CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
As she rounded the last corner, she just hoped that she wasn’t too late.
She was afraid that she might turn into that room and find the bed empty and straightened, the monitors dark, and a nurse who would look at her with quiet sympathy and tell her it had happened just a few minutes ago.
The thought had driven her through three consecutive yellow lights on the way over and it drove her faster now through the last stretch of hallway.
The nurse outside Eleanor's door was a young woman Rachel recognized from her Tuesday visits, dark-haired and unhurried, who looked up from the tablet in her hand as Rachel approached and gave a small, warm smile.
"She was asking whether you'd already been here," the nurse said.
Rachel let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding and pushed the door open.
“Is she coherent?”
“Mostly. She’s in and out, you know? Sort of dozing most of the time. But I think she’s awake right now.”
Rachel entered and found the room softly lit, the window letting in the morose light of dusk.
It seemed a lot too fitting for the moment.
The monitors were doing their work, the numbers on them lower than Rachel had ever seen them, the lines moving slow and shallow.
Eleanor was in the bed with her eyes closed, her hands resting at her sides on top of the blanket.
Her breathing was visible but thin, a labor rather than a rhythm.
Rachel sat in the chair beside the bed and reached out and took her hand.
Eleanor's eyes opened. They were clearer than Rachel had expected, steady and present in a way that her body had stopped suggesting she was capable of, and she looked at Rachel for a moment the way she sometimes did at the beginning of a visit, as if confirming it was really her.
"You came," Eleanor said. Her voice was lower than usual, worn thin, but still hers.
"Of course I came."
Eleanor turned her hand over under Rachel's and squeezed, weakly but deliberately. "I wasn't sure. I know you how…how your job can be taxing." It seemed that each word, each breath, was a struggle for her.
"Well, I'm here now."
"Good." Eleanor's eyes moved to the window and back. "I've been thinking about that book. The…the uh…”
“Lonesome Dove?”
“No. The one I told you about last Tuesday."
"The Penelope Fitzgerald."
"Yes. I was going to lend it to you. I don't think that's going to happen now." There was a quiet note in her voice that wasn't self-pity, just practicality, the same tone she'd used for months when talking about things she wasn't going to have time for.
"I'll find a copy," Rachel said.
"You should. You'd like it." Eleanor settled back slightly against the pillow. "I want you to know that this has been a genuine friendship, Rachel. These past months. Not just someone being kind to an old woman. A genuine friendship. I felt that from you. A caring woman when this old lady’s family couldn’t…well, most aren’t alive, but the ones who are…”
“Shh. I was glad to be here. I was honored to get to know you, Eleanor.”
"You filled a space that I think would have been very empty without you, and I'm grateful for it."
Rachel kept her hand and didn't try to find a response that would match the weight of the last comment.
She felt like she was being stabbed right in the heart, and she knew that sometimes the right thing to say was nothing.
She had learned that in this rooms just like this one more clearly than anywhere else—even in interrogation rooms.
"Tell me something good," Eleanor said after a moment, trying on a smile that didn’t stay there long. "Tell me about your daughter. Paige."
"She's thirteen going on forty," Rachel said. "She's been listening to true crime podcasts and keeping a color-coded spreadsheet of unsolved cases by jurisdiction."
Eleanor made a sound that was close to a laugh. "Is she going to be you?"
"I think she might be worse," Rachel said. "I think she might actually be smarter."
"Good," Eleanor said, and her eyes were warm even as they grew heavy. "The world needs more of that."
Her breathing had gone shallower in the last few minutes, slower between each rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes drifted closed and then opened again halfway, and she turned her head slightly toward the small table beside the bed.
She reached out, a deliberate motion that took effort Rachel could see the cost of, and her fingers found something on the table and closed around it.
She lifted Rachel's free hand and pressed the object into it, folding Rachel's fingers down around it and holding them there.
Rachel looked down. It was a key, small and old-fashioned. It looked to be made of brass with a simple bow and a short shaft, the kind that belonged to a lockbox or a drawer rather than a door.
"What is this?" Rachel asked.
But Eleanor's eyes were closed. Her breathing was slow and even. For a moment Rachel thought she was simply resting, gathering herself to answer. But the quiet stretched out, and her hand went still over Rachel's, and the monitors continued their slow, steady work.
Rachel sat with her.
It was another fifteen minutes before the line on the nearest monitor went flat, a soft alarm sounding that brought the nurse in from the hallway, quiet and practiced.
Her face held the steady, tempered sorrow of someone who had done this work for years without being emptied by it.
Rachel stood and stepped back to give her room and stood near the window, her hand still closed around the key and thinking about the Penelope Fitzgerald novel she was going to find a copy of.
She stayed until there was nothing left to do and after that, she stayed a bit longer.
***
The funeral was held on a Thursday, two days later.
It was held at a small Episcopal church in the West End that Eleanor had attended for decades before she'd gotten too sick to make the drive.
The service was short and honest, conducted by a minister who read from a passage Eleanor had apparently requested herself.
The minister spoke about Eleanor without platitudes or borrowed sentiment, which Eleanor would have hated.
He described her sense of humor and her kindness, and the way she'd been able to make anyone who sat with her feel that the conversation had been the most important one she'd had all week.
It was all absolutely correct.
Rachel sat in a pew near the middle with Jack on her left and Paige on her right.
Paige had worn her good coat without being asked, which Rachel noted quietly without comment.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the minister, and once or twice Rachel caught her daughter blinking more than usual in the way she did when she was trying her best not to cry.
The church wasn’t crowded. There were only a dozen people, perhaps a few more, none of them young. There was no family that Rachel could identify, and that made her incredibly sad. It reminded Rachel of what Eleanor had said near the end about spaces going unfilled.
When it was over and they were standing on the stone steps of the church with the morning light thin and flat overhead, a woman approached Rachel from across the small gathering.
She was quite old—maybe in her early eighties.
She was white-haired, dressed in a dark coat and a silk scarf, moving slowly and with intent.
Something about her posture remined her of Grandma Tate and she wasn’t sure if this warmed her heart or saddened it even more.
"You're Rachel, right?" the woman said.
“Yes.”
The woman smiled and said, “Eleanor talked about you. I'm Eve Whitehall. I'm her younger sister."
Rachel shook her hand, absorbing this. Eleanor had never mentioned a sister, not once in months of conversation. "I'm so sorry for your loss."
"Thank you." Eve looked toward the church doors briefly and then back.
"I'll be honest with you. We hadn't spoken much in the past few years.
There were some difficulties between us that I won't go into, and I had no idea things had progressed the way they had.
She didn't tell me how sick she'd become, even when I spoke with her on the phone two weeks ago.
" Something moved across her face and was brought back under control almost immediately. "I was shocked to get the call."
"I'm sorry," Rachel said again, meaning it differently this time.
Eve gave a short, composed nod. "She spoke well of you.
More than once, from what I understand. I just wanted to say that, and to thank you for being present with her.
" She looked at Jack and then at Paige and included them in a brief nod before she turned and walked back toward the small cluster of people near the foot of the steps.
Rachel watched her go and it occurred to her that maybe Eve would know about the key Eleanor had given her. But it felt too soon, too private, and she didn't know enough yet about what had passed between the two sisters to step into it.
Jack took her hand, kissed her on the cheek, and said: “Ready?”
Rachel nodded, and she walked across the church yard with her family.
In the car on the way home, Jack drove and Rachel sat in the passenger seat with the key in her hand, turning it over the way she'd been doing since Tuesday night, running her thumb along its teeth.
It was old but not worn, which meant it hadn't been used often, or at all.
She'd gone online and looked up what she could about keys of this type: small brass bow keys, the old-fashioned kind.
She read that they were most often used for lockboxes, safety deposit inserts, small personal safes, and things of that nature.
They were common enough in an earlier era that narrowing it down without more information was going to be difficult.
She didn't know if Eleanor had meant for her to understand what it opened or simply to have it, and that uncertainty was its own small, persistent pull.
From the back seat, Paige said, "What's that?"
Rachel looked down at her hand. "Just a key."
"I can see that. But it looks…old. Where'd it come from?"
"Eleanor gave it to me. Right before she passed."
“Oh. Well…do you know what I opens?”
"No, I don’t," Rachel answered.
Jack glanced over briefly without saying anything and then looked back at the road. Rachel turned the key over again in her hand, looking at the short shaft and the simple cut of its teeth.
No, I don’t know, she thought. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to find out.