Chapter 4 The Register

The storeroom was off the kitchen, behind a door that said NO ENTRY in a hand that had gone soft with age. In practice everyone entered it, because it held the spare linen and the Christmas decorations and the boxes of old files that the trust had never gotten around to digitizing, and it was where you went at two in the morning to find a lightbulb or a box of tea. Edie had been in it a hundred times without looking at anything above the shelf line. The morning after Inez Vickery's night, she went in and looked. The boxes were stacked along the back wall in a leaning tower, most of them marked with years, a few with names. She pulled the lowest one, because it was the one that had been there longest and nobody had touched, and carried it to the office and set it on the second chair and opened it under the desk lamp. What came out first was a smell of damp paper and old glue, and then a bundle of loose photographs, and then, at the bottom, a book. It was a bound admissions register, the kind of heavy ruled ledger that offices used before computers, with a marbled cover gone dull and a spine held together by linen tape that had been rewrapped at some point by a person who cared. The first page was dated 1976, the year the trust had taken the house from the family that had built it, and the earliest entries were in three or four different hands, each one a row of names and dates and a single word for the outcome. Most of the words were *home*. A few were *hospital*. The ones that were *here* were written in a smaller hand than the rest, as if the writer had not liked to say it. Edie turned the pages slowly. The house had always been a place people came to at the end; that was not news. What she was looking for was harder to name, and she found it on a page dated the winter of 1981, where the ink changed from blue to a thin brown that had once been black, and the handwriting changed with it into something small and upright and patient, the hand of a person who had decided to do this carefully. The rows in that hand did not have outcomes. They had times. *R. Adcock — 3.05.* *M. Prelle — 3.10.* *J. Ostander — 2.58.* *H. Vane — 3.12.* Edie put her finger on the column and read it down the page, and then down the next page, and then she turned back and read the whole year. Every time in the column fell between ten to three and a quarter past three. Fourteen of them in one year. In a house with twelve beds and an average length of stay of nineteen days, that was dozens of deaths that should have happened at every hour of the day and night, that had happened instead in a narrow band of twenty-five minutes, over and over, as regular as a train. In the margin, beside the first entry, the same hand had written a word. Edie had to tilt the book toward the lamp to read it. It was *ready*, and under it, later, in fresher ink, the same hand had written, *again*, and then, at the foot of the page, in a line that ran off the ruled edge and into the gutter: *It asks the same question. It does not care what you answer.* Edie sat very still. The office at eight in the morning had the day already in it, the phone and the coffee and the sound of Roz laughing at something in the corridor, and all of it seemed to be happening at a distance, behind glass, the way a room looks when you are running a fever. She turned to the front of the register to find the name of the person who had kept it, and it was not there; the register belonged to the house. But on the inside of the back cover, in the same small upright hand, somebody had written a name and a title and a date, the way a child writes its name in a book. *Marguerite Sorrel, RN. Nights.* And under it, pressed hard enough to score the endpaper: *If you are reading this, you are the one who noticed. Do not tell the day. The day cannot help you. Keep your own count.* Edie looked at the words for a long time. Then she did the thing she would afterward think of as the moment she stopped being able to go back, which did not feel like a moment at all, and did not feel like anything but a nurse looking at a chart. She took out her phone and photographed the back cover and the two pages of times, and she closed the register and put it back in the box under the photographs, and she put the box back in the tower in the storeroom, and she went out to the desk and signed her name on the shift sheet as if nothing had happened, because on the shift sheet nothing had. Roz found her in the kitchen at half past eight, making tea she did not want. "You look like the floor of a bus," Roz said, kindly. "Rough one." "Bed seven?" "No," Edie said. "Bed seven was fine." Roz waited, the way a good colleague waits, giving her the room to say more. And Edie stood over the cup with the steam coming up and the register sitting in the storeroom behind the wall and the name Marguerite Sorrel in her head, and she heard herself say, "I'm all right. Just tired," and watched Roz believe her and go, and understood, standing there in the warm kitchen with the day shift moving all around her, that the person who had kept the ledger had written *do not tell the day* for a reason that had nothing to do with the day being unkind. It had to do with the shape of the sentence. Because there was no way to say it out loud in daylight without becoming, in the space of one breath, a woman with a bad knee and a dead mother and a list of old timestamps, standing in a hospice kitchen telling her colleague that the dying were being logged. That afternoon, before she went home, Edie went back into the storeroom alone and took the register out again, and turned to the last page that had been written in the small upright hand, and found what she had hoped and feared she would find. The entries stopped in the spring of 1989, in the middle of a row, with a time half-written and a name only begun, and someone else's hand in blue ink had written the final outcome in the margin: *night nurse left post, three a.m., no notice.* She stood in the storeroom for a while with the register open in her hands and the cold of the concrete coming up through her shoes, and she did the arithmetic that she had been avoiding since the first page. Eight years of nights, one nurse on, one house, a cluster of deaths in the same twenty-five minutes of every day, logged by a woman who had written *do not tell the day* as if it were a rule of the building and not a confession of loneliness. Marguerite Sorrel had not been mad. That was the thing Edie could not get around, standing there in the smell of damp paper and old glue. A mad woman writes one thing. A frightened woman writes many things. This woman had written a column. ---