Chapter 8
Sundays at nine lasted nine days.
It was not anybody’s fault and it was certainly not a plan. It was simply that a house with a man in a hospital bed in it does not run on a schedule, and the first crack in hers came on a Tuesday when the agency called Christina to say the night aide had quit.
Christina called Mila from the car, in tears, which Christina did not do.
“I’m in Harrisburg,” she said. “I’m in Harrisburg until Thursday and I cannot get out of it, and the day girl finishes at six, and Jason has not slept in a bed since the fourteenth.”
“Where’s he sleeping?”
“In the chair. In the room. He says he’s fine.”
Mila stood in the barn office with the phone against her ear and the vet schedule in front of her and watched herself make the decision from a long way off.
“I’ll do Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights,” she said.
* * *
Larry hated the television and could not say so, and had therefore had the television on, tuned to the same channel, for nine days.
He was right-handed and had been a right-handed man his whole life, and every single thing anyone put on the tray was put on the right, where he could not reach it.
He was frightened at about four in the morning, reliably, and there was no call button that a left hand with no grip could work, so at four in the morning Larry Shepard lay in a room in his son’s house and waited for it to be five.
Mila fixed the tray on the first night. She fixed the television on the second.
On the third she took a bicycle bell off a rusted kid’s bike in the back of Nikki’s hay barn and wired it to the bed rail with a loop of baling twine so that the flat of his left hand would ring it, which was the single most useful thing anybody did for Larry Shepard that winter and cost nothing at all.
The first time he rang it, at ten past four, she came down the hall in her socks and found him with his eyes wide and his face wet.
“I know,” she said. “I’m here. It’s ten past four on Friday morning. You rang the bell and I came, and that’s how it works now.”
She sat with him until it got light.
* * *
There was an intercom in that room and it drove her mad.
It had come with the bed and the hoist and the rest of it, a white plastic box on the shelf by the window with a second box you carried about the house, and it was a baby monitor with a medical price on it.
It hissed. It picked up the air mattress pump and the radiator and the window rattling, and in the small hours it made a sound like a shell held to your ear.
Mila hated it on the first night and understood it on the second.
The point of it was not that you could hear Larry. Larry could not make a sound. The point was that somebody, somewhere in that house, always had that room in their ear — the pump, the hiss, the nothing — and so the room was never entirely alone, even when it was.
She carried the handset around while she made tea. Jason carried it upstairs at midnight. Verity clipped it to her belt.
And it went both ways, which nobody thought about, because nobody ever does. The box on the shelf had a button on the front of it, and if you pressed the button on the handset the box in the room played whatever you said into it.
Mila pressed it once, from the kitchen, on the first night.
“It’s Mila,” she said. “It’s twenty past nine and I’m putting the kettle on, and I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
And in the room, forty feet away, through a plastic box on a shelf, Larry Shepard heard that somebody in the house knew he was in it.
She started doing it every night. It became a thing in that house — everyone did it, within days, without anyone deciding — and within days the room was full of disembodied voices saying ordinary things into the dark.
Nobody ever turned the box off.
* * *
She had rules for the room and she enforced them without apology.
Talk to him. Tell him the day. Tell him before you touch him. Do not talk about him over the bed. If you have to say something in front of him you would not say to him, go out into the hall and shut the door, and Mila would rather you did not, but the hall is there.
The day girl, Verity, took to it inside an hour and was better at it than anyone.
The physical therapist who came Mondays and Fridays took to it grudgingly.
Roger Dunham, who visited twice, did not take to it at all — he stood at the end of the bed talking about the campaign to Jason in a low voice with his back half turned, and Mila let him do it once and then, the second time, said, “Roger,” and pointed at the door.
He went pink. He also went out to the hall.
And Jason took to it like a man taking a rope thrown to him in water.
That was the thing. He had been in that room for two weeks with nothing to do and no idea how to do it, and the moment somebody handed him a method he became, within four days, extremely good at it.
He told his father the day. He told him the weather and who had called and what the market had done. He read him the whole Sunday paper including the parts no one wants. He said, every time, I’m going to move your arm now, Dad, and waited.
Mila watched him do it from the doorway on the third night with a cup of tea going cold in her hand.
He was careful. He was patient in a way she had genuinely never seen in him, not in ten years, not once.
He was sitting in a chair at three in the morning being tender toward a man who had never given him anything and who could not thank him for it, and he was good at it, and he had always been able to do this.
He had simply never spent it on her.
She stood in the dark hall and let that go through her the way you let a wave go through you standing in water, and then she took the tea to the kitchen and poured it out.
* * *
They started meeting in the kitchen at three.
Not on purpose. She got up for water; he got up because he could not sleep. It happened again the second night, and then it was a thing that happened.
The first night they said almost nothing. He would make tea for her without asking, in her own mug, which she noticed and did not comment on, and then he would take his cup to the far end of the counter and stand there, deliberately, at a distance he had measured.
Then one night he said, “He hated the wing, you know.”
“What?”
“The wing. He fought it for two years.” Jason turned his cup on the counter. “Said the only people who put their name on hospitals are people who are worried about something.”
“That’s the most self-aware thing I’ve ever heard about your father.”
“Right?” He laughed, once, into his cup. “And he was completely right, and he did it anyway, and then he made me give the speech.”
Mila did not laugh. But something in her chest moved, and she was aware of exactly which muscle it was.
“What was the speech?”
“Twelve minutes on compassion. I wrote it on a plane.” He rubbed his eye. “You were in the second row in the blue thing. You told me afterward it was the worst speech you’d ever heard and that I did the hand.”
“You do a hand.”
“I do not do a hand.”
“You do a hand,” she said. “You do a thing with the hand when you get to the part you don’t believe.”
And he laughed properly then, head back, one short bark of it in a dark kitchen at three in the morning, and Mila stood there on the other side of that counter and understood that she was in trouble.
* * *
Then, on the third night, he asked her a question.
“How’s the work going?”
Mila had the kettle in her hand and nearly dropped it. In eight years of marriage her husband had asked about her work perhaps four times, and every one of them had been the kind of question you ask to be seen asking.
“It’s going,” she said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Okay.” He did not push. He made the tea and went to his end of the counter. “It’s only that Christina said you’ve got somebody coming out with cable in a Subaru and you’re up at five doing the aisle, and I know better than to ask you anything else about it, so that’s my one.”
She should have left it there. She did not.
“It’s sound,” she said. “I don’t know what it is yet. It’s rooms.”
And Jason Shepard, at three in the morning, in a dark kitchen, with his tea going cold, said: “Like the pier.”
Mila went absolutely still.
“What?”
“The grain pier. The third one.” He was looking at his cup. “Where the old boy’s talking and you can hear the water behind him the whole time and you don’t cut it, and then he stops talking and you hold it for — I don’t know. Ages. Much too long. And it’s the best thing in the whole series.”
The clock in the hall did what it always did.
“When did you listen to that,” she said.
“November.”
“All of it?”
“Six hours.” He turned the cup a quarter turn. “Twice, actually. There’s a lot of driving in my life at the minute.”
She stood on the other side of that counter and could not think of a single thing to say.
Because here was the thing. That series had come out the year before they married.
It had been the whole of her, at twenty-nine, and she had played him one episode on a drive to Delaware in their second year and he had said that’s great, babe and changed the subject, and she had never offered again, and she had filed it under things a person does not push.
Ten years. He had gotten to it in a hospital parking lot in November.
“You never said,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I listened to it to have something of you,” Jason said, “and if I’d told you that in November you’d have thrown it at my head, and you’d have been right.”
He took his cup and went down the hall to his father’s room, and Mila stood in her own kitchen for a long time with a kettle in her hand.
* * *
Christina got back from Harrisburg on the Thursday and fell asleep on the kitchen table.
Not figuratively. Mila came in at half past eight and found her with her head on her forearms among the mail, and woke her, and put food in front of her, and Christina ate it like a woman who had forgotten food was a category.