranged by Cyndi, she could suppose. There was just barely room in the middle for the desk and chair, and for the IN basket with its stack of papers waiting to be dealt with.
She’d deal with it. It would take a while, but she’d dig out from under. For sure it was better than grinding flour for hours at a stretch, than keeping fires fed a few sticks at a time, than breathing smoke all day long because nobody had heard of chimneys.
Her voice-mail tape was close to maxed out. She’d have to ask Cyndi to fill her in — she even had a good pretext: some of her business had been taken over by other people in the firm.
Why, she thought in a pause between messages, Cyndi was her Julia in this world. She hoped, at least, that Cyndi didn’t feel like a slave, or feel she needed manumission.
It took her a moment to remember how to use her computer, but her password came right back to her: justkim, the first syllables of her children’s names. It wasn’t secure, it was much too easy to guess, but if she’d been more paranoid she might never have remembered it. Once the system came up, she found herself as inundated with e-mail as with voice calls and paperwork. Most of the e-mail was intraoffice, and most of it was personal: sympathy notes at first, some from surprising people, and then get-well wishes. She had more friends here than she’d thought. It touched her, made her eyes prickle and her throat go tight.
So many cards, so many flowers, so many good wishes. She took a deep breath and set them aside to savor later, and turned to the in box. She’d pick up where she left off, she resolved. Right… here. She reached for the top folder in the stack.
But she’d reckoned without the rest of the world. Once word had spread that she was back, everybody and his third cousin from Muncie came by to say Hello and Glad you’re feeling better. Hardly any of them stayed more than a minute or two, but a minute here and two minutes there added up to a good many minutes altogether.
She wasn’t the slightest bit startled when, toward midmorning, Gary Ogarkov poked his head into her office. He looked as if he expected her to throw something at him, and probably something sharp.
His expression was so nervous, she started to laugh. “Come on in,” she said. “I won’t bite, I promise.”
“No?” He didn’t sound convinced. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” But he slid in and sat on the edge of the chair she kept for clients.
Nicole looked at him and sighed. “Gary, it’s over. It happened the way it happened. This isn’t the end of the world. I’m not starving” — I’ve done that — “or sleeping in my car.” Even if it might be more comfortable than that bed over Umma’s tavern.
Gary eyed her a little dubiously. “You’re taking it really well,” he said. “I guess when you set a partnership against your health, it’s not such a big thing after all. But even so…” His voice trailed away.
“That is part of it,” Nicole agreed. Part of the rest, she realized, was the emotional distance her time in Carnuntum had given her. And part was an insight she’d also gained on the other side of time: the distance between bad and worse was a lot greater than the distance between good and better. Winning the partnership would have been better. What she had was still pretty decent.
Fortunately, Gary Ogarkov didn’t ask her to elaborate. Like everybody else in the world, he worried about himself and his own concerns first. And a good thing for her, too, all things considered. “I felt terrible about the way things turned out, and then I was afraid…” He stopped again.
Afraid you tried to kill yourself because I got the partnership and you didn’t. Nicole
had no trouble filling in the blanks. Such things happened. Sometimes they made the news. More often, they spread along the attorneys’ grapevine. After all, lawyers made their living by writing and talking. What else would they do for entertainment but gossip?
“I didn’t try to kill myself,” Nicole said firmly. “If my doctor doesn’t understand what went wrong, don’t expect me to” — even if I do, don’t expect me to say so — “but it wasn’t that, believe me.”
He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, all right. I believe you. I’m glad. And I’m glad you’re back, and I’m glad you don’t hate me. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did.”
He looked very boyish when he worried — and he was worried. She wasn’t altogether sure she’d reassured him, either. She soothed him a bit more, reflecting as she did it that it was a good thing he didn’t spend a lot of time in court. His opponents would have read altogether too much from his face.
Finally he seemed to realize that she was busy, or trying to be. He pushed himself to his feet, dipped his head — it was almost a bow — and fled back to his own desk. It was still the same one, she couldn’t help but notice. She’d have thought he’d have moved into the rarefied expanses of partner country by now.
So maybe, she thought, her absence had disrupted the firm just a little bit. Then she shook her head. No, of course not. The mills of the firm ground exceedingly fine, and ground exceedingly slow. Gary would get his new office in the firm’s good time, and not a moment sooner.
She shook herself and wrenched her mind back to the work she’d been trying to do all morning. Just about four memos down the stack, yet another visitor tapped lightly on the doorframe. She let out a grunt of annoyance. Best wishes were all very well, but so was getting some work done. That was what she was here for, wasn’t it?
But when she looked up, she wiped the frown off her face in a hurry. Sheldon Rosenthal stood in the doorway of her plain, plebeian office, attache case in hand, looking the very model of the modern founding partner.
