Chapter 3 The Wrong Side of Three

Cecil Kader died on the fourth night, at a quarter to five in the morning, with his daughter asleep in the chair beside him and Dessa holding one of his hands and Edie holding the other. It was a good death, which is a phrase that only people who work in the room ever use, and it means that it came slowly enough to be met and not so slowly that it hurt. His breathing had thinned across the small hours to a shallow, spaced thing, the kind that a nurse times with her watch, and then at some point that no one caught he had simply stopped, and the room had gone quiet in a way that made the concentrator in bed four sound enormous. Edie washed him and closed his eyes and opened the window a hand's width, because that was the custom, and she stood for a moment with her hand on the sill and looked out at the garden wall and the parking lot and the last of the sodium light, and she was aware, in the way you are aware of a sound you have stopped noticing, that the old man's hip had not hurt him at all for three nights. Three nights. She took the page out of the front of her bag in the office, after the family had come and gone and the paperwork was started, and she read her own handwriting. Cecil had said *past three* on the first night and again on the second and again on the third, and on the fourth night he had not mentioned any visitor at all, and on the fourth night he had died. Inez had said it once. Edie looked at the two lines and made a small mark beside Cecil's, a tick, and did not know yet why she had made it. The day shift came in at seven and took the unit back, and Edie gave the report in the flat voice, Cecil Kader expired at oh four forty-five, family present, no distress. Roz Hathaway wrote it on the death sheet and said the house had lost a good one, and asked, because she was kind, whether Edie was all right. Edie said she was. She went home to her flat on the third floor with the bad knee and the curtains she never opened and slept until two in the afternoon, the way she always did, and woke with the page still in her bag and the tick beside Cecil's name sitting in her mind like a stone in a shoe. She went in that evening and there were eleven names on the whiteboard, because one of the beds was empty now, and the empty bed had a paper strip across it that said, in Dessa's handwriting, *bless this room*. Inez Vickery had moved to the bed nearest the window, because she had asked to, and she was worse. She had stopped eating anything but ice, and she had begun to say the thing Edie had heard a hundred times, that she wanted to see her sister, who had been dead since 1987. Edie sat with her for a while at the start of the shift and let her talk, and Inez talked about Brackton the way it had been when she was young, the mill and the river and the dances at the hall, and then she stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked toward the foot of the bed and said, without any particular fear, "Not tonight. I've company." There was no one at the foot of the bed. Edie checked, then and once more, because that was the kind of thing she did now, and there was nothing there but the chair and the folded blanket on the chair and the wall behind it with its small gold circle of light. She did not turn around. She had decided several nights ago, without ever putting it into words, that she was not going to turn around in that room again. The night shifted. At half past two the man in bed eleven rang and asked for a pen, and when Edie brought one he had forgotten why he wanted it and began to cry, and she sat with him until the crying was done. At three, nothing. At ten past three, nothing. At a quarter past three, she was in the kitchen filling the ice pitcher for the water round, and she stood still with the pitcher in her hand and sniffed the air like an animal, and there was no orange in it and no copper, only the cold clean nothing of a kitchen at night, and she felt the relief go through her so hard that she had to set the pitcher down, because it meant, she told herself, that the whole thing had been a pair of old brains hitting the same chemical wall, and that tonight the wall was not there, and that she could go back to being a woman with a mortgage and a bad knee and a shift to finish. And then at twenty past three, Dessa came into the kitchen with her face carefully empty, and said, "Bed seven wants you. She says she's got something for you to write." Edie went. Inez was lying flat, her hands at her sides, and for the first time since she had come to Ferrier House she looked afraid. "It was here," Inez said. "You missed it. It was here while you were in the kitchen, and it stood right there, and it said *Is this one ready*, and I thought it meant me, nurse, and I sat up and I said, not me, not yet." Her eyes went to the empty foot of the bed and then away. "And it looked at me over its shoulder and it said it again. And it wasn't asking about me at all. It was pointing at the door and it was asking about whoever was coming through it." "Coming through the door," Edie said. "The morning," Inez said. "It was asking about the morning. It wanted to know if the morning was ready." Edie took the old woman's hand and found it cold, and gave her the dose she was allowed and a little of the one she was not, and stayed until Inez slept. And in the morning, when the day shift came in and the sun was up over the garden wall and the whiteboard had been wiped and rewritten with the new count, Edie went out to the parking lot and sat in her car with the engine off and the page in her hands, and she wrote at the bottom, in the small careful letters of a woman recording a temperature: *she knows the door. It knows the door.* And she underlined it once, and put the page back in her bag, and drove home the long way, past the mill and the river and the hall where the dances used to be, and told herself that she was tired, and that tiredness was a country too, and that she would feel differently after she had slept. ---