第12章 The Visitor Turns

The first thing it took from Edie was her knee. It had been bad for six years, the left one, worn down by the wide hallways and the lifting and the long hours, and she had a way of walking with it that she no longer noticed, a small hitch at the turn that made the other nurses ask her, sometimes, whether she wanted the lift. On the Tuesday after Myra died she came off a shift and walked to her car and got all the way to the driver's door before she understood that she had walked without it. No hitch. No ache. She stood in the parking lot in the gray morning and bent the knee and straightened it, and there was nothing there, and instead of relief she felt the floor of her stomach go cold, because she knew what it meant. She had spent a month writing down what it meant. She drove home and sat in her flat with the curtains closed and the pain gone, and the taste of copper in the back of her mouth, and she did not sleep. She was being weighed. That was the word she had from Myra, and it was the right word, and she lay on her bed with her bad knee that was not bad, and understood that the visitor had moved on from the residents of Ferrier House and had begun, in the patient and unremarkable way of a clerk working through a box, to process the night nurse as well. She went back the next night and the pain was back, worse, the way Myra had said, and she almost laughed at the neatness of it, and then she stopped laughing. Over the next week the other things came. She smelled oranges and pennies in her flat, once, at three in the morning, standing at the window with a cup of tea, and the smell was so specific and so calm that she stood there and let it be, because there was no longer any point in pretending. She heard, twice, the low complaint of the boards at the kitchen door, in her own flat, where there were no boards and no kitchen door and no one to cross it. And on the third night she woke from a dream she could not remember with the sentence in her mouth, *is this one ready*, the way you wake with a song, and she lay in the dark and said it back to the ceiling, quietly, to see how it felt, and it felt like a name she should have recognized. At work it was worse, because at work she could measure it. The accounts she was collecting had begun to change direction. Hugo Blaise, who was down to weeks, told her that the visitor had stopped at the foot of his bed and looked at the door and not at him, and that the door, both times, was hers. Ira Rusk, who had been asleep for a day, woke once and asked Edie whether she had gotten her coat back, and when she said she did not know what coat, he said, the one you take off the hook to see how heavy it is, and went back to sleep and did not wake again. She wrote it all on the page. There were pages now, four of them, folded into the front of her bag, and the top of each one had a date and the bottom of each one had a line, and the lines had stopped being observations and started being a kind of address. She found herself writing things that were not for her, or not only for her: *the day cannot hear it. The day is not permitted. If you are reading this you are the night.* She caught herself doing it and sat back and put the pen down, and thought about Marguerite Sorrel writing in the back of the register, *if you are reading this, you are the one who noticed*, and understood that she was no longer keeping a record for herself. She was keeping a record for the next one, the way Sorrel had, the way Grell had kept her death records in a shoebox, three night nurses in three houses keeping the same paperwork for the same clerk, passing it down the dark like a shift report that never reached the end of its chain. Dr. Thane called her in on the Friday. It was not a confrontation. He had her file open on the desk and a mug of tea and the reasonable face of a man who has decided to be humane. "You've dropped weight," he said. "You're wearing the same shirt twice a week. You've worked twenty-two nights in the last twenty-four days, which the roster will not let you do, so either you're in the building off-shift or you've found a way around the sheet." He closed the file. "I'm not asking you what you saw. I'm telling you that whatever it is, you will not be able to keep it in the dark forever, because you are a person and you have a body, and the body always sends the bill. I'm putting you on days for two weeks. Paid. Roz has agreed." And Edie sat in the chair with her hands in her lap and felt the whole building lean, because days meant the visitor could work without her, days meant the residents would go down in that narrow band past three and there would be nobody in the corridor who knew to stand with them, days meant that she would be awake in the daylight when the smell could not reach her and asleep at the hour when everything he did was done. She understood then that he had not made an error. That was the point. The kindest, most reasonable, most medical decision in the world was also the decision that would take the one witness off the night shift, and if she had wanted to design a system that kept the day from ever learning what the night knew, she could not have done better than to fill it with good people being reasonable. She said yes. There was nothing else to say in the office at four in the afternoon. Then she went home and set her alarm, and that night, instead of sleeping, she drove to Brackton and parked across from Ferrier House and watched the one lit window of the office and the night nurse who was not her moving behind it, and she waited, because she had decided on the drive over that two weeks was the same as never, and that if the day was going to take the nights away from her, she would simply have to start arriving as a visitor. That was how the last week of October went. Mornings on the day shift, gray and hollow among the cheerful; afternoons asleep in a flat with the curtains closed; and every night, from eleven until the sky went the color of dishwater, a middle-aged nurse in a parked car across from a residential hospice, watching one lit window, counting the times, keeping her own count of a building that had no use for her any more and could not let her go. There is a word for what she was doing and it was not a word she would have said out loud: she had become the visitor. She came in the dark, she stood outside the lit room, she kept a record of who was going down, and the only difference she could find between herself and the thing in the coat was that she came to watch them and it came to weigh them, and she was not at all certain that this was the larger difference she wanted it to be. ---