Bonus: Patient Twelve

Kestrel

She arrives on a Tuesday in March, in the rain, in the back of a gray sedan, with her hands in her lap and her hair still the color of wheat.

I watch from my study window. It is a quarter past four. The light is dying over the beeches, the gravel drive is running with water, and the seven clocks behind me are all agreeing, for once, to within three seconds, that this is the hour. Hollis gets out first. He opens the rear door with the careful gallantry of a chauffeur. A young woman steps down onto the stones, in a camel coat that is too thin for the weather, and stands there blinking at the house.

She is not frightened. That is the first thing I note.

She looks at Aldenmoor as a surveyor looks at a building. Her eyes go up the face of it, floor by floor, window by window, to the roofline, to the chimneys; I see her lips move. She is counting something. Then she turns her head and says a few words to Hollis, who bends to hear, and she smiles at him, a quick, wry, level smile, the smile of a person who is perfectly willing to be gracious to a man who has been told to be unpleasant.

Callie Ashby, says the file on my desk. Twenty-nine. Single. Junior auditor, Marrow Foundation. Voluntary admission for exhaustion and anxiety. Recommended: six weeks.

I read it a third time.

Voluntary.

It is written in Cordelia's own hand, in the margin, beside a signature in blue ink that reads, in rounded careful capitals, C. A. ASHBY. Beneath it, in the same small upright script: To the East Wing. At once. Ambrose, I rely on you.

I put down the file.

I go to the window again, and she is gone from the drive. The rain is falling on the empty gravel. I stand there for some time with my hands behind my back, listening to the seven clocks, and I think, with the dry exactness that is my profession: this one is going to be a difficulty.

…

I see her first on the Thursday.

It is the standard protocol. Forty-eight hours of observation, a physical, a blood draw, a meeting with the medical director in the green room at the end of the east corridor, with a lamp and a gray chair and a carafe of water. I have done it a hundred times. I know what I will say, and in what order. I know the faces of the people who come in: the white ones, the red ones, the ones that have been crying, the ones that have decided to be brave.

She comes in with her chin up.

She has been given a gray gown and a pair of cloth slippers. Her hair has been cut, I note, to the jaw. It has been dyed, overnight, to a hard glossy black. I do not ask by whom. She sits in the chair opposite mine with her hands on her knees and looks at me, and I look at her, and neither of us blinks.

"Dr. Kestrel," she says.

"Miss Ashby."

"I was told you'd be taller."

"I am sorry to disappoint."

"You haven't." She tilts her head. "You've got a clock on the wall behind you that's four minutes fast, a desk lamp with a frayed cord, and a pen in your breast pocket that you haven't used since you came in. You've been looking at my left hand for the last ten seconds, which is the hand I write with. Is that a technique?"

I say nothing.

"I'm an auditor," says Callie Ashby. "I look at things. It's a bad habit." A small, fierce, humorless smile. "I'd like to know what I'm here for."

"You are here to rest."

"I'm not tired."

"You have been under considerable strain."

"I've been under considerable scrutiny. It's different." She sits forward. "Doctor, I'm going to tell you a story. You can listen to it or not. But I want it on your record that I told you, on the second day, in my own words, in front of a lamp."

"Please."

She tells it.

…

It takes forty minutes.

I will not give it all; I have heard it since, in other voices, and I know it by heart. A transfer in February. Four million one hundred thousand dollars. A shell with a stupid name. A Panamanian vehicle. A bank in George Town. Four digits, nine-two-six-one, which she says aloud in a flat voice and then repeats, as one repeats a telephone number to an operator.

She tells it plainly. She does not weep. She does not plead. She sets the facts in a row on the table between us, one beside another, like cards, and when she has laid out the last, she folds her hands and says:

"That's it. That's the whole of it."

I am sitting very still.

"You find it fantastic," she says.

"I find it coherent."

"Well. That's something."

"Miss Ashby."

"Callie."

"Callie." The name goes oddly across my tongue. "Who have you told?"

"Conrad Marrow."

"Only him?"

"Only him. He told me to keep it quiet. He was so kind about it." She laughs, short and sharp. "He bought me lunch."

I look at the lamp.

It is a green-shaded thing on a brass stand, with a frayed cord. I have had it for nine years. I have used it to put perhaps three hundred patients into a light trance, and I find that I cannot, for the life of me, remember the first sentence of the induction. My mind is perfectly blank.

She is telling the truth, I think.

I know it as I know my own pulse. I have sat across from liars for twenty years. I know the little hitch in the voice, the glance up and to the left, the over-smooth sentence. She has none of them. She is simply a clever, honest, frightened girl telling me exactly what she saw.

And on the other side of my desk, in a buff folder tied with blue tape, lies an instruction from the woman who holds my life in her left hand.

"Doctor?" says Callie.

"Yes."

"Do you believe me?"

I open my mouth.

I have, in the course of my professional life, told a good many lies. I tell them easily. I tell them well. I have said to the families of the dying that it will be quick. I have said to the dying that it has been quick. I have said to a girl in a gray gown, in front of a lamp, a hundred times, you are safe here.

I look at her face.

It is thin, and white, and very young, under the cruel black dye. The eyes are brown, and wide, and perfectly steady. And behind them, in the dimness of the green room, as plain as a print on a plate, I see another face. A pale one. A long-jawed one. With black hair to its waist, and gray eyes, and a mouth that is saying, through a keyhole, in the dark: nothing can hurt you in the glass orchard.

"No," I say.

Her face does not change.

"I think you have had a very trying time," I say. "I think you have been working too hard. I think that in your exhaustion you have mistaken a clerical irregularity for something more sinister." My voice is smooth. "I think that with rest, and quiet, and time, you will see it differently."

"I see."

"I am sorry."

"Don't be." She stands. "It's a good performance. I'd give it a seven."

"Miss Ashby..."

"Out of ten." She smooths the gown. "The pause before No was a second too long."

…

I will skip the weeks.

They are all the same, and I do not like them. There are the sessions, which I conduct to the letter of Cordelia's protocol, in the lamplight, with the watch, and the low voice, and the careful suggestion that her recollection of the Larkspur account is a confabulation. There are her answers, which are clear and dry and unbending. No. I don't think so. You've said that before. I'd like to go to the bathroom. There are the pills, which she cheeks, and the injections, which she takes with a kind of cold resignation, and the meals, which she eats entirely, to the last crumb, with the grim thoroughness of a woman keeping up her strength.

There is the night I come to the door of her room with a lamp.

I do it every night. I have done it for nine years. I walk the east corridor at two in the morning, in my shirtsleeves, with a small brass lantern, and stop at each of the doors, and look through the glass. It is not a duty. It is a vigil. I tell myself that it is part of the method, a matter of professional vigilance. I do not tell myself the other thing.

She is lying on her side with her back to the door.

She is asleep, I think. Her breathing is even. The black hair lies on the pillow in a dark fan. One hand is outflung on the blanket, palm up, the fingers curled. In the lamplight, a hairpin gleams between them.

She is counting, I think. Even in her sleep.

I stand there a long time.

"Rosa," I say.

I do not say it aloud. I say it with my lips, against the cold glass, without breath. It is a thing I have not done since I was ten years old. The name goes out of me like a bubble out of a drowned man's mouth, and hangs in the air of the corridor, and bursts.

She stirs.

Her hand closes on the hairpin.

I turn the lamp down and walk away.

…

"She is a problem," says Cordelia.

It is the twenty-fifth of April. She is sitting in my chair, in the study, with her gloves in her lap, and she has driven up from the Hall without notice, in a car with no driver. The windows are open. The scent of lilac comes in from the garden. Outside, in the long afternoon light, a gardener is raking the drive.

"She is intelligent," I say.

"She is persistent."

"The two are often connected."

"Ambrose." Cordelia looks at me over the tips of her fingers. "I am told that there has been no progress."

"The treatment is slow."

"It has been six weeks."

"It is a delicate case."

"It is a simple case." Her voice is soft. "A girl has found something she should not. She has been told, by two persons she trusts, that she is mistaken. She has been given time to think. In any ordinary person, the thing would have dissolved by now."

"She is not an ordinary person."

"No." Cordelia's mouth thins. "Evidently."

I say nothing.

"I have spoken to Warren," she says. "He is of the opinion that a more thorough approach is required."

I go quite cold.

"What approach?"

"The usual one."

"The Quiet Room."

"The Quiet Room." She says it as one says the name of a servant. "I should like you to prepare the order."

"Cordelia, she has been here six weeks. She is a competent, functioning adult, with no history of psychosis, and a story that, taken at its face, is entirely consistent. If you wish her to forget, the treatment is a matter of months. If you wish her to stop, I should say—"

"I wish her to be quiet."

The word falls into the room like a coin into a well.

I look at her.

I look at the small black figure in the chair, with her cameo and her pearls, and her pale, lined, patient face. She is looking at me with a mild and level eye. I think of a folded page in a safe. I think of a boy in pajamas in a corridor, in the dark, with his hand over his mouth.

She holds the page, I think. She holds it in her left hand.

She has always held it.

"I shall need a week," I say.

"You have three days."

"Cordelia—"

"Three days, Ambrose." She rises. She pulls on her gloves, one finger at a time. "I should so dislike to be obliged to do it myself."

…

I sign it on the twenty-eighth.

I do it at my desk, at six in the evening, in the green light of the lamp, with a Montblanc pen. It is a plain form, in triplicate, on a pale blue paper, with a box at the foot marked Medical Director. I have signed a hundred like it. Transfer to Secure Observation, East Wing, lower corridor. Duration: indefinite. Rationale: acute paranoid ideation, resistant to ordinary therapy. The language is mine. I wrote it myself, in an hour, with great care, and I made it good.

I look at the paper.

At the bottom, in the space for the patient's name, is a typed line. Patient: Ashby, C. A. (No. 12).

Patient Twelve.

I have never numbered them before. It is Warren's idea. He says it is tidier. He says that a name on a form is a thing that can be traced, and a number is not.

I put the nib to the paper.

It trembles. I steady my wrist. I think of a girl's voice, in a green room, saying: I'd give it a seven. I think of a hairpin in a curled hand. I think of a long fine silence, in which, for a space of perhaps eleven seconds, I hold the whole thing in my hand like a stone, and I could drop it.

I sign.

A. Kestrel, M.D.

It is a clean, small, upright hand. It does not shake.

I sit looking at it for some time, and the seven clocks tick, and from the garden comes the scrape of a rake on gravel. And I say, aloud, in the stillness, to nobody:

"Forgive me."

It is the only thing I can think of to say.

…

She dies on the third night.

I am not told at once. I am in the study, at ten, with a glass of whisky and the Satie, and a window open on the dark, when the door opens without a knock, and Hollis comes in. He has his hat in his hand. He stands in the middle of the Persian carpet, very large, very quiet, and looks at the floor.

"Doctor," he says.

"Yes."

"There's been an incident."

I put down the glass.

"The girl. Twelve." He swallows. "It was Mr. Warren's idea. He said, just a mild sedative, just to make her easier. A bit of the chloral. I said, she's small. He said, it's only a spoon." He turns the hat. "She had a bad reaction. Her heart."

"Where is she?"

"Downstairs."

"Alive?"

He doesn't answer.

I am on my feet. I do not remember rising. I stand with my hands flat on the desk, and I hear a voice say, from a long way off, in a perfectly steady tone: "Show me."

…

The Quiet Room is white.

It was white then, too. It has always been white. The bed, the basin, the vaulted ceiling, the little barred window: all milk and lime and clean cold stone. There is a lamp on the floor, turned low. And on the narrow iron cot, under a gray blanket, lies a girl of twenty-nine, quite still, with her hands folded on her breast.

Somebody has arranged them.

It is the first thing I see, and the thing I shall see always. Somebody, Teague, I think, or Sorrell, has laid her out. Her eyes are closed. Her hair has been brushed. The black dye stands out against the pillow like ink, and under it, at the roots, a quarter inch of honey-colored regrowth, which they have not had time to touch.

I stand at the foot of the bed.

I do not touch her. I do not take the pulse. I know. I have known since I saw Hollis's hat. I stand in the doorway of a white room with my hands at my sides and look at the girl on the cot, and I feel, in the center of my chest, a small cold silent thing coming apart, like a plate cracking in a kitchen: a sound so quiet that it is only the silence afterward that tells you.

"She went easy," says Hollis, behind me. "I'll say that."

"Who else knows?"

"Teague. Sorrell."

"The nurse."

"She found her. She's... she's took it hard." A pause. "Mr. Warren says, the usual."

"What is the usual?"

"Death certificate. Natural causes. Cardiac." He clears his throat. "Cremation. Quiet. The family's been told she left on her own."

"Her mother."

"There's a mother?"

I turn my head.

I look at him, then, for the first time since he entered. At the heavy gray face, the pale eyes, the sagging jaw. He looks back, and I see in his expression nothing at all: not malice, not even indifference. He is simply a man who has been given a task and has done it, and is waiting to be told that it is over.

"Yes," I say. "There is a mother."

"Oh."

"She lives in Ohio."

"Oh."

"She will wonder."

Hollis shifts his weight. "Mr. Warren says that's been seen to."

…

I sit with her until dawn.

I send them out. I tell Hollis that I will do the paperwork myself, that I will examine the body, that it is a matter for the medical director. He goes. The door closes. The key turns. And I am alone in the white room, with a lamp on the floor and a dead girl and the sound of my own breath.

I draw up the chair.

It is the stool from the alcove, a small hard three-legged thing. I place it beside the bed, at the head, and sit down, and look at her face. It is very young. It is more peaceful than it was in the green room. The mouth has gone soft. The lines of strain between the brows are smoothed away. In the lamplight she looks, as the dead do, like a child who has been told a story and gone to sleep before the end.

"Callie," I say.

My voice is hoarse.

"I am sorry. I want to say that. I do not know to whom. I do not suppose it matters." I put my hands between my knees. "I should have said yes. In the green room. When you asked. I should have said, yes, I believe you, and I should have opened the door, and put you in my car, and driven you to a police station. I should have done it on the second day."

The lamp hisses.

"I am a coward. I have been one all my life. I was taught it very young, by experts, and I have a gift." A thin, terrible laugh. "I built a hospital in order to be good. I built a garden. I built a room with a glass floor. And when you came to it, you walked in and asked me a plain question, and I told you a lie."

I look at the hand on the blanket.

It is the left. It lies a little open, the fingers slack. And in the creases of the palm, quite small, there is a thin curved line of dried blood.

I take it in mine.

It is cold. It is light. Between the first and second fingers, caught in the web of skin, is a short bent length of wire. A hairpin.

I turn the hand over.

On the inside of the wrist, in faded blue ink, half washed away, there is a row of digits. 5031 7440 9261.

I hold it a long time.

"I will keep it," I say. "I do not know how. I do not know where. But I will not let you be a number."

I do not know what I mean.

I know only that I mean it.

…

I do the paperwork at dawn.

I do it in a steady hand. Cause of death: cardiac arrest. Manner: natural. I sign it. I sign Hollis's form for cremation. I sign a letter, which I do not send, to a woman in Findlay, Ohio, whose name I learned from the file, beginning Dear Mrs. Ashby, it is my melancholy duty. I sign the log in the east corridor. I go upstairs, in the pale early light, to my study, and sit at my desk among the seven clocks, and unlock the second drawer.

I take out a small black book.

It is a plain thing, bound in cloth, with a ribbon. I have kept it for thirty years. It is addressed, on every page, to the same person. I turn to the first blank leaf, and uncap my pen, and for a long time I only look at the paper.

Rosa, I write.

I have killed another one.

I stop.

Outside the window, the day is breaking over the beeches. The sky is the color of a pearl. A thrush is singing in the lilac, and the gardener is raking the drive, and the first light of morning is coming slowly across the carpet, over the desk, over my hands.

I did not do it with a needle, I write. I did it with a pen.

I do not think that makes it better.

I think it makes me exactly what Mother was, and I have spent thirty years telling myself that I was not.

I put down the pen.

I sit with my hands over my face.

And in the long gray silence of the dawn, with the clocks ticking about me, one after another, in the flat dry voices of seven time zones, I make a resolution. It is not a large one. It is not, in any sense, brave. It is merely the kind of thing a man resolves when he has run out of other things.

The next one, I think.

The next one, I shall not sign.

I do not know that she is coming.

I do not know that she will have black hair, and a clear brown gaze, and a pencil in her hem. I do not know that she will walk into my green room in November, and sit in my gray chair, and say in a soft vacant voice, Hello, Doctor, while her left hand taps three times against the cloth of her gown. I do not know that I shall look at her, and see a girl with a hairpin; and see another, further back; and see a third, who had black hair to her waist, standing at the bottom of ten stairs in a white dress, with her hand held out.

I do not know that I shall sit there for a long time, in the lamplight, with my breath stopped.

I know only that I am tired.

I know that it is morning.

I know that somewhere, a long way off, in a flat country under a wide sky, a woman is lying awake in the dark with a porch light burning, waiting for someone to come up the road.

Forgive me, I write, and lay down the pen.