Judith Tarr: Household Gods

He was already wriggling to get down. She let him go, and scooped up the waiting Kimberley, whose kiss was a fraction more demure. Then Kimberley too was ready to make the break. For Nicole it was like ripping Velcro, but they seemed quite unfazed.

At the entrance to the yard, Nicole looked back. Kimberley was already playing with another girl about her age. Justin had found a ball and was chasing after it, yelling at the top of his lungs. They both seemed to have forgotten she existed.

She should have been pleased that they were so independent. She felt like crying.

The turn back onto Tampa from that miserable parking lot was a challenge, to put it mildly, but when she finally did get out to the street, she was only ten minutes’ drive from her office. This, I could get used to, she thought as she turned into the lot and found her space vacant as it should be. She’d almost wondered if it would be given away — as if she really had been away a year and a half.

Even before she got to the elevators, the wave of welcome had started. She gave up trying to find variations on Thank you. I never felt better, and settled for that one, canned line.

She’d more than half expected to feel depressed about returning to the place that had relegated her to a dead-end job, but the familiar spaces, the people she’d known for the whole of her working life in L.A., even the sight of her own cubby of an office and her secretary sitting in front of it, gave her a sense of being home again — just as she’d been in her house. This was her life, too, no matter how badly it had treated her.

Cyndi bounced up from her desk to give Nicole a giant hug. “It’s great to have you back,” she said.

“It’s good to be back,” Nicole answered. “You have no idea how good it is.” And isn’t that the truth? “Now let’s see if I remember anything about the law.”

Cyndi laughed, as anyone would who’d welcomed a lawyer back to work after a little over a week off. But Nicole meant it. She’d been away a lot longer than anyone knew.

Still, if her memory had gaps in it, she had her books and she had a computer. She might not be so quick with an answer as she’d been before, at least not at first, but the answers she gave would be the right ones. If law school had taught her nothing else, it had given her a solid grasp of combat research skills.

There was a small silence, which Nicole became aware of somewhat after Cyndi did. Cyndi broke it a little abruptly. “Everyone was upset about the way things happened,” she said. “Very upset. “ She hesitated. Then she went on, “I’m really glad you didn’t…” She paused again, looking for a safe way to say it. At length, she found one: “… you didn’t do anything foolish.”

You have no idea what a foolish thing I did. I had no idea what a foolish thing I was doing. “Not making partner isn’t the end of the world,” Nicole said from the perspective of a year and a half in another world and time. God knew, she hadn’t felt that way when Sheldon Rosenthal pulled the rug out from under her.

Cyndi nodded vigorously. Her curls were elaborately styled and piled, but by no means as elaborately as the styles the wealthy Roman matrons had affected. Those had looked as immovable as marble curlicues on a monument. These bounced as she moved, in a way that was pure modern America, and pure Cyndi. “I should say it’s not the end of the world,” she said, “especially compared to losing your health.”

Like people in Carnuntum, she was putting her own spin on Nicole’s words, making them fit into patterns she found familiar. It was the human way of doing things. Nicole was glad of it, too: it made life easier for those who didn’t fit those patterns. If she even approximated one of them, the people around her filled in the rest.

Not that Cyndi was wrong in this particular instance. Nicole said, “I was never so surprised in my life as when I woke up in that hospital bed.” That wasn’t exactly wrong, either, though it was only about an as’ worth of an aureus of truth: certainly less than a cent on the dollar.

Nicole didn’t linger too long, and Cyndi didn’t try to keep her, though Nicole could tell she’d have been glad to babble on indefinitely about everything and nothing. The office was waiting. Nicole had to face it now or not face it at all.

It didn’t look anything like the cluttered cubicle she’d left. It was jammed full of flowers and get-well cards, arranged by Cyndi, she could suppose. There was just barely room in the middle for the desk and chair, and for the IN basket with its stack of papers waiting to be dealt with.

She’d deal with it. It would take a while, but she’d dig out from under. For sure it was better than grinding flour for hours at a stretch, than keeping fires fed a few sticks at a time, than breathing smoke all day long because nobody had heard of chimneys.

Her voice-mail tape was close to maxed out. She’d have to ask Cyndi to fill her in — she even had a good pretext: some of her business had been taken over by other people in the firm.

Why, she thought in a pause between messages, Cyndi was her Julia in this world. She hoped, at least, that Cyndi didn’t feel like a slave, or feel she needed manumission.

It took her a moment to remember how to use her computer, but her password came right back to her: justkim, the first syllables of her children’s names. It wasn’t secure, it was much too easy to guess, but if she’d been more paranoid she might never have remembered it. Once the system came up, she found herself as inundated with e-mail as with voice calls and paperwork. Most of the e-mail was intraoffice, and most of it was personal: sympathy notes at first, some from surprising people, and then get-well wishes. She had more friends here than she’d thought. It touched her, made her eyes prickle and her throat go tight.

So many cards, so many flowers, so many good wishes. She took a deep breath and set them aside to savor later, and turned to the in box. She’d pick up where she left off, she resolved. Right… here. She reached for the top folder in the stack.

But she’d reckoned without the rest of the world. Once word had spread that she was back, everybody and his third cousin from Muncie came by to say Hello and Glad you’re feeling better. Hardly any of them stayed more than a minute or two, but a minute here and two minutes there added up to a good many minutes altogether.

She wasn’t the slightest bit startled when, toward midmorning, Gary Ogarkov poked his head into her office. He looked as if he expected her to throw something at him, and probably something sharp.

His expression was so nervous, she started to laugh. “Come on in,” she said. “I won’t bite, I promise.”

“No?” He didn’t sound convinced. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” But he slid in and sat on the edge of the chair she kept for clients.

Nicole looked at him and sighed. “Gary, it’s over. It happened the way it happened. This isn’t the end of the world. I’m not starving” — I’ve done that — “or sleeping in my car.” Even if it might be more comfortable than that bed over Umma’s tavern.

Gary eyed her a little dubiously. “You’re taking it really well,” he said. “I guess when you set a partnership against your health, it’s not such a big thing after all. But even so…” His voice trailed away.

“That is part of it,” Nicole agreed. Part of the rest, she realized, was the emotional distance her time in Carnuntum had given her. And part was an insight she’d also gained on the other side of time: the distance between bad and worse was a lot greater than the distance between good and better. Winning the partnership would have been better. What she had was still pretty decent.