Chapter 1 The First Night

Edie Stroud took the report standing, because the day nurse was already reaching for her coat. Roz Hathaway went down the twelve names on the whiteboard the way she always did, bed by bed, in the flat voice people use for lists, and Edie wrote nothing down, because after nine years on nights she did not need to. Bed three, fluids down, the son visiting after lunch. Bed five, new admission from the hospital, watch the morphine, the family is loud. Bed seven had stopped eating. Bed eleven had asked twice that afternoon whether the doors were locked. "Which doors," Edie said. "Any of them." Roz pulled on her coat and looked at the window, where the streetlight had come on over the parking lot. "I told him they were." They were. Ferrier House had a front door with a keypad and a side door that only opened from inside, and a garden with a wall around it, and every one of the twelve rooms had a window that would not open more than a hand's width. It was a residential hospice, which meant that people came there to die slowly, over weeks, with their own blankets and their own photographs, and the building did its best to look like a place where nothing bad had ever happened. On the wall by the entrance there was a framed watercolor of the garden in June, and under it a small brass plate that said the house had been a family home for ninety years before the trust took it. Edie liked the nights. She had said so for so long that it had stopped being a defense and become true. Nights were quieter, and quiet suited her, and the dark on the other side of the glass made the lit rooms feel closer together, like the inside of a ship. She made her first round at eight, while the day staff were still in the hallway talking about a wedding, and by half past the building had thinned to the people who belonged to it: eleven patients, one nurse, one aide, and the woman in the office who answered the phone after hours when the answering service misfired. The aide that week was Dessa Meeks, twenty-eight, who had a tattoo of a sparrow on the inside of her wrist and the patience of someone who had grown up in a house with a lot of children. She and Edie had worked together for two years and had a language that was mostly silence. When Edie came back to the office at ten with the medication cart, Dessa was already there with a crossword and a mug of tea she kept forgetting to drink. "Bed nine wants his door open," Dessa said. "Leave it open." "He wants it locked." "Then leave it open," Edie said, and Dessa wrote something in the crossword that did not fit the boxes. The unit made its sounds. The oxygen concentrator in bed four hummed, then paused, then hummed. Somewhere the ice machine dropped a load of cubes with a clatter that had made Edie jump on her first week and never since. The floorboards by the kitchen door gave a soft complaint whenever anyone crossed them, and the complaint was always the same, a low note two steps before the door, and after nine years Edie could tell from the office whether the person crossing was heavy or light, quick or tired. At eleven she did her round with a penlight, and at midnight she charted, and at one she charted again, and the night arranged itself the way it usually did, into a long hall of small tasks with the clock at the far end. The trouble started, if it started anywhere, at seven minutes past three. Edie was in bed three, because the fluid bag had run dry and the pump had begun to chirp, when Cecil Kader said something behind her. Cecil was eighty-one and had been a printer for forty years, and he had come to Ferrier House in the summer with a cancer in his pancreas, and he had a manner of speaking that made everything he said sound considered, the way a man speaks who has spent his life setting type and checking the proof. He was awake, which did not surprise her; the dying keep odd hours, and three in the morning is a country most of them visit. "I had a visitor," he said. Edie changed out the bag and hung it and watched the drip start. "Your daughter was here after lunch." "No." He said it without impatience. "Not her. After." She turned. He was propped on the pillows with his hands folded, and the nightlight behind the bed had put a small gold circle on the wall above him, and he was looking toward the foot of the bed with an expression she could not read, not frightened, exactly, more as if he were still working out the grammar of something he had seen. "After what time," Edie said, because that was a question you could ask. "Past three. A few minutes past." He looked at her then, and his eyes were the clear eyes of a man who is lucid and knows he is lucid. "You'll want to write it down, so I'll give it to you once. It smelled like oranges and pennies. Oranges and a pocketful of pennies. And it stood at the foot of the bed and it said the same thing it always says." "It always says," Edie said. "*Is this one ready.*" He said it in the voice he must have used for readings at funerals, level and unhurried, and for a moment the room was so quiet that Edie could hear the concentrator in bed four pause and hum. "Ready for what," she said. "That's the joke of it," Cecil said. "It didn't ask me. It asked someone I couldn't see." He let his head go back against the pillow. "And then my hip stopped." Edie waited. "It's been biting all week. The bone, they say. And it stopped, just like a tap, while it was standing there. And when it left, it came back. Only heavier." He closed his eyes. "Write that down too." She wrote it down. In the chart, in the box for the night shift, she wrote: *0310 — pt reports visual/olfactory hallucination, calm, no distress. Concerned re pain control. Reported to day shift.* That was the honest version of the language she had, and it was the language that would keep him safe and credible and her sane. She gave him his breakthrough dose and he slept, and she stood by the door a moment listening to the house settle, and then she went back to the office and drank water and looked at the whiteboard and told herself what she had told herself a thousand times on a thousand nights, that the dying dream out loud, that the morphine speaks, that there is a country past three in the morning where the mind goes walking without its shoes. And she believed it. She was a nurse, and nurses believe in the things that can be measured, and she had a mortgage and a bad knee and a mother who had died nine years ago in a place very much like this one, and there was nothing in any of that close to a reason to stand in a hallway at three in the morning listening to the wallpaper. When she did her four o'clock round, she passed bed nine, and the door was open, and the man in bed nine was awake too, lying on his side in the dark with his eyes open, and when he saw her he said, not to her, to the ceiling: "Did you smell it? It's been by." "There's nothing here," Edie said, and pulled the door to until it was almost closed. She wrote nothing in his chart. There was nothing measurable to write. ---