Chapter 7
CESARE
"Sit on the edge of the bath."
"No."
"Rosalie."
"I will stand."
"You will not stand, because in about four minutes I am going to be putting a needle through you, and if you faint standing up you will take the sink with you, and that sink is older than both of us."
She looks at the bath. She looks at the sink. I can actually watch her price the sink.
Then she sits on the edge of the bath with her spine absolutely straight and her hands flat on her knees like a woman waiting outside an office, and I kneel down on the tiles in front of her, and my knees make the noise they make, and she says, "You should have that looked at," in a completely flat voice, and I laugh before I can stop it.
"Thank you."
"It is not funny. It is a joint."
"I know what it is."
"You are thirty four."
"I am aware of how old I am, thank you, I have been keeping track."
Here is the situation.
The doctor is not coming back. Teodoro's tape job has held for four days and is now doing more harm than good, because the wound closed at the surface over an inch of nothing underneath, and it has to be opened and cleaned and put back together properly, and the only two people in this house who can do it are a man with four daughters and a hole in his shoulder, and me.
So it is me.
I have a lamp, a bowl, a bottle of the good stuff from the cabinet in the office, a curved needle in a sterile packet, and hands that I know for a fact are not steady enough for this, because I have never once been steady enough for this, which is why other people do this part.
"You are shaking," she says.
"Slightly."
"You are the one holding the needle."
"I am aware of the distribution of responsibilities, yes."
"Give it to me."
"You cannot reach your own ribs at that angle and you know it."
"I have done my own thigh."
"Of course you have."
I have to lift her shirt.
I say so first. Out loud, in advance, the whole sentence, which is a thing I have started doing around her without ever deciding to, the way you announce yourself going into a stable.
"I am going to lift this to about here."
"Yes."
"And then I am going to take the tape off, and it is going to be unpleasant, and I am not going to do it fast to be kind because fast is not kind, it is just fast."
"Yes."
"You can say stop."
"I know what stop is."
"Do you," I say, and take the tape off.
She does not make a sound. She goes absolutely rigid and her hands close on the edge of the bath and the enamel creaks, and that is all. Not a breath out of rhythm. Her face does not do anything at all.
I have hurt people. I have paid for people to be hurt, and I have stood in the room while it happened, and I have never in my life seen anything like this and I do not want to see it again.
"You can make a noise," I say.
"There is no reason to."
"There is every reason to. It is a normal thing that people do."
"It uses air," she says, "and it tells the room where you are," flat, like a road sign, and then she stops, because she hears it.
I keep my eyes on the wound.
"Right," I say. "Well. There is nobody in this room but me, and I already know where you are."
It takes forty minutes.
Ten stitches, which is four more than it should be, because I am bad at this and I am not going to pretend otherwise and I say so at stitch three when I have to start again.
She talks.
That is the thing I did not see coming. She talks the entire time, in the flattest voice imaginable, about absolutely nothing, and I work out somewhere around the fourth stitch that she is doing it because there is a needle going through her and she has to put her attention somewhere, and that this is her version of screaming.
The load rating of the gutter bracket on the north face of this building.
The lift, which is not unsafe, only badly balanced, and that anybody could fix it with a spanner and forty minutes, and that it has been annoying her.
She tells me there are two hundred and eleven panes in the roof of a building she does not name, and that eleven of them are cracked, and that the crack in the fourth one from the east end is shaped like Portugal, and that when she was small she used to lie on her back and look at it and that she has not thought about it in years and does not know why she is thinking about it now.
I do not look up.
I put the fifth stitch in and say, "Hold still," and she holds still, and I say nothing else, because if I say one word about the panes she will stop talking for a month.
"Four exits," she says.
I glance up.
She is looking at the door, and then the window, and then the door again, and her mouth is doing it without her.
"Two," I say. "This is a bathroom."
"What?"
"There are two. Door and window. And the window is a slot, so realistically one."
She blinks at me. She has no idea it left her mouth. The whole thing arrives on her face and then gets very carefully packed away again, and I go back to the sixth stitch and let her have it.
"You do that when it hurts," I say, to the ribs, conversationally. "You did it on Tuesday as well."
"I do not."
"All right."
"I do not do that."
"All right," I say again, and tie off, and start the seventh.
At the eighth she puts her hand on my shoulder.
Not for balance. She has been perfectly balanced for forty minutes. She puts her hand flat on my shoulder the way you would put your hand on a rail, and it stays there, and neither of us remarks on it, and I do the ninth stitch with a woman's hand on my shoulder and my ears roaring.
I have been touched a great deal in my life. I am thirty four years old and I run a family and people embrace me in restaurants.
I have never had my ears roar.
She takes it away at the tenth, when it is done, and puts it back on her knee, and she looks at the wall.
"That was not in the rules," she says.
"The rules are for the bed."
"They should be for the house."
"Then write more tape," I say, and put the needle down, and my hands are steadier than they were, which is backwards, and I sit back on my heels on the tiles.
We stay like that. Me on the floor, her on the bath, the two of us looking at ten crooked stitches in the lamplight.
"They are ugly," she says.
"They are extremely ugly."
"It looks like a shoelace."
"It looks like a shoelace tied by a man in the dark," I agree. "I did tell you."
And she makes a sound.
It is not a laugh. I want to be accurate about this because I am going to think about it for a long time. It is one syllable, through the nose, entirely involuntary, and it stops the instant it starts, and she puts her hand up over her own mouth like a woman who has dropped something in a church.
We both sit very still.
"Sorry," I say. "That was my fault."
"You did not do anything."
"I made the joke."
"You should not have made the joke."
"No," I say gravely. "It was irresponsible."
She takes her hand down off her mouth, slowly, and looks at me with an expression I have no name for, and the lamp is doing something to the grey of her eyes that I am going to have to have a word with myself about later.
Afterwards she says thank you.
She is standing by the door with her shirt back down, and I am packing the bowl and the bottle away, and she says it from behind me, out of nowhere, into the middle of nothing.
"Thank you."
I turn round.
It comes out flat and slightly too loud and about four seconds after the natural place for it, and it lands in the bathroom like a chair going over, and her face while she says it is the face of somebody defusing something.
She has practised that word.
That is what I understand, standing there with a bowl in my hands.
She has practised it, at some point, alone, the way you practise a phrase in a language you do not speak, and she has been carrying it around unused for years, and she has just spent it on ten bad stitches and a joke about a shoelace.
"You are welcome," I say.
"Is that the right one?"
"What?"
"The response." She is looking at the door frame. "There are three. I do not know which one is for this."
I put the bowl down on the side of the sink very carefully, because my hands have started again.
"It is the right one," I say.
"Good."
"Rosalie."
"What."
I have a great many things I could say. I have three years of folder and nine stages and a brother making a list of eleven names, and every one of those is more important than what I actually say, which is:
"There is a chair on the roof. It is a terrible chair, Teodoro dragged it up there in July and it has been rained on ever since. If you are going up there at night anyway, and you are, because I can hear the hatch, you may as well sit down."
She looks at me for a moment.
"You can hear the hatch," she says.
"The whole building can hear the hatch."
"Then I will fix the hatch."
"You will not fix the hatch."
"It would take ten minutes."
"Rosalie," I say, "if you fix the hatch I will not know when you go up there, and then I will lie awake wondering, and I am already not sleeping, so I am asking you, as a formal request from the head of this family: please leave the hatch broken."
She stands in the doorway with her hand on the frame.
"All right," she says.
And goes.
And I stay on the bathroom floor for a while with a bowl of pink water and ten stitches' worth of thread and the absolutely clear understanding that stage two is going extremely well and that I am in a great deal of trouble.