CHAPTER 34
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There are nine granite steps up to the courthouse door and I take them sideways, left foot leading, right foot brought up after.
The strapping under my trouser leg won't let the ankle roll through.
Sixteen hours ago I was on a mezzanine with a rail in my hands, and I've slept four of them at the Ferrises', in a bed with a crocheted blanket on it.
This is the day. There's no number left to say out loud, no arithmetic to do in the dark before the alarm. The calendar has been walking toward this Tuesday since June and now it's here, and it's cold, and I haven't eaten.
Rachel is at the top of the steps.
She's been standing there long enough that her hands have gone red at the knuckles. Her coat smells of wet dog and antiseptic and four hours of car, and that smell is the first thing about my sister I've been close enough to take in since I was thirty.
I start to make some kind of face at her. Something with an apology folded into it.
“Don't.” Her hand comes up flat. “Don't you dare do the face. I wrote you twenty-two times. Twenty-two, Evie. I drove up that road four times and got turned round by a gate, and every single time you were forty feet away.”
The bruise across my right hip finds the cold and settles in.
“For two of those years I thought you'd simply decided,” she says.
“I told people my sister married money and went quiet.
I said it out loud at work, more than once, and everybody there was very kind about it, which was worse.
And then I'd get in the car anyway and drive up and talk to a speaker box on a post.”
“I know about the gate,” I say.
“You don't get to know about the gate calmly. I want you to understand what I was doing while you were forty feet up a drive. I was rehearsing what I'd say to you at Christmas. I was working out whether I'd hug you or wait to be hugged.”
A man in a good overcoat goes past us into the building and neither of us moves for him.
“I've got all of them,” I say. “Every envelope, opened and resealed and put back in a drawer with a rubber band round them. I know what's in every one. I know what you said in the fourth one about Mom.”
That lands somewhere under her ribs and I watch it go in.
“That was a private letter,” she says.
“It was. He read it before I did, and then he kept it, and I found it in June, and I have read it about forty times since. You were right about her. You were right about her and you were nicer than she deserved.”
Rachel looks past my shoulder at the door and her chin does something it's done since she was six.
“You want me to be glad,” she says. “I'll get there. Right now I'm extremely angry and I'm also still here, and you can have both or neither.”
“I'll take both. And for what it's worth, I won't argue with one hour of the angry part, now or later or in four years when you bring it up at a table.”
“Oh, I'll bring it up at tables.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, businesslike, the way she must wipe things at work. “I'm not doing the bit where we say it's all fine now and go in and hold hands. I've had four years of imagining that bit and it turns out I don't want it.”
“What do you want instead?”
“I want to be furious at you in your kitchen for about a year,” she says. “A kitchen I'm allowed in. With a door that opens because somebody's hand is on it, and no voice in the ceiling telling me where you are.”
“I can manage the door part fairly soon. Give me a week on the kitchen.”
“Is he in there already?”
“He'll be in there. He's never been late to anything in his life.”
The courtroom is smaller than the classroom I sat my exams in. Eight rows of benches, a low rail, a radiator under the window that ticks like something cooling down after a long drive. The clock over the door says 8:58.
Julian is at the front table in a charcoal suit with the left sleeve arranged over a sling. The strap goes behind his neck and it has pushed his collar a quarter inch out of true, and I have never in six years seen his collar out of true.
He turns and finds me and gives me a small nod, the way you do across a restaurant when you've seen someone you know and the food has already come.
His counsel stands at nine exactly and speaks for about ninety seconds, and for about ninety seconds it sounds like a reasonable thing a family would do.
“A temporary appointment, narrowly drawn,” he says. “Reviewable in six months. My client has no interest in his wife's independence beyond her safety, and he has borne the cost of her care privately, without publicity, since the eleventh of June.”
Rachel's shoulder comes against mine on the bench and stays there.
Then the county's lawyer stands up and says she has forty-one minutes of gate footage and would like to play eleven of them, and the room lights go down two steps.
Rain on a lens. The gate camera. The timestamp in the corner reads 11:52 p.m. and a slate-blue wagon comes down the drive with the strap of a bag hanging out of the driver's door, caught in it, dragging.
That's me. I don't remember it. I'm watching a woman leave a house with her bag caught in the door and I have no memory of her at all.
At 11:54 a second car goes out after her.
At 1:20 a.m. one car comes back. One. It comes in slowly and it parks square between the lines.
The camera changes to the great room, and a man crosses his own floor in a wet coat, past the sofa where his wife isn't, and goes down the west-wing corridor at a walking pace, and the door of the server room takes him.
I keep my eyes on Aldred for all eleven minutes of it. He's in the second row with his hands on his knees. Four minutes in he takes his rimless glasses off, and he doesn't put them back on, and he doesn't clean them either, he just holds them.
The county's lawyer says the clinical history was filed under a July date and is seven times the size of everything filed with it, and she says it plainly, once, and sits down.
Nora goes up at seven minutes past. She's in her good coat and her plait is pinned flat and she puts her hand on the book like she's testing a stove ring.
She gives the doses first, reconstructed from her own pharmacy paperwork, dates and quantities, no hesitation. She says which ones she collected and which ones she watched go into a seven-day acrylic box on a bathroom shelf, and she gives the month the strength changed without being asked to twice.
Then the letters. Gatehouse to drawer, eleven years of a house and the last four of them carrying envelopes she had stopped letting herself look at properly.
“I knew what the handwriting was,” she says. “A sister's handwriting doesn't look like a bank's. I carried them anyway, and I put them in the drawer with my own hand, and I want that said in here rather than about me later on.”
Nobody asks her the hard question. She asks it of herself.
“I told myself I was keeping her calm,” she says. “I was keeping her quiet. There's a word for the difference and I've had four weeks in a rented room to learn it.”
She doesn't look at me when she says it. She looks at the radiator. I think that's the only honest place in the room for her to look, and I don't hold it against her.
Aldred is called after her and it takes under two minutes, and it's the worst two minutes in the room, because he isn't a bought man. A bought man would have been a relief.
“I wasn't paid a penny beyond my rate,” he says. “I was persuaded. I've been going back over what persuaded me since they brought Mr. Brennan in, and I can't find one thing that man told me that was untrue. He simply never once told me a whole one.”
Then he turns his head and finds me on the third bench, and I have to make myself hold still.
“I believed I was going to keep you alive,” he says. “I'd like that on the record before somebody says it worse.”
The judge has read the file. You can tell within a sentence, the way you can tell whether a man on a site has read the drawings or is going to ask you where the beam goes.
“I've read the exhibits,” she says. “The petition is dismissed with prejudice, and I'm referring the medical history to the county attorney this morning. Ms. Vance, you don't need anything further from me. You may go.”
The clock over the door says 9:11.
Eleven minutes. Six years of a marriage and four months of paper and a woman's whole capacity to sign her own name, and it takes eleven minutes and a radiator ticking through every one of them.
Rachel's hand closes over my wrist so hard it hurts the four small marks that are almost gone now.
In the corridor Roz Pike is standing with a second unit by the water fountain, and she doesn't hurry, and she doesn't raise her voice.
“Julian Vance. Put your good arm behind you.”
She names the charges the way she'd read out a parts list: filing a false instrument, tampering with evidence, obstruction. Then she stops naming and says the rest to him, and the corridor hears it, because a corridor is a public place and she has chosen one.
“The reservoir case is being reopened,” she says. “Delphine Vance's death is back on my desk as of this morning, and it stays there until it's finished properly.”
Delphine. Her name, said out loud, in a building with a public gallery, seven years and two months after she went into cold water.
They turn him carefully because of the collarbone. He lets them. He's looking at me the whole time with an expression I've seen him wear at fundraisers when somebody has got a detail wrong and it would be ungracious to correct them.
“You do understand that I never once raised my voice to you, not once in six years,” he says.
“I do,” I say. “That was always the frightening part.”
He seems to consider that, the way he'd consider a proposal that hadn't been costed properly, and then they take him past the fountain and around the corner and he's gone, and the corridor is a corridor again.
A woman from Roz's unit comes over with a clear bag and a printed label, and I take the organizer out of my coat pocket and put it in her hand. Seven-day acrylic, lid hinged on the left, fifteen doses palmed one at a time over nine weeks and kept in a cold hollow of an apple crate.
She peels the adhesive strip. It comes away with a long sticky sound and she smooths it down with two fingers, and that's it, that's fifteen doses of my life stopping being mine and becoming an exhibit.
“I'd like it back one day,” I say, and then I hear it and put my hand over my mouth.
Outside, Nora is at the rail with her handbag in front of her like a shield and she doesn't come toward me, so I go toward her, and neither of us manages anything except her saying my name and me saying hers.
Marguerite Ferris is three steps down in a good coat, seventy-one years old, still frightened of everything that estate ever did, and here anyway, holding the rail with both hands.
“I didn't want to sit at the front,” she says. “I hope the back was all right.”
“The back was exactly right, and I saw you from the door.”
Cole is at the bottom of the steps with his right hand taped and Bramwell's blanket hairs on his coat, and he doesn't come up. He can't, until somebody disposes of a complaint that was never a complaint, and he's standing ten feet off in the cold to prove he knows it.
“I'm going to my sister's tonight,” I say.
“Your sister's got you.” His good hand goes into his pocket. “I'll be here when she hasn't.”
The cold comes up off the courthouse steps and my ankle tells me about every one of them on the way down.
Rachel takes my left arm without being asked, on the bad side, the way you do if you've been somebody's sister for the whole thirty years you've been alive.
“Four hours to my place,” she says. “And I'm warning you now, you're going to hate my sofa.”