Matt. Probably asking whether I wanted to start looking for apartments in Manhattan.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said.
“Brigid, it’s Beppe,” he said gravely. “It’s happening again.”
CHAPTER 7
I texted Aimee a 911, then raced to Dartmouth-Hitchcock.
At the information desk, a gray-faced woman asked, “Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m Brigid Bronik. I’m looking for my husband, Matthew Bronik. He was just brought here in an ambulance. I’m not sure if he’s in the ER or if he’s been moved somewhere else already.”
“Can I see some ID?”
I hastily produced my driver’s license. The woman glanced at it just long enough to verify my name, then started typing.
“He’s in the ICU. It’s—”
“I know where it is. Thank you.”
I hurried off through the hallways. When I reached the ICU, a nurse asked me to stay in the waiting area, just like last time. Matt had the same alarmingly low blood pressure and heart rate.
Around eleven, the cardiologist came out and told me Matt was responding well to fluids and norepinephrine and we were “out of the woods” after some nervous moments, at least as far as his respiration and oxygen levels were concerned.
At noon, Dr. Reiner escorted me into Matt’s room, where he looked mostly the same as he did last time. The hospital gown. The tube stuck in near his collarbone. The gadgets surrounding him.
Except this time he had a nasty gash on his forehead. Reiner said the EMTs found him that way and surmised he hit his head when he lost consciousness.
Reiner wanted to at least try a CT scan, hoping Matt would be still and they could get pictures of his brain while the fit was still ongoing. After that, he was transferred to neurology.
I recognized one of the nurses there, a woman named Yvonne who gave me a grim smile of recognition.
Back again?
I just nodded. No one wants to be a repeat customer in the neurology wing.
Time passed slowly. Whenever Matt got riled up and began fighting against those awful straps, it got even slower. He was hurting himself, but there was nothing anyone could do about it.
At one point, Reiner came by to say he had read the CT scan. It didn’t provide any firm answers as to what was happening.
“Does that mean he’ll come out of it again?” I asked.
“Maybe? I’m afraid if I told you anything else, it might be a lie.”
I continued my vigil, talking to him when I could think of anything to say, remaining watchful for any changes in him.
He kept alternating between closed eyes and half-lidded vacant ones. Periods of frightening agitation—moaning, sputtering, struggling against his restraints—were followed by calm.
When he started getting upset, I’d massage his bare scalp, something he liked—or at least he did when he was conscious. It was difficult to tell whether it was having any effect.
Now and then, I’d put an ice bag on his forehead. The wound there was so angry and swollen, I figured it might help.
Mostly, I waited. And watched.
The first real sign of life came around 5:30 p.m., and it came from Matt’s tongue.
It was searching out his teeth, like he was checking to see if they were all there.
Other signs soon followed. A flexed hand. A shifted leg.
Then, with his eyes still closed, he said, “Do you think this place gives frequent-flier miles? We’ve got to be halfway to a ticket for Bora Bora by now.”
He had been out for roughly eight hours. I felt like, one forehead gash aside, it had taken as much of a toll on me as it had on him.
We ran through the same battery of tests, plus a few extra “just in case” ones.
Once he recovered from his headache—he described it as “thunderous” this time—Matt was an agreeable, good-natured pincushion, joking and quipping his way through the whole thing.
I made a quick trip home, where Aimee had everything under control. Morgan loved his time with his aunt, who followed the rules just enough to give him the structure he craved but playfully bent them just enough to be fun.
Then I returned to the hospital and spent a long, uncertain night by Matt’s side.
The next day, morning soon blurred into afternoon.
I wasn’t aware of the exact time when Dr. Reiner appeared and gave us a rundown of everything he had learned from the tests.
Or, rather, everything he hadn’t.
He concluded by saying, “I have to be honest: at this point, we’re looking for zebras.”
“Zebras?” I said, sure I had misheard him.
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’? Well, in this case, we’ve looked for all the horses. So we’re left with zebras.”
“Great,” Matt said. “I’ve always wanted to go on a safari.”
“I keep going back to the similarities between this attack and the last one,” Reiner said. “It was the same time of day, which makes me wonder if it’s some kind of narcolepsy. I’m going to order a sleep study to see if it tells us anything. I’m afraid that’s going to mean another night at the hospital.”
“Seems like I’m going to keep getting those one way or another if we don’t figure this out. Might as well plan it.”
“The other thing that’s the same is where it happened.”
“The lab,” Matt said.
“Is there anything in there that might have caused this? You said you play with lasers. Could you have zapped yourself unconscious?”
Matt shook his head. “We’re not exactly talking about Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber here. It’s very low powered, very delicate. I use it to gently nudge around things that could fit on the head of a pin with room to spare.”
“Still—”
“You’d have better luck knocking down the Empire State Building with a flyswatter. I could run the thing over your body all day long and you’d never feel it.”
“Okay, what about some kind of contaminant?”
Matt, who was sitting in bed, crossed his arms and frowned. It was not a look I normally attributed to him.
“What?” I said.
“I’m not sure I would call it a contaminant. And I can’t imagine how it would . . .”
“Matty, what are you talking about?”
He took in a deep breath, then let it go.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”
“No, not forget it,” I said. “This is not a ‘forget it’ kind of time. You’ve got something really scary happening to you, and we have to figure out what.”
“It’ll help me to know more, not less,” Dr. Reiner said.
Matt looked back and forth between the two of us before finally settling on Reiner.
“This is . . . something I can’t advertise,” Matt said. “Some of my funding comes from the Department of Defense. They haven’t explicitly told me not to tell people about what I’ve been doing, but they’ve cautioned me against loose talk. Particularly with foreigners or people I don’t know well. I’m not saying it’s you they’d be concerned about, but I wouldn’t want you discussing this with colleagues.”