Digital Winter (3 page)

Rosa caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of one of the windows and hated it. She always had—face too round, hair too thin, skin too pockmarked, eyes too dark, body too heavy, worry lines too deep.

She looked through the reflection to gaze at the ocean. There were easier jobs, but none that paid so well or provided such a view. Her work would never make her famous, never fill her bank account with cash. She was a care-at-home nurse, caring for a person who barely acknowledged her existence. Still, she had grown fonder of Donny than she had any of her past patients. She had become attached to him, something a nurse shouldn't do.

Maybe she was getting too old for this work. Fifty-two wasn't old, but old was closing in fast. At times she looked forward to retirement, to spending the day with her truck-driving husband and spoiling her grandkids, but reality always set in. She doubted she would be able to retire at an age where she could enjoy free time. Barney made a trucker's salary. She made decent money but not enough to create a nest egg. Like so many people of her class, she would depend on Social Security for retirement income, and that wouldn't be much.

Too old? Maybe. Donny was a fully-grown man who, for whatever reason, refused to walk. At times she could get him to stand, but that was only to move him from the powered wheelchair to the toilet. Even then she had to add her strength to his to make the transition.

Rosa's primary job was to care for Donny during the day, when his parents were away. Often their schedules meant she had to stay late into the night. They always gave her a bonus for those times.

She had been doing this work for two decades. The nurse before her had taken to stealing jewelry from Mrs. Elton's case. When they hired Rosa, they made it clear that they would prosecute any theft. Rosa had no problem with that. She cared nothing for jewelry, fine clothing, or artwork. She loved her family and her work, and that summed up her existence.

Her biggest challenge was dealing with the boredom. Although Donny couldn't be left alone, he was not demanding. If his food was delivered on time and she was available when he needed to go to the bathroom, he was happy staring at all those computer monitors by the hour.

To pass the time, Rosa cleaned the condo. It wasn't part of her duties, but it gave her something to do, and it was another way to say thank you to the people who paid her generous salary.

After cleaning up the breakfast dishes and chatting with Donny, who never responded, she straightened the magazines on the rosewood coffee table in front of the tan leather sofa. It was an eclectic gathering of reading material:
Time
,
Newsweek
,
Forbes
, the
Wall Street Journal
,
Barron's
, and other business periodicals for Mr. Elton;
Science Review
,
Journal of Genetic Studies
, and
Nature
for Mrs. Elton. Smart people.

Next she moved to a small cabinet of cleaning supplies, gathered up a bottle of Windex and a soft cloth, and began touching up the windows. She tried to focus on the smudges and spots but allowed herself moments of wistful ocean gazing. She tried her best to avoid her own reflection.

A breeze had picked up over the ocean, decorating the surface with tiny whitecaps. California gulls, white as milk with long, yellow beaks, soared high and then turned into the wind, hovering as if filled with helium. Cormorants did aerobatic dive-bombing runs, dropping from the sky like spears, disappearing beneath the waves, and reappearing moments later. In the distance, a cruise ship plied the waters, headed to the Mexican Riviera.

What a wonderful world
.

A motion caught her attention. Something in the window, a reflection of something behind her.

Not something. Someone.

Dark. Tall. Faceless.

Rosa's heart stuttered like a car engine deprived of fuel.

No eyes. No mouth. No face.

She released a tiny scream and spun, pointing the bottle of Windex as if it were a weapon, as if the intruder could be killed by glass cleaner.

Nothing.

No shape. Nor form. No dark being. Nothing.

She looked back at the window. The reflection was gone.

From behind her came the muted voice of Donny in his room, closed off from the world.

Shadow, shadow on my right,
Shadow, shadow on my left,
Shadow, shadow everywhere,
Shadow has all the might.

“Donny!” She sprinted to his door and flung it open.

Donny was alone.

C
olonel Jeremy Matisse, PhD, had added distance to his trip by going into DC to see his wife. Had he headed north to Fort Meade from their College Park home, he could have saved ten or fifteen minutes, but he harbored no regrets. Any time spent with Roni was an investment in his own happiness. Fortunately, the travel time to Fort Meade from the nation's capital was less than an hour if the traffic cooperated. This being a Thursday, traffic was only mildly annoying. It was just a little after 1300 hours. By 1800, DC would be clogged with people looking to escape the city, many of them on US 50 with him.

Leaving his wife behind was nothing new. Over the course of their twenty-year marriage, he had left her behind many times. On the other hand, she had left him cooling his heels while she did double shifts at the hospital or traveled to various symposia. Such was the life of professionals.

He drove his Jeep Cherokee in the right lane, in no hurry to click off the miles. He had an extra hour before the new Army officers showed up for their tour. He let that thought percolate for a moment. He would help General Holt with the senator as well. At least he assumed so.

He wondered if more was going on.

The sun reflected off the chrome and windows of the car in front of Jeremy, stabbing his eyes.

By the time he crossed under the I-95 cloverleaf, his mind returned to Roni. As promised, he prayed for her. He had spent the first ten minutes listening to the news. Investigators had not yet determined why the train derailed a few miles northeast of the Amtrak terminal on Massachusetts Avenue. The news reported thirty or forty injuries but no deaths. That last part was good. In 2008, twenty-five passengers were killed on a Los Angeles Metrolink that ran into a freight train because the engineer missed a signal. He had been texting.

Jeremy took time to pray for the injured and the families. He couldn't imagine the turmoil going on at Roni's hospital.

The woman on the surgical table looked like Amy.

Roni Matisse started her medical career wanting to be a pediatrician. After all, that's what women doctors did, wasn't it?

The idea was old and out of touch with twenty-first-century thinking. But then, Roni grew up in a family that was stuck in the 1950s. She was the youngest of three children. More than once she had overheard her father refer to her as an “oops.” Such comments undermined her already shaky self-esteem. It had taken all her courage to tell her parents that she wanted to be something other than a housewife.

But being the youngest and the unexpected child also had some positive impact on her life. It made her shy, and shy girls often retreated to the world of books and long, lonely hours in their bedrooms dreaming of things they never expected to experience. Roni poured herself into schoolwork. What else did she have to do? By third grade, she proved to be the best student in the elementary school and the darling of several teachers. That also made her the butt of cruel comments from other kids, and she withdrew all the more.

By fourth grade she developed a love for science. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she replied, “A scientist.” When asked what kind of scientist, she froze. Did it matter? She liked it all. On some days, she saw herself as a sky-breaking astronomer; on others, as a biologist. She was in college before she felt the first calling to medicine. Biology came easy to her, and she aced chemistry, microbiology, zoology, botany, and other upper-division life-science courses. That was at Morehead State University in Kentucky, a four-year school that had a good biology department and that was just far enough away from her parents' home in Flemingsburg to keep them from dropping in uninvited.

Morehead was very different from her high school, but Roni hadn't changed. A good day was spent in classes and the library. She was addicted to study. It protected her from others and gave her a sense of accomplishment. Graduating with honors was never the goal, but it was a certainty.

During her junior year, she met another studious coed. Amy had frizzy hair, bad skin, pale eyes, a photographic memory, and a passion for knowledge. She also had an unwavering goal to be a medical doctor. At night, Roni would listen to Amy speak of the future, of the glories of being a physician. “The money is good, but that doesn't matter; I want to change the world one treatment at a time.”

Like Roni, Amy was not part of the campus scene, and if that bothered her, she never showed it. Roni had many interests, but Amy had just one one—medicine.

Alone at night, staring at her ceiling, Roni would think of Amy's enthusiasm. She was an evangelist of Hippocrates, a siren of the noblest profession.

At first, Roni attributed Amy's comments to loneliness, but Amy never wavered, and over the course of the semester, Roni began thinking about a career in medicine. By the end of the semester, she had committed to the additional years of training. During their senior year they took the Medical College Admission Test, and both passed easily. Armed with impressive scores, they applied to thirty medical schools. One night, over a chocolate milkshake at a restaurant near the campus, they agreed to attend the same medical school if they could. What could be better than having a lab partner you already know and trust?

Both received scholarship offers from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Two months later, Amy's Vespa scooter was hit by a drunk driver in a thirty-year-old Ford pickup. She lingered in the hospital for several hours as Roni sat in the waiting room. Amy's family lived across the country, and Roni was the closest thing she had to a sister, so she answered questions from the medical staff and then made the call to Amy's mother and father. That was by far the most difficult thing she had ever done—until three hours later, when she called again to say that Amy was no more.

The drunk driver went to jail. Amy went to the grave.

One memory of Roni's darkest night surfaced a thousand times during med school. Dr. Carrie Mayer, dressed in surgical greens, walked into the waiting room. She was a tall woman with ebony skin and moved with confident steps, but her shoulders were bent.

Her eyes scanned the room and settled on Roni. “I'm Dr. Mayer, are you…” She looked at a note on a small pad in her hand. “Roni?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry for my confusion. They spelled your name R-o-n-n-y. I was looking for a guy.”

“I get that a lot.” She blinked with brimming eyelids. “You… you're…”

“I'm a trauma surgeon. I understand you're Amy's—sister?”

They looked nothing alike, but telling the truth at this point achieved nothing. She did her best to lie convincingly. She managed one word. “Yes.”

“I see. Are you here alone? No other family?”