Chapter 26

Inconveniently it was about 4:00 a.m. when I finally woke back up. I'd actually initially started stirring two hours earlier, but the bed was so comfortable that I'd just turned over, pulled up the covers and dozed right back off. After that I'd come half awake, think about getting up, reject the idea and snooze away for another while. The impulse to actually arise took a long time to set in.

The inconvenient part was that I was getting pretty hungry—I'd missed dinner again—but it was still two and a half hours before I could get any food. The girl at the desk had prattled on at length about the elegant breakfast buffet the lodge put out in season, when the skiers would be looking forward to an early start on the slopes and in want of calories to fuel their exertions.

"Right now, though, we're a little slow, with no snow yet and all," she'd told me. That was understating it considerably; I didn't think I was quite their only guest, but it was pretty close from what I saw during check-in. Ski lodges aren't big vacation spots when the ground is bare. So for me breakfast would be cooked to order, and the kitchen opened at 6:30 and closed at 9:00. "No extra charge," she'd added hastily, and I could have anything I wanted from the menu. I'd let the whole thing slide right over my head at the time, but now it loomed a bit larger.

Still, there was a coffee machine in the room, and I guessed I could survive that long. They'd upgraded my accommodations, given the dearth of business, and my room was considerably more spacious than the one in the downtown hotel. I set the machine to work while I did my morning toilette, including a long hot shower, and by the time I was ready so was the coffee. By then it was quarter to five, and breakfast was on the horizon.

Susan seemed uncommonly subdued. Usually she was quite chatty in the mornings; she had been before all this had happened, too. At first I'd had to adjust. I've never been what they call a "morning person," all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to meet the new day head-on; my norm was to get up slowly and reluctantly and face the day only when I had to. But her enthusiasm had proved infectious, and before she'd walked out so abruptly I'd grown used to her early-hours vibrancy. It had resumed when she'd rejoined me in this odd disembodied form, and I found myself missing it.

"Hey, sweetheart, everything OK?" I asked while I was taking my first couple of sips of the surprisingly good coffee; the place sure didn't stint on that.

" ... I guess," she said.

That woke me up the rest of the way fast. "Which means everything's not OK," I observed. "All right, honey, talk to me. Tell me what's going on in that pretty head of yours."

"It isn't!" she burst out. "A pretty head, I mean. It's no head at all, and no body, and no, well, no nothing. No me. Larry, why isn't there still any me? What's going on? Is this like forever now?"

Uh-oh. She'd got to where I'd already been a couple of days ago. I hadn't said anything then, thinking I don't know what. Thinking maybe she wouldn't notice? It's a little hard not to notice that the only thing that's left about you right now is your, well, your spirit. Nothing physical at all, and when you talk there's just one person who can hear what you say. That's not the sort of thing you're likely to overlook.

But I guess I'd hoped that she somehow wouldn't recognize the amount of time that was passing while she stayed in that state. Unfortunately, it didn't look like that was happening.

"No, of course it's not forever!" I exclaimed with false heartiness. "It's just while your body, well, recuperates."

"Should that be taking this long?"

"Well..."

"Larry, tomorrow will be two weeks from the night I came to you," she said. "Two fucking weeks! That doctor, he told you I was in an induced coma, remember? In other words, they were keeping me knocked out for a while so I wouldn't stir around, get all panicky and everything and maybe mess up the repairs they did to me, to my legs and my arm and my hips and my guts and all, right?"

"Right," I put in, using as positive a tone as I could muster.

"So how long do they usually do that?" she demanded. "This long? Wouldn't they have waked me up by now? Or tried to? Tried to, and maybe they couldn't."

"Susan, I'm no medical expert—"

"Well, neither am I," she cut me off. "But it's just common sense, isn't it? There's no reason to keep me sedated on and on, like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or something. People live with those brace things like they put on me all the time when they're completely conscious and aware, don't they?"

"Don't ask me, sugar."

"Uh." It took a little of the wind out of her sails. But only for a moment. "I'm sure they do, though, they'd have to. Get on the Internet and look it up, OK? No, don't, I don't think I really want to know."

Never ask a question to which you don't want to hear the answer. I'd known that one for a long time.

"Well, sweetie, what do you want then?" I asked reasonably.

"Shit. I want to know what's going on with me, with my body that is. I want to know when I'll get back together, me and my body, or if I ever will. Damn this witness protection thing anyhow. I don't even know where I am now, much less how I'm doing. They're hiding me from me as well as everybody else, and I fucking hate it!"

"So do I, from that standpoint," I told her. I meant it, too. When they'd whisked her away the weekend before it had bothered me a lot, but I'd rationalized to myself that at least she'd be safe from the people who wanted her dead and would finish the job if they got even half a chance. A week with no updates and no prospect of any, though, had got me edgy too. "But at least you're safe," I added lamely.

"Yeah, safe," she said, the scorn dripping down her voice. "Great. I'm all apart, strung out from hell to breakfast, from here to wherever the bejesus they have the rest of me, but Bobby and all can't get to me. Either part of me. But for how long? Larry, suppose..." She trailed off.

"Suppose?" I prompted. Might as well get it all out in the open, all the stuff that had been troubling her. Better than letting it just fester.

"OK," she said, "suppose they can't wake me up. One of the things I got when Warren hit me was a knock on the head, wasn't it?"