For a split second, Terry just stared at him. Then she whipped out her evidence pad, wrote something, handed it to him, and hurried out of the room, dumping her files onto the floor. "Back ASAP w/ doctor," Don read. He ripped that sheet out of the notebook, just to see if he could hear the tearing, but there was nothing. He threw the whole notebook against the wall; it hit the floor as silently as snow. Feeling a little ridiculous, he reached up to touch his ears, just to make sure they were still there. Yup: ears accounted for. Somehow that just made it worse: no obvious solution.
Don didn't feel particularly disoriented: he knew he was in a hospital, and he could tell from the weird anesthetic tingle that he'd been hit on the left side of the head. But when he tried to calm down and remember what had gotten him here, things became confused. The last thing he remembered with absolute clarity was helping Charlie with the groceries. He'd left, maybe, and been in some sort of…car accident? He thought he could remember Charlie talking to him, but was that at the hospital or at home? If he'd been at home, what was Terry doing here? If it had been at the hospital, where was Charlie now?
It's hard to commandeer a doctor's attention. In a city hospital during visiting hours, it is nearly impossible, but FBI agents can be very persuasive when they want answers. Terry had a disgruntled Dr. Powell in Don's room before Don had even puzzled out the origin of the bruises on his hand. The interrogation that followed would have made Quantico proud. Within ten minutes, Powell had explained that the deafness was just temporary.
"How temporary?" Terry demanded.
The doctor rolled his eyes and flipped through Don's chart again, trying to look as though he had much better things to do. Terry was not impressed: "Doctor, please answer the question. An estimate will be fine."
"I don't know," Powell conceded, "The problem is swelling that prevents the ossicular chain from vibrating freely. Now that Mr. Eppes is conscious, we can medicate the swelling and his hearing should return within a few hours."
Powell had an annoying habit of talking only to Terry. Don wanted to remind the good doctor who the patient was in this scenario. I may be deaf, Don figured, but I'm not stupid, I can understand anything you have to say. He probably would have said as much, too, just to counteract the unaccustomed fear that was growing with the silence. Being anxious made him angry and Terry, sensing how much he hated to be out of the loop, was diligent about writing down whatever the doctor said and handing the notes to Don. That helped. Still, Don did his best not to show his relief when he read that his hearing would soon be back to normal; it would have felt like taking a favor from this self-important jerk.
Terry asked every question she could think of and relayed several of Don's. She even got Powell to draw a diagram of the ear, something the doctor obviously considered childish but that made Don envision Charlie wandering around the kitchen, putting away groceries and talking about the sad echoes of the universe. Which reminded him, where was Charlie?
Charlie hated hospitals. It wasn't a fear of blood or needles or anything like that; it was something more fundamental, something that just shriveled Charlie's normally free-ranging curiosity. He wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't even watch medical dramas on TV, and Don didn't know why. Now, Larry—Larry, among his other quirks, had an almost paranoid wariness around medicines of any sort. The physicist devoutly believed that anything stronger than children's aspirin inhibited his thinking. A particularly unfortunate belief since Larry had terrible allergies, which he tried unsuccessfully to medicate with Vitamin C tablets. When Don learned that, he figured he'd solved the problem of his brother's phobia, but Charlie had just looked surprised when Don had asked about it. "No," he'd said slowly, as though he were carefully measuring the effect of every pharmaceutical substance he'd ever touched. "No. That's an interesting theory, but either I think clearly or—or, well, or I can't. And it doesn't matter what I'm on." He seemed almost disappointed that Don's suggestion didn't fit the facts; he would have lied if it had been anyone else but Don. Only recently had Don begun to think his brother remembered more about those childhood tests than anyone else imagined.
Still, a hospital is just a building, and it was time for Charlie to get over that irrational fear. The more Don thought about it, the more irritated he became: his annoyance had a new target now. If Charlie was in the hospital, or anywhere else for that matter, no force on the planet would keep me away, he thought savagely. But here I am all by myself. And if it weren't for Terry, I'd be completely out of luck. Their parents had always kept Charlie too sheltered. They'd allowed him to avoid what he was uncomfortable with: his life is tough enough, they'd said, it's easier for everyone this way. Hey, other people had tough lives, too. And it had certainly come back to bite them when Mom got sick, now hadn't it?
Don had completely lost track of what conversation Terry was having with the doctor. He didn't care anyway. He tugged the pen out of her hand and, for lack of a piece of paper, wrote on his arm in angry capitals: WHERE'S CHARLIE?
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