第6章 Three Nights

By the middle of the month Edie had the count. It had come together the way a diagnosis comes together, not in one flash but in a slow accumulation of ordinary things that only mean something once you have enough of them. She had been keeping the page for twelve nights, and on the page were nineteen accounts from six patients, and when she laid them out against the death dates, a shape rose out of them that she had not wanted and could not unsee. The visitor came three times. That was the rule, and it held. It came on three separate nights, once each, always a few minutes past three, and then it did not come on the fourth night, and on the fourth night or the morning after, the patient died. Not every patient. Only the ones who spoke. But every patient who spoke, without exception, died within a day of the third visit, and every patient who died at Ferrier House during the weeks she was watching died in that narrow band past three, and the ones who had not spoken had gone the same way, quietly, in the dark, with nobody in the room. Cecil Kader had been the first, because Cecil had been the first to say it. Inez Vickery had gone the next, and Edie had counted her nights and known. She had known, and that was the part she could not put down. On the third night of Inez's visits, Edie contrived to be in the room. She told herself it was nursing; there was a woman at the end of her life who was frightened, and a nurse belongs where the frightened are. She sat in the chair by the bed from two-thirty until four. Inez slept, or seemed to, in the shallow way of the very near. At seven minutes past three the corridor light went soft at the far end, the way it did, and Edie's tongue filled with the taste of copper, and the woman on the bed opened her eyes and looked past Edie's shoulder toward the door and said, in a voice that was almost conversational, "There now. Don't be shy." And Edie looked at Inez the whole time, at the woman's face and not at anything else, and held her hand, and felt the room fill and then empty, and did not turn around, and did not turn around, and did not turn around, until Inez's grip slackened and her breathing changed and she said, "Gone. It's gone on to the next." Inez died the next morning at half past four, and Edie was not there, because Roz had come on at seven and Edie had gone home, and there was nothing unusual about that at all. It was a good death. It was on the sheet. It had happened in the dark at the hour when old women die, and you could put a hundred possible explanations in a row and they would all fit, and none of them would be the one Edie had. The rule was not the whole of it, though. The rule was the easy part, the part a superstitious aide might have guessed after a bad week. The harder part was the ledger in the storeroom, and the times in the small upright hand, and the way those times reached across forty years and lined up with the times she was writing now, so that a night nurse in 1981 and a night nurse in the present were keeping the same column, in the same house, for the same visitor. Edie had begun to think of it as a shift handover that ran the other way. Someone had kept this list before her, and someone had kept it before that, and the list was not a warning. The list was a log. It was the record a worker keeps of a process. She began to test it. That was the nurse in her; she could not help it. She started asking patients, in the ordinary course of care, where they would put their pain on the little scale of faces, and whether it had any quiet hours, and whether anything had changed in the last few nights. She did not ask about the visitor. She never asked about the visitor. She let them bring it, and they brought it, because it was three in the morning and she was the one who was there. Myra Zeff described the coat. Hugo Blaise described the smell. Ira Rusk, who was fading, described the sentence and then asked Edie whether he had dreamed it, and Edie said, "You told me it," which was true, and which he took as a denial and was comforted by, and which made her feel like a woman standing in a doorway with her hand on the frame. She made a mark for each account. After three marks beside a name she began, without deciding to, to stop charting that patient's relatives for the afternoon visit, and to stop promising them anything, and to make sure the room was tidy and the blinds were as the patient liked them, and to sit a little longer than the round required, and to say the small true things that a person wants to hear before the end and that a nurse can give without lying. She did this for six patients over five weeks, and five of them died on schedule, and the sixth, Myra, was still alive and still counting, and every so often Myra would look at her with the flat appraising look of a woman who has run a household and has noticed who is doing which job. "You know," Myra Zeff said one night, out of nowhere, while Edie was adjusting her pillow. "You've got the face of somebody who's been told." "Told what," Edie said. "Whatever it is you know," Myra said. "You've had it a while. It's the face people get when they've stopped being able to say a thing out loud. I had it for a year after I got the diagnosis and before I told my son." She settled back. "Who did you tell?" Edie thought about lying. It was her habit, with the day. But it was half past two in the morning, and the corridor light was steady, and Myra Zeff could no longer lift her own hand to her face. "Nobody," she said. "There's nobody to tell." And Myra Zeff, who could not move, and did not need to, said the thing that Edie would carry from that night forward like a stone in her coat pocket: "Then it's only got to get you to believe it yourself. That's all it needs. It doesn't need the day." She closed her eyes. "It's got all night, and you're the only one on." Edie sat with that in the office afterward, with the page open and the whiteboard wiped clean for the morning, and she found that she could not argue with it. She had told no one. That was true. In five weeks she had written eighteen accounts and shown them to nobody, and every night she had come in and taken the report and walked the corridor and kept the count in her own bag, and the only person who knew what she knew was a dying woman in bed five who could not lift her own hand. It needed only one witness, and it had found her, and it had found her the way it found everything, quietly, at three in the morning, when the day was asleep and the house was awake and the only person on was the one who had decided, long ago and for ordinary reasons, to work the hours nobody else wanted. ---