第5章 Citrus and Copper

The following week there were three deaths and two admissions, which is how a hospice goes, in waves, and Edie worked four nights on and three off and kept her page in the front of her bag and added to it each shift and said nothing to anyone. She learned to write small. She learned to write in a way that could not be mistaken, if the page were ever found, for anything but a nurse's private record: date, bed, time, words. She was careful about the words. *Pts describe the same figure. Pts describe the same sentence. Both, independently.* There was no medical reason for a record like that, which was why it had to look medical, which was a logic she did not examine. She had four patients now who were close enough to the door to be speaking from it. The man in bed eleven, whose name was Ira Rusk, had been a machinist and had the kind of emphysema that meant he lived with a machine of his own now, a concentrator that hummed and paused and hummed. Myra Zeff was in bed five; she was fifty-three, which was young for Ferrier House, and she had motor neuron disease and could still use her hands enough to hold a pen, and she had written Edie a note the first week that said, *please don't do the voice*, by which she meant the bright, high nurse-voice, and Edie had not, and they had gotten along ever since. In bed eight was a man named Hugo Blaise, who had come in only days ago and was not yet speaking. And in bed seven was Inez Vickery, who was speaking less and less, and sleeping more, and going down the way a tide goes out, in small withdrawals that could be timed. It was in the fourth hour of the fifth night that Edie smelled it. She was doing the water round, and the corridor was quiet, and she had just come out of bed nine with the empty pitcher in her hand when the air changed, not suddenly, but the way a room changes when someone has been in it, the way the smell of a thing arrives a half step behind the thing itself. Oranges. Not the fruit, exactly, but the rind, the oil of the rind, sharp and cold, and under it the flat metallic sweetness of a pocketful of old pennies, the smell of copper handled too long by hands that had nothing better to do. Edie stopped. She did not turn around. She stood in the middle of the corridor with the pitcher in her hand and the corridor light soft at the far end near the garden door, and she took one breath and then another, and the smell was there, and then it was less, and then it was gone, and the corridor was only the corridor again, with the lemon polish and the cold. Behind her, in bed eight, Hugo Blaise said something. She went in. He was lying on his back with his eyes open, and he had not spoken since he had come, and now he spoke with the careful, stranded voice of a man who does not have much air left and knows it. "It's been by," he said. "You just missed it. It came down the hall and it stopped at the end for a while and then it went back." "Which end," Edie said. "The door end," he said. "Where the light is soft." He looked at her, and there was something in his face that was almost apology, as if he were the one who had gone wrong. "It smells like my father's garage," he said. "He kept a jar of pennies for the meter. And oranges, the little ones, what were they called." "Mandarin," Edie said. "Those." He closed his eyes. "It's the same one every time. It has a coat. Something you'd wear to a burial. You never see the face. I told the day nurse and she said it was the medication, and I said I'm not on that medication, and she said well, it's the disease, and she was very nice, and I stopped telling her." Edie stood by the bed with the pitcher in her hand and felt, for the first time since all of this had begun, something other than fear, which was a colder and more useful thing. She felt alone in a way that had a direction to it. This man had told the day, and the day had been kind and had not heard him, and he had stopped telling the day, and now he was telling her, and the reason he was telling her was that it was three in the morning and she was the only one in the building whose face he could see, and at three in the morning there is no such thing as a wrong kind of witness. The night hears what the day cannot afford to. She sat with him a while. When she got up to go, he caught her sleeve with two fingers, light as paper. "Don't tell them I said the face," he said. "But there was a face. I'm sure of that much. There was a face and I looked away from it, and I don't know why, and I've been lying here trying to remember why." On the way home, in the car, Edie did not put on the radio. The morning was coming up gray over the mill and the river, and in the front of her bag the page was fat with dates, and in her chest something had loosened that had been tight for nine years. Because there was a face and you looked away from it, and she had heard that before, once, and not in this house. Her mother had died at Aldercrest, a care home two towns over with a garden and a fish tank and a night nurse named Grell who had been kind, and in the last week of her life Edie's mother, who had been a fierce and orderly woman, had told her daughter about a man who came at night and stood at the foot of things and asked about readiness, and had smelled, she said, like oranges and pennies. And Edie, who had been thirty-odd days into what would turn out to be the last year of her mother's life, and who had been a nurse even then, had done the kind thing. She had said, *it's the morphine, Mum*, in a soft voice, and had held her hand, and had not looked at her mother's face when she said it, because she had not wanted to see what a daughter looks like when she tells her mother she is dreaming. She had never told anyone that. There had been no one to tell, and no reason, and the thing had closed over like water. But now she sat in her car outside her own building with the engine off, and she understood that her mother had been giving her a report, the same report everyone was giving her now, in the same words, with the same smell, and that she had filed it under grief and left it there for nine years, and that the visitor — she used the word to herself for the first time, in her own car, in the daylight, and the daylight let her — the visitor had been asking about her mother too, and her mother had not been ready, and neither, it seemed, had the morning. ---