7. Lily
LILY
The universe has a sense of humor: the travel nurse, feverish in a dangerous man's bed, being spoon-fed broth by the dangerous man.
It came for me the day after the storm let go, the way it always does, waiting until the danger is past before it comes to collect.
I woke burning. I knew the shape of it before I opened my eyes, the ache deep in the joints, the sandpaper behind the lids, the particular misery of a body that has been pushed past what it had and is now presenting the invoice.
I am a nurse. I diagnosed myself in about four seconds, and then I spent the rest of the morning being an appalling patient about it.
He turned out to be a nurse's worst nightmare, which is to say a competent one.
He appeared at the side of the bed with a bowl and a cloth and the flat, unbothered calm of a man who has done this before, and he did not ask how I felt, because he could see how I felt, and he did not promise me I would be fine, because he did not know that yet and would not insult me with it.
"Drink," he said, and set a cup against my mouth.
"I don't want it." "I did not ask what you wanted.
" I drank. It was water with something bitter run through it, willow bark or the memory of an aspirin, and I was too wrung out to fight him and, humiliatingly, glad of it.
"You're a terrible nurse," I informed him.
"I am not the nurse in this room. You are.
And you are arguing with a cup of water.
I have met corpses more cooperative." "That is the nicest thing you have said to me.
" "It was not meant to be nice." "I know. That's what makes it nice."
Later there was broth. He held the bowl and worked the spoon himself, patient as a metronome, because my hands were shaking too hard to be trusted with hot liquid and only one of us was willing to say so.
"I can feed myself," I said, wearing the spoon's contents on my chin as I said it.
"Clearly." He wiped my chin, unbothered, and loaded the spoon again.
"Open." "This is undignified." "You drove a car through my gate and clawed through a blizzard for a necklace.
Dignity left some time ago. Open." I opened.
He laid the cool cloth on my forehead with two fingers, careful, the way you handle something you are afraid of breaking, which was a strange way for a man built like a bank vault to touch anyone at all.
Everything about how he tended me was wrong for the story I had been telling myself about him.
Killers do not fold a cloth into quarters so the cold lands even across your skin.
They do not know the trick of getting water into a person who will not take it.
They do not sit up in a hard chair through the worst hours because the patient might spike again.
He did all of it without a word, and every quiet, competent kindness added a line to a file I was fast running out of room to keep calling murder-cabin.
Fever is a truth serum. It burns off the part of you that keeps everything in, the sentry posted at the gate of your mouth deciding what gets out. Mine clocked out somewhere in the gray middle of that day, and I began to talk, and once I began I could not find the switch to stop.
I would like to report that I began somewhere dignified.
I did not. I started with the weather in a Duluth I had never reached, and moved on to a patient I had lost in Phoenix, and a diner in Missoula that made a pie worth turning the car around for, the whole scattered map of a life spent not staying anywhere.
He took all of it in without a flicker, and somewhere in the wandering I came, the way water finds the low ground, to my mother.
"My mother took pictures," I told him, or told the ceiling, or told the dog.
I was not always sure which. "Everything and nothing.
A crack in a sidewalk. The light coming through a bus window.
She said there was no such thing as a bad place to point a camera, only lazy eyes.
That old Nikon was hers." He was somewhere in the room.
I could feel him listening, and listening is something you can feel, the difference between a man waiting for you to finish and a man actually hearing what you say.
"She raised me on her own. My father was a story she told, gone before I was old enough to keep any of him.
It was the two of us and that camera and not quite enough money, and it was plenty, it was more than plenty.
" My voice was going places I had not signed off on.
"And then she got sick, the kind that does not negotiate, and so I did the sensible thing.
I went to nursing school. I was going to learn the body well enough to argue with it. I was going to save her."
"You did not." It was not a question. It was the first thing he had said in a long while, and there was no pity anywhere in it, only the plain fact of it set down gently, and somehow that was the only way I could have borne to hear it.
"No," I said. "I did not. I learned the body end to end, and it turned out the body does not care what you know.
I held her hand and read her chart and counted her breaths spreading further apart, and all that expensive knowledge was good for nothing in the end except telling me, almost to the hour, when she would go. "
"After, I could not be still. Still is where it catches you.
So I keep moving. Three months in a place and then a new hospital, a new city, a fresh set of strangers who do not know to step careful around me on the bad days.
A moving target never has to feel the anniversary coming.
That is the whole system. That is the entire architecture of my life, keeping the car aimed at what comes next so what is behind can never catch up.
" I laughed, and it came out wrong, wet and broken.
"I was very good at it, too, right up until I drove it through your gate. "
"The last roll she ever shot is still in that canister," I said.
"The one you dug out of the snow. I never developed it.
Two years, and I cannot make myself take it in, because right now it could be anything.
It could be her best work. The second I develop it, it becomes the final frame, and there is nothing after the final frame.
" I had never said that out loud to a living person.
It sounded insane in the air and completely reasonable in my chest. "She would have developed it the same afternoon.
She was not afraid of the last of anything.
She used to say a photograph is a way of telling time it cannot have this one moment back.
I got her camera. I did not get her nerve. "
He did not tell me it was not my fault. He did not tell me she would be proud, or that time heals, or any of the lines people reach for when they want the sadness to stop making them uncomfortable.
He just sat in the dark and let me have said it, let the words stay in the room without trying to fix them or fold them up and hand them back.
In two years it was the kindest thing anyone had done for me, and he managed it by doing nothing at all.
After a while he spoke, once, into the dark.
"My mother took pictures too," he said, and did not explain it, and did not say another word, and did not need to.
It was almost nothing. It was also the first door he had ever cracked open, even an inch, and he had cracked it for me in the middle of the night while a fever burned me down to the truth.
I set it alongside the reading glasses and the folded cloths, in a growing stack of evidence that the man was a fraud, and that the fraud was the wolf and not the tenderness underneath it.
I wanted to ask him a hundred questions, about whose pictures they were and what they showed and where she was now.
But I was a nurse before I was anything else, and I know the sound of a wound closing over, so I let the door keep its single inch and asked him not one of them.
I drifted after that, under and up and under again, and every time I surfaced he was there and I cataloged one more piece of him, because reading the people in my rooms is simply what I do.
There was a shelf I had not noticed before, low and half in shadow, crowded with books whose spines had cracked and whose corners had curled, books read and read again.
There was a pair of reading glasses on the arm of the chair that he took off and pretended to have merely been holding whenever I opened my eyes.
And there was Tank, who had installed himself along my side like a furnace with a heartbeat, and who was, I was fairly certain, the only reason I had not shaken myself to pieces.
He caught me studying the books once, and he did not care for it.
"You should sleep," he said, which is what people say when they do not want to be seen.
"You read poetry," I said, because I had gotten close enough to the shelf to know it, worn paperbacks with pages gone soft with handling.
"You own a gun for every room, and a door you will not open, and you made me pry your own name out of you, and you read poetry by the fire.
You are the least believable person I have ever met, and I once treated a man who faked his own funeral to escape a timeshare.
" "Sleep, Lily." He did not deny the poetry, and he said my name, which he almost never did, and I noted both facts and closed my eyes on a smile.
"You know what you are?" I said, to the room, to the wolf across from me.
"You are a golden retriever in a wolf costume.
That is the whole diagnosis. You growl and you glare and you own more guns than a small country, and underneath all of it you fold cloths into quarters and you talk to your dog in Russian when you think I am asleep.
" He said nothing, which I chose to read as agreement.
"Tank. Back me up." And Tank, my only witness, my furnace, my friend, chose that exact moment to release a sound and a smell that emptied the near corner of the room, and then went straight back to sleep, deeply satisfied with his contribution to the discussion.
The laugh took the last of what I had. I felt myself going down into the fever-dark, the good kind now, the kind with a warm weight at my back and a quiet man keeping watch and a bitter cup waiting if I woke.
Right at the lip of it I said the true thing, because fever has never learned how to lie and I did not have the strength left to stop my mouth.
"You're not what you pretend to be," I mumbled into the pillow. He didn't argue. That was answer enough. I fell asleep smiling like an idiot, which is either the fever or the beginning of a very bad idea.