THE FRIEND

Callum

The apartment was on the third floor of a brick building on Detroit Avenue, between a laundromat and a shop that sold secondhand records, and the stair smelled of cabbage and cat. He climbed it slowly. His right hand was bandaged to the wrist. He had slept, in the previous seventy-two hours, for perhaps four, and the world had taken on that peculiar polished clarity of the sleepless, in which every doorknob and stair-rail is distinct, and tilts very slightly toward the eye.

He had no coat. He had left it in the plane. It was nine at night and seventeen degrees, with a wind off the lake that came down the avenue like a blade, and his shirt-sleeves were stiff with cold; but he had not felt it. He had not felt anything since a quarter to two on the morning of the second of March. He'd walked like a man who has been told that the ground is a long way down and has decided not to look.

3C. A strip of masking tape, a ballpoint pen. MARCHETTI/ WOO. Beneath it a sticker, curling at the edges, of a cartoon pelican.

He raised his hand.

What do you say to her? he thought. What does a man say? There is no form of words. You would have to begin, I am sorry, and I cannot even begin that, because the sorry is too large for the door.

He knocked. Three times.

There was a pause: the sound of a chair, a muffled curse, bare feet on boards. A bolt shot back. A chain rattled. The door opened a hand's breadth, and a face looked out. It was small and sharp and sallow, with a mop of black hair, and a pair of reddened, furious, inky-brown eyes. She wore a gray T-shirt that said CLEVELAND PRESS—NEVER FORGET, and a pair of men's flannel pajamas, and in one hand, held low and cocked, a heavy glass ashtray.

She looked at him. She looked at him for what must have been six seconds.

"Oh, you son of a bitch," said Josie Marchetti.

"Miss Marchetti—"

She opened the door and hit him.

…

It was not a slap. He had expected a slap. It was a closed fist, flung from the shoulder with the full weight of a hundred and nine pounds behind it, and it took him on the left cheekbone with a sound like a dropped plate. His head snapped round. He stumbled against the wall of the landing. Stars crossed his eyes. For a moment the stairwell tilted and he thought, with abstract interest, That was well done.

She hit him again.

He did not lift his hands. He had decided on the plane that he would not. He stood against the wall with the blood running warm from his lip and let her do it: let her beat on his chest with both fists, and his shoulders, and his bandaged hand, in a rain of small hard furious blows, saying in a hoarse sobbing monotone:

"You— you absolute— you took her— you took her apart— she was alive, she was thirty, she was going to do it on her own, she had a plan, and you put her in a dress—"

"Yes."

"—and you bought her— you ordered her— you made her sign—"

"Yes."

"—and you let her go through it alone—"

"Yes."

"—and she's dying, you son of a bitch, she's dying in a hospital in a state I can't even— and you've been in a tower—"

"Yes," said Callum. "Every word."

She stopped.

She stood with her fists against his chest and her head down. Her shoulders were heaving. She was breathing in short harsh gulps, like a person who has been underwater. Then, very slowly, she lifted her face; and he saw that it was not rage in her eyes at all. It was a kind of blank, exhausted amazement. She had expected him to fight.

"Why aren't you defending yourself?" she said.

"Because you are right."

"I haven't said anything."

"You've said it all." He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. "I would like to say that I did not know. I would like to say that she hid it from me. It would be true and it would be no excuse. I had every sign. I read them and I looked away, and I wrote a clause so that I would not have to look, and she was very happy to let me." His voice was quite steady. "I'm not here about the contract."

"Then what—"

"I am here to ask where she is."

…

Win

The hospital had a night.

She had not known that. In the day it was a place of linoleum and murmurs, of trays and sunlight and the cheerful intrusions of Teddy with his blood-pressure cuff; but at ten o'clock the lights dimmed to a soft amber, and the corridor emptied, and a great hush came down on the ward like a hand laid on a drum. She lay in it, propped on her three pillows, listening to the machines. There was a clock somewhere. There was a faint wet whisper of oxygen from the room across the hall, where an old man named Mr. Brandt had been dying, gently and unfussily, for nine days.

They had given her something for the pain. It was a pump, a clear little bag on a pole, a button under her thumb. It did not take the pain away; it moved it. It lifted it up and set it on a shelf, a little to the left, where she could see it, glowing, like a lamp, without having to be burned by it. The room had gone soft at the edges. The ceiling breathed.

Ten, she thought. Nine.

She could not remember why she was counting. It had become a kind of music.

Eight. Seven.

There was a step in the corridor.

She heard it quite clearly. It was a man's step, long, measured, unhurried, passing the nurses' station and coming down the carpet: not a nurse's soft-soled tread, nor the squeak of a gurney, but a heavy, even, deliberate stride, heel and toe, heel and toe, such as one might hear on the deck of a ship. It paused outside her door.

She stopped breathing.

No, thought Win. It isn't. It can't be.

She knew that stride. She had counted it, on the marble of the Tower, in the long white hall of Halcyon, on the boards of a dock in Montauk with the spray in her face. She would have known it in her sleep; she did know it, in her sleep, in a dream she'd had every night for a month, in which she lay in a cabin in the dark and heard it coming up the gravel.

She did not turn her head.

It is the night nurse, she told herself. It's a doctor on rounds. It's the man from across the hall, going to the bathroom. She lay with her eyes fixed on the ceiling and every nerve in her body strung like wire, and the stride stood at the door, and stood, and stood.

Open it, she thought, with a sudden wild fierce longing. Come in. Say my name. I'll tell you everything. I'll—

No. Go away. Don't look at me. I'm yellow. I smell. I'm—

Please.

The step moved on.

It went down the corridor, unhurried, to the end of the ward, and turned, and was gone. A door opened and closed. Far away, someone coughed. The amber light hummed softly on the ceiling, and the pump clicked, and the little bag on the pole gave up another drop.

She lay quite still.

After a long time, she found that her face was wet. It was a small and silly thing to weep about. It was a man in a corridor, in the dead of night, with a clipboard; he'd gone to the bathroom, or the ice machine, or the staff room for a cup of coffee. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.

You were never going to turn, she told herself. You made quite sure of that.

And you'd have turned him away.

You would have, wouldn't you?

She closed her eyes. She did not answer. In the dark, behind her lids, the ten came round again, and she began, slowly, to count.

…

Callum

Josie had made coffee.

It was the dreadful kind, black and bitter, stewed on the stove in a dented enamel pot and poured into a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST REPORTER. She set it in front of him on the kitchen table, and sat down opposite, and put a bag of frozen peas on his cheekbone without a word. The kitchen was small and yellow, with a bare bulb, and the table was covered with notebooks, and press clippings, and the unwashed remains of three days' takeout. A packed duffel stood by the door.

"I fly back Sunday," said Josie. "I came home to see my editor. I told them I need a month. They said no." She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking. "I said, That wasn't a question."

"Is she—"

"Wait."

He waited.

She smoked half the cigarette. Her eyes were on his face, narrow and unsparing, with the cold professional attention of a woman who has interviewed a great many liars. He sat under it. He held the peas to his cheek. He did not move.

"She said you'd come," said Josie at last.

"I'm sorry?"

"The day she left. At the airport. She said, He'll come to your door. He's very good at finding." Her mouth twisted. "She made me swear. On her mother's grave. She said, If he asks, you don't tell. And I said I wouldn't. And I haven't. For five weeks." She stubbed out the cigarette. "I'm breaking it now. She's going to kill me. I'd just like that on the record."

"On the record."

"You know what I did, every night? I read the paper. Your name. Your face. I wanted to see if you were all right. I wanted—" She broke off. "I wanted you to be suffering. I'm not proud of it. I thought, Good. Let him. Let him feel one thousandth of what she's—"

"I am."

"I know. I saw you at the door."

"I would like to ask you a question."

"Ask it."

"Is she afraid?"

It was the question he had carried up the stairs. He hadn't known until it left him that it was the one he meant. Josie stared at him. Something moved behind her face, slowly, like a fish in dark water.

"No," she said. "She isn't. She says she's not. She's been saying it since the day she got the diagnosis." Her voice dropped. "But I've known her since we were eighteen. And I've never in my life seen a person so afraid of being a burden. She'd rather die than be looked after. She'd rather die in a ditch than make you hold the bowl."

"I would hold the bowl."

"I know that. She doesn't."

"Then she is a fool."

"Yes!" said Josie, almost laughing. "God, yes. The stubbornest fool alive." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "And you're another. I suppose that's the point."

She rose. She went to the duffel by the door and unzipped the side pocket, and he heard the rustle of paper. When she came back she was holding something flat, folded in four, soft as cloth from long handling. She laid it in front of him on the table, and smoothed it with her palm.

"There's a good deal I'm going to tell you," said Josie. "I'll tell you the town. I'll tell you the hospital, and the ward, and the name of the nurse. You can have the whole map. But I wanted you to have this first."

"What is it?"

"A photocopy. She sent it to me in October, in a card, with a note that said Keep this for me. I didn't understand." She sat down. "The first page of the ledger."

…

It was a page like any other. It was cream, ruled, slightly stained. At the top a title had been crossed out with a single hard line: Wedding Ledger & Future Planning. Above it, in a small upright hand, she had written The Last Ledger.

Below were a few lines of figures. He knew some of them. A cashier's check. A sum in a bank in Ohio, with a question mark. A name, Dr. Voigt, and a date; and the words Median survival, w/ treatment: 8–12 mo. W/o: 4–6.

And at the foot of the page, ruled off, alone, in the same steady hand:

Cost of dying: unknown.

He read it.

He read it again.

He had the page flat under his palm, the bandaged one, and the paper was warm from the lamp, and the figures swam a little, and settled. Unknown. It was the last word on the page. It was such a small, neat, dry word. She had written it in October, in a high-rise in Cleveland, on the night after the doctor, and she had gone on living with it for four months. She had not known the price. She had gone to New York to find out.

She went out to buy it, he thought. She went to the one place on earth where she thought she could afford to learn.

And she met me.

He bowed his head.

It happened slowly. It happened without a sound. He sat at the table in a stranger's kitchen with a photocopied page under his hand, and the tears came up in him like water in a sunk well; and they fell on the paper, one and then another, and the ink on the figures did not run, because it was only a copy. He did not lift his hand to hide his face. He did not seem able to move at all. He sat with his head down and the water running off the end of his nose, a very large and very quiet man in a bloodstained shirt, weeping in front of a woman who hated him.

He had not wept in front of another person since he was seventeen.

Josie said nothing. She did not look away. After a time she got up, and went to the stove, and he heard the clink of the enamel pot, and the coffee splash. She came back and put a fresh mug beside his hand, and a roll of paper towels, and a pen.

"Write this down," she said gruffly.

He lifted his head.

"Ashbourne Medical Center. Portland, Oregon. Palliative wing, third floor, the room with the cherry tree in the window." She pushed the pad across. "She fainted on Sunday. A bleed. They banded it, and she's stable, but it's days. Maybe a couple of weeks. The nurse says—" Her voice cracked. "Teddy says."

He wrote it. His hand shook so that the letters came out ragged.

"And Callum."

It was the first time she'd said his name.

"Don't you dare walk in there and try to fix it. You can't. She doesn't want you to. She wants—" She searched for it. "She wants someone to be there who isn't scared of her. That's all. That's the whole thing. You'd think, with all your money."

"I won't fix it."

"You will. You'll try. You'll call in the Mayo Clinic and a Nobel laureate, and she'll let you, because she loves you, and it'll make her sick." Josie gripped her mug. "Promise me you'll sit down. Promise me you'll just sit."

"I do not know how," said Callum.

"I know."

"I have never done it."

"I know that, too." She almost smiled. "It's the only thing she wanted from you. It's the only thing you couldn't buy. I think that's why she picked you."

He looked at the page. At the line at the foot.

Cost of dying: unknown.

"Someone else has been asking after her," Josie added, after a moment, in a different voice. "An old man. He rang the hospital twice; they wouldn't tell him anything. He rang me too, last week, at the paper. A very polite, very tired old voice. Said he was her former employer."

"Vance."

"Arthur Vance. From Hartwell." Josie shrugged. "He'd heard she'd resigned, and then that she was ill. He wanted to know whether she was being looked after. He wanted to send a check. I told him no, and then I thought, Well, why not?" She sniffed. "She'd have hated it. But he's a good old man."

"He sounds it."

"He's the closest thing she had to a father. Don't tell her I said."

He tore the page from the pad. He folded it with care, and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt, behind the watch, which he'd put on its chain again in the car; and he laid the photocopy of the ledger beside it, folded in four, against his heart. He stood. He found that his legs held him.

"Miss Marchetti."

"Josie."

"Josie." He inclined his head. It was not the bow he gave to a boardroom; it was something older, and humbler, such as a man might give to a judge. "I will not fail her."

"Don't make promises," said Josie. "She's had enough of those."

"What then?"

"Just go," she said, and turned her face away to the window, where the streetlight lay yellow on the snow. "And for God's sake, wear a coat."