THIRTY DAYS

It was Mrs. Dray who found the bottle, in the end, and not Margaux.

That was a thing he would turn over afterwards with a kind of bitter wonder. All those weeks of lists and cameras and Delta flights, and what broke the wall was a woman of sixty-three with a mop. The order had been clear: the Fifth Avenue apartment was to be kept as it was. No one was to enter. But the flowers in the hall had been there six weeks, and Mrs. Dray, who had been housekeeper to three families on Fifth and had never once in her life left a dead flower standing, had gone up on the first of March with her key and a trash bag, in flagrant defiance of her employer, to throw them out.

She did the hall. She did the library. She did the kitchen, where a single cup stood in the sink. And in the bathroom off the guest room, which Miss Callaghan had used when she wished to be alone and which no one else had ever entered, she tipped the wastebasket into the bag and saw something small and orange roll across the tile.

She picked it up. She stood for a long time, holding it.

Then she telephoned Margaux Teague, and said, in her old brisk country voice, "Miss Teague, I've done something I wasn't told to do. And you'd better come."

…

It lay on his desk in a plastic evidence bag, because Margaux had never in her life handled an object without one.

He looked at it. It was a prescription vial, amber, with a white child-proof cap, about the length of his finger. The label was a pharmacy's, from a Duane Reade on Madison, and the typeface was the dull gray dot-matrix of every pharmacy label in America.

CALLAGHAN, WINIFRED M.

ONDANSETRON 8 MG TAB.

TAKE 1 TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY 8 HOURS AS NEEDED FOR NAUSEA.

DR. H. VOIGT. QTY 30. REFILLS 2.

Beneath it, in the bag, were two other things. A folded square of paper, creased soft, as though it had been opened and closed many times: an appointment card from University Hospitals of Cleveland, Division of Hematology and Oncology, with a date in January and a time. And a smaller scrap, torn from a notebook, in a hand he knew. It said, simply, Ask about the varix.

He read it. He read the three lines on the label, and the three words on the card.

"Where?" he said.

"The wastebasket in the guest bath." Margaux stood very straight. She had put on her good gray suit. She had the look of a woman who has come to be shot. "I want to be clear that I did not look for it. Mrs. Dray found it. I have not read the bottle beyond the name. I have not run the doctor."

"I see."

"I am aware that the order was—"

"Margaux."

"Sir."

"Please go."

She went. She did not argue, and she did not say I told you. The door closed behind her with a sound so soft he almost did not hear it.

He sat alone with the bag in front of him.

…

He knew.

That was the thing he could not afterwards forgive himself. He had known for months. He had known on the day of the elevator, in the corridor of the clinic, with her bright hand on the wall; he had known on the beach at Big Sur, watching her sleep in the car; he had known in the cellar, at the eighteenth hour, when she said I've had it for months and bit through her sleeve. He had known, in the hundred small intelligent ways in which a body speaks to a man who loves it. He'd drawn up a table of them in a tower office and torn it into eighths.

He had looked at the sum and refused to read the total.

Ondansetron. He knew the name. It was for nausea. It was what they gave to people on chemotherapy. He knew that much, from a ward, from a long time ago, from his grandfather's last winter, in a room that smelled of lilies and disinfectant, where an old man who had carried a silver watch for sixty years had said with great gaiety, Don't mind the green pills, Cal, they're only for when I'm silly. He had died in March. Callum had been nine.

He took out his telephone.

Do it, said a voice in his head. You gave an order. You said, no inquiry. You said, if she wants me to know, she will tell me.

She did not tell you.

She told you in a hundred ways and you went deaf.

He typed the name of the drug into the search bar.

…

It was a simple matter. It took four seconds.

He read the first page. It said what it should: a serotonin antagonist, indicated for the prevention of nausea and vomiting associated with cytotoxic chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. He read it twice. Then, because he was a methodical man and had always believed in following a thread to the end of the spool, he typed another word. Oxycodone. He remembered the second pill: the small brown one, in the compact with the mints. He'd seen it, once, in her hand. A morphine derivative. A controlled substance. He read a long and carefully worded page about opioid analgesics in the management of severe chronic pain.

Severe chronic.

He typed: varix.

A diagram came up: a pale-pink tube, and along the lower part of it a cluster of dark swollen veins like a bunch of grapes. Esophageal varices. A complication of portal hypertension. Almost always the result of advanced liver disease. When they bleed they may be rapidly fatal.

His hand had begun to shake. It was a very small shaking, a fine tremor in the thumb, such as one might see in a man who had been holding a heavy object a long time. He watched it with curiosity. He had never seen it before.

He typed: liver disease causes.

He typed: cancer that spreads to the liver.

There were several lines at the top of the page, in bold. Colorectal cancer is the most common source of liver metastases. He looked at the word. He had not known there was a word for it. Metastases. It had the sound of a spill: a small dark stain, spreading.

He typed, slowly, one letter at a time, with the thumb that shook:

stage iv colorectal cancer liver mets survival.

It came up in a second. It was a chart. It was a plain thing, gray and white, a graph of a line descending from left to right, with years along the bottom and percentages up the side. It had been made for a patient pamphlet. It was labeled in a friendly font. What are the chances?

He read it to the end.

He read the next one. And the next. He went through them with that terrible methodical attention, the same attention with which he had once read the arithmetic of a failing company, line by line, noting each figure and setting it down in the column of his mind. Median survival without treatment: four to six months. With: eight to twelve. Five-year survival: 14 percent. He read an account by a surgeon in Houston. He read a forum, where a woman who signed herself Lilac_47 wrote that her husband had gone from the diagnosis to the grave in nineteen weeks. He read a paper by a team in Rotterdam. He read about jaundice, and ascites, and hepatic encephalopathy. He read about the last two weeks.

He read about the last two days.

At some point the light changed. At some point Margaux's silhouette appeared in the frosted glass, and stood a while, and went away. The city lights came on. The clock in the corner struck eleven, and midnight, and one. He sat bent over the screen in the dark, with his knuckles against his teeth, and the blue glow lying on his face like the light of a drowned room.

Four to six months.

She was told in September.

He counted. It was a thing he could still do; it was perhaps the one thing. September, October, November. December. January. February.

March.

There was no more arithmetic. The sum was done.

She has weeks, thought Callum.

She has weeks, and she is somewhere, alone, in a cabin or a hospital or a ditch, and I have been drinking Scotch on the floor of my study and bidding on violinists.

…

It came up through the floor of him like an earthquake.

He had thought he knew fear. He'd held it in his hands and made a trade of it. He had watched it rise in the faces of other people, and had felt the cold small answering tide, and called it by its name. He had said to a girl on a balcony, I haven't been afraid in twenty-two years. It was the proudest and saddest sentence of his life.

He had been wrong. It had not been fear. It had been the shadow of fear on a wall.

This was the thing itself. It started in his stomach, a cold, leaden, unspeakable sinking, as of a lift dropping its cable; and rose; and took his lungs; and closed on his throat. His heart stopped, and started again, and went like a hammer. His vision narrowed to a tunnel. The room swung, and slid, and tilted, and he heard himself make a sound, a high thin involuntary breath, like the sound a drowning animal makes.

Not her, he thought. Not her.

Not after Theo. Not after all of it. Not her.

He was on his feet. He did not know how. He was standing in the middle of the dark office with the telephone in his right hand, and the whole of his body was shaking, and a dreadful, helpless, childlike rage was surging up in him from somewhere below the ribs. He could not find the source of it. There was no one to blame. He could not blame the cancer, or the doctor, or the girl, or the clause. He could not find the lake.

He drew back his arm.

He did not mean to throw it. He meant only to hold it, to crush it, to do something with his hand that was not shaking. But the phone had been made by a very good company in California, in a case of glass and steel, and when he closed his fist around it with the whole of his strength, it did not crush. It cracked, with a small bright report like a pistol. The screen starred. A shard of glass went into the heel of his palm.

He looked down.

The blood ran out along the lines of his hand, dark in the blue light, and dropped on the blotter.

He opened his fingers. The telephone lay in them, ruined, its face shattered into a web of pale lines, still glowing faintly through the cracks. A word was visible under the fracture. Survival. He stood and watched the blood run round it.

I have bled, thought Callum, with a vast stupid wonder, for a woman.

It was a ridiculous thought. It was the thought of a child. He found, to his considerable surprise, that he was laughing, a thin helpless breathless sound, and then that he was not.

…

"Mr. Draycott."

She came in without knocking, which she had never done in sixteen years. She had been outside the door all night. He saw that at once, from the set of her mouth, from the wrinkles in the gray suit. She stopped three paces inside the room. She saw the telephone, and the blood, and the man; and her face did a thing he had never seen it do. It broke, for an instant, from the top downward, like ice on a pond.

Then she was across the room. She took his hand in both of hers, quite roughly, and turned it palm up. "Sit down," said Margaux. "Sit down."

He sat.

She took a cloth from her pocket, a clean white handkerchief, and pressed it hard against the heel of his hand. She was kneeling on the carpet in front of his chair, a woman of forty-seven with iron hair, and she held the bleeding hand between her own and did not look at him.

"Did you know?" said Callum.

"No."

"You were with her for months."

"I was with her for ninety days. At a distance, by your orders." Her voice was low and entirely level. "I read her bank. I read her phone. I read her travel, her purchases, the name of the man she once dated. I did not read her chart. You told me not to." She drew a breath. "It was the only order you ever gave me that I did not question."

"Why?"

"Because it was the first time in sixteen years that you asked me for something that was not for you."

He said nothing.

"The medical record is the one thing I never touch, sir. I have never done it, for anyone. It is the one door I keep shut." She pressed harder. "I could have opened it in an hour. I wanted to. I knew from the first week that something was wrong. She walked like someone carrying a full glass. I watched her take that brown pill in the car, and I looked out of the window, and I thought, If I know, he'll make me say it. And I did not want to be the one."

"You should have told me."

"Yes."

"I would have fired you."

"Yes." The handkerchief was red. "I know. I'd have gone. I'd have said, thank you for sixteen years, and cleared my desk. But I would have preferred it to this." Her voice shook very slightly. "I've had a long time to think about it. I believe I was wrong. I believe it was cowardice dressed as respect. I'm sorry."

"Margaux."

"I am not good at this."

"Neither am I."

They stayed like that for a while, in the half-dark: the tall man in his chair, the narrow woman at his feet, with the blood on the white linen and the light of the broken screen going out, slowly, by degrees, on the desk behind them. Somewhere in the walls a pipe knocked. A siren went up Park Avenue, rose, and died.

"I wish to say," said Margaux, "that I think it is possible that she left because she did not want you to be in the room."

"I know."

"She left to spare you."

"I know that, too."

"She did not wish you to stand on the dock."

"Margaux."

"Then perhaps," said Margaux, very low, "we should not ask her permission."

He looked at her.

It was a long look. She met it. For the first time in his life he saw in her face not the cool intelligence of a subordinate, or even the dry loyalty of a friend, but something he'd only seen once, in the face of a woman in a hospital in Cleveland, twenty-two years ago, telling a boy of seventeen that his brother's body had been found. It was grief. It was grief that had made up its mind.

He stood.

He stood slowly, with the bandaged hand held against his chest, and the room seemed to steady about him. The tremor had gone out of his legs. The terror was still there. It would always be there, he thought; he could feel it, deep in the middle of him, a cold bright coin that would not be spent. But it had changed its nature. It was no longer a thing that was happening to him. It was a thing he was going to carry.

"The Gulfstream," said Callum.

"Where?"

"Cleveland."

"Now?"

"I can't ask her," he said. "She's made sure of that. I can't ask the hospital. I can't trace the cards, because she's stopped using them." He looked at the cracked telephone. "But there is one person on this earth who knows exactly where she is. And she has a spare key to her own apartment, and a night shift at a newspaper, and she has hated me from the first moment she saw my face."

Margaux was on her feet. She had the other telephone in her hand already, the one with the number that nobody had; she was dialing, with her thumb, while she turned for the door. Her voice came back to him over her shoulder, crisp, level, wonderfully steady, the voice of a woman who has just been told she is permitted to be herself.

"Wheels up in ninety minutes, Mr. Draycott."

"Thank you."

"And sir."

"Yes."

"Your watch." She paused with her hand on the door. "You left it open."

He looked down.

It lay on the blotter beside the blood, its lid raised, its small white face turned up to the ceiling. The hands stood where they had always stood. He had not touched it all night. It was only that, somewhere in the course of the hours, with his fingers shaking over the screen, he had opened it, and had not been able to close it again.

4:17.

He picked it up. He held it against his chest, over the thing that was beating.

"Cleveland," said Callum. "Now."