Shelter (67 page)

    "I hope it stays relatively benign," Roberta said. Once upon a time, people with flu symptoms hadn't automatically done home-culture tests to find out if they had something deadly.

    "Well, we all hope that. But thanks."

    "Thanks for letting me know," Roberta said, and discovered that she really meant it. "And thanks for being so decent about—about the visiting stuff. How are you holding up?"

    "Up and down," Doe said, her voice brittle. "I think maybe I can't talk about it anymore right now."

    "Okay. Thanks for calling, Doe. I mean it."

    "Thanks for going to see Mom," Doe said, and hung up. Roberta was still holding the handset when the phone rang again a minute later. This time, it was Fred, which meant it was Preston too.

    "Roberta, I've been very concerned. Are you all right?"

    "I'm fine, Fred."

    "Your voice doesn't sound fine."

    "I just found out that a friend of mine's in the hospital with CV. I'm pretty upset. Otherwise, I'm fine."

    "I'm very sorry, Roberta. I hope your friend gets better."

    "So do I," she said, and realized that maybe Zephyr made friends with bots because they couldn't die. "Preston? Are you there too?"

    "I am here too, Roberta. This must be extraordinarily difficult for you. I am so very sorry. Will you let me know if you need to talk, or if I can do anything for you?"

    "Sure," she said. You can keep your promise, Preston. You can protect me at work. "Listen, guys, I think maybe I can't talk about it anymore right now." Or about anything else. Now she was quoting Doe: terrific. "Fred, I'll see you Monday, okay?"

    "I understand, Roberta. Good-bye. Try to have a nice weekend, and remember that you're special."

    Fat chance, she thought, and slammed the phone down. Damn them all. Damn Meredith for taking Nicholas away, and damn Iuna for taking Doe away, and damn the CV, and damn Fred and Preston, who couldn't really feel anything, however good they were at faking it. She curled up on the couch, shaking. Tomorrow she had to go to the hospital, and on Monday she'd have to go back to work, and right now she didn't even feel as if she had the strength to make it to her bedroom.

    Twenty-Six

    SHE woke up on the couch the next morning, and wondered blearily, What am I doing here? Then she remembered, and remembered too how similar this was to that night Doe had come home late, the night she'd stayed at the office, working on documents with Iuna. Roberta got up stiffly, every muscle aching, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Mr. Clean, eating grease on the countertop, dutifully rolled out of her way. "I wish you could talk," she told him. "Do you miss Zephyr, Mr. Clean? Do you miss the other bots? Is being here like being in isolation for you?"

    Her voice sounded tinny to her, too high, like the voices people put on at college poetry readings. Mr. Clean's only response was to pull himself onto the top of the refrigerator, where he began attacking dust. ''I'm not a very good house cleaner, huh. You'd yell at me if you could."

    The sound of her own voice only made her lonelier. She looked at the clock: eight-thirty. She had to call Pacifica and see when visiting hours started, and then she had to make up her mind when to go, and then she had to call Doe to let her know when she'd be going so they wouldn't run into each other. Except that she'd forgotten to get Doe's number, and she didn't know Iuna's last name. Shit,

    Okay. Call the hospital and find out about visiting hours. After that, she could call Mitzi—it sounded as if she'd be able to talk on the phone, given what Doe had said about the symptoms—and find out if Doe was there. Mitzi would send Doe away if Doe showed up before Roberta did. Mitzi understood that kind of thing.

    "Only immediate family's allowed in iso," the Pacifica receptionist said, in a tone suggesting that had Roberta been immediate family, she would already have known that. ''I'm afraid my terminal isn't showing any exceptions in this case. Sometimes the family or the patient add other people to the visitors list."

    Roberta rubbed her eyes and took a long swallow of her coffee. "Her daughter called me last night and asked me to visit."

    ''I'm sorry, ma'am, but my screen's not showing any exceptions." "Okay." Doe was too stressed out to keep track of the red tape; Roberta couldn't blame her. "Does the patient have a phone?"

    "Yes, ma'am. Connecting you. One moment, please." The receptionist's smug voice was replaced by the welcome sound of a ringing telephone.

    But when the phone stopped ringing, Roberta didn't get Mitzi; instead, she got a soothing voicemail message, telling her that the patient was unable to receive calls right now, followed by a dial tone. Roberta blinked at the buzzing receiver in her hand, took another swallow of coffee, and then groggily began putting two and two together. If Mitzi had just been in the bathroom, the phone would have taken a message. She couldn't be anywhere else, not in an iso unit. If she couldn't take calls, that meant she was in really bad shape, and if the receptionist hadn't yet known that she couldn't take calls, that meant that she'd gotten into really bad shape really quickly.

    Roberta, suddenly all too awake, put down her coffee cup and headed for the shower. Come on, she reasoned as she hurriedly soaped herself, hospitals fuck up all the time. The receptionist might have had the wrong patient altogether, or connected you to the wrong unit, or maybe Mitzi really was in the bathroom and the voicemail just wasn't working. As she dried herself and got dressed, she gave herself a lecture. It's just the hospital, dummy. There's no reason to panic. You're going to feel really stupid if you run in there like some panicked idiot and Doe and Iuna are there and Mitzi's sitting up talking about the weather. And even if something horrible has happened, you'll just make it harder on Doe and Hugh and everybody else if they don't want you there.

    But she discovered that she didn't care. Mitzi wanted her at the hospital; Doe had said so. And Roberta was going, whether anyone else wanted her there or not.

    * * *

    They wouldn't let her in. The door to the viewing area was closed, and a determined nurse, clutching a clipboard, stood in her way. "I'm sorry, Ms. Danton, but you aren't on the list."

    "Excuse me," someone said, a doctor in green scrubs; he opened the door just far enough to scoot through before shutting it again, but in that moment Roberta heard quiet hysteria, someone sobbing, someone saying tensely, "She's crashing," and above everything else Hugh's voice, angrier than Roberta had ever heard it.

    "Don't you dare opaque that barrier! She's my wife! I want to see her!" Roberta's bones turned to ice water. "What's happening? What's going on in there?"

    "I can't tell you that," the nurse snapped. "You're not on the list. You don't belong here. Ms. Danton, please go away and let me do my job."

    "Should I call security?" someone said behind them, and Roberta turned to find a tall man with red hair, wearing the green and white badge of the Gaia chaplaincy, holding a bouquet of ivy and roses. He looked at her, his face kind; he handed her the flowers and then took her arm. "Here, come over here. There's a waiting room. We can sit down."

    "Thanks, Matt," the nurse said.

    Feeling foolish, Roberta looked down at the flowers. "Are these for Mitzi?"

    "They're for whomever they can help. I think they're for you." He urged her gently into a small room decorated with garish chintz furniture.

    Roberta, her resolve gone, collapsed into an overstuffed wing chair. "Somebody paid for Mitzi to have them, right? I can't take them."

    "They're a Temple offering," he said. "The Temple paid to water and fertilize them; but really, they're a gift from the sun and the earth, aren't they? I'm giving them to you. Anyway, I wouldn't have gotten to go in there; I'm not on the list either. It's hard being shut out, isn't it?"

    He reminded her of Fred. "Hugh and Mitzi aren't Greens," Roberta said numbly. They weren't Webheads, either. Mitzi wasn't rigged.

    Matt shrugged. "Somebody in there is. Somebody on the list. Somebody asked for a Temple offering and said she'd be outside to pick it up—well, you were the one outside, so you have it. If the other lady still wants one later, she can have one too. What's your name?"

    "Roberta. I—I used to live with Mitzi's daughter. I didn't even know Mitzi was sick until last night."

    "Ah. Used to live? You haven't seen Mitzi recently, then?"

    "A few months," Roberta said. She hurt too much to do the math. Anything she might have said about her relationship with Mitzi felt like a cliche. I loved her. She was just like a mother to me. "I—I heard someone in there say she was crashing. That's bad, isn't it?"

    "Yes," Matt said matter-of-factly. ''I'm afraid it is. Are you angry that they didn't put you on the list? I'd be angry, if it had happened to me."

    "I don't know. They didn't think of it, or they didn't even know there was a list."

    He nodded. Something beeped: he was being paged. "You're numb. That's normal. It's okay if you're angry later."

    Roberta blinked, trying to keep her thoughts straight. "Do people ever get better, after they crash?" There was that dreamy voice again, the same one she'd used with Mr. Clean that morning.

    Matt's face softened. "Roberta—I don't think so. I don't know. If that's what you heard—are you sure that's what you heard?"

    She considered this, while Matt's pager beeped again. "I don't know. I think so. Can I ask the nurse?"

    "Best not, right now. She saw us go in here. She'll send someone to let us know."

    "Okay. You have to go now, don't you? Your pager—"

    "I turned it off," he said. "I don't have to go, unless, of course, you'd rather be alone."

    She shook her head, tried to answer, and found her voice choked by tears. The very, the utterly last thing in the universe she wanted was to be alone, and she had never felt so achingly alone in her life. She buried her face in the flowers, inhaling the sweet smell of the roses, and wept, dimly aware of Matt's arm around her, his hand gently patting her shoulder.

    She was still crouched over like that, sobbing, her nose dripping into the roses, when Matt said, "Hello. Are you the person who called me before?"

    Roberta lifted her head and found herself blinking wetly at a thin woman with dark hair, stylish rig implants, and a pinched, panicked expression. "They asked me to come find you," she said, her voice tense. "The nurse said you were here. Everyone else is too upset." And then Roberta realized who it had to be.

    "I've been crying into your flowers," she told Iuna, whom, after all, she had never seen before, who'd only been a disembodied voice under the sheets. "I don't think you'll want them now."

    "It's okay," Iuna said, trying on a shaky smile and then discarding it. "Neither will anyone else. Look, I'm sorry, this sucks, Doe shouldn't have sent me out here."

    "No," Roberta said, "but I guess you were the logical choice. Is—it over?"

    "I think so," Iuna said. "They opaqued the barrier; they won't let us see anything. We'd already seen too much. Ebola, or something like it. Bloody mess."

    Roberta, fighting nausea, realized that the phrase was literal, not an attempt at antiquated British slang. Iuna was rigged. Whatever she'd seen in there, it was recorded for posterity. "How's Doe?"

    "Hard to tell. She's still in shock, which I guess is good because she's with Hugh now, and he's out of his mind. He was here all night. One of the nurses just went to get a tranquilizer shot for him."

    Matt's eyebrows went up. "That's—unusual these days." Roberta tried to imagine kind, cheerful Hugh in any state that would require a tranquilizer, and found that she didn't want to. She blinked away more tears, fiercely, and said, "How did this happen? How did she get CV? How could she get CV? She was a school librarian in the fucking Marina district—it's not like she was working with high-risk populations!"

    Iuna looked stricken, and then looked down at the floor. "For the past month she'd been doing volunteer literacy work. Going into Folsom."

    Roberta shook her head wildly. "Stupid. Stupid. How could she willingly walk into a prison—"

    "They said everybody was healthy," Iuna said, and then, sadly, "I think she walked in because the people there couldn't walk out. They're testing everybody there now; nobody goes in or out until the tests are done. You haven't seen it on the news?"

    "No," Roberta said. When was the last time she'd watched the news?

    She had no idea what was happening in the world outside her apartment, outside KinderkAIr. "Did Doe think I'd seen it on the news and hadn't called?"

    "No, no," Iuna shook her head, "nothing like that. They didn't mention Mitzi's name, anyway: confidentiality." Of course. "Roberta, listen, I need to get back to Doe and the others now, okay?"

    Roberta felt Matt's grip on her shoulder tighten, just for an instant, as the old loneliness swept over her like a wave. Breathe. Breathe. "Of course. Tell them—I'm sorry. And if there's anything I can do—"

    "Yes, I will." Iuna tried to smile, failed, and turned and left the room, her footsteps receding quickly, too quickly, down the hall. She was running away from the ugly chintz, away from Roberta, running back to Doe and Hugh and iso and Mitzi's dead or dying body.

    "Well," Matt said very gently after a moment, "I guess you get to keep the flowers. Will you take them home and put them in water?"

    "They'll die anyway," Roberta said.

    "Yes, they will. Everything does. But they won't die as soon, if you put them in water. Water and aspirin. And maybe a little sugar."

    Her anger srnoldered. "There's nothing inevitable about CV."

    "No, there isn't. Except in the cases when there is. Roberta, when the flowers do die, would you put them in the earth somewhere? In a garden, or a park?"

    Her bitterness overwhelmed her. "And you want me to think of Mitzi while I'm doing it, right? You want me to say some kind of prayer and thank the fucking earth goddess for Mitzi and roses and the CV virus, right? Isn't that how it goes, at Green temples?"