He frowned. “When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“You were with Mrs. Atkinson, downstairs in PT, yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s right. It happened shortly after I’d completed the therapy session, before I was brought back up here.”
She told him how Murf and Phil had shoved her into the elevator with the four fraternity men.
“Why didn’t you report all of this last evening when I was here?” McGee asked, a reprimanding tone to his voice.
“You were in such a hurry...”
“Not that much of a hurry. Am I a good doctor? I think I am. And a good doctor always has time for a patient in distress.”
“I wasn’t
in
distress by the time you made your evening rounds,” she protested.
“Like hell you weren’t. You had it all bottled up inside of you, but you were in distress sure enough.”
“I didn’t want to make you late for the Medical Association meeting.”
“Susan, that’s no excuse. I’m your doctor. You’ve got to level with your doctor at all times.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at her hands, unable to meet his forthright, blue-blue eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to explain why she hadn’t told him about the elevator vision. She had been worried that she would appear hysterical, that he would think less of her because she had panicked yet again. Worse, she had been afraid that he would pity her. And now that she was beginning to think that she was falling in love with him, the very last thing she wanted was for him to pity her.
“You don’t dare hide things from me. You’ve got to tell me everything that happens, everything you feel. And I mean
everything.
If you
don’t
tell me everything, then I might not be aware of an important symptom that would explain the root cause of all your troubles. I need every piece of information I can gather in order to make an informed diagnosis.”
She nodded. “You’re right. From now on, I won’t hide anything from you.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Good.”
“But you see,” she said, still staring at her hands, which she was flexing and unflexing in nervous agitation, “it is getting a lot worse.”
He put a hand against the side of her face, caressed her cheek.
She looked up at him.
“Listen,” he said softly, reassuringly, “even if you
are
having more frequent attacks, at least you come out of them. And when one of these episodes passes, you’re able to see it for what it was. After the fact, you’re always aware that you were only hallucinating. Now, if you still believed that a dead man had come to get you last night, if you still thought that it had
really happened,
then you’d be in very deep trouble. If that’s the way it was, then maybe I’d be sweating. But I’m not sweating yet. Am I? Do you see rivers of sweat streaming down my face? Are there dark, damp circles under my arms? Do I look as if I belong in a TV ad for Right Guard? Huh? Do I?”
She smiled. “You look as dry as toast.”
“As dry as a sandbox,” he said. “As dry as a stick of chalk. As dry as chicken cordon bleu when I try to cook it myself. Can you cook chicken cordon bleu, by the way?”
“I’ve made it a few times,” she said.
“Does yours come out dry?”
She smiled again. “No.”
“Good. I was
hoping
you could cook.”
And what does he mean by that? she thought. His blue eyes seemed to say that he meant just what she thought he meant: He was as interested in her as she was in him. But still she couldn’t trust her perceptions; she couldn’t be positive of his intentions.
“Now,” he said, “will you
please
think positive?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
But she couldn’t stop shaking.
“Do more than try. Keep your chin up. That’s doctor’s orders. Now, I’ll go find a couple of orderlies and a stretcher, and we’ll go downstairs to diagnostic and get these tests out of the way. Are you ready to go?”
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Smile?”
She did.
So did he. And he said, “Okay, now keep it on your face until further notice.” He headed toward the door, and over his shoulder he said, “I’ll be right back.”
He left, and her smile slipped off.
She glanced at the curtained bed.
She wished it wasn’t there.
She longed for a glimpse of the sky, even if it was as gray and somber as it had been yesterday. Perhaps if she could see the sky, she wouldn’t feel quite so trapped.
She had never before been this miserable; she felt wrung out and useless, even though her physical recuperation was coming along well. Depression. That was the enemy now. She was depressed not merely because other people had taken some control of her life, but because they had taken over
all
control of it. She was helpless. She could do absolutely nothing to shake off her illness. She could only lie on an examining table as if she were a mindless hunk of meat, letting them poke and prod her in their search for answers.
She looked at Mrs. Seiffert’s bed again. The white curtain hung straight and still.
Last night, she had not merely opened a privacy curtain that had enclosed a hospital bed. She had opened another curtain, too, a curtain beyond which lay madness. For a few nightmarish minutes, she had stepped beyond the veil of sanity, into a shadowy and moldering place from which few people ever returned.
She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t run away from her hallucination last night. What would have happened if she had bravely and foolishly refused to back off from Jerry Stein’s decomposing corpse? She was afraid she knew the answer. If she had held her ground, and if her long-dead lover had clambered out of his bed and had touched her, if he had embraced her, if he had pressed his rotting lips against her lips, stealing a warm kiss and giving her a cold one in return, she would have snapped. Real or not, hallucination or not, she would have snapped like a taut rubber band, and after that she would have been forever beyond repair. They would have found her curled up on the floor, gibbering and chuckling, lost far down inside herself, and they would have transferred her from Willawauk County Hospital to some quiet sanitarium, where she would have been assigned to a nice room with soft, quilted walls.
She couldn’t take much more of this. Not even for McGee. Not even for whatever future they might have together if she got well again. She was stretched taut.
Please, God, she thought, let the tests reveal something. Let McGee find the problem.
Please.
The walls and ceiling were the same shade of robin’s-egg blue. Lying flat on her back on the wheeled stretcher, her head raised just a few inches by a firm little pillow, looking up, Susan almost felt as if she were suspended in the middle of a summer sky.
Jeff McGee appeared beside her. “We’re going to start with an EEG.”
“Electroencephalogram,” she said. “I never had one of those.”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “While you were in the coma. But of course you weren’t aware of it. You wouldn’t remember it. Now, don’t be afraid. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
“I know.”
“It’ll give us a look at the pattern of your brain waves. If you’ve got abnormal brain function of any kind, it’s almost sure to show up on an EEG.”
“Almost?”
“It’s not perfect.”
A nurse rolled the EEG machine out of the corner where it had been standing, and she positioned it beside Susan.
“This works best if you’re relaxed,” McGee told Susan.
“I’m relaxed.”
“It won’t be very reliable at all or easily interpreted if you’re in an emotional turmoil.”
“I’m relaxed,” she assured him.
“Let’s see your hand.”
She lifted her right hand off the stretcher’s three-inch-thick mattress.
“Hold it straight out in front of you, keeping the fingers together. Okay. Now spread the fingers wide apart.” He watched closely for a few seconds, then nodded with satisfaction. “Good. You’re not trying to fake me out. You
are
calmer. You aren’t trembling any more.”
As soon as they had brought her downstairs, Susan became relatively calm, for she felt that progress, however limited, was finally being made. After all, as a first-rate physicist, she could understand, appreciate, and approve of what was happening now: tests, laboratories, the scientific method, a carefully planned search for answers conducted by eliminating possibilities until the solution stood alone, exposed. She was comfortable with that process and trusted it.
She trusted Jeffrey McGee, too. She had a lot of faith in his medical abilities and confidence in his intellect. He would know what to look for, and, more importantly, he would know how to recognize it when he saw it.
The tests would provide an answer, perhaps not quickly but eventually. McGee was now taking the first tentative steps toward putting an end to her ordeal.
She was sure of it.
“Calm as a clam,” she said.
“Oyster,” he said.
“Why oyster?”
“It seems to fit you better.”
“Oh, you think I look more like an oyster than like a clam?”
“No.
Pearls
are found in oysters.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet you’re a shameless come-on artist in a singles’ bar.”
“I’m a shark,” he said.
McGee attached eight saline-coated electrodes to Susan’s scalp, four on each side of her head.
“We’ll take readings from both the left and the right side of the brain,” he said, “then compare them. That’ll be the first step in pinpointing the trauma.”
The nurse switched on the EEG apparatus.
“Keep your head just as you have it,” McGee told Susan. “Any sudden movement will interfere.”
She stared at the ceiling.
McGee watched the green, fluorescent screen of the EEG monitor, which was not in Susan’s line of sight.
“Looks good,” he said, sounding somewhat disappointed. “No spikes. No flats. A nice, steady pattern. All within normal parameters.”
Susan kept very still.
“Negative,” he said, more to himself than to either her or the nurse.
Susan heard him click a switch.
“Now I’m taking a look at the comparative readings,” McGee told her.
He was silent for a while.
The nurse moved off to another corner, readying another piece of equipment either for Susan or for a patient who had not yet been brought into the room.
After a while, McGee shut off the machine.
“Well?” Susan asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Well, the electroencephalograph is a useful device, but the data it provides aren’t one hundred percent definitive. Some patients with serious intracranial diseases have been known to exhibit normal patterns during an EEG. And some people with no demonstrable disease have abnormal EEGs. It’s a helpful diagnostic tool, but it isn’t where we stop. It’s where we begin.”
Disappointed, but still certain that one or more of these tests would pinpoint her malady, Susan said, “What’s next?”
As McGee removed the electrodes from Susan’s scalp, he said, “Well, radiology’s right next door. I want new X rays taken of your skull.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Oh, it’s a genuine laugh riot.”
The Radiology Lab was an off-white room filled with lots of cumbersome, shiny, black and white equipment that looked somewhat dated to Susan. Of course she wasn’t an expert on X-ray technology. Besides, she couldn’t expect a hospital in rural Oregon to have all the very latest diagnostic tools. Though they might be a bit dated, Willawauk’s machines looked more than adequate.
The radiologist was a young man named Ken Piper. He developed the plates while they waited, then pinned the sheets of X-ray film to a pair of light boxes. He and McGee studied the pictures, murmuring to each other, pointing at shadows and areas of brightness on the film.
Susan watched from the wheeled stretcher to which she had returned from the X-ray table.
They took down the first X rays, pinned up others, murmured and pointed again.
Eventually, McGee turned away from the light boxes, looking thoughtful.
Susan said, “What’d you find?”
He sighed and said, “What we
didn’t
find are signs of brain lesions.”
“We couldn’t detect any collections of fluid, either,” Ken Piper said.
“And there’s been no shifting of the pineal gland, which you sometimes find in cases where the patient suffers from really vivid hallucinations,” McGee said. “No depressions in the skull; not the slightest indication of intracranial pressure.”
“It’s just a perfectly clean set of pictures,” Ken Piper said brightly, smiling down at her. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Miss Thorton.”
Susan looked at McGee and saw her own feelings mirrored in his eyes. Unfortunately, Ken Piper was wrong; she had
plenty
to worry about.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I want to do an LP,” McGee said.
“What’s that?”
“A lumbar puncture.”
“Spinal tap?”
“Yeah. We might have missed something with the EEG and the X rays, something that’ll show up in the spinal. And there are some conditions that can be identified only through spinal fluid analysis.”
McGee used radiology’s phone to ring the hospital’s lab. He told the answering technician to get set up for a complete spinal workup on the samples he was about to take from Susan.
When he put the phone down, she said, “Let’s get this over with.”
In spite of the fact that McGee anesthetized Susan’s lower spinal area with Novocain, the lumbar puncture wasn’t painless, but neither was it remotely as bad as she had expected it to be. It brought quick, sharp tears to her eyes, and she winced and bit her lip; but the worst part was having to remain perfectly still, worrying about the needle breaking off in her if she twitched or jerked suddenly.