EVERYTHING MONEY CAN BUY

He kept the promise for nineteen hours.

That was the exact figure. He worked it out afterwards, in the way he worked out everything, with the cold small clarity that was the last of his old self. Nineteen hours, from the moment he laid the watch on the table to the moment, at ten past three in the morning, when he stood up from the green chair, said to the dark, "I'll get coffee," and walked out into the corridor with his telephone in his hand.

I'm only going to look, he told himself.

He had a new telephone. Margaux had brought it on the second day, with a case of gray rubber and a card in a plain envelope that said, in her cramped upright script, All numbers transferred. The old one is in a drawer. He held it now in the amber hush of the palliative wing, under a poster about hand-washing, and listened to the faint hiss of oxygen from the room of the old man across the hall, and thought: Nothing is being done. Nothing is being promised. It is a question of information.

He called Cleveland.

It was past six in the East. He did not have Dr. Voigt's private number, but he had Margaux, and Margaux had never gone to bed in sixteen years. By twenty past three he was speaking to a woman with a dry, tired, perfectly courteous voice, who had been woken in a house in Shaker Heights by a telephone ringing on the nightstand, and who said, after he'd given his name:

"Mr. Draycott. I wondered if I'd hear from you."

"You know who I am."

"I know she signed the contract." A pause. "She told me in January. I want to say at once that she did not seek my advice. But I advised her anyway."

"What did you say?"

"That the ones who are told are the ones who stay." Her voice was neither warm nor cold. "She said she'd think about it. I gather she did."

"Doctor." He found that his hand on the wall had tightened. "I want to ask you what can be done."

"Mr. Draycott—"

"I know what you will say. I have read the literature. I know the stage. I know that the options are limited, and that she declined chemotherapy, and that she is in a condition—" He stopped. "I wish to know whether there is anything. A trial. A new agent. A center in Europe. A liver—I am told there are cases, even in advanced disease, where a transplant—"

"Mr. Draycott."

"I will pay for any of it. All of it. I can have a plane in Portland by morning. I can have a team—"

"Mr. Draycott. Callum."

He fell silent.

"I'd like you to listen for a moment," said Dr. Voigt. She had not raised her voice. It had, if anything, gone gentler. "I have been an oncologist for twenty-six years. I've had a great many people come to me with money. I have had a man offer me a wing of the hospital. I had a woman put a check for a million dollars on my desk and ask me to look the other way." A breath. "I have never once been able to use it. I would like to. It is the thing I would like more than anything in this world. But I can't."

"Then let someone else—"

"By all means." There was a rustle, as of a woman sitting up in bed. "I will make you a deal. I will fly to Portland myself on Friday. I'll bring her scans. We'll convene whoever you wish. The best hepatologist in the country, the best oncologist, the people at Ashbourne's cancer institute, who have a Phase I program she might just be eligible for. You will have a full review. You'll have every number. And on Saturday you will accept what it says."

"I—"

"I'm not asking you to agree now. I'm asking you to tell me, as a matter of honor, that when it's done you will go back into that room and be a man and not a purchasing department."

He stood in the corridor with the telephone against his ear.

A purchasing department. It was so exactly the thing that he was. It had been his entire life. He'd walked through his days with a checkbook in his hand and a belief, as unshakable as a creed, that there was no door that would not open to the correct sum.

"I accept," said Callum.

"Then go and sit by her bed."

"Doctor."

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," said Dr. Voigt. "Wait till Saturday."

…

He told Win in the morning.

He told her the plain truth, because he'd promised, because it was the only thing he had. He sat on the edge of the bed with the bandaged hand folded in the good one and said it all, from the first word: the call, the offer, the Friday meeting. He did not dress it. He did not defend it. When he'd finished she was looking at him in silence, with her gray eyes quite steady, and he waited for the anger.

It did not come.

"Nineteen hours," said Win.

"How did you—"

"Teddy told me. He said you went out at ten past three and didn't come back for forty minutes. And I thought: Well. That's about as long as I'd have given him." She sighed. "I had a bet with myself. I said twenty-four."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She turned her head on the pillow. "I'd have been disappointed in you if you hadn't."

"You would?"

"You are who you are." A smile. "I didn't fall in love with a man who sits."

Love. She had said it so lightly. It slid by in the middle of the sentence like a coin in a stream, and he found that he could not move, and she did not seem to notice. She went on:

"I'll let you do it. The review. I think—" She hesitated. "I think I need to be seen, Callum. By people with all the answers. I think if I don't, you'll lie awake in forty years and wonder what they would have said."

"Forty years."

"It's a figure of speech."

"I know." His voice was not steady. "I'm only— I noticed."

"Don't notice."

"I notice everything."

"Yes," said Win, "that is rather the trouble."

…

By Friday there were eleven of them.

They came in by air, in twos and threes, summoned by Margaux's pale unshakable telephone and the discreet magic of a number with many zeros. A hepatologist from the Mayo, a lean sardonic woman called Raman, who wore her hair in a gray braid and had written the standard textbook. A surgical oncologist from Memorial Sloan Kettering, a heavy courteous man with a faint accent of Lagos and the kindest hands Callum had ever seen. A radiologist from Houston. A palliative specialist from Seattle. A pharmacologist who ran the early-phase trials at Ashbourne's cancer institute, a young brisk bespectacled Scot who said "right, then" at the start of every sentence. A geneticist; a nutritionist; a nurse practitioner; two men from an insurance company who had been asked to come and did not know why.

They filled the conference room on the sixth floor. They put a hundred and four images on a lightbox, and a set of laboratory results on a screen, and they sat round the long table with their pens and their tablets, and the room was quiet with that dense professional quiet of people who were each privately the best in the world.

At the head of the table sat Dr. Voigt.

She had flown from Cleveland on the red-eye. She had not changed. She wore the same gray suit, the same chained glasses, the same new deep crease between her brows; she stood when he came in, and shook his hand with a small dry firm grip, and said "Mr. Draycott," and nothing else. He saw her glance, once, at his bandage. He saw her read it.

They worked for two days.

He was not permitted in the room. This was the rule that Voigt had made, and he'd accepted it. He walked the corridors. He sat in the chapel on the ground floor, a small blue-lit space with a stained-glass window of a cherry tree, and stared at nothing. He ate what Margaux put into his hand. He went back, at hourly intervals, to Win's room, where she lay in the white bed and looked at the ceiling, and was patient, and slightly amused, and slept a great deal.

On the Friday evening she said:

"They've examined me eleven times."

"I know."

"A man with a ring on his finger asked me to describe the color of my stool."

"I'm sorry."

"It's all right. I told him it was a pleasing sort of beige." She was laughing a little, weakly. "But I want to say something. And I want you to be quiet till I'm done."

"Yes."

She was silent a moment, gathering it. Her hand lay on the sheet, thin as a leaf. "You're doing to me," said Win, "what you wished you'd done for Theo."

The corridor outside seemed to go very far away.

"I don't—"

"Let me finish." She did not look at him. She was looking at the window, at the blue of the evening, where the cherry tree stood in bud against the sky. "I watched you in the doorway. I've watched you for three days. And what I see isn't a man trying to save me. It's a boy on a dock who's gone back in. Every time a doctor walks in, I see you go to the edge. I see you think, This time. This time I'll be fast enough. This time I'll go in at second one and not second thirty-eight."

"That's not—"

"It is, though."

He was silent.

It was true. He knew that it was true. It came at him like cold water, from every side, filling the places in him that had been empty a long time. He had not thought of Theo once. He'd thought only of her. He had been so clear that it was for her. And yet, as she spoke, he saw the dock, and himself in a pair of swimming trunks, with a book in his hand, getting up; and the red towel, and the water; and he understood that every call he had made was a stroke toward a child who was already dead.

"Yes," said Callum.

"It isn't wrong."

"No."

"It's the most loving thing a person can do. It's only that I'm not a lake." Her mouth shook. "I'm a woman in a bed. I can't be pulled out. I can only be kept company."

"I know."

"Then you'll accept it?"

"What?"

"Tomorrow. Whatever they say." She turned her head at last and looked at him. Her eyes were clear and brilliant and unafraid. "You'll hear it, and you'll sit down, and you won't make another call."

"I swore it to Voigt."

"Swear it to me."

"I swear," said Callum.

"Say the words."

"I swear that whatever they say tomorrow," he said, slowly, "I'll sit down, and I won't make another call."

"Good." She closed her eyes. "Then it's one week, with conditions. And a trial, if there is one. And if there isn't, we stop. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"Come and lie beside me," said Win. "I'm cold."

He lay on top of the blankets in his shoes, with his arm over her, and listened to her breathe.

…

The verdict came on Saturday at eleven.

He had gone down to the courtyard to wait. He stood under the bare cherry, in the thin cold sun, with his hands in his pockets, and watched the door. He had been standing there forty minutes. A boy on a skateboard had passed on the street. A gull had landed on the wall. He had counted, without wishing to, the number of buds on the lowest branch: thirty-one.

The door opened.

Dr. Voigt came out alone, in her gray suit, with a folder under her arm. She walked across the flagstones to where he stood, slowly, with her head a little bowed. She had taken off her glasses. They hung on their chain against her chest. Her eyes were wet.

He knew at once.

He had known, he thought, from the first telephone call. It was only that his body had needed to be told.

"Tell me," said Callum.

"Shall we sit?"

"No."

She nodded. She opened the folder and then closed it again, and held it against her, as one holds a child. "The panel was unanimous," she said. "I want you to know that I fought it. I argued for four hours. I argued for a thing I knew was impossible, because I wanted you to see that we tried." She drew breath. "Her bilirubin is eight-point-one. The liver is no longer synthesizing clotting factors. Her Child-Pugh score is C, the worst category. Her performance status is three."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means that she is too sick." Her voice was gentle and flat. "Every trial in the country has a floor, a minimum for liver function. We're a long way under it. Even the compassionate-use agents, the ones that are given only when nothing else is left. The pharmacologist from Ashbourne went through the criteria with me, line by line. She cannot enter a single study. A transplant is not an option, because of the metastases. And chemotherapy would—" She stopped. "It would not be a treatment. It would be a poison. It would shorten what she has."

"How long?"

"I won't—"

"I'm not asking you. I swore to her. I'm asking only because you are the one person who may tell me whether it is right to be here."

Voigt looked at him a long time.

"Yes," she said. "It is right to be here. Be here as much as you can."

"Weeks."

"Yes."

"How many?"

She closed her eyes. "Between three and seven."

He did not move.

He stood under the cherry tree, with the sun on his face and the gull on the wall and the thirty-one buds on the bough, and nothing happened. That was the extraordinary thing. He had thought the sky would tilt. He had thought the ground would go. But the courtyard was entirely itself: bright, ordinary, a little cold, smelling of damp stone and last year's leaves. A woman in a lab coat crossed the far end of it with a coffee. Someone laughed behind a window.

He had spent twenty years in rooms where a sum could be turned into a result. He had walked into each of them with the same bright steel confidence. There was no vault he had not opened. No man he could not buy. No machine, no minister, no moment, that would not eventually bend to the weight of what he could put on the table.

He put his hand in his pocket. He took it out.

It was empty.

He looked at it. It was a large, well-made, scarred hand, with a bandage on the heel and a groove across the palm where a lid had rubbed it raw. It had signed contracts worth more than the gross product of several countries. It had held a girl's ankle on a balustrade. It held nothing. It had never in its life been so completely empty, and he stared at it as at a thing that had been handed to him by a stranger.

"Mr. Draycott," said Dr. Voigt.

"Yes."

"I'm very sorry."

"Thank you."

"I would have given anything."

"I know. So would I." He closed the empty hand slowly, and opened it again. "That's what's so strange."

He stood a while longer. Then he turned, without another word, and went into the hospital, and down the long corridor with its poster of hands, past the nurses' station, past the room where the old man lay breathing with the oxygen, to a door on which a sheet of paper said, in marker, PLEASE KNOCK AND WAIT, with a smiley face.

He knocked.

"Come in," said Win.

He went in. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He did not say anything at all. And she looked at his face, and at the empty hand, and understood; and she lifted her arms, and he went into them, and they stayed there a long time, not speaking, with the sun moving slowly across the sheet.