“Thank you for your time,” Carol said. “You’ve been more than kind.”
“Come back this evening and talk to the girl if you want. I’m sure you’ll find she doesn’t blame you one bit.”
He turned and hurried across the gaudy lounge, in answer to the page’s call; the tails of his white lab coat fluttered behind him.
Carol went to the pay phones and called her office. She explained the situation to her secretary, Thelma, and arranged for the rescheduling of the patients she had intended to see today. Then she dialed home, and Paul answered on the third ring.
“You just caught me as I was going out the door,” he said. “I’ve got to drive down to O’Brian’s office and pick up a new set of application papers. Ours were lost in the mess yesterday. So far, this has been a day I should have slept through.”
“Ditto on this end,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
She told him about the accident and briefly summarized her conversation with Dr. Hannaport.
“It could have been worse,” Paul said. “At least we can be thankful no one was killed or crippled.”
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me: ‘It could have been worse, Carol.’ But it seems plenty bad enough to me.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I told you. I wasn’t even scratched.”
“I don’t mean physically. I mean, are you together emotionally? You sound shaky.”
“I am. Just a little.”
“I’ll come to the hospital,” he said.
“No, no. That’s not necessary.”
“Are you sure you should drive?”
“I drove here after the accident without trouble, and I’m feeling better now than I did then. I’ll be okay. What I’m going to do is, I’m going over to Grace’s house. She’s only a mile from here; it’s easier than going home. I have to sponge off my clothes, dry them out, and press them. I need a shower, too. I’ll probably have an early dinner with Grace, if that’s all right by her, and then I’ll come back here during visiting hours this evening.”
“When will you be home?”
“Probably not until eight or eight-thirty.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Miss you, too.”
“Give my best to Grace,” he said. “And tell her I think she is the next Nostradamus.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Grace called a while ago. Said she had two nightmares recently, and you figured in both. She was afraid something was going to happen to you.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. She was embarrassed about it. Afraid I’d think she was getting senile or something.”
“You told her about the lightning yesterday?”
“Yeah. But she felt something else would happen, something bad.”
“And it did.”
“Creepy, huh?”
“Decidedly,” Carol said. She remembered her own nightmare: the black void; the flashing, silvery object drawing nearer, nearer.
“I’m sure Grace’ll tell you all about it,” Paul said. “And I’ll see you this evening.”
“I love you,” Carol said.
“Love you, too.”
She put down the phone and went outside to the parking lot.
Gray-black thunderheads churned across the sky, but only a thin rain was falling now. The wind was still cold and sharp; it sang in the power lines overhead, sounding like a swarm of angry wasps.
* * *
The semiprivate room had two beds, but the second one was not currently in use. At the moment, no nurse was present either. The girl was alone.
She lay under a crisp white sheet and a creamcolored blanket, staring at the acoustic-tile ceiling. She had a headache, and she could feel each dully throbbing, burning cut and abrasion on her battered body, but she knew she was not seriously hurt.
Fear, not pain, was her worst enemy. She was frightened by her inability to remember who she was. On the other hand, she was plagued by the inexplicable yet unshakable feeling that it would be foolish and exceedingly dangerous to remember her past. Without knowing why, she suspected that full remembrance would be the death of her—an odd notion that she found more frightening than anything else.
She knew her amnesia wasn’t the result of the accident. She had a misty recollection of walking along the street in the rain a minute or two before she had blundered in front of the Volkswagen. Even then, she had been disoriented, afraid, unable to remember her name, utterly unfamiliar with the strange city in which she found herself and unable to recall how she had gotten there. The thread of her memory definitely had begun unraveling prior to the accident.