CHAPTER 8 #2
“Because pulling them out means writing down that they were there,” I said. “I have asked twice. The answer both times was that a chaise is furniture, and furniture is not on any inventory a board reads.”
“Somebody watered that tree for years,” she said, after a moment. “Then somebody stopped and nobody threw it out. That is an entire institution in one pot.”
“I water it,” I said. “Badly, and not often, and it has not been enough for a long time.”
She set the pen down on the wicker arm and picked it up again with the same hand, and her fingers would not close on it. She tried it twice. The last time she put it down slowly, which cost her more than the first time had.
“May I look at your hand, Miss Vance?”
She unwound the towel and put the hand out into the corridor light, palm up, and did not say anything while I looked at it.
The cut crosses the heel of the palm and runs toward the wrist, and the edges have started to close and pull against each other.
I set the flashlight on the arm of my chair and turned the beam with one finger so that it fell across her hand and not into her face.
She looked up when it moved, and there was a little amber in her eyes, and I took the light off her.
I did not touch her.
“It is closing clean,” I said. “It will hold if you keep it dry and do not grip anything hard for a few more nights.”
“It is my writing hand. That is the part that matters.”
“I know,” I said. “I can write for you, if you tell me what to put down.”
She almost laughed, and it came out of her as one short breath through the nose. “No. I am not dictating my own work to anybody in this building, and you would not do it either.”
“No, I would not,” I said. “That is the correct answer and I asked anyway.”
The rain came at us again and took a full minute of it away. When the noise dropped she was already looking at me, and she got her sentence out before I could begin one of mine.
“You count. I can hear you not saying the number.”
“Yes.”
“What are you counting tonight?” she said.
“The generator. It runs up when the freezer calls for it and then it drops back down. I count the gaps between.”
“How long are they?”
I did not have to go looking for it. “Forty-one seconds. Then thirty-eight. Then forty-one again.”
“That is a thermostat, not a fault,” she said. “You know that better than I do.”
“I do know it.”
“Then you are not counting it because it is broken.”
I did not answer that. She let the question lie on the tiles between us and she did not pick it up again, and I understood what it cost her to leave it there.
She put the towel back over the hand and set the pen square to the edge of the wicker arm and left it alone.
“There was never a lock on my door. Did you know?”
“I knew on Friday. It should have been fitted the day you signed.”
“Say the whole thing,” she said. “You are giving me the short version and I can hear the seams in it.”
“There is an old mortise cut into the inside face of that door and somebody has puttied and painted it over three times. A lock came out of it a long time ago. Nobody put one back in. I sent the order down on Friday and it has not come up.”
“Nobody lied to me about it.”
“Nobody lied to you about it,” I said.
She said it back to me with one word moved, and the moved word was the entire argument.
“Nobody lied to me. Nobody told me either.”
“That is correct,” I said. “It is the sentence I would have used.”
She did not raise her voice. She got precise instead, and precise is what she does in place of loud, and it is a worse thing to sit across from.
“I have handed three men in this building worse than that,” she said, “and every one of them gave me something back. A jaw. A door. Something. You give me nothing and you keep asking me polite questions.”
“I have not raised my voice in eleven years. That is not patience.”
“What is it, then?”
The tree stood in its wired pot with the crooked shoulder it had grown in order to stay upright. “It was put into me here and I kept it up. I am not going to dress it into something better than it is.”
“That is the first thing you have said tonight that you did not want to say,” she said.
“Yes.”
The telephone started up in my office at a quarter past twelve. I walked the corridor to it, and the floor reported me the whole way down, which it does for everybody who has ever lived on it.
“The car left at ten past midnight,” Alistair said. “North, and it ran without lights as far as the second bend.”
“And Rook?”
“Went down to the gate at eleven and has not come back up it. I have had no word off him since, and the line to the gate rings out.”
“Send somebody after him.”
“There is nobody to send.” Glass touched glass on his end and was set down again. “The crew will not come before morning, and the cameras in the Gallery are dark, exactly as you said they would be, for six hours.”
“Then it is you, and me, and a flashlight,” I said.
“It is. I am not going to ask what you have been doing for six hours in a room with no camera in it, Julian. I am only noting the hour, which is what I do with everything.”
“Note it,” I said, and put the telephone down.
She had gone under by the time I came back along the corridor.
She was sideways in the chaise with the towel still around the hand and one shoe off, and the corridor light reached as far as her knees and stopped there.
Her feet were bare against the cold end of the glass.
That glass will pull the heat out of a palm in about four seconds.
I had tested it earlier without meaning to test anything.
There was a blanket folded over the wicker settee. I picked it up and shook it out once and stood at the foot of the chaise with it in both hands.
“May I put this over your feet, Miss Vance?”
She got one eye open and left the other one shut. “You already know what I am going to say.”
“It is still a question.”
“Yes.”
I laid it over her feet and drew it up as far as her knees. My hand stopped four inches short of her ankle and came back to me. Nothing in the room stopped it. There was no camera in the corner and no board sitting anywhere in the county on a Sunday and nobody on that floor but the two of us.
“I do not touch a patient,” I said, out loud, to a room with nobody awake in it.
I love her. I squared the corner of the blanket against the chaise frame and went back to counting the gaps.
Forty-one seconds. Thirty-eight. Forty-one. The rain took the south glass and let it go again, and under it the generator came up and settled. Then the door at the head of the corridor opened, and Rook came through it soaked to the collar, with blood on his sleeve that was not his.