Chapter 10 The Long Corridor

Myra Zeff died on the fourth night, at seven minutes past three, and Edie was not in the room, because Myra had made her promise not to be, and the promise was the last thing the woman had asked for and it would have been a small cruelty to break it. Edie kept it. She sat at the desk with the intercom on and listened, and at seven minutes past three the corridor light went soft at the far end, and she heard nothing but the concentrator, and after a while the concentrator in bed four kept humming and the room that had held Myra was quiet in the way a room is quiet after. She went in at ten past. The body was still warm at the hands and cool at the feet. The window was closed. The blinds were up, because Myra had wanted the sky. On the little tray by the bed, where nothing had been all night, there was a smell that Edie did not have to lean in to find, and she stood over the woman she had sat with for three weeks and breathed it and did not pretend it was the polish and did not pretend it was the medication and did not call herself any of the names she had been calling herself for a month. Then she did her round, because the living were still in the building and that was the job. The corridor that night was longer than it was. She noticed it the way you notice a word used out of place, without being able to say at first what was wrong. Bed nine, bed eight, bed six, bed four, bed three, the small numb recital of a woman walking a hall she could walk in her sleep. And she was counting the doors and there were more doors than there were rooms, which is a thing the eye does in the half dark and the mind corrects a half second later, and hers did correct it, and the corridor was the length it had always been, and still she found herself walking it at the pace you use in a long room, unhurried and level, like a person making a delivery. At the far end, by the garden door, the light was soft. She had come all the way down without deciding to. She stood at the end of the corridor in the soft light with the glass of the garden door in front of her and the night on the other side of the glass, black and ordinary, the wall and the sodden lawn and the one lamp at the gate, and she was about to turn and go back when she saw the coat. It was in the glass. There was a figure in the garden door's reflection, standing behind her and a little to her left, at the distance a person stands when they are waiting to be noticed, and it was tall, and it wore a coat the color of a wet slate roof, and it had a face, and Edie did not look at the face. She looked at the coat and the hands and the thing in the hands, which was dark and flat and held low, a folder or a board, the kind of thing a person carries around a building when they are counting the rooms. And she stood with her back to it in the soft light of the garden door and understood, with a calm that she would afterward find more frightening than fear, that Myra had been right, that she had been right to keep her page, that the thing behind her had been in this house since before the trust took the name off the door, and that the reason it had a face and the reason you did not look at it were the same reason, which was that the face was for the writing and not for the meeting. She did not turn around. That was the one thing she held to, the whole length of the corridor, the one rule she had left: that she would not look at it the way a person looks at a person, because she had a suspicion that looking at it was the beginning of being taken, the way Myra's questioning had been. She kept her eyes on the glass and she said, out loud, in the flat voice she used for the phone, "This is the night nurse. The house is quiet. Everyone is settled." And in the glass, at the edge of the frame, the figure made the small housekeeping motion of a person finishing a page, and the light went from soft to ordinary, and the corridor was the corridor, with its twelve rooms and its one long hall and its cold at the garden end. Edie walked back. She did not hurry. She checked bed nine and bed eight and bed six and bed four and bed three, and every one of them was asleep and breathing, and at the desk she sat down and looked at the whiteboard for a while. Then she took out the page and read it through from the first line, all nineteen accounts and now Myra's star and the two words, *it knows the door*, and she added a line at the bottom in the small careful letters, and the line was not about the visitor. It was the first thing she had written on the page about herself, and she wrote it plainly, the way you write a fact in a chart that other people will read later: *It has my report. It has been keeping my report since Aldercrest.* She did not know, that night, exactly what she meant by it. She only knew that the sentence had been waiting a long time to be written, and that writing it felt less like discovery and more like admitting a diagnosis you have been carrying home from the clinic for a week and have not told anyone. She put the page away and made the tea she did not want and sat with the house until the morning shift, and when Roz came in at seven with her coffee and her kindness, Edie gave her the report in the flat voice, bed by bed, and did not mention the coat, and Roz said it was a good death, and it was, and that was true too. She finished the shift. That was the whole of her response to the coat in the glass and the board in its hands and the long corridor that was not long: she finished the shift, and did the water round, and emptied the catheter bags, and wrote her notes in the small square hand the trust required, and at half past six she made the first tea of the day for the aide who was coming in, and then she went out to the car and sat in it and shook, briefly and completely, for about four minutes, and then stopped, and drove home. That night she slept, for the first time in a week, a long dreamless sleep with her hand curled around the bag on the floor beside the bed, and in the morning she understood that the shaking had been a kind of graduation. She was no longer a woman deciding whether to believe. She was a woman who had seen it and had come back to work anyway, which is the only kind of nurse there has ever been in a house like that. ---