HOSPICE

The forms were eleven pages long, and the first page asked her to name her next of kin.

She sat at the table with the Montblanc in her hand and looked at the box. It was a small box, white, outlined in gray, with a line beneath it for a signature. Next of kin / Emergency contact. Nell had set the folder in front of her at nine in the morning with a flask of tea and a plate of toast, and then, with the tact of thirty years, had gone out onto the porch and begun doing something loud to a fishing net.

Win filled in the name of her mother. She looked at it. She crossed it out.

Josephine Marchetti, she wrote.

Her hand was steady. It was only her heart that wasn't. There was a line below, Relationship to patient, and she wrote friend, and then, after a moment, added the word only; and then, because she was an adjuster and could not leave an ambiguity on a form, she struck it through and wrote above it the one I have.

It took her forty minutes to finish. Nell came in at the end and checked every page, running a square brown finger down the margins, and nodded at the signatures. "Good. I'll fax it to Ashbourne this afternoon. The intake nurse is a friend of mine. She'll come out Thursday and look you over, and if she likes what she sees, we'll get you on the list."

"On the list for what?"

"For a bed. When you need one." Nell tucked the forms into a folder. "You won't need it yet. But it's like a lifeboat. You want to know where it's kept before the ship goes down."

"That's a cheerful metaphor."

"I have several." She sat down across from Win, put her elbows on the table. "There's one more thing. I won't push it, because it's yours. But there's a conversation you ought to have with a lawyer."

"I've done my will."

Nell's eyebrows rose.

"I did it in October," said Win. "At a place in Cleveland, on a lunch hour. It was a very good form. I left everything to Josie." She smiled faintly. "It was a lot easier then. It was the same sum, near enough. It's just that I've spent some since."

"On what?"

"On a few things." She turned the pen over. "On a dress. And a mask. And a glass floor in the sky."

"Did they take it?"

"I don't know, yet. I haven't done the arithmetic." She took a sip of tea, which tasted of metal. "But I think I got my money's worth."

…

She rewrote it anyway, that afternoon, on the back of one of the forms, in her small upright print.

I, Winifred Maureen Callaghan, being of sound mind, which is the one thing I've never needed a lawyer to confirm—

She stopped. She scratched out which is. She began again, more plainly.

It was brief. She left the remainder of her savings, a hundred and nine thousand dollars, after the cabin and the nurse and the Tidewater's chowder, to Josephine Marchetti, with instructions to spend it on something unreasonable. She left her mother's silver thimble to Odessa Pell, for no reason she could have explained, and wrote with thanks for the loan of a door. She left the gold Montblanc to Josie. She left the unsent letters to nobody, and then crossed that out, and wrote, to be burned, or sent, at the discretion of the executor.

She read that line for a long time.

The executor. She had named Josie. But Josie was a journalist, and a journalist did not burn things. Josie would put them in a drawer and stare at them for three years, and then do the dreadful, reasonable, loving thing, and put them in an envelope.

Let her, thought Win. I won't be there to mind.

At the bottom she wrote:

The ledger is to be kept by the person it was written for, if he wishes it, and if not, by the sea.

She looked at it. It was not a legal sentence. It had no legal force whatever. But it was the only one in the document she felt entirely sure of, and she signed beneath it with a flourish, and Nell witnessed it with a stump of pencil, and the postmistress, who had come to deliver a parcel, put her name and Marrin's Landing, Ore. and went away without asking a single question.

…

Josie arrived on the last Tuesday in February, in the rain, in a rented Kia with a cracked windshield and a gas-station coffee between her knees.

Win heard the car on the gravel and thought: no. It was the one thing in the world she had been certain would not happen. She had written two postcards in a code, the pelican says hello, and had received one back, and had told herself that this was the end of the matter.

She went out onto the porch in the quilt. The rain had thinned to a mist, and the beach was a long pale bar of silver under a low pearl sky. A small figure got out of the Kia. She wore the trench coat. She wore it, as she had worn it since the age of twenty-two, open and belted wrong, with the collar up and the sleeves rolled and a dozen unidentifiable papers sticking out of the pockets like the plumage of a bird. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were red. She stood at the end of the path with her car-keys in her fist and her mouth shut in a hard line.

"I'm not going to say anything," said Josie.

"All right."

"I want you to know that. I told myself the whole way from the airport. Don't say anything, don't cry, don't shout. I'm going to be so calm."

"You're doing wonderfully."

"I'm going to hug you."

"Okay."

"And then I'm going to kill you."

She came up the path at a run. She went up the steps in two strides and flung both arms around Win and the quilt together and held on, hard, with her face in the collar of the coat and her whole small body shaking; and Win stood in it with her eyes shut, and her arms at first not moving, and then moving, and then fastened round her friend's back with a strength she hadn't known she had.

She smelled of cigarettes, which she had sworn off, and of newsprint, and of the cheap citrus shampoo she'd used since college. She smelled of Cleveland. She smelled of every night that Win had ever sat awake in a cubicle, with the grief coming up the stairs, and a phone had rung, and a voice had said it's me, come downstairs, I've got a pizza.

"You weigh nothing," said Josie, into her shoulder. "You weigh nothing. Win."

"I know."

"You're yellow."

"A bit."

"You're— oh, God. Oh, my God." She drew back and took Win's face in both hands and looked at it. Her eyes were swimming. She was a woman who had written five thousand obituaries and had seen the bodies of three of the people they were about, and her gaze did not shrink. "You look like Mom."

Mom. She had always called Maureen that. It was the thing that had made the loss between them one thing.

"Yes," said Win. "I know that, too."

…

They fought on the second night.

It was no one's fault. They had been very careful all day. They had walked the beach in the thin pale sun, Win on Josie's arm, stopping three times; they'd eaten Nell's soup; they had sat in front of the stove with their feet up and talked about nothing in the gentle exhausted fashion of people on either side of a death. But at half past nine, over the second glass of the wine Josie had brought, the thing came up between them like a stone through ice.

"You should have told me," said Josie.

"I did tell you."

"In January. On a phone. From an airport. After you'd already decided." She put down the glass too hard. "Win, you've known since September. You've known since September, and you spent the autumn running around New York in a dress, and you told me you were working on a case, and I believed you, I believed every word, I'm a trained fucking journalist—"

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I'd have come. I'd have taken leave. I'd have sat with you in that horrible hospital and made terrible jokes. You didn't give me the chance."

"I didn't want you to watch."

"That's not yours to decide!"

The stove ticked. Outside the surf boomed.

"No," said Win, slowly. "It isn't."

"Then why did you?"

She had asked it so many times, in so many ways, of so many people, that the answer came out simply, without heat.

"Because I watched my mother," said Win.

Josie went still.

"For a year. I watched the hair, and the vomiting, and the bag, and the way she'd smile at the nurses so they wouldn't think she was a burden. I watched her apologize for being sick." She looked at her hands. "And at the end I couldn't hold her up. I was twenty-two. I stood in a hospital corridor and thought: if I had been somewhere else, I'd have been spared this. I thought: I'll never let anyone see me like that. And then I got to be thirty and it was my turn."

"Oh, honey."

"I was going to do it alone. I'd made my peace. I had a ledger and a bank balance and a plan." She smiled a little. "And then a man in a mask asked me to dance."

"And you fell in love with him."

"God help me."

"Is he awful?"

"He's the best man I've ever known," said Win. "And a complete disaster. And he's looking for a way to be frightened of something real." Her voice shook. "I couldn't be it. I couldn't be the thing that finally scared him. Not like that."

"So you left."

"So I left."

"And now?"

"And now I'm in a cabin in Oregon, with my best friend, and I'm so glad to see you I could cry."

"Then cry, you idiot."

"I'm trying."

"You never do."

"I know."

"Do it now."

And she did. They sat on the green couch with the quilt over both of them like a tent, and Josie held her head against her shoulder, and she wept, at last and properly, for the first time since the airplane. She wept for her mother and for Keaton, who had taken the coffee machine; for the six months of her lost life and the ninety days of her found one; for a man in a white kitchen with a tea towel on his shoulder. Josie wept too. They cried together for a long time, loudly and unattractively, with the kind of abandon that is only possible in front of one other person in the world.

At last it was spent.

"We're pathetic," said Josie, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

"Hideous."

"I haven't cried like that since Titanic."

"You were thirteen."

"I was fifteen, and I cried for two days." A damp laugh. "I read a review that said it was manipulative. I wanted to murder him."

"The critic?"

"The iceberg."

Win began to laugh. She laughed until her ribs hurt and she had to put a hand against them; and Josie laughed, rocking, with her arm round her; and Nell, who had been standing on the porch for some time with a basket and a lantern, and had decided that this was not the moment, took a long breath of the wet night air and tiptoed away.

…

On the fifth day Josie said it.

She said it on the beach, at dusk, with her hands in the pockets of the trench coat and her eyes on the sea. They had walked a hundred yards and sat down on a log, bleached white and smooth as bone, and the light was going out of the sky in long bars of rose and lead. The tide was far out. A line of small birds ran along the edge of it, at the exact speed of the retreating wave.

"I won't tell him," said Josie.

She did not turn her head.

"I've thought about it. Every night. I lie awake and run it like a story. Lead: a billionaire's lover disappears. I think about what I'd say if he called. I think about the look on his face." She pulled out a cigarette, looked at it, and put it back. "I read about him, you know. In the Journal. A little item. He missed a board dinner, and the Fed, and a man at the Post wrote that Draycott was unwell, or in love, or both." She almost laughed. "I cut it out. I've got it in my wallet. I don't know why."

Win's breath stopped.

"I called the Tower once. From the pay phone at the paper, at three in the morning. I got the receptionist. I said, I'd like to leave a message for Mr. Draycott, and she said, Of course, may I ask who's calling? And I sat there with the receiver in my hand, and I couldn't think of one thing I was allowed to say." Josie's voice cracked. "So I hung up."

"Josie—"

"Not one person has found me, do you understand? Not one. Not him, not his people. He's got a security chief who could find a needle in the Atlantic, and nobody's turned up on my street. Because of that clause. He's keeping the stupid, wonderful, heartbreaking clause. He's up there somewhere with the whole world on a plate and he's keeping a promise. And I don't know what to do with that."

"I do."

"What?"

"Nothing," said Win. "It's what I asked of you."

"But he—"

"He wanted me to be well, Josie. And I'm not going to be. And I will not have him standing in a hospital room doing what he's done every day of his life since he was seventeen." She drew a breath. "Watching. I won't have it. I'd sooner be alone."

"You aren't alone."

"I know."

"Then—"

"You promised."

"I know I did."

"On my mother."

"I know," said Josie, and put her face in her hands. "I hate it. I'll do it. I'll take it to my grave. But if you could see what it's doing to him—"

"I can," said Win. "I can see it from here."

…

It was the first of March when she fell.

It was a small thing, a stupid thing. She was alone in the kitchen. Josie had driven to the Tidewater for bread, and Nell was up at the yellow house, and the afternoon had the soft dead stillness of a place where nothing is going to happen. Win stood at the sink with a glass in her hand, and the glass was suddenly too heavy, and then the floor of the cabin gave a sort of slow lurch, like the deck of a boat, and the window went white.

Oh, she thought, quite calmly. That's what it is.

She heard the glass break. She felt the linoleum come up against her cheek, cool, with a faint smell of bleach. Somewhere very far away a screen door slammed and a voice shouted her name, and then there were hands, and the roof, and the world tilting and sliding away. Ten, she thought, but the number would not come. She was lying in the bottom of a green sea, looking up at the light.

It's quiet, she thought. I didn't know it would be so quiet.

She heard Josie screaming for Nell.

She heard Nell say, in her flat, dry, absolutely steady voice, Call it in. Ashbourne. Tell them it's a bleed. Tell them stat.

And then, nothing for a long time.

…

She woke in a room with a window.

It was a nice window. It looked out on a courtyard, and in the courtyard there was a cherry tree, bare, with its black branches wet from rain. There was a bed with a clean white sheet and a frame of brushed steel. There was a long panel on the wall with a row of plugs, and a soft green light, and a quiet regular tick from somewhere behind her head. There was a bag of something clear on a pole. There was a needle in the back of her hand, taped neatly, and the faint cold taste of metal in her mouth.

"Welcome back," said a voice.

A nurse stood by the bed, a young man with a kind round face and a pair of enormous forearms, in blue scrubs. He was checking a monitor. His name tag said Teddy. He smiled at her with the practiced warmth of a person who has said welcome back to a great many people.

"Where am I?"

"Ashbourne Medical. The palliative wing." He adjusted the line. "You gave your friends a scare. You'd lost a fair bit of blood. Dr. Okafor banded the bleed this morning. You're stable. You're going to feel like you've been hit by a truck for a day or two, and then you're going to feel better. A bit."

"How long?"

"You came in yesterday afternoon."

"Josie?"

"Down the hall. She's been here all night. Your other friend, Nell, went home to feed the cat, but she'll be back at noon." He made a note on a chart. "They've been taking turns not sleeping."

Win turned her head on the pillow. The room swam, and settled.

"Is it bad?" she said.

"It's what it is." He said it gently. "You've got days, maybe weeks. We'll do everything we can to make them good ones. That's what this place is for."

She closed her eyes.

Days, maybe weeks. She tried it for size, as she had once tried the word terminal in a doctor's office. It fitted. It was a little loose at the shoulders. She could feel the draft.

"There's one other thing," said Teddy.

She opened her eyes.

He had stopped at the foot of the bed and was holding the chart against his chest. He looked mildly puzzled, the way a person looks who has been given a message he does not quite understand. "Someone called the desk this morning. Twice. A man. He asked if a patient by the name of Callaghan had been admitted."

The tick of the monitor seemed to grow louder.

"What did you tell him?"

"What we always tell them. That we can't confirm or deny." He frowned. "But he sounded—" He considered. "Well, he sounded as if it mattered."

"Did he leave a name?"

"No, ma'am."

"Did he sound—" She stopped. She had almost said, tall. She had almost said, like the sea.

"He sounded old," said Teddy. "Older than you'd think. A bit hoarse. Said he was an old friend of the family." He shrugged. "I figured maybe a cousin."

"No one knows I'm here," said Win.

"Yes, ma'am."

"No one at all."

"Well," said Teddy kindly. "Somebody's heard."

He went out. The door sighed shut behind him. She lay and looked at the cherry tree for a long time, with the soft green light on the wall and the monitor ticking at her ear, and found, to her great astonishment, that she was smiling.

It was an old man. A hoarse, old, ordinary voice. A cousin, a family friend; it could not be. She knew exactly what it had been. It was Josie's editor, or her landlord, or some dim relation from Parma Heights, ringing round the hospitals out of a vague alarm. It was nothing.

It couldn't be him, she told herself. He doesn't know. He promised. He wouldn't.

But she lay in the white bed with the needle in her hand and the rain coming down on the courtyard, and thought of a hoarse voice asking the desk, twice, for a name that was her own, and could not make the smile go away.