THE REVERSE CONTRACT

She wrote it on the back of a menu.

It was the only paper to hand. Teddy had brought her a laminated card from the palliative wing's kitchen, a thing with a border of pale-blue daisies, offering Oatmeal (Plain or With Brown Sugar), Cream of Wheat, Scrambled Eggs (Soft), Jell-O. On the reverse was a blank white panel meant for the patient to circle her choices in grease pencil. She turned it over on the tray table, and uncapped the Montblanc, and looked at the clean space for a long time.

It was Tuesday. A fortnight had passed since the courtyard. Time in the ward had a peculiar texture, thick and unhurried, like honey poured slowly from a spoon; the days did not so much pass as pool. She had learned the order of it. Six-thirty, the light on the cherry, which was now in full soft pink bloom and shedding petals on the flagstones in drifts. Seven, the pump and the nurse. Nine, Nell, with her basket, and a flask of something that smelled of ginger. Eleven, Josie, who had come back on the eighth in a taxi from the airport with four suitcases and a battered guitar and had refused to leave. Noon, soup. One, the long gold slow stretch of afternoon in which she slept.

And through all of it, at the edge of her vision, always, in the green vinyl chair: a tall, thin, unshaven man in a gray sweater.

He had kept his word. He sat. It was an astonishing thing to watch. He sat as other men run marathons. He sat with the discipline of an ascetic, in a body that seemed designed for motion, with his hands lying open on his thighs; and when the old impulse came upon him, she could see it, a tightening of the shoulder, a flicker in the jaw, the hand beginning to rise toward the telephone, he would breathe once, deeply, and the hand would lie down again like a trained dog.

He had not slept more than three hours a night. He ate what Josie put in front of him, with an air of grave surprise. She had watched him, three days ago, stare at a ham sandwich as if it were a document in a foreign language.

That's enough, she thought now. That's the thing. I have to see to it.

She began to write.

…

She was very careful. She wrote it in her best hand, the small upright capitals of the claims department. She wrote it as she had once written a denial of benefit, in the clear impersonal style of a woman who had learned that nothing is as kind as a precise sentence.

THE CALLAGHAN AGREEMENT

Entered into this 31st day of March between Winifred M. Callaghan ("the Patient") and Callum A. Draycott ("the Host"), who has asked, and been permitted, to remain.

WHEREAS the Host has proved, over the course of an unusually bad winter, a tendency to neglect his own person in favor of the person of another;

AND WHEREAS the Patient, being in a position to observe him at close range, has formed the view that this is unsustainable;

THE PARTIES AGREE AS FOLLOWS:

She stopped. The nib hung over the card. She heard, in the corridor, Josie's voice raised in an argument with a vending machine; she heard the soft click of Teddy's clogs.

She wrote:

1. The Host shall eat. Three meals daily, of which at least one shall not have been selected, ordered, or paid for by him. A sandwich counts. A sandwich counts if it contains ham.

2. The Host shall sleep. Seven hours in twenty-four, horizontal, in a bed. A chair is not a bed. If necessary the Patient will pretend to be asleep, in order that the Host may do the same.

3. The Host shall go outside. One hour per day, in daylight, without a telephone. He shall walk. He shall look at a tree. He may take Josie, who is in need of supervision.

She smiled at that. She was writing faster now. The contract seemed to flow from her hand of its own accord, in the dry bright cadence she had used to such dreadful effect in the autumn; and it was a curious sensation, writing in that voice about this. It was like stepping into an old coat and finding that it fit a different body.

4. The Host shall not fix. No specialists, no consultants, no second opinions, no experimental agents, no aircraft, no purchase of any building, hospital, island, or pharmaceutical concern. He may bring soup.

5. Margaux Teague shall have a day off. The Host shall tell her to take it. She shall not be permitted to check in.

6. The Host shall laugh at least once daily. If he cannot find a reason, the Patient will supply one. (See attached list of puns.)

7. The Host shall tell Josie that she was right.

8. The Host shall not play.

She looked at the last line a good while. It was not the way she wanted it, and she crossed it through and wrote beneath:

8. The Host shall close the house. Not tonight; not for me. But before the end of the year, he shall find some way to let those rooms be empty, and mean it. The Patient does not condemn them. The Patient merely observes that he never found what he was looking for there, and may find it elsewhere.

She read that one over twice. Then she took a breath, and put the pen to the card again, and wrote the last, slowly, in capitals, with a line drawn beneath it.

9. THE HOST SHALL LET THE PATIENT CHOOSE HOW SHE GOES.

No machines against her wish. No further tests. No tubes she hasn't asked for. No heroic anything. When the time comes, the Host shall not call a doctor to ask whether there is something more. He shall instead be in the room. He shall hold her. He shall let her say what she wishes to say, and hear it, and not argue.

This clause is not negotiable.

It is the only one that matters.

She put down the pen.

…

"Well," said Win.

He took the card in both hands.

He read it standing. He had come to the bed at her bidding, and she had said "Read," and put it into his hand, and he had stood in the soft gray light of the morning with his head bent, and read. She watched his face. She saw his lips move at the first clause. She saw one corner of his mouth lift at the second, and again at the third, and heard, at the fifth, a small stifled sound that might have been a laugh. At the sixth he glanced at her sharply. At the seventh he said "Josie," in a faintly resigned tone.

At the eighth he paused.

At the ninth he did not move at all.

She had thought a great deal about how it would be. She'd thought he might argue, as he'd argued on the Saturday, in the courtyard. She had thought he might refuse. She had expected, she supposed, some of the old fire: the voice going level, the thumb finding the lid. She was prepared for it, and for the long gentle patient business of talking him down.

He stood perfectly still.

The card shook slightly in his hands. It was a slight movement, a fine quiver, no more than the vibration of a violin string when a distant door is closed. She watched it travel up his forearms and into his shoulders. She watched him draw a breath that was not quite a breath, and hold it, and let it go.

"You've written no exceptions," he said.

"None."

"No provision for—"

"No."

"What if I—" He stopped. "What if, at the end, I cannot do it?"

"Then you'll do it badly. And I'll forgive you." Her voice was very gentle. "I only want you in the room. I don't need you to be good at it. I'd rather you were terrible and there."

"I have never been terrible at anything."

"I know. It's your great weakness."

He laughed. It broke in the middle. He put the card down on the tray, face up, on the daisies, and turned away, and walked three steps to the window, and stood with his back to her and his forehead against the glass.

She did not speak. She waited. Out in the courtyard the wind took a drift of petals off the flagstones and sent them spinning, a small pale whirlwind, round and round the base of the tree.

"Where do I sign?" said Callum.

…

He signed with her pen.

She held it out and he took it. He took it as a man takes something hot. He leaned over the tray, and found the line she had ruled, and bent his head. His hand came down on the card. It was the right hand, the healed one, with its pink new scar across the heel; and it shook so badly that the nib skidded, and a long ugly blot ran out across the daisies.

"I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

"I can't—"

"Here." She put her thin hand over his. It was dry, and weightless, and utterly steady. "Together."

She guided it. Slowly, a stroke at a time, she drew his hand down the line, and the ink ran from the nib in a thin black thread, and it was not his signature at all, not the quick angular C. D. that had gone under a thousand million-dollar agreements. It was the signature of a child. It wobbled. It slanted across the card like a man on a gangplank. When it was done there was a long silence in the room, in which the only sound was the tick of the monitor and the faint rattle of a trolley in the hall.

Callum A. Draycott.

Below it, in her own small hand, she wrote W. M. Callaghan, and dated it, and blotted it with a corner of the sheet.

"There," said Win. "It's binding."

"Is it?"

"I'm an adjuster," she said. "I know a binding instrument when I see one."

She laid the pen aside. She looked up at him. He was standing beside her bed with his hands hanging at his sides and tears running openly down his face, soundless, unhurried, as water runs from a spring. He did not wipe them. He did not seem to know they were there.

"Come here," she said.

"Win."

"Please."

…

She did not know, afterwards, how they came to be in the bed.

It was evening. It was late. The ward had gone amber and still, and Josie had been dismissed with a kiss and a rude word, and Nell had done the rounds with her flask and her small dry smile and said, "I'll be next door," and had meant the room beyond the wall, the empty one, which she had taken for the week with a blanket and a thermos. Teddy had been on the early shift. The night nurse, a stout calm grandmother named Mrs. Ito, had looked at the door of room 312 and the paper sign and said, to nobody, "Bless them," and gone off to attend to Mr. Brandt.

The lamp was off. The window held a square of deep blue, with the black bough of the cherry across it.

He lay on his side, behind her, on top of the blankets, with his arm about her waist. He had taken off his shoes and put them neatly under the chair. He had unbuttoned his collar. He held her very carefully, in the way one holds a vessel that is full to the brim, and she felt his breath at the back of her neck, slow and warm, and the long line of his body against hers, and the thud of his heart.

She turned.

It took a long time. She had little strength, and the lines pulled, and the pump gave an annoyed little chirp. He helped her, with great gentleness, as one helps a person turn a page. When she was facing him she lay and looked at him in the blue light. His eyes were open. They were the color of the sea at dusk.

"I'd like to lead," said Win.

"Yes."

"I'd like to—" She faltered. "It's been such a long time since I did anything. Since I decided anything, I mean. I've been managed. By doctors, by forms, by my own damn pride. I'd like to do one thing."

"Whatever you wish."

"Don't say that."

"Why?"

"Because you'd say it to anyone." She smiled. "Say, I'm here."

"I'm here."

"Good."

She put her hand against his face. She drew it down the line of his throat to the open collar and lay it flat above his heart. He closed his eyes. She felt the pulse knock against her palm, once, twice, a heavy slow knock like someone at a door; and she thought that she would remember that all her life, and laughed softly, because it would not be very long.

There was no hurry in it. There was no game, no silk, no counting, no candle and no clock. There was no dark to be crossed. They were two people in a narrow bed, in a quiet room, with the light of a hospital corridor under the door and a tree in the window; and what passed between them was not the thing that had passed in the cellars and the towers and the dark. It was slower than that. It was almost nothing. She touched his face, his hair, the scar along his forearm, the groove in his palm where the lid had worn it; he touched her temple and her wrist, and the thin hollow of her collarbone, with a reverence that had no fear in it, and no pity either. It was very quiet. It was like a long exhale.

She led. He followed. It was, in every respect that mattered, the opposite of the Blindfold Hour, and she thought, in some distant place, with a rush of tenderness so vast it frightened her: I have been wanting to say this since the night I met you.

She was not afraid. She had never been so unafraid in her life.

…

Later, they lay with her head on his shoulder and his hand moving, slowly, over her hair.

The blue in the window had deepened to black. Somewhere beyond the wall Nell snored softly and stopped. A car passed in the street below, and its lights crossed the ceiling in a slow bright arc and were gone.

"Callum."

"Mm."

"I want to say something."

"Say it."

She was silent a moment. She was gathering words, as she had been doing for a month, from the corners of the cabin and the long nights, and holding them in a heap. She had composed it so often. She had rehearsed it for the sea, and the heron, and the empty chair. And now it was here, and she found that she needed none of it.

"I love you," said Win.

His hand stopped moving.

"And that isn't a term. I'm not saying it because of a clause, or a game, or because I'm dying and I've nothing to lose. I'm saying it because it's true. I've known since the cellar. I've known it since you said, Are you hungry?" Her voice shook. "It isn't a condition, and it isn't a price. It's a fact. It's the only fact I'm certain of. I just wanted you to have it, in the plainest form, in writing, so that no one can ever say that I left without telling you."

He said nothing.

She felt something wet fall on her forehead. It was warm. She lay perfectly still while another followed it, and a third. She did not look up.

"I love you," said Callum.

It came out of him cracked, and raw, and astonished, like a man speaking a language he had just learned. "I've never said it. To anyone. I was not sure that I— I didn't think I had the equipment." He drew breath. "It is the first thing I've said in my life that I didn't calculate."

"Then it's a good one."

"It's the only one."

"That's the same thing."

She laughed. She felt it shake his chest. They lay in the dark, laughing and weeping, two people in a narrow bed, until it faded, and the room was still again, and she heard his heartbeat settle under her ear: slow, strong, a little unsteady, going on.

"Callum," she said, drowsily.

"Yes."

"Take me to the sea."

His hand began to move again in her hair.

"Not the cabin. Not this. Not a window." Her voice was slipping. "I want to be somewhere I can hear it. I want a porch. I want a long gray house with a rocking chair and a bad stove and a view of a headland. I've had such a lot of beds in my life, you see, and I've been very careful to leave this one for last."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Madronas," he said.

"What?"

"They bloom in April. It's a very short time. They blossom, and the whole hillside turns white." His voice caught. "The house is called Saltwick. There's a dock. I bought it in January, in four minutes, on a Tuesday, for a woman who liked water. I never knew how to tell you."

She turned her face into his neck.

"Yes," she said.

"Yes?"

"I said yes to you in a cellar, and I lied." Her words were running together, soft, blurred. "I'm saying it again. It's April next week. I want to see the madronas."

"You shall."

"Promise?"

"I'll try," said Callum. "I will be terrible, and there."

She smiled against his throat. And somewhere between one breath and the next she slept, with her hand open on his chest, in the dark; and for the first time since the night in the library he did not move, or count, or stir, but lay awake until the window turned gray, holding the whole slight sleeping weight of her, and did not look away.