第16章 Her Sister's Version

The telephone came back between seven and eight, and Cleo called Nita from the booth in the corridor where the camera could see the top of her head, and asked her, without saying hello, whether Cleo had called her at three in the morning in the week before the study. Nita said, "Which time?" They went through it slowly, because Nita did everything slowly when it mattered and had learned that from their mother. Nita said there had been the three calls in the first week, the ones Cleo already knew about, and there had been a fourth call, two nights before Cleo moved into Trenner Row, and it had not been a call so much as a message, and Nita had saved it, because Nita saved everything, and she played it down the line. It was Cleo's voice, and it was tired, and it said: *I know you don't want me to do it. I know. But I can't do the nights in this flat anymore and I can't do the nights at work and I can't do the nights at all. They said there's a version where I come out the other side rested. I signed the thing. Don't tell Mum's people.* There was no such version of that night in Cleo's memory. The night before she moved in, she remembered sitting in Nita's kitchen doing the arithmetic and going to bed early and waking at four, which was her usual, and she remembered all of it with the grain of weather. But the message existed. It was in Nita's phone, dated, unedited, and Nita could not have faked it, because Nita could not have faked Cleo's own voice into a phone at three in the morning on a night Nita hadn't been awake. Cleo asked Nita about the forms. Nita said Cleo had sent them to her to sign as the emergency contact, in the summer, months ago, and that Nita had signed them standing at the kitchen counter and had thought nothing of it, because Cleo was always signing things to make the money work. Cleo asked whether she had signed anything else. Nita went quiet in a way that had a shape to it, and then said that there had been a second envelope, later, that Cleo had asked her to hold onto without opening, and that Nita had put it in the drawer under the cutlery, and that she had not opened it, and that it was still there. Cleo asked her to open it. There was a pause on the line, and the sound of a drawer, and the sound of paper, and then Nita read it out in the flat voice she used for documents, which was the voice of a woman who had spent years reading terms at people over a headset. It was a schedule. It was a schedule for a study of twenty-eight nights, and the dates on it were not the dates Cleo was living through now. They were the dates of a study that had begun eleven months earlier and ended eleven months earlier, and at the bottom, under the schedule, there was a line in Cleo's own handwriting that Nita read without any expression at all, because reading without expression was the only way she could get to the end of it. *If I don't remember signing this, tell me anyway. That's the point. That's the whole reason I'm writing it down.* Nita stopped reading. The line hummed. And then Nita said the thing that Cleo had been waiting for since the first morning, the thing that made the corridor and the camera and the counting all fall away into something simpler and worse. Cleo asked her to read the schedule again, slowly, and to read the dates one at a time, and Nita did, in the flat voice, and Cleo wrote each date in the notebook and put it beside the date it should have been. The schedule ran from the second week of September to the first week of October, twenty-eight squares, and every square had a number in it and a letter, Q for quiet and H for hold, and the pattern of letters was the same as the pattern of letters on the wall of the common room where she now lived: Q, H, Q, Q, H, Q, and then a block of four holds that she had not yet reached and that the wall had shown her in advance, because the wall showed the whole month after the fifteenth. The dates in the envelope were not the dates she had lived. In the second week of September she had been working nights at the contractor, transcribing discharge notes for the emergency rooms, and she remembered those weeks with the grain of weather, because they had been the worst weeks, the ones where her mother's file had come across her own desk at eleven at night and she had typed it without her hands shaking, which had felt at the time like a professional achievement and had felt like something else entirely in the months afterwards. She asked Nita whether she had seemed different in September. Nita was quiet for a moment, and then she said that in September Cleo had been the one who slept. She said it plainly, the way she said everything plainly, and she said that it had been a relief, because for two years Cleo had not slept, and that in September Cleo had started sleeping eight hours and had stopped calling at four in the morning, and that Nita had assumed it was the medication or the end of the worst of the grief, and that she had been glad, and that she was now, sitting in her kitchen with the second envelope open on the counter, wondering whether glad had been the wrong thing to be. Cleo asked her what else had been in the envelope, beyond the schedule. Nita said there had been a second sheet, and she read that one too, and it was a cuff calibration record, the kind a technician fills in at the start of a study, with a participant number and a berth number and a date, and the participant number was C-14, and the berth number was three, and the date was eleven months earlier. Nita read it out and then said, into the silence, that she did not know what any of it meant, and that she had signed what Cleo had asked her to sign and had kept what Cleo had asked her to keep and had done it because Cleo had never in her life asked her for anything that could not be explained by money. Cleo stood in the phone booth with the receiver against her ear and looked down the corridor at the door of berth three and understood that her sister was the only witness she had, and that a witness is a record like any other, and that Nita's record and hers had been running side by side for a year and had agreed on the facts and disagreed on the person, and that in Nita's version there was a Cleo who slept, and in Cleo's version there was a Cleo who had not slept since March, and that one of those women had gone into the Ondale Institute in the summer and signed an envelope, and that Cleo could not prove which. "You asked me," Nita said, "on the phone, last week, if I'd noticed you'd stopped taking the nine. I said I didn't know what that meant. You said it was the pill they give you at night." A breath. "You sounded like you were reading it off a card, though. You sounded like a woman reading off a card." ---