Monday, shortly after dawn, she woke, groggy and damp with sweat. She remembered dreaming about wolves and about Ernest Harch. In the flat, hard, gray light of the cloudy morning, it seemed ridiculous for her to entertain the thought that Harch actually had been in her room last night. She was still alive, uninjured, utterly unmarked. It had all been a nightmare. All of it. Just a terrible nightmare.
5
Not long after Susan woke, she took a sponge bath with the help of a nurse. Refreshed, she changed into her spare pajamas, a green pair with yellow piping. A nurse’s aide took the soiled blue silk pajamas into the bathroom, rinsed them in the sink, and hung them to dry on a hook behind the door.
Breakfast was larger this morning than it had been yesterday. Susan ate every bite of it and was still hungry.
A few minutes after Mrs. Baker came on duty with the morning shift, she came to Susan’s room with Dr. McGee, who was making his morning rounds before attending to his private practice at his offices in Willawauk. Together, McGee and Mrs. Baker removed the bandages from Susan’s forehead. There was no pain, just a prickle or two when the sutures were snipped and tugged loose.
McGee cupped her chin in his hand and turned her head from side to side, studying the healed wound. “It’s a neat bit of tailoring, even if I do say so myself.”
Mrs. Baker got the long-handled mirror from the nightstand and gave it to Susan.
She was pleasantly surprised to find that the scar was not nearly as bad as she had feared it would be. It was four inches long, an unexpectedly narrow line of pink, shiny, somewhat swollen skin, bracketed by small red spots where the stitches had been.
“The suture marks will fade away completely in ten days or so,” McGee assured her.
“I thought it was a huge, bloody gash,” Susan said, raising one hand to touch the new, smooth skin.
“Not huge,” McGee said. “But it bled like a faucet gushing water when you were first brought in here. And it resisted healing for a while, probably because you frowned a lot while you were comatose, and the frowning wrinkled your forehead. There wasn’t much we could do about that. Blue Cross wouldn’t pay for an around-the-clock comedian in your room.” He smiled. “Anyway, after the suture marks have faded, the scar itself will just about vanish, too. It won’t look as wide as it looks now, and, of course, it won’t be discolored. When it’s fully healed, if you think it’s still too prominent, a good plastic surgeon can use dermabrasion techniques to scour away some of the scar tissue.”
“Oh, I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Susan said. “I’m sure it’ll be almost invisible. I’m just relieved that I don’t look like Frankenstein’s monster.”
Mrs. Baker laughed. “As if that were ever a possibility, what with your good looks. Goodness gracious, kid, it’s a crime the way you underrate yourself!”
Susan blushed.
McGee was amused.
Shaking her head, Mrs. Baker picked up the scissors and the used bandages, and she left the room.
“Now,” McGee said, “ready to talk to your boss at Milestone?”
“Phil Gomez,” she said, repeating the name McGee had given her yesterday. “I still can’t remember a thing about him.”
“You will.” McGee looked at his wristwatch. “It’s a bit early, but not much. He might be in his office now.”
He used the phone on the nightstand and asked the hospital operator to dial the Milestone number in Newport Beach, California. Gomez was already at work, and he took the call.
For a couple of minutes, Susan listened to one side of the conversation. McGee told Phil Gomez that she was out of her coma, and he explained about the temporary spottiness of her memory, always stressing the word “temporary.” Finally, he passed the receiver to her.
Susan took it as if she were being handed a snake. She wasn’t sure how she felt about making contact with Milestone. On one hand, she didn’t want to go through the rest of her life with a gaping hole in her memory. On the other hand, however, she remembered how she had felt yesterday when the subject of Milestone had come up during her talk with McGee: She’d had the disquieting feeling that she might be better off if she never found out what her job had been. A worm of fear had coiled up inside of her yesterday. Now, again, she felt that same inexplicable fear, squirming.
“Hello?”
“Susan? Is that really you?”
“Yes. It’s me.”
Gomez had a high, quick, puppy-friendly voice. His words bumped into one another. “Susan, thank God, how good to hear from you, how very good indeed, really, I mean it, but of course you know I mean it. We’ve all been so concerned about you, worried half to death. Even Breckenridge was worried sick about you, and who would ever have thought he had any human compassion? So how are you? How are you feeling?”
The sound of his voice kindled no memories in Susan. It was the voice of an utter stranger.
They talked for about ten minutes, and Gomez tried hard to help her recall her work. He said that the Milestone Corporation was an independent, private-industry think tank working on contracts with ITT, IBM, Exxon, and other major corporations. That meant nothing to Susan; she had no idea what an independent, private-industry think tank was. Gomez told her that she was—or, rather, had been—working on a wide variety of laser applications for the communications industry. She couldn’t remember a thing about that. He described her office at Milestone; it sounded like no place she had ever been. He talked about her friends and co-workers there: Eddie Gilroy, Ella Haversby, Tom Kavinsky, Anson Breckenridge, and others. Not one of the names was even slightly familiar to her. By the end of the conversation, Gomez’s disappointment and concern were evident in his voice. He urged her to call him again, any time, if she thought it would help, and he suggested that she call some of the others at Milestone, too.
“And listen,” he said, “no matter how long it takes you to recuperate, your job will be waiting for you here.”
“Thank you,” she said, touched by his generous spirit and by the depth of his concern for her.
“No need to thank me,” he said. “You’re one of the best we have here, and we don’t want to lose you. If you weren’t nearly a thousand miles away, we’d be there, camping out in your hospital room, doing our best to cheer you up and speed along the healing process.”
A minute later, when Susan finally said goodbye to Gomez and hung up, McGee said, “Well? Any luck?”
“None. I still can’t remember a thing about my job. But Phil Gomez seemed like a sweet man.”
In fact Gomez seemed so nice, seemed to care about her so much, that she wondered how she could have forgotten him so completely.
And then she wondered why a dark dread had grown in her like a malignant tumor during the entire conversation. In spite of Phil Gomez, even the thought of the Milestone Corporation made her uneasy. Worse than uneasy. She was ... afraid of Milestone. But she didn’t know why.
Later Monday morning, she sat up on the edge of her bed and swung her legs back and forth for a while, exercising them.
Mrs. Baker helped her into a wheelchair and said, “This time I think you ought to make the trip yourself. Once around the entire second floor. If your arms get too tired, just ask any nurse to bring you back here.”
“I feel great,” Susan said. “I won’t get tired. Actually I think maybe I’ll try to make at least two trips around the halls.”
“I knew that’s what you’d say,” Mrs. Baker told her. “You just set your mind to getting around once, and that’ll be enough for now. Don’t try to make a marathon out of it. After lunch and a nap, then you can do the second lap.”
“You’re pampering me too much. I’m a lot stronger than you think I am.”
“I knew you’d say that, too. Kiddo, you’re incorrigible.”
Remembering yesterday’s humiliation—when she had insisted she could walk but then hadn’t even been able to lower herself into the wheelchair without Mrs. Baker’s assistance—Susan blushed. “Okay. Once around. But after lunch and a nap, I’m going to make two
more
laps. And yesterday you said I might try walking a few steps today, and I intend to hold you to that, too.”
“Incorrigible,” Mrs. Baker repeated, but she was smiling.
“First,” Susan said, “I want to have a better look out of this window.”
She wheeled herself away from her own bed, past the other bed, which was still empty, and she stopped alongside the window through which she had been able to see (from her bed) only the sky and the upper portions of a few trees. The windowsill was high, and from the wheelchair she had to crane her neck to peer outside.
She discovered that the hospital stood atop a hill, one of a circle of hills that ringed a small valley. Some of the slopes were heavily forested with pines, fir, spruce, and a variety of other trees, while some slopes were covered with emerald-green meadows. A town occupied the floor of the valley and extended some of its neighborhoods into the lower reaches of the hills. Its brick, stone, and wood-sided buildings were tucked in among other trees, facing out on neatly squared-off streets. Although the day was drab and gray, and although ugly storm clouds churned across the sky, threatening rain, the town nonetheless looked serene and quite beautiful.
“It’s lovely,” Susan said.
“Isn’t it?” Mrs. Baker said. “I’ll never regret moving out of the city.” She sighed. “Well, I’ve got work to do. Once you’ve made your circuit of the halls, call me so that I can help you get back into bed.” She shook one plump finger at Susan. “And don’t you dare try climbing out of that chair and into bed yourself. Regardless of what you think, you’re still weak and shaky. You call for me.”
“I will,” Susan said, although she thought she might just carefully try getting into bed under her own steam, depending on how she felt after taking her wheelchair constitutional.
Mrs. Baker left the room, and Susan sat by the window for a while, enjoying the view.
After a couple of minutes, however, she realized that it was not the view that was delaying her. She hesitated to leave the room because she was afraid. Afraid of meeting Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike. Afraid that he would smile that hard smile, turn those moonlight-pale eyes on her, wink slyly at her, and perhaps ask her how good old Jerry Stein was getting along these days.
Hell’s bells, that’s just plain ridiculous! she thought, angry with herself.
She shook herself, as if trying to throw off the irrational fear that clung to her.
He’s not Ernest Harch. He’s not the boogeyman, for God’s sake, she told herself severely. He’s thirteen years too young to be Harch. His name’s Richmond, Bill Richmond, and he comes from Pine Wells, and he doesn’t know me. So why the devil am I sitting here, immobilized by the fear of encountering him out there in the corridor? What’s wrong with me?
She shamed herself into motion. She put her hands to the chair’s wheels and rolled out of the room, into the hallway.
She was surprised when her arms began to ache before she had gone even a fifth of the distance that she had planned to cover. By the time she traveled both of the short halls, across the top of the hospital’s T-shaped floor plan, her muscles began to throb. She stopped the chair for a moment and massaged her arms and shoulders. Her fingers told her what she had wanted to forget: that she was terribly thin, wasted, far from being her old self.
She gritted her teeth and went on, turning the wheelchair into the long main hall. The effort to move and maneuver the chair was sufficiently demanding to require concentration on the task; therefore, it was amazing that she even saw the man at the nurses’ station. But she did see him, and she stopped her wheelchair only fifteen feet from him. She gaped at him, stunned. Then she closed her eyes, counted slowly to three, opened them—and he was still there, leaning against the counter, chatting with a nurse.
He was tall, about six feet two, with brown hair and brown eyes. His face was long, and so were his features, as if someone had accidentally stretched the putty he was made from before God had had an opportunity to pop him into the kiln to dry. He had a long forehead, a long nose with long, narrow nostrils, and a chin that came to a sharp point. He was wearing white pajamas and a wine-red robe, just as if he were an ordinary patient. But as far as Susan was concerned, there wasn’t anything ordinary about him.