Chapter 2 Two Ways to Chart It

The next night Cecil Kader was worse, which was not the same as saying he was different. The dying go down in stages that look from the outside like weather, and by the time Edie came on he had gone a little grayer, a little further into himself, the way a photograph fades when it has been left in a window. His daughter had been in all afternoon. His tray was untouched. When Edie asked him, as the protocol said, whether he had any pain, he said that it had been quiet all day, and that was a sentence she had learned to distrust, because a quiet day in a man with bone disease usually meant a bad night coming. At nine she gave the meds. At eleven she turned the ones who could not turn themselves. At half past midnight she sat with the man in bed nine, who had stopped asking about the doors and started asking about the hallway, whether anyone had gone down it. When she told him no, he seemed disappointed and would not say why. Inez Vickery was in bed seven. She was ninety and had spent the whole of a long life in Brackton, and she had been a schoolteacher, and the first thing she had said to Edie on the night she arrived, three weeks before, was that she intended to die without making a fuss, and the second thing was that she wanted the blinds left up, because she had never trusted a room that would not show her the sky. She was too thin now to be anything but the frame of the person, but her voice still came out of her with the clear habit of a woman who had stood in front of thirty children and expected to be heard. At three she rang her bell. Edie came and found her sitting up, which she could not do without help, and holding the rail of the bed with both hands like a person on a bridge. "There it is," Inez said. "Did you catch it? You were in the hall." "Catch what." "The visitor." She said the word the way a person says a word they have heard used wrongly and have decided to use anyway. "The one with the oranges." The floor of the room seemed to Edie to tilt by a degree and then right itself. She took the blood pressure because that was what her hands knew to do. One-oh-eight over sixty-two. Pulse eighty. The number on the little screen was a perfectly ordinary number belonging to a perfectly ordinary dying woman, and it told her nothing at all. "Tell me about the oranges," Edie said. "Rind and copper," Inez said. "That's the way it comes in. Like the bottom of a pocketbook." She let go of the rail and lay back, and her breath went out of her in a way that cost her something. "It stands at the end of the bed. You can't see the face. It has one, I'm sure of that, but you don't look at the face, you look at the coat. And it says, *Is this one ready.*" "Who is it asking?" "Somebody behind you," Inez said. "But there's nobody behind you. That's the thing I'd have you put in the report, nurse. There's nobody behind you, and it asks them anyway." Edie stood at the foot of the bed, and she did not look behind her, and she was aware of making a decision not to look behind her, which was worse than looking, and she wrote it down. She gave Inez her three o'clock dose and stayed until the old woman's breathing had leveled into sleep, and then she walked the length of the corridor to the office and closed the door. Dessa was at the desk with the crossword and the cold tea. "Everybody's up tonight," Dessa said. "Two of them." "Three." Dessa turned the crossword over. "Bed nine's been talking to somebody since midnight. Bed eleven asked me for a pen so he could write it down." "Write what down." "He wouldn't say." She looked at Edie with the flat sympathy of someone who has decided in advance not to ask the question. "You want tea?" Edie did not want tea. She sat at the second chair with her hands in her lap and listened to the house, the concentrator, the icemaker, the small complaint of the kitchen boards, and in her head she put the two accounts side by side the way she would have put two medication lists side by side, item by item, looking for the discrepancy that would tell her the whole thing was ordinary. The smell: oranges and pennies, rind and copper. The same. The time: a few minutes past three. The same. At the foot of the bed. The same. The sentence: *Is this one ready.* The same, word for word, from a printer of eighty-one and a schoolteacher of ninety who had met once, at dinner in the common room, and had not spoken to each other since. There was no discrepancy. That was the discrepancy. Edie had been a nurse for twenty-six years. She knew the shapes that the end of a life could take. She had seen the man who argued with a brother dead since the war, the woman who packed her suitcase every night for a train that left at dawn, the ones who saw their mothers, the ones who saw nothing, the ones who went quiet a week out like a radio losing the station. There was a word for all of it. The word was *terminal restlessness*, and it was a good word, because it was true and because it fit under the door of a chart. But terminal restlessness is a soloist. Each patient sings his own song, in his own key, in his own language. It does not put the same sentence in the mouths of a printer and a schoolteacher within twenty-four hours, at the same minute of the same hour, unless the sentence is coming from somewhere they are both standing. At four she made the round. Bed three, bed five, bed seven, bed nine, bed eleven. The corridor was lit by a single row of tubes that hummed and flickered at the far end, near the garden door, where the wiring was oldest. She walked it twice, and the second time she stopped at the far end, where the light was softest, and stood still in it, and did not turn around, and smelled nothing but the lemon polish the cleaner used and, under it, faintly, the air of a place where people were slowly leaving. When she came back to the office, she took a clean page from the back of the roster notebook and wrote at the top, in small letters, the date she had started, and under it, one line for Cecil and one line for Inez, and under those, one line for what bed nine had said. Then she put the page in the front of her bag, where the day could not reach it, and went to check on bed five, who was new and frightened and needed someone to sit. Years later she would remember that she had hesitated before she wrote the page, and would not be able to remember why. It was only a list of what people had said. It was only nursing. And she kept it because a nurse who is told something twice by two different people is a nurse who has been told something once. ---