THE WORST NIGHT

It began with the rain.

It came in from the Pacific on the evening of the sixth of May, a long gray slant of it, driven before a southwest wind, and by nine o'clock it had closed over the island entirely. The mountain vanished. The headland vanished. The sound went from pewter to black, and the madronas, which had been white a fortnight earlier, bowed in the gale and let down their blossom in a slow soaked drift across the lawn. The house shook. The gutters sang. In the sunroom, with the lamp turned low and the windows streaming, the old Zenith was playing the shipping forecast to nobody. Cromarty, Forth, Tyne. Southeast, six to gale eight. Rain. Poor.

She had been quiet all day.

He had noticed it, in the manner of a man who noticed everything and had trained himself not to say so. She'd eaten two spoonfuls of broth at noon and none at six. She had not asked to go to the porch. She lay on her back with her eyes half-closed and her face the color of candle wax, breathing in short careful sips, as one breathes when something inside is not to be disturbed; and twice that afternoon he had seen her hand creep to her right side and press, and lie still.

"Win?"

"Mm."

"Is it bad?"

"It's a little loud," she said, with her eyes shut. "I'll turn it down."

She did not turn it down. It was Nell who did, at seven, with the pump and a quick expert touch; and for an hour the lines went out of Win's forehead and she lay slack, with her lips parted, dozing. He sat in the green chair that he had brought from Portland, by what he did not remember, perhaps by Margaux's art. He held her hand. He watched the watch on the table, in its silver case, going round. Tick, tick, tick. It had become the metronome of his life. He found that he listened to it constantly: in the kitchen, in the garden, in the middle of the night. He did not understand how a man could have lived twenty-two years in a house without it.

At ten past eleven, the pain came back.

…

It did not come as it had come before.

He had seen it, the little pangs, the held breath, the bitten lip; he had seen her count. This was other. It started with a sound. It was a low, thin, involuntary sound, a sort of moan, drawn out of her chest as water is drawn out of a well by a rope; and her eyes flew open, and her whole body drew up on the bed like a bowstring.

"Win."

She did not answer. She had both hands pressed against her right side, under the ribs, and her knees came up, and her head went back against the pillow with the tendons standing out like cords in her throat. Her mouth was open. No breath came out of it. And then it did, a long thin scream, high and cracked, horribly small, which went through the house like a knife through silk.

He was on his knees by the bed. He did not know how.

"Nell!"

She was there already. She had come in her nightgown, with her white hair standing up, and her face under it set and calm. She had the bolus in her hand. "Hold her," she said. "Not the arm. The shoulders."

He held her.

It was the worst thing he had done. It was worse than the dock. He took her by the shoulders, gently, with both hands, and felt through the thin cotton the whole terrible convulsion of her, the muscles rigid, the heart racing like a trapped bird; and he heard her say, between the screams, in a voice he did not know, "Ten— nine— eight— oh God, oh God—"

"Count with me," said Callum. "Win. Count with me."

"I can't—"

"Seven."

"Seven—"

"Six."

"It's not— it won't—" She was sobbing. "Make it stop. Callum. Make it stop—"

Nell pushed the button. She pushed it again. She was working quick and steady with her small brown hands, changing a line, flicking a syringe, speaking in the low flat monotone of a woman at the wheel of a ship in a storm: "That's the second. We'll give it two minutes. We'll give it three. If it doesn't turn, the third." She glanced at him. "It will turn."

It did not turn.

…

At half past midnight the third dose went in.

He knew the numbers because Nell said them aloud. Morphine, hydromorphone, a small clear ampoule of something else with a name he did not catch. She said them as a sailor calls the soundings. Four. Eight. A further two. He knew that the quantities were large. He knew that they would have laid out a man twice her size. He knelt on the floor at the head of the bed, with his arms round her, and felt the pain go through her in waves; and each wave was a little smaller, and a little slower, and the screams were less; and at one in the morning she lay in his arms quite quiet, with her head on his shoulder, and her eyes open, fixed on nothing.

She was breathing in small shallow gasps.

"Is it over?" said Callum.

"It's lessened," said Nell. She was gray in the face. She sat down on the edge of the bed with her hands between her knees, an old woman at the end of a long road. "It hasn't gone. I can't make it go. Not tonight. Any more and I'd stop her breathing." Her voice was steady. "I want you to hear that, Mr. Draycott. I've given her all that I can. It is a thing that happens, near the end. It's called breakthrough. It doesn't always answer."

"There must be something."

"There is. In the morning. A different pump, a different route." She lifted her head. "Tonight, there's you."

"Me."

"Yes." She rose. She laid a hand, briefly, on his shoulder. "I'll be next door. Call if she wants me. But I think—" She hesitated. "I think what she wants is quiet."

She went out. The door closed.

He sat on the floor, on the cold boards, with the woman in his arms and the rain beating on the windows, and listened to her breathe.

…

"Callum."

It was a whisper. It came from a great way off.

"I'm here."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't."

"I— that wasn't— I didn't mean to be so—"

"Win. Please. If you say that to me again I'll go through the wall." He heard his own voice crack. "You do not apologize. You do not apologize for this. Not once. You hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Say it."

"I won't apologize." A breath that was almost a laugh. "You're very fierce."

"I am terrified."

She lay quite still. He felt the thin warm weight of her against his chest. The watch ticked on the table. Tick, tick, tick. Through the window, over the gale, he could hear the sea throwing itself against the rocks at the foot of the garden, and drawing back, and throwing itself again.

"Don't go," said Callum.

It had been in him for weeks. It had been under the clause, and the courtyard, and the card with its blot of ink; it had been in the cellar. It was the thing that was in all things, at the bottom, like water at the bottom of a well. He had not meant to say it. He had promised. It was in the ninth clause, in black and white. The Host shall not argue.

"I can't do it, Win. I don't know how." The words came out of him in a rush, cracked and low, with his mouth against her hair. "I've tried. I have sat in that chair for six weeks and learned what it is to be still. I've held the bowl. I have walked in the garden. I've done everything on your list. And I cannot do the last thing. I cannot see what comes after. I look, and there's nothing. There's no house. There is no room. I don't know how to live without you."

"Callum—"

"I've never learned. You came, and I knew everything, and you were in it, and it was all of it new. I don't know how to be a person who gets up and eats a ham sandwich and walks to the water with nobody to say 'I'll come'." He was weeping now, quite openly. "I cannot be left. I can't. I am not made for it. I had thought that I was, and I wasn't. Don't go."

"I'm not going yet."

"Don't go at all."

"I know."

"Stay."

"I know. I know." She was crying too. He felt it on his collar, warm. "I'd stay if I could. If you could see how badly. There's nothing in the world I'd stay for if I couldn't stay for you."

They were silent.

The wind rose, and dropped, and rose again, and a branch somewhere scraped the roof like a long fingernail. Win moved in his arms, painfully, the way she had in the cellar, and turned her head, until her face was in the hollow of his neck. He felt her breath against his throat. It was very quick. It was very light. He thought: This is the sound of someone who is not sure.

"Callum," said Win.

"Yes."

"I'm going to tell you something."

"Tell me."

"I've never said it. I haven't said it to Josie, or to Nell, or to anyone. I haven't said it to myself." Her voice was a thread. "I've said the opposite so many times that I'd begun to believe it."

He waited.

She drew a long breath. It rattled at the bottom.

"I'm frightened," said Win.

…

It went into him like a blade.

He had not known. That was the cruelty of it; that he had been so certain. He had looked at her in the cold, in the cellar, in the lake, and seen a thing that did not flinch, and had loved it, and built on it, and been saved by it; and she had said it a hundred times, I'm not afraid, and he had believed her, because it was what he needed to be true.

She was afraid the whole time.

It rose in her voice, now, as the tide comes up under a dock, soft, black, enormous, shivering the boards. She was shaking in his arms, a fine quick tremor, like a leaf in a draft. "I'm so frightened. I don't want to die. I never did. I wanted to want it, I wanted to be the sort of person who could go off a cliff with her arms out. But I'm not. I'm not brave. I'm just a girl from Parma Heights who thinks she can do the arithmetic, and the arithmetic doesn't work. It's all black. I can't see the bottom."

"Win."

"It's so dark."

"I'm here."

"I'm scared," she said, and the word broke out of her like a sob. "I'm so scared, Callum, I'm so scared, I'm so—"

He held her.

He held her as he had never held anything. He did not say a word. There were none. He bent over her with his whole body, and he felt the fear come off her in waves, thin, cold, shaking, exactly the thing he'd spent twenty years chasing up and down a house on a cliff, the thing he had paid for, the thing he had made women weep to give him; and it was here. It was here at last, in his arms, in its pure form, real, uncounterfeited, and she was giving it to him, freely, in the dark, with her face against his throat.

And he felt it.

He felt it entirely. Not at one remove. Not as a pale cold echo, a tide that rose a little and drew back. It came into his chest and filled it, and went down through the long bones, and flooded his belly, and his throat, and the roots of his hair. It was the whole of the thing. It was the terror of the lake, the dock, the thirty-eight seconds, and the terror of the room, the bed, the end of everything, all of it together, and it was so large that it had no edges. He felt his heart go hammering like a thing trying to break out. He felt the cold sweat start on his back.

So this is what it is, he thought.

And then, because he was a man who had always looked at what was in front of him, he looked.

It was not the death. That was the thing. He examined it with the fierce slow attention of someone turning over a stone. It was not the fact of her dying, that he could not bear, though God knew that was unbearable. It was not the empty house. It was something smaller, and worse, and far more simple.

It's that I can't share it.

She was afraid, and he was afraid, and they were in the same room, in the same arms, and they could not carry it for each other. Each of them had a fear that belonged to one body alone; and each of them was going to walk into the dark alone, she first and he after, by different doors. The fear itself was not the thing. It was the loneliness of it: that there is no way for two people to be afraid together, to pour the weight from one vessel to another. He had thought he'd been alone since the dock. He had not known what alone was. It was this. It was holding the one person on earth you would die for, and being unable to take one ounce of her terror out of her.

"I can't take it," said Callum. His voice was quite steady. "I can't take it from you."

"I know."

"I'd give anything."

"I know that, too."

"I am so sorry."

"Don't be." She pressed her fingers to his lips. "You're doing it. You are doing it. You're afraid with me."

"I—"

"You shook. I felt it. You're— you're frightened for me." Her eyes opened, in the lamplight, enormous, wet, gray. "Do you know, nobody has ever been frightened with me. In all of it. In the whole year. They've been sorry, they've been kind, they've been brave on my behalf. But nobody's just—been scared. Alongside."

"I am."

"It's the nicest thing anyone has ever done."

He laughed, helplessly. He pressed his forehead to hers.

"I don't have much to offer," said Callum. "I haven't any words. I've nothing that will make it smaller. I have this." He found her hand and laid it on his chest, on the hammering. "That's all. I'm afraid, and I am here."

"That's a lot."

"It isn't."

"It's all there is," said Win.

…

He did not know how long they lay there.

The rain went on. The clock in the hall struck two and three. At some point the pump gave a small click and the line went quiet, and her breathing deepened, and slowed. The terror did not go; it never would. But it changed. It was no longer a thing that rushed at him. It had become a presence in the room, like a third party, large and silent, sitting on the end of the bed; and they lay side by side and looked at it together.

"Callum."

"Yes."

"Say it."

He knew which. It had been six months. It had been a card on a library table, heavy, black, the size of a playing card, with a single word. If at any point in any scenario you wish it to stop. He remembered the weight of it in his fingers, and the feel of the engraving, and the sentence he had said, lightly, to a woman in a gray coat: It's where you go when the water's too much.

She had never used it. She had said she wouldn't. She had stood in a cellar for twenty-four hours with her sleeve in her teeth and the blood running into her mouth and had not said it once.

He understood suddenly that it had never been hers to say.

It was his.

It had always been his word. He had made it for himself, in a bad hour, twenty-two years ago, and handed it to strangers so that someone, once, might say it to him. Take me out. Take me somewhere safe. And now he held it in his mouth like a coin, and knew what it meant, and what it cost, and that it was not a way out at all, but a way in.

"Harbor," said Callum.

He said it very quietly, into the dark, over her head, not as a safe word, not as a signal, but as a man says a name. It was a place. It was the shelter at the end of the water. It was what he had to offer, the only thing, the only title he had ever wished to hold: not lover, not Host, not owner of anything. A place for her to come in.

Let me be it, he said, without saying. Let me be where you come to rest.

She understood. He felt her understand. She lay quite still for the space of three heartbeats, with her cheek against his chest, and then he felt her nod, a small slow movement, once, against the cloth of his shirt.

And the dark in the room, which had been enormous, which had no bottom and no edges, lightened. It did not go. It was not that. But it lightened by exactly one degree, as the sky lightens at the horizon an hour before the sun; and he felt the weight on the end of the bed settle a little, and slide, and become a thing that two people could hold.

On the table, the watch went on ticking. Outside, the rain was easing. A long way off, toward the east, the first thin gray came into the window; and the woman in his arms, with her hand over his heart, slept.