“How’s Bibi doing?” he asked.
“You know her. She copes. Whatever’s happening to her, she’s already thinking what she’ll do once she’s gotten through it, if maybe it’s good material for a story.”
Rolling his mobile computer station before him, Dr. Barsamian, the chief ER physician during the current shift, approached them with the news that Bibi had been admitted to the hospital following her CT scan. “She’s in Room 456.”
The doctor’s eyes were as black as kalamata olives. If in fact he knew something horrific about Bibi’s condition, Nancy could read nothing in his gaze.
“The CT scan seems to have been inconclusive,” Barsamian said. “They’ll want to do more testing.”
In the elevator, on the way from the first floor to the fourth, Nancy suffered a disturbing moment of sensory confusion. Although the position-indicator light on the directory above the doors went from 1 to 2, then to 3, she could have sworn that the cab was not ascending, that it was descending into whatever might occupy the building’s two subterranean levels, that they were being cabled and counterweighted down into some enduring darkness from which there would be no return.
When the light moved to the 4 on the directory and the doors of the cab slid open, her anxiety did not abate. Room 456 was to the right. When she and Murph got there, the door stood open. The room contained two unoccupied beds, the sheets fresh and taut and tucked.
Bibi’s drawstring bag stood on the nightstand beside the bed that was nearer to the window. When Nancy peered into it, she saw a toothbrush, toothpaste, and other items, but no pajamas.
Each bed came with a narrow closet. One of them proved empty. In the other hung Bibi’s jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. Her shoes stood side by side on the closet floor, her socks stuffed in them.
With the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and the scent of soap, a young blond woman in blue scrubs entered the room. The nurse looked too young to be credentialed, as if she might be just fifteen and playing hospital.
“They told us our daughter would be here,” Murph said.
“You must be Mr. and Mrs. Blair. They’ve taken Bibi for tests.”
“What tests?” Nancy asked.
“An MRI, blood work, the usual.”
“None of this is usual to us,” Nancy said, trying for a light tone of voice and failing.
“She’ll be all right. It’s nothing intrusive. She’s doing fine.”
The much-too-young nurse’s reassurances sounded as hollow as a politician’s promises.
“She’ll be a while. You might want to go down to the cafeteria for lunch. You’ll have the time.”
After the nurse left, Nancy and Murph stood for a moment in bewilderment, looking around the room as though they had just now been teleported into it by an act of sorcery.
“Cafeteria?” he asked.
Nancy shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“I was thinking coffee.”
“Hospitals ought to have bars.”
“You never drink before five-thirty.”
“I feel like starting.”
She turned toward the window and then, with a sudden thought, turned away from it. “We need to tell Paxton.”
Murph shook his head. “We can’t. Not now. Don’t you remember? His team is on a blackout mission. No way to reach them.”
“There’s got to be a way!” Nancy protested.
“If we tried and Bibi found out, she’d want our scalps. Even though they’re not married yet, she’s getting more like him each day, tough-minded and committed to the way things are in that life.”
Nancy knew he was right. “Who would have thought it would be her we’d have to worry about instead of him?”
She switched on the TV. None of the programs was entertaining. All of them seemed intolerably frivolous. The news inspired despair.
They went down to the cafeteria for coffee.
Later, Bibi would be told that the CT scan had been inconclusive but suggestive, that her doctors would have preferred a stroke to what was now suspected. Having eliminated the possibility of embolism or hemorrhage, they proceeded with a growing concern that they refrained from sharing with her. Their smiles were masks, not because they wished to deceive her, but because physicians, no less than their patients, live to hope.
Later, too, she would learn that if embolism and hemorrhage were ruled out, her best chance of a full recovery might be a diagnosis of brain abscess, which was a pus-filled cavity surrounded by inflamed tissue. This life-threatening condition could be treated with antibiotics and corticosteroids. Often surgery proved unnecessary.