18. THE CALL
eighteen
"THE CALL"
Marcia Belcher's house on the hundred and eighth day was warm and clean and smelled of the lemon balm Hannah had brought to cut the sickroom smell, and for the first hour there was nothing in it but the ordinary work of helping a woman die well.
Hannah did the things she did. She turned the pillows and checked the line and counted the breaths and noted the new gray at the lips that meant the body was beginning the long quiet business of letting go.
Hannah had sat with a great many people through this exact stretch, the weeks when the dying turn the corner from living-toward-death into actively-leaving, and she knew its small signs the same as Casey knew weather.
The cooling hands. The long sleeps. The appetite going first, then the thirst, then, near the very end, the breath itself changing its grammar.
She found a strange steadiness in the knowing.
It was the one country where her competence was total, where nothing could surprise her and she could not be made afraid, and she had come to Marcia's house that afternoon glad of it, glad of a room where she knew exactly what she was doing, after a week of rooms where she had not.
Marcia was lucid that afternoon, the good kind of lucid the very ill get in patches near the end, and she watched Hannah work with the flat clear attention of a woman who had stopped being afraid of anything in the room.
"You don't fuss," Marcia said. "I told you that the first day. The good ones don't fuss."
"You're easy not to fuss over. You do most of it yourself." Hannah smoothed the blanket. "You've been doing it yourself a long time, I think. Most things."
"A woman learns." Marcia's eyes were on her, mild and unhurried. "Roger did the fussing for both of us, when he was alive. He couldn't stand to feel useless, that man. He'd reorganize the whole medicine drawer rather than sit still while I had a bad hour."
"He sounds like a good husband," Hannah said, straightening the blanket.
"He was a good husband and a weak man, and I loved both of him.
" Marcia's eyes tracked her, mild. "People want those to be two different men.
They are not. You will learn it in your work, if you haven't.
The same hands that fail you are the ones that held you.
There's no sorting them out at the end. You take the whole person or you take nobody. "
"I've learned a little of it."
"You've learned more than a little. I can see it on you. You've got somebody whose hands you're trying to take whole." Marcia almost smiled. "Don't take too long about it. I took forty years, and I'd give them back for ten more honest weeks."
On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a loon, a note in a man's careful hand had hung long enough to go soft at the corners.
Hannah had read it her first week and read it again now while Marcia rested her eyes.
If Hagen calls about M — take a message.
Don't promise him anything. — R. A dead man's instruction to whatever caregiver came after him, left on the fridge for a future he would not be in, and Hannah had not understood it the first week and understood it entirely now: Roger Belcher, dying, had known to put a wall between Roy Hagen and his wife, and had not trusted himself to be there to hold it, so he had left it in writing for a stranger.
She had thought, the first week, that the note was only the reflex of a controlling man, a husband fussing past his own death.
She thought differently now. Roger Belcher had written it, she was sure of it now, knowing exactly what Roy Hagen was, because he had sold the man something once and learned the price of it, and he had wanted, with the last of his arranging, to keep that reach off his wife after he was gone.
It had not worked. The man's reach went everywhere.
But the note hung under the loon magnet, a dead husband still trying to stand between his wife and the thing he had let into their lives, and Hannah had to turn from it and busy her hands.
The kitchen phone rang at half past three.
Hannah almost let it go. But a dying woman's phone might be the daughter, might be the doctor, might be anything, so she stepped out to the kitchen and picked it up with the receiver still half toward the bedroom, listening for Marcia.
"Belcher residence."
"So you're the nurse." Not a question. She knew the voice before he said another word, the unremarkable, comfortable, careful voice from the warming room, and the whole afternoon went cold and very clear around her.
"It's Roy Hagen. I help look after Marcia's affairs, have done since Roger passed. I heard she had a hard week."
"She's resting comfortably." Hannah put her voice in still water and held it there with both hands. "I'll let her know you called."
"You do that." A pause, friendly, terrible.
"Let me say something to you, nurse to neighbor.
There's been a little talk. Somebody mentioned a hospice nurse out at the Yates place a good deal, asking around the county about old county business, courthouse records, that kind of thing.
Now that's none of mine. But you know how a small town is about its caregivers.
People want to feel their dying are in careful hands.
It'd be a shame if a question came up about whether a nurse was keeping her mind on her patients or on something else.
For Marcia's sake I'd hate to see anybody's standing get tangled up in gossip. You understand me."
"I understand you," Hannah said.
"I thought you would. You've got a kind face. Marcia thinks the world of you." Warmth, all the way through, not one word a board could hear. "You take good care of her now. I'll check in."
The line went dead.
For a moment she did not move. The dial tone had not started yet, only the dead air of a hung-up line, and she stood in it.
Through the kitchen doorway she could see the corner of the bed, the shape of Marcia under the blanket, the woman all of this had been done to save and was now being done through.
The lemon balm she had brought sat on the sill.
The note hung on the fridge. The afternoon was exactly as warm and clean as it had been ten minutes before, and a man eight miles south had reached into the middle of it and rearranged what everything in it meant.
He had done it without setting foot in the house, the same as he had arranged a death eight years ago without ever standing on the rim.
That was how the man worked. He was never in the room.
Hannah stood in the dead woman's kitchen — the dying woman's kitchen, she corrected herself, Marcia was not gone yet — and held the receiver until the dial tone came on, and understood she had just been threatened in ninety seconds by a man who had not said a single thing she could write down.
She put the receiver down. Her hands were steady.
She had spent twenty years keeping her hands steady in rooms where steady hands were the whole job.
But something under the steadiness had gone to ice: the case had stopped being a thing she and Casey did out at the ranch in the evenings, and become a thing that could reach into the rooms where she earned her living and take them from her one phone call at a time.
She made herself breathe and ran the arithmetic of it cold and clear.
A complaint from a man like Hagen would not need to be true.
It would only need to be made. A quiet word to the right person at the county, a suggestion about a hospice nurse with divided attention, and there would be a review, and a review meant pulling her off her patients while it ran, which meant Marcia would die with a stranger's hands on her instead of Hannah's — and Hagen would call that concern for Marcia.
The cruelty of it, the using of the dying woman as the lever, was so complete that Hannah set her hand flat on the counter a moment.
He had found the one thing she could not afford to risk and the one thing she could not bring herself to abandon, and he had set them against each other, and he had done it in ninety pleasant seconds without one word she could carry to anyone.
When she went back in, Marcia was awake and watching the door.
"That was Roy," Marcia said. It was not a question either.
The dying miss very little. "He has a voice he uses on the phone.
I've heard it forty years. It's the voice he uses when he wants a thing and means you to think he's offering it.
" She let her head settle deeper into the pillow.
"Tell me what he wanted from you, my dear. "
Hannah came and sat on the edge of the chair by the bed and did not lie, because you did not lie to the dying, it was the one place lying was no use to anyone. "He wanted me to be careful. About what I ask, and who I ask it of."
"Mm." Marcia's eyes closed and opened, slow.
"Roger did a wrong thing once. A great wrong thing.
For me. To keep me." Her voice was very quiet and very even, a woman setting down a weight she had carried as long as Hannah had carried hers.
"I knew it when he did it. I let him. That's mine to answer for, not just his.
People will tell you the man who does the wrong thing is the guilty one and the woman he does it for is the victim.
It's never that clean. I took the years he bought me.
I'm still taking them, lying here." She found Hannah's hand and held it, dry and light as paper.
"If you ever have to decide what to do about a person who did a terrible thing for love of someone — and I think you might, my dear, I've thought it about you since the first day — you remember it's possible to forgive the love and still tell the truth about the thing.
Those aren't opposites. Roger thought they were.
It's the one thing I'd take back, letting him die thinking he had to choose. "
"I don't know that I can do both," Hannah said, before she could stop herself, which was the most she had ever given away in that room.
"No one knows till it's in front of them," Marcia said.
"But you're the kind that can. I knew it the first day.
The good ones don't fuss, and they don't flinch either, not when it counts.
" Her eyes drifted closed. "Tell the truth, my dear.
Forgive the love. They both fit in two hands.
I've had mine full of the pair for eight years and I'm still here. "
Hannah sat very still with the dying woman's hand in hers and did not know, would never quite know, how much Marcia had seen of her, how much the perfect terrible peace of the woman in the bed already understood about the nurse who held her hand.
She only knew she had been given something she had not earned and could not refuse: permission, from the one person on earth with the standing to grant it, to love the man's reason and still bury the lie.
She drove home in the early dark and did not call Casey, though her thumb hovered over his name at every stop sign.
He did not know about the rink call into her work.
His own phone, she knew, had a message light that had been dark eight years and was dark still, a federal call he kept not returning.
Two people with a dark phone apiece, each calling the silence a kindness.
She would tell him. She would tell him all of it, the Hagen call and Marcia and the diagnosis and the for Marcia, when she could set it down as a fact and not a wound.
But the man eight miles south had just put his hand inside the one room she had thought was hers, and she drove the cold road north toward the ranch carrying that, alone, as she carried everything she was not yet ready to set on his table.