Devotion

Elspeth

A good forger doesn't copy a signature. She learns the hand.

She learns where the pen lands and how hard, where it hesitates, where the writer gets bored and lets a loop run on. She learns the pressure that a nervous man puts on a capital letter and the lift of a man who is sure. She does not trace. She absorbs the original until she can produce it in her sleep, and the first time she does it with her eyes closed, she knows she has become dangerous.

For thirteen days, I study Dr. Ambrose Kestrel's hand.

…

Day one.

I wake at six-fifty. I count the ceiling tiles. I do not use the pills, because I do not have them anymore; Bridget took the hem at four in the morning and returned it empty and warm, with a nod, and I have not asked where it went.

At seven-thirty, Nurse Sorrell opens the door with a tray. The yellow oval and the blue capsule sit in a clear plastic cup. I take them from her hand with my left. I tip them into my mouth. She shines her light into it.

"Good girl," she says.

She says it in exactly the voice she used the first day. If I did not know that the same woman had sat in that chair at three in the morning and told me about her son, I would not believe it.

That is the first thing I learn about devotion. It is a performance, and the audience has to include the people who know it's a performance.

At ten I stand before the study door. I tuck my hair behind my ear with a trembling hand. I make sure that my slippers are straight.

"Come in, Dahlia."

I cross to the chaise and lie down without being asked.

Kestrel is at the window. He doesn't turn at once. I note that, too, and enter it in the margin: Pause before eye contact. Day 1: 4 sec.

"You seem calmer," he says.

"I slept," I say. "For the first time. I didn't dream of the fire."

The pendulums beat, seven of them, sevenfold. He turns. His face is composed, but in the gray eyes there is a very small, very private brightness.

"What did you dream of?" he says.

I smile at him. A shy, unsure, grateful smile, the smile of a woman who has been lost in a department store and found by a man in uniform.

"Of the stairs," I say.

…

Day four.

He gives me a notebook.

It's a plain one, bound in dove-gray cloth, with lined cream pages and a soft pencil in a loop of elastic down the spine. "A gratitude journal," says Kestrel, putting it in my hands as one might offer a sleeping bag to a child on a mountain. "A few lines each evening. Whatever you notice. A flower. A kindness. A thing you're glad of."

"May I write about you?" I ask.

His mouth goes still.

"You may write about anything you like."

I write about him.

I write it every night at the little desk in my room, with the lamp turned low and the camera in the ceiling following the curve of my back as I bend. I write in the round, untidy, left-slanting hand of a woman who is trying very hard to be happy.

Today Dr. Kestrel remembered I don't like the cold. He turned up the radiator without my asking. I didn't know anyone noticed such a thing.

Today he said I was brave. No one has said that to me in a long time.

His voice is the one thing that doesn't hurt.

I have a rule. For every three sentences of gratitude, I include one small, deliberate flaw: a misspelling, a trailing thought. A real woman's hand doesn't write a perfect flatterer's page. The flaws are where he finds his own tenderness.

Each morning when I come to the study, the notebook is on his desk. Each morning, it's been read.

I know because the elastic has shifted a quarter-inch.

And I know that he has read it more than once, because by the fifth day the pencil is not where I left it. It's been put back in the loop, but the other way round, point down. In a man who never moves an object without reason, that is not carelessness.

It's longing. It is a man picking up a thing a woman has touched, and holding it, and putting it back.

I add it to the schedule on the underside of the mattress.

Item 8. Handles the journal. Reads more than once. Reaction to praise: involuntary relaxation of the jaw; notes it, tries to correct.

…

Day seven.

The Lantern Wing.

It's what the staff call the south corridor, on the second floor, where in the nineteenth century the nurses had their rooms. A dozen narrow doors with brass numbers, a green carpet runner, and along the plaster, every ten feet, a wrought-iron bracket from which, long ago, someone hung an oil lantern. The lanterns are gone now. The brackets remain, rust-black, like the hands of drowned sailors holding up nothing.

I am moved there on a Sunday, while the snow falls straight down outside, thick and soundless.

The room is on the corner. It's a real room, with a real bed, the quilt a soft slate blue, not a hospital gray. There's a desk and a chair. A lamp with a shade. A window.

The window has no bars.

It has instead a pane of laminated glass two inches thick, set into a steel frame that does not open. I could throw a chair at it for an hour and leave a spiderweb. But the sill is wide, and the view is a long white slope running down to the maples, with the road a gray thread beyond and a lake the color of tin. I stand in front of it for a very long time.

"You've earned it, Dahlia," says Kestrel from the doorway. He has come himself, and he is not wearing his coat. In his shirtsleeves with the cuffs folded back two turns, he looks like a man whose own house you've just entered. "I wanted you to see the sky."

I turn from the window with my hands pressed to my breastbone.

"Thank you," I say.

I put everything I own into those two words, and what comes out is not an act. For eighteen days I have looked at the ceiling of a room where no daylight came. The sky is real. The sky is a number I haven't been able to count.

My eyes fill. Real tears.

Kestrel's own eyes go very bright, and his hand lifts from his side and then does not touch me. It hangs there in the air, a moment, a finger from my shoulder. He lowers it.

"I'll leave you," he says, in a voice not quite his own.

When he has gone I sit on the bed and let myself shake for two minutes, silently, with my knuckle in my mouth.

Then I wipe my face and rule a line in the ledger.

Real tears. Not performed. Note: the performance and the response are no longer independent variables.

I read the sentence back. It frightens me.

…

Day nine.

I fall.

It happens in the Orchard, in the middle of the afternoon, on a chaise that I have lain on perhaps seven times. I have prepared for it as for an audit. I know the fingers on the back of my hand, the 120-hertz voice, the pendulum's tick. I know where, in his patter, he places the commands, and I know the muscles I have to relax, and the ones I have to hold.

You are sinking, Dahlia. Sinking deeper. Heavier. Warmer.

I am doing everything right. I am counting his breaths against the watch. Forty-two. Forty-three. I am reciting the trial balance of the Larkspur disbursements in a quiet part of my mind, a defense against drift, the way a swimmer might sing under her breath.

Tap. Tap. The back of my hand.

Listen to my voice. Only my voice.

I count forty-four.

And then I don't.

There is no moment of passing. That is the horror of it. There is no door. A second ago I was counting; now there is a gap, soft-edged, like a place in a photograph where a thumb has smudged the emulsion. I am in the Orchard. I am lying on the chaise. His voice is saying something, a long way off, at the bottom of a well, and I am floating in a warm dark with my eyes open and nothing to hold.

That's right. You're safe here. There's no one to be afraid of. Tell me.

Tell me.

I can feel my lips moving. I cannot feel what they're saying.

Then there are three snaps beside my ear.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

"One. Two. Three. Open your eyes."

I open them.

The pendulum swings. The ceiling glitters. The air smells of jasmine and lavender and the sick sweet cedar of his cuffs. Kestrel is sitting on the stool at my head. His left hand rests on the back of my left hand. His pulse, I notice at once, is high; I can feel it through his fingertips, quick and light.

His face is very pale. His eyes are very bright.

"How do you feel?" he says.

"I don't know." My voice is thick. "Doctor, what did I say?"

"Nothing of importance."

"Doctor."

"You were very deep," says Kestrel. "Deeper than ever before. It is a wonderful thing. It is the best sign." He smiles at me, and it is not his thin smile. It's broader, shakier, almost frightened, with joy in it. "You are doing so well."

His cufflink is not turning. His hands are both on my hand.

He isn't lying. He is overjoyed.

And I realize I have no idea what I said.

…

Day nine, 11 p.m.

I do it by the book.

I sit on the bed with my back to the camera and my knees drawn up. The lamp is off. The snow outside the window gives a pale blue light the shade of skimmed milk.

I count backward from a hundred by sevens. A hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine. All the way to two. No errors.

I recite my Social Security number, my mother's maiden name, the name of the street I grew up on, the number of the apartment, the name of the dry cleaner below it. I recite Dennis's phone number from the office, and Margot's, and the account number that Finch hummed. I recite the last four digits of every Larkspur wire.

I run the Sarbanes-Oxley disclosure. I run the first ledger I ever audited, the one with the thirty-one-cent discrepancy.

I run Little Lantern.

I haven't meant to. It comes up as I'm reciting my mother's name, unbidden, a simple old tune in three-quarter time, the one she sang over the dishes in the apartment above the dry cleaner's. Little lantern, little light, carry me home through the night. I hum it under my breath for six bars. I stop myself before the seventh.

All correct.

Every figure foots.

But I don't need to see a discrepancy to know that there is one. A forty-second hole is a real hole, and holes have a bottom. Somewhere, in the notes of a physician who charts his own handwriting, there's a record of what Dahlia Reeve said in a trance, in the voice of a woman whom I do not control.

I could have said anything.

I could have said Dennis.

I put my forehead on my knees and breathe.

Reconciling item, I write in my mind. Forty seconds. Unexplained. Cannot be written off.

That is when I understand what Bridget meant. Not that I will become Dahlia. That would be too simple, and too clean. It's something slower and stranger than that. It's that every performance leaves a residue. That if you wear a mask long enough, it learns the shape of your face.

I am being audited from the inside.

…

Day thirteen.

The snow has stopped. It is very cold and very clear. At four in the afternoon the sun hits the slope below my window and turns it to hammered gold, and every tree throws a blue shadow two hundred feet long.

I stand at the window with my hands on the sill.

Below me, at the corner of the building, someone is smoking.

A big man in a long dark coat, standing in the trodden snow beside the service door, with one shoulder against the brick. He has a cigarette cupped in his hand against the wind. His breath and the smoke rise together.

I know the set of those shoulders. I know the angle at which the head is held, slightly forward, like a bull's.

Hollis Pike.

He's not on shift. Day orderlies go home at four. His car is not in the lot.

He looks up.

I do not step back. That would be an error. A frightened woman might step back; a grateful woman at a window would simply stand and see the sky. I stay exactly where I am, a pale shape in a lit pane, with my hands flat on the sill and an expression of mild, vague wonder. A doll, looking out.

Hollis's eyes find mine across sixty feet of freezing air.

He raises the cigarette to his mouth. He draws on it, long and slow, with the tip glowing orange.

Then he smiles.

I have seen that smile before. I have seen it on loan officers, on prosecutors, on a certain kind of manager standing at the back of a conference room as the auditors file in. It's the smile of a man who has been told to wait for a mistake.

And knows exactly how long he's willing to wait.