第19章 The Last Night on the Unit

Hugo Blaise died on the third of November at four minutes past three, and Edie was there, and it was quiet, and when she had done the last of the care and opened the window to a hand's width, she went out to the storeroom and took the register and carried it to the office and set it on the desk and sat in front of it for a while without opening it. She had thought, in the week between the board and Hugo's death, about leaving. She had thought about it seriously and in detail, the way a nurse plans a discharge: the notice, the reference, the flat in another town, the agency work that would take her anywhere and ask no questions. She even looked at the postings on her phone, on the shifts, sitting in the office with the corridor stretching away toward the soft light at the garden end, and found that there were plenty of night jobs in plenty of towns, in care homes and hospices and wards, and that every one of them needed someone awake at three in the morning, and that this was not the comfort she had been looking for. She tested it once, properly, to be sure. She took three days and drove north to her sister's town, where she had not been in two years, and slept in a motel with the curtains open, and did not go to Ferrier House, and did not drive past Aldercrest, and on the second night at seven minutes past three the smell of oranges and copper came into the motel room, strong enough that she sat up in the dark, and in the bathroom the tap dripped once, in the pattern of the boards by the kitchen door, and she sat with her back against the headboard and understood that leaving the house did not leave the job, and that Grell had left Aldercrest and had still kept the death records in a shoebox by her chair, and that Sorrel had left the post at three in the morning and had still spent the rest of her life being the kind of woman who writes *if you are reading this, you are the one who noticed* in the back of a ledger. The house was not a place. It was a shift. She drove back the next morning. She did not tell Dr. Thane that she had thought about leaving, because it was not the kind of thing you put on a form, and because, if she was honest with herself, she had not really been deciding whether to leave. She had been deciding whether to stay, and she had been deciding it for nine years, ever since a woman she loved had told her about a man in a coat and a smell of oranges and a question, and she had said *it's the morphine, Mum*, and had not believed her, and had gotten up in the morning and gone to work in a building just like this one and been, all that time, exactly the person who was going to end up on the night side of the board. She stayed. She stayed through November, and there were three more deaths in November, and she was in the building for all of them, or near enough, and she kept the page and cleaned it up and turned it into something a person could hand over at the end of a shift, a small square notebook now instead of folded pages, with a column for the date and a column for the bed and a column for the words, and a line at the top that said, in her own good handwriting, *the night record of the unit at Ferrier House.* She did not put the sentence in the record. The sentence did not need to be written down; it wrote itself. And in the back of the register, on the endpaper, under the name of Marguerite Sorrel and her own name and the date, she added one more thing, for the next one, whenever the next one came, because she had come to believe that the next one always came, and that the only kindness one night nurse could do for another was to leave the rules where they could be found: *The work is a count. It is done every night in every house where the day cannot see. If you are keeping this record, you are not ill, and you are not haunted, and you are not alone. You are on shift. Keep your count. Do not answer the face. And when it asks, and it will ask, remember that the question is not about the one in the bed. It is about you, and it has always been about you, and there is no wrong answer except the one that puts you to sleep.* She read it back once, and then she closed the register, and she did not put it back in the storeroom. She kept it in the office, on the shelf behind the desk, where the next night nurse would find it on her first quiet shift, the way Edie had found the box, the way every one of them had found whatever version of the thing was left for them. Then she made the tea she did not want, and started the round, and the house settled, and the night went on being the night. November went on. There were nights when nothing spoke and nights when three rooms spoke in one shift, and Edie learned how to hold it all without writing any of it in a patient chart, and the unit went down in the narrow band past three, night after night, and the staff who worked the days went on believing that people die at dawn and at dinner and at the small hours in between, all hours, indifferent and scattered, because that is what the death records showed when you collapsed them into a month and did not look at the minutes. She kept the notebook in the pocket of her cardigan, and she kept the register on the shelf, and she began to teach, without meaning to, the way the older nurses had taught her in the beginning. She taught the new aides to leave the corridor light on at the garden end, because the dark there made people walk faster than they meant to. She taught them to check the boards by the kitchen door in the small hours, because a house that complains for nobody is a house that has had a visitor who does not use the boards. She taught them, without ever putting it into a sentence they would repeat to the day, that if a resident described a smell of oranges and old coins, the right thing to do was to sit down and stay, and not to say the words *it's the medication*, and not to be clever, and not to leave. Whether they understood what she was teaching them, she did not know. Some of them did, she could see it; they got the look that Dessa had gotten, the look of a person who has decided not to say what they have seen. Others did not, and would not, and would work the building for years and never once catch the smell, and Edie did not hold it against them. Every house needs people who cannot see the night, or the night would run out of the ones who can. And she went on being the one who could. She went on being awake at three in the morning, in the soft light at the end of the corridor, with the register on the shelf behind her and the count in her cardigan pocket, and every night she did not answer, and every night the question was asked, and every night the count grew by one, and she began, somewhere in that long November, to think of it almost as a job. Almost. Not quite, because a job does not keep your name in a book, and does not leave a blank in your column, and does not ask, in the same patient voice, in the same patient hour, whether you are ready, when it already knows that you are not, and never will be, and will have to be anyway. ---