第18章 The Count

On the last night of October, Edie sat with Hugo Blaise, because he asked her to, and because she had promised, and because she had decided that whatever was about to happen she would be in the room when it did. He was very close to the door now. He had stopped eating, and his hands had gone the color of old paper, and his breathing had the long pauses in it that a nurse times with her watch and does not count out loud. At two he was awake and lucid and talked about his mother and a car he had owned and the road to the coast, and at twenty past two he slept, and Edie sat in the chair by the bed with her eyes on the far end of the corridor through the open door, and waited. At seven minutes past three the corridor light went soft at the garden end, and the smell came down the hall ahead of the visitor the way it always did, oranges and the flat sweetness of copper, and this time Edie did not stand and did not turn and did not look away. She watched it come. It came up the corridor at the pace of a person doing the last round of a long shift, unhurried, level, its shoes making no sound on the boards that complained for everyone, and it stopped in the doorway of bed eight and stood there, tall, in the coat the color of a wet slate roof, and it had a face and she did not look at the face, she looked at the hands and the flat dark board, and it came to the foot of the bed and looked down at Hugo Blaise and then at the door and said, in a voice so ordinary that it took the breath out of her, the sentence. *Is this one ready.* And Edie said, out loud, in the flat voice she used for the phone, the question that Marguerite Sorrel had asked in 1988 and had never written down the answer to: "Why me." The figure did not startle. It did the small housekeeping thing, the turning of a page, and then it turned the board, slowly, so that the side of it that was written on faced her across the bed, and held it there in the light from the corridor, and let her read. There were two names on the page, one above the other, in a small upright hand that she had seen in the register and on the back of her own hand. The top name was Margaret Stroud. Under it, in the column where the times went, there was a space and no time, which is what a clerk leaves when a job is begun and not finished. And under that, on the next line, in the same hand, was Edie's own full name and her date of birth and, where the column ran, a blank. She looked at the blank for a long time. It was the blank that explained everything, and it explained it the way a diagnosis explains a life: not at all, and completely. Her mother had been halfway through the door, nine years ago, at Aldercrest, at three in the morning, when a daughter who was also a nurse had said *it's the morphine, Mum*, and had taken her mother's hand, and by doing the ordinary human thing had put a body in the doorway of a process. The process had not been angry. It had simply left the job open, the way you leave a form open when the person you are processing is called away, and the daughter had been standing in the doorway of the very next file, and the clerk had done the only sensible thing a clerk does with an unfinished account, which was to carry it forward. She understood, standing at the foot of Hugo Blaise's bed with the board turned toward her, that she had been on the list since the night of her mother's death, and that the four weeks of watching and weighing had not been the beginning of it, only the point at which the file had come to the top of the stack. "Say my name," she said. "If you're going to count me, say it." The figure did not say her name. It looked at the door, at the corridor behind her, at the far end where the light had gone soft, and it said the sentence again, the same sentence, the only sentence it had, and Edie, who had heard it a hundred times in a hundred rooms, heard it now for what it was: not a question about the dying. A question about the nurse. It had been asking it of her since the first night, in every room, over the head of every patient, the way one night worker asks another across a desk at handover, the way you ask whether the person coming on is ready to take the floor. *Is this one ready.* And Edie, who was not dying, and who had a blank in her column, and who had been awake in this house for nine weeks, understood at last what the register had meant by the words at the bottom of the page, the ones she had read and not understood: *she asked it why. It told her. She stopped asking.* Marguerite Sorrel had asked, and had been told, and had stopped asking, and had gone on working the nights for two more years, because the answer was not a monster and not a bargain. The answer was the night itself. There has to be someone at the desk. Someone has to be awake when they come down the corridor, and someone has to count, and the day will never do it, and the dying cannot, so the night keeps one of us, and the one it keeps is the one who is already awake. The light came back. The corridor was the corridor. Hugo Blaise drew a long breath and let it go and did not draw another for a while, and then drew one, and went on living for three more days, and Edie sat with him until the morning came and the day shift arrived with their coats and their coffees and their kindness, and she gave the report in the flat voice, bed by bed, and did not mention the board or the blank or the line under her name, because the report was the day's, and the count was the night's, and she had finally learned where each of them belonged. She did not sleep that morning. She sat in the car in the gray cold with the heater clicking and read her own handwriting in the little notebook and did not recognize it as the writing of the woman who had come on shift in September and believed in the things that could be measured. Somewhere between the register and the board and the blank in her column she had stopped being that woman and become someone else, and the someone else was not mad and was not haunted, and understood exactly how the house worked and where she stood in it, and that was worse, because there was no treatment for it and no leave to take and no form on which to write the thing that was happening. She drove home and slept four hours with the lights on and came back for the day shift, and when Roz asked her, kindly, whether she was all right, she said the only true thing available to her, which was that she was tired, and Roz believed her, and there was a kind of mercy in that too, the mercy of a day that could not hear and therefore could not be afraid. ---