第16章 The Fourth Round

The rule had been three, and in the last week of October the rule became four. Edie knew it the way she had known everything in this house, from the paper. She had gone back to keeping her page nightly, and Leon Odell had given her his three accounts in three nights and then, on the fourth night, one more, and then on the fifth night he had died, and Edie sat with him for the last two hours and it was the quietest death she had ever attended, and she laid his hand down and closed the window to a hand's width and added his name to the page with a small mark beside it, and only then did she count the marks and see the extra one and understand. Three had been the old rhythm. Four was the new. Whatever the visitor was, it had been made faster by something, or it had decided that the house needed a closer count now that the nurse was in the ledger instead of standing beside it. She stopped sleeping on the off nights. Not on purpose; the sleep left the way a tide leaves, in small withdrawals, until the nights were four hours and then three and then two, and she lay in the dark of her flat with her curtains closed against a daylight she no longer trusted and listened to a building that was three miles away. On the shifts she moved through Ferrier House the way a person moves through a house they are leaving, touching the doorframes, checking the garden door twice, reading the whiteboard like a map of somewhere she used to live. The boards by the kitchen complained under her feet every time and she had stopped being able to tell whether the complaint was the boards or her. The handwriting appeared on the second day of that last week, on the page, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a list, in her own hand and not her own: *one of the slow ones, left side, weighed twice, still waiting on the door.* She had not written it. She had written other things that night and could not now find them, as if the page had been turned over between her pen and her memory, and she sat at the desk at four in the morning and read the line and looked at the empty chair and the lit whiteboard and the long corridor, and reached the conclusion that she had been circling for a week without wanting to land on it, which was that the record was no longer only hers to keep. She counted the nights she had been clear. She counted them back through the month, past Myra, past the register, past the first night and Cecil Kader and the words *past three*, and it came to nine weeks, and she understood that a person can be processed for a long time. The visitor had been keeping a file on her since the day she had first written *Is this one ready* on a page and refused to call it the morphine. Nine weeks. Three rounds, and now a fourth, and whatever the fourth round was for, it was the one you did not come back from in the ordinary way, and she was in it. She took the register out of the storeroom that night and carried it to the office, and laid it open on the desk beside her own four pages, and did the thing that Marguerite Sorrel had done and that Grell had done in a shoebox and that every night nurse in this house must have done in some form, which is to write down, for the person who would come next, everything the day could not be told. She did not have the register's own column; the admissions were computerized now and the book was a relic. So she wrote in the back of it, on the endpapers, in her own good nursing hand, in ink, the way Sorrel had, and she began with the only sentence that would carry across a gap of years to another woman standing in the same corridor: *The house takes the slow ones at three. It is not a ghost and it is not a mood. It is a process, and the process has a clerk, and the clerk keeps a book, and you are not on the book because you are dying. You are on the book because you noticed. Do not look at the face. Keep your own count. And do not, under any circumstances, tell the day — not because the day is unkind, but because a thing that cannot be filed cannot be stopped, and you will spend whatever is left of you trying to file it.* She signed it and dated it and stopped, her pen an inch above the page, because there was one more line she wanted to write and did not know how, and she sat with it for a long time and then wrote the thing that was true and not helpful and she knew it: *it will ask about you now, the way it asked about your mother. When it asks, the answer is not yours to give. Ask it why.* She read the note back and did not correct it, and she did not, that night or any night after, put the register back in the storeroom. She kept it in the office, on the shelf behind the desk, where it stayed, and where, over the weeks that followed, she found herself returning to it the way a woman returns to a mirror she does not want but cannot pass. The fourth round did not end. That was the thing the register had not prepared her for, and that Marguerite Sorrel had not written down, perhaps because there was no way to write it down, perhaps because the writing would have made it true. The visits went on past four nights, and then past five, and by the second week of the new pattern they had stopped being countable, because the visitor had stopped coming in the shape of a visit. It was simply in the building now, the way the cold was in the building, the way the smell of the polish was in the building. The corridor light at the garden end had stopped going soft and coming back; it stayed soft, all night, every night, and the boards by the kitchen door complained when nobody crossed them, and at three in the morning, every morning, the taste of copper came up in Edie's mouth whether she was standing in a corridor or sitting at the desk or lying in her own bed three miles away with the curtains closed. She watched the residents go down, one and then another and then another, in the narrow band past three, and she was there for all of them, and she did the work well, and she did not once, in all that time, answer the question. That was the discipline now. It was the whole of the discipline, and it was harder than any of the nursing had ever been, because everything in her training wanted to respond, because a nurse does not stand in a room with someone who is distressed and say nothing. And every night she stood in the room and said nothing, and every night the visitor filed its patient and went on, and every night the count on the endpaper of the register grew by one, and the line under her own name did not change, and she began to understand that a person could live a long time with a blank in a column and that the blank was, in its way, a kind of sentence. ---