第8章 Terminal Restlessness

She went to Roz first, because Roz was the one she liked, and because if you are going to be disbelieved it is better to be disbelieved by someone who loves you. It was the changeover, eight in the morning, the corridor full of coats and the day's first coffees. Edie asked Roz to come into the office and closed the door, which was itself a signal, and Roz sat down with the particular patience of a woman who has been a charge nurse for eleven years and has closed that door for many reasons. "I want to tell you something," Edie said. "Not as a nurse. As a colleague. I've been charting something for a few weeks, and it isn't in the patients' charts, it's my own, and I need you to hear the whole of it before you decide what it is." Roz listened. Edie gave it to her in order, the way she would have given a report: the two accounts, the register, the times, the three nights, the smell, the sentence. She did not dramatize. She did not say the word ghost. She used the language she had, which was the language of observation, and she watched Roz's face while she spoke, and Roz's face did the thing that kind faces do when they are being asked to hold something too heavy for the room, which is that it stayed gentle and went a little still. When Edie finished, Roz was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Dr. Thane's in for the round. Come and say it to him." And that, Edie understood too late, was the answer. Roz was not going to meet it alone; she was going to route it, because routing is what a charge nurse does with a thing that is too heavy for one room. Edie said no. She said it before she had decided to say it, and heard in her own voice how it sounded, and knew that from here there were only two roads, and one of them ran through the doctor's office and the other ran alone, and she had already chosen the second one in the half second before Roz spoke. "Then I'll say it for you," Roz said. "Not the ghost part. The part that matters. You've worked fourteen nights out of sixteen. You look like something the cat brought in. I don't care what you saw, Edie, I care that you're seeing it. Take the leave. There's a counseling benefit. There's a form, you don't have to tell me why." The thing was, Roz was right. That was what made it unbearable. Every word she said was the correct word, the kind word, the sort of thing you would say to anyone, and it fit Edie's situation so exactly that it became a kind of wall: you could not climb it, because it was made entirely of reasons. If Edie said the list was real, she was a woman who needed the leave. If she said it was not real, she was a woman who needed the leave. The leave was coming either way, the way the morning came, and it would take her off nights and put her in a bright room with a stranger and a box of tissues, and it would not put one person in the building at three in the morning who knew what to watch for. She did not take the leave. She did the other thing, the thing that people do, which is to agree in principle and do nothing. She said she would think about it. She went home and slept and came back at seven and signed the sheet. Dr. Thane found her himself a few nights later, in the kitchen, which was how she knew Roz had told him. He was sixty and calm and had spent thirty years sitting beside dying people, and he did not begin with the leave, which she respected. "You're charting the deaths," he said. "I'm charting what the patients say." "You're charting the times." He said it without accusation, stirring his tea. "I've read the night notes. You've started writing the time of death when you expect it, before it happens. That's not a hallucination, Edie, that's a prediction. You're predicting the day and hour of death in a residential hospice and you're getting them right, and that is either the best clinical instinct I've seen in this building or something I have to ask you to stop doing." "What if it's the first one," Edie said. "Then I'd tell you to keep it in your head and out of the notes, because the notes belong to the trust and to the coroner and to the families." He set the cup down. "And if it's the other thing, then I'd tell you the same, for the same reason. Do you see what I mean? It doesn't matter which it is. It only matters where you write it." That was the whole of the day's world, and it was not stupid, and it was not cruel. It was a system doing the thing systems do, which is to protect the people in it from what cannot be filed. And Edie stood in the warm kitchen with the doctor's cup going cold on the counter and understood the shape of her problem for the first time. She had a fact, and the fact was that the dying in this building were being received, at three in the morning, by someone who had been doing it for forty years, and the fact could not be filed, and a fact that cannot be filed cannot be shared, and a fact that cannot be shared is not a fact at all. It is a private weather. It is a woman standing alone in a corridor at three in the morning with a list in her bag. That week she stopped going home on her off nights. She told the roster she was picking up extra, and she did pick up extra, but on the nights she was not on she sat in her car in the parking lot with the seat back and the windows down a crack, and watched the garden wall and the one lit window of the office and the night nurse's shadow moving behind it, and slept in pieces, an hour at a time, the way the dying sleep. And on the third night of that, at three in the morning, sitting in the car in the dark with the heater clicking, she smelled oranges. No fruit. No tree. Just the cold sharp rind of it, in a closed car, in an empty parking lot, with the engine off. She sat in the dark and let it come and go. It did not stay; it was not that kind of thing. It arrived the way a colleague arrives for a shift, present and unremarkable and expecting the desk to be ready, and when it was gone the car was only a car in a parking lot at three in the morning, and Edie was a woman in it with her hands on the wheel and a list in her bag and no one to call. She thought about calling Roz, and about the promise Roz had not yet made to her, and understood that a phone call from the parking lot at three in the morning would only become a sentence in a file. So she did not call. She started the engine and drove the long way home, past the mill and the river and the dark hall where the dances used to be, and the smell came with her a little way and then fell behind, the way a passenger gets out at a stop you did not plan to make. ---