第20章 The Next Shift

Lois Baxter came to Ferrier House in the second week of December, thirty-one years old, two children and a night shift of her own at home, and she learned the building in the way good nurses learn a building, which is fast and without being told. Edie trained her. That was the arrangement Dr. Thane had made after Hugo Blaise died and the roster thinned again, and it suited everyone, because it kept Edie on nights, where by then the whole unit understood, without ever putting it into words, that she belonged. Lois was competent and calm and asked good questions and did not ask the one question Edie was waiting for, which meant that on the third night, at the desk, in the small hours, Edie brought it up herself. "There's a register on the shelf behind you," she said. "There's a thing in the back of it you should read before you're on alone. You can read it as a joke or you can read it as a handover. I'll take either, but I want you to have read it." Lois read it on her break. Edie watched her from the corridor, watched the young woman stand at the desk with the book open and her tea going cold and her face doing the slow work of a person deciding what kind of place she has come to. She closed it and put it back on the shelf and came out and said nothing about it at all, which Edie took as the best sign she had seen in months, because it meant the young woman had understood that the register was not a thing to be discussed in the corridor. It was a thing you read at the desk and kept at the desk and carried in the body, and the only question was whether she would be one of the ones who noticed, or one of the ones who worked the nights for a year and never saw anything and left believing the register was a joke in bad taste. She found out on the fifth night, when Winifred Wallace came in. Winifred was eighty-eight and had been a piano teacher and had a room on the garden side, and she was still talking comfortably, in the way of the very old who have decided that the remaining business is to be pleasant to the staff. Edie had put her in bed three that morning. She was not, so far as anyone knew, close to the door; her numbers were ordinary and her appetite was good and she had, that day, asked for the piano in the day room to be tuned. At seven minutes past three, Edie was at the desk and Lois was on the round, and the corridor light went soft at the garden end and the taste of copper came up in Edie's mouth, and she did not move, because she had learned not to move, and she listened to the boards. In bed three, Winifred Wallace said something to the young woman who was checking her drip, and her voice carried the way voices carry in a house at three in the morning, clear and small and perfectly calm. "You've a visitor, dear," she said. "It's been standing at your elbow since you came in. It has a book. It's been writing the whole time you were doing my line." Edie heard Lois's voice, level and trained: "There's nobody here but me, Mrs. Wallace. I'm the night nurse." "I know who you are," Winifred said. "It's not asking about me. It's asking about the other one. The one with the list." And then, in the exact flat tone of a person reporting what they can see through a window, she added, "It's asking whether she's ready yet." The corridor was very quiet. Edie sat at the desk with her hands flat on the wood and the notebook open in front of her and the register on the shelf behind her, and she did not go into bed three, because she had learned, over the long autumn, that the one thing a night nurse does not do is answer, and she did not turn her head, and she did not look at the far end of the hall where the light had gone soft, and she waited. At three twenty the light came back and the smell was gone and Lois came out to the desk with her face exactly as it always was, which was the other thing Edie had learned, that the young ones are better at not showing it than she had been, and Lois said, "Mrs. Wallace is comfortable, drip's fine, she's a bit confused, she'll be asleep in ten minutes," and Edie said, "Good," and they sat together in the ordinary quiet of a building that was not asleep and never had been. Edie opened the notebook and wrote the date and the bed and the words, the way she had written them for two months, and when the entry was done she turned to the back of the register, to look at the names on the endpaper, the way she did on the quiet nights, and there under Marguerite Sorrel and under Edie Stroud, in the small upright patient hand that had been writing in that book since before either of them was born, a line had been added while the house was quiet and no one was at the shelf, and the line was her own name again, and beside it, in the column where the times went, in ink the color of a wet slate roof, a single word, and the word was a number, and the number was not a time. It was a count. She was on the list a second time, and this time the list was shorter. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she closed the register and put it back on the shelf, and she made the tea she did not want, and she started the round, three, five, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, the small numb recital of a woman walking a house she could walk in her sleep, and behind her at the desk young Lois Baxter was already writing her own first entry in her own careful hand, the way every night nurse in Ferrier House had written it, the way they would keep writing it, night after night, in a house where nobody died in the daylight and somebody always had to be awake, and at the far end of the corridor, by the garden door, the light was soft, and waiting, and did not go out. She walked the round twice that night, the way she always did when the house felt close, and on the second pass she stopped at the far end, in the soft light by the garden door, and stood where she had stood so many times now, with the coat behind her in the glass and the night black and ordinary on the other side of it. She did not look at the face and she did not turn her head and she did not answer, and after a while she said, in the flat voice she used for the phone, the way she said it every night now, the way she had learned to say it, "The house is quiet. Everyone is settled. Go on." And at the desk behind her, at the far end of the corridor, young Lois Baxter lifted her head from her first entry and looked down the long hall and saw nothing at all, which was the whole point, which was the way it would keep working, night after night, in a house where the count never closed and the night was never quite over.