Chapter 11 The Long Call

The call that changed the shape of everything arrived on the first night of the next month, and it did not end when the shift did. It began at 03:13, the way they began, and it came in on Ione's board. Sabine watched her recruit answer it with the new steadiness she had learned over the last weeks, heard her say the opening line into the headset, and then saw her face change. Ione put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Sabine and said, in a voice pitched low, "There's a woman. She says she's been in a hospital corridor for days, and her dog is with her, and she can't find the exit." Sabine crossed to Desk 2 and put on the spare headset. There were two of them now, on the same call, which was against every protocol the Well possessed and had become, over the last weeks, their own quiet standard. "Called in, this is Desk 4," Sabine said. "We're both here with you. What's your name." "Thea." The voice was thin and reasonable and very tired. "I've been walking. There's a dog with me, a little one, he won't leave. He has a tag but I can't read it in this light. There's a corridor and it goes on and there are doors but they're all locked and there's a cart with a tray on it that never moves." A hospital corridor. A tray. A dog. Sabine had spent four years on an ambulance, and pieces of a real place began to assemble in her mind whether she wanted them to or not. A patient. An admission. A dog that had been with her when she came in. "Thea, I need you to think about before the corridor. The last thing you remember from outside." There was a long pause. The three notes rose under her breath, patient and slow. "It was night," Thea said at last. "I was walking my dog and I felt strange, and then I was sitting on a curb and someone was asking me questions, and then the lights were very bright, and then" — another pause — "then I was walking down a long hall looking for the exit, and I've been walking ever since. What day is it?" Sabine looked at the date on the screen. "Thea, I want you to hold on. We're going to find you." She muted the line and turned to Ione. "Unidentified patient. Female, came in at night, brought in with a small dog. Somewhere in the system, sometime in the last week. She's in a coma or close to it, and wherever her body is, that's the corridor." Ione was already typing. She pulled the regional hospital admissions feed, which the Well could see but rarely used, and searched for unidentified females. Nothing. She widened the window to twelve days. Nothing. Then she went to the county's Jane Doe log, and there, on the fourth page, was an entry that made her go quiet. "Female, approx. forty, found unresponsive on a curb on Thurlow Avenue eleven days ago, no ID, no matching missing-person report, admitted to Rossmere General under the name Unknown Female Four." Ione looked up. "She had a dog with her. The responding officers took it to the shelter. It's still there, in hold, because nobody came for it." Sabine unmuted. "Thea," she said. "Your dog is safe. He's at the shelter on Mott Lane and he's fine. I want you to hear that, and I want you to keep walking, because we know where your body is, and we're going to bring a voice to it." She sent Ione to make the calls, and Ione made them with a speed and a calm that Sabine would remember. She reached the hospital charge nurse and then the attending and then, after two transfers and a hold, a doctor who listened for ninety seconds and said, against every instinct the profession had taught him, that he would bring a phone to the room and put it to the patient's ear, because the family was absent and the case was eleven days cold and there was nothing left to try. At 04:30, Sabine was still on the line with Thea. At 04:45, the phone in the hospital room was lifted and a nurse's voice came down the connection, faint and tinny and arriving through two instruments and a hundred feet of building. "Ma'am, I'm holding the phone to her ear. I don't know if she can hear you." "She can hear me." Sabine had her eyes closed. "Thea, this is the exit. I'm going to count, and on the count of three you're going to see a door with a light above it, and you're going to walk through it, and you are not going to look back down the corridor, and the dog is going to follow you because the dog has been following you the whole time." She counted. On three, there was a sound on the line that Sabine had heard before and would hear again: the specific static of a connection being released, the soft collapse of a held line, and under it, far away, the flat beep of a hospital monitor changing its rhythm. Then the nurse's voice, higher now, no longer professional. "Her eyes. She's opening her eyes. Oh my God, she's awake." The line stayed open another minute. Sabine listened to a woman's voice, hoarse and confused and real, ask for water, and ask where her dog was, and the nurse answer that everything was all right. Then the connection ended, and the screen cleared, and Sabine stood up from Desk 2 and had to put a hand on the desk, because the room had tilted. Her nose was bleeding. Her right ear had gone muffled, the way an ear goes muffled on a plane, and it would stay that way, more or less, for the next several weeks. Ione brought her a wad of paper towel and a glass of water and stood over her with an expression that was equal parts terror and awe. "You brought her back," Ione said. "From in there. You pulled her all the way out." "She walked out." Sabine pressed the towel to her nose. "I just held the door." But she knew, and Ione knew, and neither of them said it, that the line had taken something from the one who held it. She had spent two hours on the connection with the Offline, longer than anyone had stayed, and the muffled ear and the blood were the toll. The operator had said the chair would help every one of them, forever. Sabine had just found out what forever cost when you did it from this side. At 07:10 the day shift arrived to find the night watch still at their desks, one of them with a bloodstained paper towel and both of them looking at a blank screen as if it had said something. Sybil Arden came down and looked at Sabine and did not ask. She had the second drawer, the folder, the warnings. She had chosen, quietly, not to choose. She poured herself a coffee and stood at the back of the room and watched the morning board come up, and when the day supervisor asked what had happened, Sybil said only that Desk 4 had handled a long call, and that it was over now, and that it was fine. Sabine went home and slept for eleven hours, and when she woke her ear was still muffled and the pad on her kitchen table had a new page, and on the page was a list of everything she had learned from a dead woman's notebooks and a live woman's breath, and at the top of the page she wrote the question that would carry her through the rest of the winter. If the board holds every connection it ever made, then it holds the door too. Where is the door, and who is standing in it? ---