第9章 Myra's Account

Myra Zeff had three nights left and she knew it, or knew it the way the articulate ones know it, which is precisely. She had stopped using the pen. Her hands were past it now, and she spoke instead, in the evenings when her son had gone home and the corridor had gone quiet, and Edie sat with her because there was nothing left to do that was not sitting. Myra Zeff had been an accountant and then a school secretary and then a person who kept everybody's birthdays in her head, and she had a mind like a good filing system, and it had not yet begun to close, which the disease had taken as an insult and had answered by taking everything else first. "I'll give you the whole of it," she said, "because you're the only one who's asked without asking, and I've watched you not ask for two weeks, and I think that deserves the whole of it." Edie sat and did not write. She had a rule now, with Myra, that she wrote it down afterward, in the car, from memory, which meant it had to be said well enough to be carried. "It comes on three nights," Myra said. "You know that. It stands at the foot, and it doesn't come closer, and it has a coat the color of a wet slate roof, and it holds something in one hand, a book or a folder or a board, the kind of thing you'd take around a building if you were counting the rooms. It asks *Is this one ready.* It doesn't ask me. It asks whoever it's reporting to, and there isn't anybody there, and that's the worst of it, that it's talking about me to nobody, the way you'd say a thing about a patient at the desk where they can hear you. And it writes." "It writes," Edie said. "It writes after. When I say yes, or when I say nothing, either way. It makes a mark, and it goes." Myra's eyes went to the foot of the bed and back. "And here's the thing you'll want for your list. On the first night, it took the pain. All of it, gone, for a night and a day, and I could lift my arm, I could hold a cup, I nearly called my son. And on the second night it came back, all of it, and more, the way a bill comes back with interest. And on the third night it took it again, and I knew that time what it was. It wasn't giving me anything. It was weighing me. It takes the pain off you the way you take a coat off a hook to see how heavy it is, and then it puts it back, and then it writes down the number." Edie's mouth was dry. "It knows your name," she said. "Does it know your name?" "It knew the name I had before I was married," Myra said. "Nobody here knows that name. Not my son, not the doctor. I stopped using it in 1994." She was quiet a moment. "There's more, and I'll say it and then I don't want to talk about it again. On the third night I asked it a question. I said, whose list am I on. And it stopped writing and it turned its head toward the door, the way a person does when somebody's on the stairs, and it said the sentence again, and this time I understood that it wasn't about me. It was about the next one. It was telling whoever it reports to that the next one was nearly ready, and it wanted to know whether the morning could take her." "Him," Edie said, because she did not want the word to be her. "Him," Myra Zeff said, and looked at her, and the look was the same flat appraising look, and this time Edie let herself be seen. "You've got the coat off the hook," Myra said. "You're the next one it's weighing, and you don't even know it yet, and I'm telling you now because in three nights I won't be able." Edie sat with that for a long time. The concentrator in bed four hummed and paused. Outside, the sodium light made a long yellow shape on the garden wall. "Why me," she said finally. "Because you're the only one on," Myra said. "Because you see the list. It doesn't need the day, but it needs the night, and you're the night, and there's been one of you in this house as long as there's been a house. The one before you left her name in a book. You'll leave yours in one too." She closed her eyes. "Now go and chart me, and put a star by my name, and don't let it make you think you're mad. That's what it does. It makes the one who sees it into the one who's ill. That's how it keeps the day out." Edie did as she was asked. She went to the office and charted Myra's comfort and her breathing and the small dose, and she did not put a star by the name, because the chart belonged to the trust. She put the star on her own page, in the front of her bag, beside the word that Marguerite Sorrel had written forty years before, and under it she wrote the only thing Myra had said that had frightened her more than the coat or the pennies or the sentence, the thing about being weighed, the thing about the coat off the hook. And in the morning, when she drove home, she did not go home. She turned the car at the mill and drove out the road that led to the other town and the other house, and parked across from Aldercrest with the engine running, and looked at the lit windows of a place she had not been inside for nine years, in a building where a night nurse named Grell had once told her, at the end, in the corridor, in a voice that was trying to be kind, that her mother had been seeing things and that it was nothing to worry about, that it was the morphine, that they always see somebody. She sat in the car across from Aldercrest until the morning staff began to arrive, and she watched the windows the way she had once watched them from the inside, and she did not go in and she did not cry, because a woman of fifty-four who has spent her life around the dying learns early that tears are a resource and not a reflex. What she did instead was the thing she knew how to do. She took out the notebook and turned to a clean page and wrote the date and the place and one line, the line that would matter the most when she read it back months later and could not remember why she had written it so calmly: *Aldercrest, same house, same hour. My mother was on the list and I told her it was the morphine. The list does not forget a name.* ---