19. Lily #2
"About sixteen months before she died, she called and said her back hurt.
" My voice went flat and clinical, the way it does when I have to walk through it.
"She did not say it once. She said it for weeks.
She told me it felt like her back hurt on the wrong side of her body, which is a strange way to put it, and it stayed with me because it was strange.
She had gone off her food. She had dropped weight and she was pleased about it.
And she itched, her arms mostly, at night. "
"You had no training yet."
"I was twenty years old and waiting tables and I knew nothing at all, and I told her it was her mattress.
" The words came out of me one at a time, like something being lifted out of a drawer.
"I told her it was stress, take ibuprofen, go for a walk.
I said it standing in a service corridor with a tray on my hip. "
"When did they find it?"
"They found it four months later, when her eyes turned yellow.
By then it was in her liver and there was nothing left to argue with, and the better part of a year ran from the scan to that parking garage.
I spent most of it in the chair beside her bed.
" I met his eyes. "Here is the part nobody warns you about.
A back that hurts in the front is on the card.
So is weight loss the patient is pleased about.
So is itching at night. They handed me that card in my first term of nursing school, and I sat in a lecture hall and read my own telephone call off a laminated sheet. "
The fire ticked. Outside, Tank barked at the empty yard, purely to stay in practice.
"So that's the whole of it," I said. "That is what has been driving my car for two years. Everybody assumes it's grief, and grief is in there, but grief you can carry. It's the other one that won't let you sit down."
Sacha was quiet a while. Then he said, "You saw a woman with a sore back."
"I saw a chart and I didn't read it."
"You had no chart. You had your mother on a telephone.
" He leaned in, forearms on the table, and his voice dropped into the register he almost never uses, the one with no distance left in it.
"A nurse reads a stranger. Nobody has ever read her own mother.
You want that to be a failure of skill. It is only what love does to a person's eyes. "
"That's a very good sentence."
"It is also true."
"Those two have never once been the same for me." My eyes had gone hot and I refused to let them do anything further about it. "But I'll take the sentence. Put it on the shelf next to Kevin."
He almost smiled. I watched it get halfway.
"You gave me a doorway last night," I said. "Three years ago, a job that went wrong, a doorway. That's all I got, and I've been carrying it around since, trying to make it hold still."
"I know what I gave you."
"Was there somebody?"
He studied his hands. It took him a while.
"There was a person who did not walk out of that doorway," he said. "That is what I have tonight. It is not a lie and it is not the whole of it, and I am asking you to let me give you the rest of it later."
I have spent my working life in rooms where a person is deciding whether the worst sentence they own can be said out loud. You learn the sound of a wound with the dressing still on. So I did not reach for the corner of it, and that cost me something.
"Then I'll wait," I said. "But I want one promise, and it's the only one I'll ever ask you for."
"Name it."
"I want no more lies. That covers the one you told me at this table when you called Alexei old business, and it especially covers the kind you tell to be kind, because those are worse.
" I laid my hand flat between us and did not touch him with it.
"You can say not yet. You can say I can't tell you that.
You can say it every day for a year. But don't hand me something false to keep me quiet or to keep me safe, because then I've got no floor left to stand on in this house. "
He looked at my hand there a long moment. Then he set his own down beside it, close enough that the sides touched, which from him is a signature in blood.
"You will not get another one from me," he said. "When it is not yet, I will tell you it is not yet. Nothing I hand you will be false."
"Then we're square." I stood up to make more coffee, and the room slid sideways about four inches.
It rolled through me and was gone, one grayish wave that settled before I could put a word to it.
I caught the chair and waited for the world to agree to hold.
It agreed. The tiredness underneath was the real news, that heavy sitting-in-the-bones exhaustion I had been dragging for days, the kind you earn at the end of a triple shift when your legs are borrowed from somebody taller.
I am a nurse. I know what a symptom looks like. I also know that in under a fortnight I had crashed a car, opened my scalp, gone hypothermic, run a fever, fallen in love with an armed fugitive, and learned in one afternoon that a professional killer had asked me where I slept.
We promised each other the truth, whatever came. Then I chalked up the queasy, exhausted week to the strangest fortnight of my life and thought nothing of it. I had no idea just how much stranger it was about to get.