CHAPTER 16
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The east bathroom takes the first light, and the tile's cold enough that the scar on my left forearm starts aching before I've finished kneeling on it.
I've carried in everything I need. Seven pharmacy labels, peeled off seven amber bottles over the last months and flattened into the drawer under the spare toothbrushes, because I don't throw paper away.
The organizer, acrylic, seven compartments, the lid hinged on the left.
Half a carpenter's pencil, the half with the lettering.
It's Saturday. Nora doesn't come on Saturdays, and Julian runs the ridge road until the light's properly up, and the house belongs to me for about forty minutes.
I lay the labels out along the tile in the order they were filled. Oldest at my knee.
Here's what people outside my trade don't understand about a building that has started to lean.
You don't interrogate the beam. The beam has no opinion.
You go and build the load history instead — every change anyone made to what's sitting on top of that beam, in order, with dates — and then you read the changes as a curve instead of a list.
The curve tells you the thing the list never does. It tells you when somebody added weight and didn't write it down.
I've done load histories on a parking structure, a footbridge, and a church roof with a bell in it.
I've never done one on myself.
The oldest label has gone gray where the print has faded, and the adhesive along its edge is tacky enough to lift a thumbprint. I press it flat with two fingers and read it and move to the next one.
The first says 2 mg.
So does the second.
The third says 3 mg, and the print on that one is crisper, and there's a little sticker on the corner about not operating machinery, which is a joke in a house where I'm not allowed to drive.
The fourth and the fifth both say 4 mg.
The sixth says 6 mg. So does the seventh, which is the bottle sitting in the cabinet above my head right now with my name across it in the same friendly type they use on everything.
I sit back on my heels and look at the row.
It's a staircase. Two, two, three, four, four, six, six.
Somebody has been walking me up it one tread at a time, at a rate slow enough that no single step is worth a conversation, and the shape of it is the shape you draw when you're loading a specimen to failure and you want to know exactly where it goes.
Nothing in my file changed. My scans came back the way scans come back. Nobody sat on the end of my bed and said we're going to try something a little stronger, sweetheart, tell me how it feels. There was no week where I got worse.
I say it out loud to the room, because the room is listening anyway.
“AURA, has my prescription changed since I came home?”
The voice comes down out of the ceiling the way it always does, warm and unhurried, a woman who has all morning for me.
“Your prescription is unchanged, Evelyn. Would you like me to reorder?”
My hands are perfectly steady, which is interesting, because the rest of me is going a long way off.
“No thank you, there's plenty in the bottle,” I say. “Would you say that again for me, though? I'd like to be certain I heard it properly the first time.”
“Your prescription is unchanged, Evelyn.”
So that's a fact I own now. Somewhere in this house is a record that says one thing, and here on the floor in front of my knees is a row of labels that say another, and both of them are printed, and only one of them can be true.
I tell the tile, in the voice I keep for a contractor who has poured a slab wrong: “Three times. Somebody tripled me and then asked how I was sleeping.”
I want to say the number six to a person. Just once, out loud, to somebody with a face.
I want to say it to Rachel across a table with her hands wrapped around something hot. I want to say it into a phone to a man with dirt under his nails who'd go quiet for a second and then ask me what I needed him to bring.
There's nobody in this house I can say it to. Every telephone here is a telephone Julian gets a transcript of, and a call to Brennan Systems this morning would cost Cole more than it would ever buy me.
So I don't make it. The wanting sits in my chest with nowhere to go, and stays there, and I get on with the work.
I get up.
The camera in this room is in the ceiling vent housing over the door, and I mapped its cone with a hand mirror and the pencil a while back, and there's a wedge of floor between the shower glass and the linen cupboard that it cannot see.
I know it can't see it because I stood there and put my arm out and watched where the shadow stopped.
So. Morning dose.
I take the tablet out of the compartment with my thumb and forefinger. I put it on my tongue. I fill the glass at the tap and I drink, head back, throat working, the whole picture — and as I swallow I move the tablet with my tongue into the pocket between my gum and my cheek, and I hold it there.
It's chalk at first. Then it starts to go bitter and the bitterness gets everywhere, along the tongue, up behind the nose.
I set the glass down. I turn. Three steps to the linen cupboard, and I crouch in the wedge the way you crouch for a dropped towel, and I put my hand to my mouth and spit the tablet into my palm, and close my fist around it.
It's damp and it's smaller than it was and one edge has gone soft. I dry it on the hem of my shirt.
Then I open the organizer's Sunday compartment, which has been empty since the day I stopped being able to name days reliably, and I put the tablet in, and I shut the lid.
One.
I say it to the organizer with the lid still under my thumb, and I mean every word of it. “I'm sorry. You've been telling me the truth this whole time and I kept reading you as furniture.”
I don't put it back on the shelf.
The shelves in this house belong to the house.
My coat belongs to me. I carry the organizer down the back stairs in my fist and I bury it in the left pocket of the canvas coat on the hook by the boot bench, under a folded receipt and a stub of chalk, and I leave my hand in there a moment longer than I need to.
Julian's in the great room at midday with the south light coming through, and he's been running, and he's showered, and he looks like a man who has slept the way people sleep in advertisements.
He doesn't accuse me of anything. He never does. He pats the sofa back and leaves his hand there, and I sit where he's asked me to sit, and his hand stays where it is, an inch above my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the warmth of it without being touched.
“Come and sit properly with me for a minute,” he says. “There's something I'd rather you saw here, with me, than found on your own in a folder somewhere at two in the morning. You've been asking me for the raw material lately, and you were right to. So this is the raw material.”
The screen on the far wall comes up. The south light washes it so pale that the picture is mostly grays.
“Show me what?”
“You, on the mezzanine stair, in the middle of the night,” he says. “I'd rather say it accurately than gently, so that's what it is.”
The timestamp in the corner reads 3:07 a.m. The mezzanine landing, the long run of treads, the newel.
A woman in a robe standing at the top, not moving.
She stands there so long that I check the timestamp again to make sure the recording hasn't frozen.
Then she starts down, one tread at a time, both hands on both rails, and she stops twice on the way, and at the bottom she stands with one hand still on the newel and looks back up at where she's come from.
It's me. There's no question anywhere in me about that. It's my hair and my hands and the robe with the pulled thread along the cuff.
“I'm not showing you this to frighten you,” Julian says, and he says it gently, and he doesn't look at me while he says it, which is the most skilful thing he does all day.
“I'm showing you because you asked me to stop protecting you from things.
You said that to me in the kitchen and it landed, Evelyn, it genuinely landed.
I've been managing what reaches you and calling it care, and you told me you'd rather have a thing badly than have it handed to you filtered.”
He lets the frame run.
“So here it is, unedited. I haven't cut a second out of it, and you can have the two hours either side of it if you want them — I'd honestly rather you did take them, because I don't want to be the only person in this marriage who's watched this.”
The woman at the bottom of the stairs lets go of the newel and walks out of frame.
“What was I doing?”
And there it is. I've handed it to him with both hands, because I had to ask, because I don't know, because the file in my head for that night is blank in the way a wall is blank.
“I don't know either,” he says. “That's the part I keep sitting with.
You might have been getting a glass of water.
You might have heard something. It might be nothing at all, and I'd be glad if it were, and I've told Simon exactly that.
What I can't do any more is watch it on my own at midnight and then come down to breakfast and tell you that you slept beautifully.”
I make myself count.
Fourteen treads. I count them on the frozen frame from the newel to the landing, and then I count them again backwards, and it's fourteen both ways, and that's a fact I can walk over to and put my hand on. The house can lie about my prescription. The house cannot lie about fourteen.
I say it flat, the way I'd read a figure off a survey.
“Fourteen treads. I counted them going down and I counted them again on the way back up, and it comes to fourteen both times, which means that whatever else that woman was doing at three in the morning, she was taking both rails on a stair she's used every day for six years.”
His hand finally leaves the sofa back. “That's rather my point, in a way. You're the most careful person I have ever met in my life, and you were being careful there too, and that's exactly the part I can't put down.”
Aldred comes at three, unscheduled, in the good shoes, the rimless glasses catching the hall light. He shakes my hand with both of his and asks after my forearm in the cold, which is a decent question, and I dislike him for it.
“It's a very ordinary set of questions, Mrs. Vance,” he says. “Most of them are about the date.”
“How long does the ordinary set take, if nobody's rushing me through it?”
“An hour, generally, though I've had it run to two with people who want to argue with the questions, and I don't mind that at all.” He smiles.
“It's a capacity baseline. It isn't a test you pass or fail, it's a photograph.
If you're well, the photograph says so, and then it's on the record and it stops being anybody's opinion. Frankly it protects you more than it protects us.”
The old me would have taken that apart in front of him.
“Bring the short version,” I say instead, pleasantly, the way you agree to a site inspection you intend to be ready for. “I'd rather be finished before lunch.”
“Thank you for taking it so well, Evelyn,” Julian says. “That's a good deal more generous than I'd have been in your place.”
They walk to the front door together, and I walk them, and I pass the boot bench on the way.
My hand goes into the canvas coat like a woman checking for her keys. The lid comes up under my thumb, and I lift this morning's tablet out of the Sunday compartment and bring it with me, closed in my fist, because I'd like to be holding something in this hall that belongs to me.
AURA says, kind as a nurse, “Evelyn, you haven't taken your six o'clock. Shall I remind you again in ten minutes?”
Julian stops with his hand on the door he was holding open for Aldred, and turns around, and my whole hand is a fist, and inside it the tablet is starting to go soft.