Chapter 15 Nobody Dies in Daylight

The two weeks on days ended on a Thursday, and by then Edie had understood that the day was not a place you could argue with, because the day was not a position. It was an atmosphere. It did not say no; it simply could not hear you, the way water cannot hear a shout. She tested it once, properly, with the last of her credibility, because while Leon Odell was alive and articulate and willing, she had one piece of evidence that was not her own word, and she spent a week deciding whether to spend it. Leon had described the visitor in full before anyone told him to; he had described the time and the smell and the sentence and the coat; he had said the thing about the headache going and coming back; he had said it was looking at the door she stood in. On the last day of her two weeks, she brought the page out of her bag and put it on Dr. Thane's desk and asked him to read it and then to go and ask Leon Odell, himself, that afternoon, without her in the room, whether any of it was true. Dr. Thane read all four pages, slowly, the way he read everything. Then he did the thing she had not expected, which was the worst thing he could have done. He believed her. "These are good observations," he said. "You've kept them cleanly. If you were a registrar I'd tell you to publish them." He set the pages down and folded his hands. "And here is what I will do with them. I will keep them. I will not put them in a chart, because a chart can be subpoenaed by a family, and I will not put a nurse's private record of a house's deaths into a document that a grieving daughter might one day read, and I want you to understand that this is not because I think you're mad. It's because I think you're right, and I still can't do anything with it, and neither can you, and neither can anyone, because nothing in those pages is a thing a person can act on. You have described a pattern. You have not described a harm." "It takes them," Edie said. "It weighs them and it writes them down and it takes them, and the pain it takes off them it gives back worse—" "Or the last part of a terminal illness looks, from the inside, exactly like that." He said it gently. "Or the last part of a terminal illness looks exactly like that, Edie. I have sat with four hundred dying people. They get lighter and they get heavier and they go quiet and they see what they need to see, and I have never once in thirty years been able to tell you which parts of that were the disease and which parts were the person and which parts were something no one has a word for. Neither have you. That's the whole of it. Nobody dies in the daylight, and nobody knows why, and the world has decided that this is a thing we are allowed to notice and not a thing we are allowed to name." She sat in the chair with the pages on the desk between them and felt it close over her, the way the water had closed over the thing nine years ago at Aldercrest, and she saw that Thane was not the wall. He was the one standing on the other side of the wall, with his hand flat on the brick, telling her, kindly, that the brick was very thick, and that he had spent his life on his side of it, and that the only people who ever got through were the ones who stopped trying to make themselves heard and started learning to live on the wall. "I'm going back on nights," she said. "The roster's covered." "Cover it with me. You said yourself the nights are where the deaths are. You can't put a nurse on days for noticing that." He looked at her for a long moment with something that might have been, in a different man, fear. Then he did the arithmetic, the way he always did, the way the whole building did, and because the roster was thin and the agency nurse cost more than two of Edie and because he could not put a reason on a form that would hold, he signed the change, and that was how a hospice put its best witness back on the dark side of the board without ever once admitting that it had. She worked that night. Leon Odell was awake at three and did not mention any visitor, and at ten past three Edie stood at the foot of his bed and looked at the door and waited, and nothing came, and at three twenty Leon said, in a voice that had gone a little soft, "It's not coming tonight. It's busy with somebody else." And Edie, who had spent four weeks learning to distrust comfort, felt the floor of her chest drop away, because she understood that *busy with somebody else* was a sentence from a schedule, and a schedule in a house with twelve beds meant only one thing: that somewhere in Ferrier House, at three in the morning, on a night when the visitor had not come to Leon, it had gone to see the night nurse instead. She did not let herself think the thought all the way to the end of itself, not then, not in the corridor with the water pitcher in her hand and the house holding its one soft note. She finished the round the way you finish a round with a bad blood pressure in it: competently, in order, writing the numbers down, and she did not go to her own reflection in the garden door, and she did not stand at the far end where the light was soft, and at six she sat at the desk and watched the sky go the color of dishwater over the garden wall and waited for the day to come and take the unit back. Roz came in at seven with her coffee and her coat and her kindness, and Edie gave the report in the flat voice, bed by bed, and when she got to bed eight she said that Leon had been comfortable and settled and had not needed anything, and Roz wrote it down and did not look up, and Edie stood there for a moment with the report finished and the shift sheet waiting, and thought about all the sentences a person could say in a hospice kitchen in the morning, and how none of them were the one she had. "You're on again tonight," Roz said. "I'm on again tonight." "Edie." Roz set her pen down. "I've worked this building for eleven years. I know every night nurse we've ever had, and I know the ones who burn out and the ones who hold. You're not the burning kind. That's what worries me." She looked up, and there was the thing in her face that Edie had seen in Grell's face and in Myra's, the flat honest look of a woman who knew more than she would ever put on a form. "Whatever it is, you're not going to be able to say it to me, and I'm not going to be able to hear it, and we both know why. So I'll just say the one thing I can. If you need me at three in the morning, call me. Not the on-call, not Thane. Me." Edie said she would. She never did. That was the arrangement the day made with the night, and it was a decent arrangement as far as it went, which was not far, but it was more than most people ever got, and she drove home in the gray and slept four hours and came back, and the count went on. ---