The Ghost in the Doorway

Elspeth

I dress for him with great care.

I choose the gray wool dress that Bridget brought me from the laundry, the one that makes me look younger and thinner than I am. I pin my hair, which has grown two inches since November, in a low knot at the nape, so that the honey-brown roots show like a seam of ore at the part. A sensible woman would hide them. Dahlia Reeve would never think to.

I sit on the edge of the bed in the Lantern Wing with my hands in my lap and my slippers side by side on the rug, and for forty minutes I become the most defenseless person in the building.

It's an act of pure construction. I take the thing I am and subtract from it, item by item, as I'd strip a balance sheet to the bone before an audit. The sharpness around the eyes. The set of the shoulders. The habit of looking at a room as if I were pricing it. I take away the arithmetic, and the anger, and the left hand that taps. What is left looks very small and very kind and entirely harmless.

I have never been so frightened of a role.

At ten-forty, a car goes up the drive. I hear it before I see it, the crunch of tires on snow, the soft purr of a good engine. From my window I watch a black Mercedes pull up in front of the main steps, and a driver in a gray coat step out and open the rear door.

A man gets out.

He is tall. He wears a camel overcoat and a gray scarf. He moves with a slight drag of the left foot, like a man who has been told to disguise a limp and has learned only to make it elegant. He stops at the foot of the steps and looks up at the house.

I'm a floor above him and sixty yards off, behind two inches of laminated glass, and I cannot see his face.

I know that walk.

I would know it on a dark street in a city I'd never visited. I know the set of the shoulders and the angle of the neck. I know the way his head tilts, a little, to the left, when he wants a room to think he is listening.

For a moment the glass in front of me is the whole of the world, and the man in the snow is on the other side of it, alive.

Alive.

I knew it. I've known it for six weeks. I have said the word, written it, built a case around it. But there's a difference between knowing a fact and seeing it get out of a car, and I discover that difference now with my forehead against the cold pane and the breath going out of me in a long gray bloom on the glass.

I put my hand flat on the window.

I do not feel grief. I do not feel love, though it would be easier if I did. What I feel is much simpler and older, and it has a color, which is white, and a temperature, which is zero.

I take my hand off the glass. I wipe the print away with my sleeve.

Then I go back to the bed, and I sit, and I wait.

…

They come at eleven.

I hear them in the corridor first, a swell of voices, soft and modulated, in the tone of people who have been told they are visiting a place of healing and are working hard to look moved. Heels on the carpet runner. A woman's laugh, quickly stifled. The rustle of fur.

Then Kestrel's voice, level and deep: "On your right, the Lantern Wing, formerly the nurses' residence. Our more advanced patients are housed here. I must ask you not to speak to them directly."

"Of course, Doctor."

That is the other voice.

The ground drops out from under the room.

It is raspier than it was. They did something to the cords; I had known that. It's deeper in the chest, a notch rougher, with a catch at the top of the register that wasn't there. But it is his, underneath, as a painting is still itself under a coat of varnish. The same warm unhurried cadence. The same faint laugh at the corner of a sentence.

The same man who used to say Els, sing the lantern.

My heart is slow and even. I check, with two fingers, the pulse in my wrist. Seventy-one.

You are Dahlia, I tell myself. You are small. You have no past. You are happy to see visitors.

The door opens.

…

Kestrel comes first. He is in his charcoal suit, with a clean white shirt, and he looks as though he has not slept, and as though no one but I would know it. He does not look at me. He stands to one side of the doorframe with his hands clasped behind him, and I know, from the straight line of his back, that he is more angry than I have ever seen him.

Behind him, two women in fur, and a third in a long wool coat the color of oatmeal. A man with a silver beard and a Rotary pin. A younger man with a camera hung round his neck, whom I mark at once as a photographer from the Foundation's newsletter.

And in front of them, in the doorway, with the light of the corridor behind him, Anders Pryce.

I cannot see his face against the light. I see the outline: the shoulders, the set of the head. I see his hand on the frame, long fingers splayed, the left. The right is in his coat pocket.

"And here," says Kestrel, "is one of our residents. Miss Reeve."

I rise.

I do it as Dahlia would. Hesitant, a little clumsy, as if unsure of the protocol. I fold my hands in front of me. I lower my eyes and look at the floor between my slippers, and at the toes of a pair of expensive English shoes that have stopped on the threshold.

"Miss Reeve," says Anders Pryce.

He steps into the room.

And I see his face.

…

Seoul has done a remarkable thing.

It's a handsome face. I'll say that, because an auditor says what is true. The cheekbones are higher and finer than the ones I knew; the nose is narrower, the line of it straight as a ruler. The chin is full and smooth where it was cleft. The skin has a faint polished tightness around the eyes and temples, like fruit in a bowl. The hair has been cut shorter and dyed a lighter shade, the brown of wet sand.

It's a stranger's face. A pleasant, handsome, cosmetic stranger.

Except for the eyes.

Surgeons can reshape bone and lift a lid. They can't change the iris, or the way light sits in it. They can't alter the angle at which a certain pair of eyes slides away from yours at the moment of a lie. These are the same warm brown eyes, the same long lashes, the same faint crinkle at the outer corner that used to make a hundred donors forget their names.

He looks at me, and for a long, still second, I do not breathe.

He doesn't know.

I see it. I see the instant of appraisal and the instant after. He is looking at a thin gray woman with dyed black hair and a bowed head, who is plainly, utterly without recognition, and I see the muscle at the side of his mouth relax.

Relief.

It is so naked, and so brief, that I would have missed it if I had not spent seven years learning his face by lamplight.

"Such a pleasure," he says, to the room. He gives the smile that has opened a hundred wallets. "Miss Reeve, I'm Anders. Anders Pryce. I'm with the Foundation. I'm told you're making wonderful progress."

"Thank you," I whisper.

"What do you do here all day, Miss Reeve? How do you spend your time?"

It's the sort of question you ask a child. He asks it kindly, with his head tilted to the left. Behind him, one of the women makes a small sentimental noise.

"I count," I say.

"Do you?"

"Yes. I don't know why. It makes me feel..." I search for a word. "Safe. The tiles on the ceiling. The stairs. I counted fourteen steps, once, from the bed to the window."

There is a very small silence.

"What a remarkable thing," says Anders Pryce. "Counting."

He walks, slowly, round the room. He is a donor. This is a tour. He looks at the quilt, the desk, the lamp with the shade. He runs a finger along the windowsill, and glances out at the long white slope. His right hand has stayed in the pocket of his overcoat, and I watch the pocket without looking at it, a bulge of camel wool, still.

"You know, I've always liked numbers myself," he says, to the window. "I had a wife who was good with them."

Kestrel doesn't move.

"Did you?" I say, in a small voice. "Where is she?"

"Dead."

He says it lightly, almost with relish. A boy dropping a pebble down a well.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"No, no. It was years ago." He turns. In the pale light from the window, I can see that he is smiling. "She used to say that numbers never lie."

Here it comes.

I have time to think that. I have time to feel, in a long, clear second, the whole machinery of it fall into place: the visit, the number on the door, the little lecture about wives. He has not come to see a patient. He has come to set a snare.

"Isn't that so, Els?"

…

The room stops.

It is not a figure of speech. The air in it goes still, and the voices in the corridor die, and the dust in the shaft of window light seems to hang motionless over the quilt. I hear a clock somewhere strike the quarter.

He says it softly. He says it in a warm, rough, smoke-cured voice that is not his own, that is a good ten years older, with a catch of cigarettes in it and a rumble of affection.

He is imitating Dennis.

He has the cadence exactly. He has the little lift on the last word, the paternal tilt of the head. He has the way Dennis said Els, as though it were a private joke between the two of them. It is a perfect piece of mimicry, and I think, with a distant, icy admiration: he practiced it.

My face does not move.

I am looking at his lapel. I am looking at a small smudge of lint on the camel wool, just beside the third button. I count its fibers. There are eleven.

"Els?" I say.

The word comes out in a tone of faint, polite bewilderment.

"I'm sorry... who's Els?"

"A nickname," says Anders. "Of a sort."

"For whom?"

"A friend."

"Is it someone I know?" I look up at him, at last, with wide, hesitant, trusting eyes. "I don't think I know anyone called that. Is it short for something? Elizabeth? Elinor?" I frown, searching, like a woman trying to recall a dream. "I knew a nurse named Ellen once. When I was little."

He is watching me.

I have never been watched so carefully in my life. He is looking at my pupils, my mouth, my throat, the rise and fall of my chest. He is looking at my hands.

And my hands.

Oh, God.

My left hand has begun to move.

I can feel it. Down by my thigh, hidden in the fold of the gray wool, my index finger and middle finger and ring finger are lifting, one after another, and falling against the cloth. I did not tell them to. It's a rhythm so deep in the muscle that it has bypassed my intent. Three beats. Three beats. A tiny, regular pulse, like a heart that has found its own tempo.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

His own. The Marrow tell. If he looks down, if he catches it, if he sees his hand in mine...

There is a whole second in which I do nothing.

Then I do the only thing I can.

I let the three-beat run out into the longer pattern. I add a fourth finger, and a fifth. I take the little stumble and make it into the habit that I have kept since November, the one I did on the bedsheet on the sixth morning, the one Kestrel has seen a dozen times. One-two-three-four-five, five-four-three-two-one. The long run up the hand and back. A counting tic. A patient's ritual.

My fingers move faster. I stare at the lint on his lapel and I let my lip tremble.

Anders's eyes drop.

They go to my hand, where it moves against the wool. They watch it, flickering, up and down. I hold my breath.

"She does that," says Kestrel from the door.

His voice is flat as a table.

"A cataloguing behavior. Common in dissociative patients who have lost an anchor in time. She counts. The hands do it automatically. It soothes her."

"Ah," says Anders.

He studies the fingers a moment longer. He studies my face. Then he straightens and steps back, and his smile resettles itself on his face like a bird on a branch.

"Poor thing," he says to the room. "She was a bright girl, I'm told."

"She still is," says Kestrel. "It is simply the illness."

…

The tour moves on. The women make their small noises of tenderness and pity and press the arm of the man with the Rotary pin; the photographer takes a picture of me from the doorway, with a flash, while I cower on cue. Someone says so brave. Someone says what a privilege. They go out in a rustle of fur and scent, into the corridor, down the stair.

I stand in the middle of the room and listen to them go.

I keep standing for a count of ninety. Then, because there is a camera in the ceiling and a man in a charcoal suit who is almost certainly watching me from a monitor, I sit down on the bed and put my hands over my face and make a show of weeping.

It is not hard. My whole body is shaking. The tears are real. They come up out of some low place in me that I have not touched in six weeks, and they are not for Dahlia.

They are for a boy in a kitchen who could not sleep.

I take my hands away from my eyes after a while and stare at the carpet.

The door opens.

I don't look up. I think it's Kestrel. I think it's Bridget. I keep my head bowed and my face blank and wait for the voice.

"I left my glove," says Anders Pryce.

…

He is alone.

He closes the door behind him. I hear the latch, and the stillness that follows, and I know that Kestrel's cameras are on and that someone is watching and that none of that matters. The man in front of me has taken two steps into the room and is standing quite still, with his right hand out of his pocket, now, holding a pair of gray leather gloves. I can see the hand. The signet ring is not on it. Instead, around the base of the fourth finger there is a band of pale skin, a quarter-inch wide, that has seen no sun.

He crosses the room. He lowers himself, slowly, onto one knee in front of the bed. His coat spreads round him on the rug like a cape.

He looks up into my face.

"I know you can't hear me," says Conrad.

His voice is very low, almost a breath. It is not the voice of Anders Pryce. It's the one he used in the dark, in the first year, in the apartment on Seventy-First.

"They say you don't remember. Kestrel says you've gone. It's a mercy, he says. I wanted to see for myself." He laughs, a short broken sound. "Look at you. They've dyed your hair. You always hated it when anyone touched your hair."

I look back at him with wide, glazed, uncomprehending eyes. I do not blink.

"I never wanted this," says Conrad. "You have to believe me, Els, I never... it got so far. It got so far ahead of me. Warren had it all in order before I..." He stops. His throat works. "I only wanted you to be quiet. I wanted it to stop. And it's just gone on and on."

His hand lifts. It hovers over my knee. It does not touch me.

"There's a song," he says.

My heart is a stone.

"I can't sleep," says Conrad. "I haven't slept since... I can't. I lie there, and I think, if I could just hear it once. Just once. I've tried to hum it. I can't get it right. I get as far as the second line and it goes." His eyes are bright. "Little lantern, little..."

He hums it.

Eleven notes. Soft and flat and halting, a bad copy, like a photograph of a photograph. But recognizable. Unmistakable. Three-quarter time. The tender fall of the third bar that my mother used to put, as if she were laying a hand on a child's hair.

He stops at the second line, as he said.

Then he waits.

He waits, with his face turned up to me and his brown eyes naked, and I understand in the stillness exactly what he is doing. It is the last test, and the most terrible. It is not a trick or a snare. It is a man asking, without hope, with all the hope in the world, whether the only person who ever sang it for him can still hear.

The room is perfectly silent.

I look at him, from the bottom of a very deep lake, and I do not blink, and I do not breathe, and in the most extraordinary effort of my life I allow my face to fill with simple, dim, impersonal pity.

"That's pretty," I say.

My voice is soft and childlike.

"What is it?"

Something in his face goes out.

It happens slowly. It's like watching a candle gutter in a draft. The hope drains from the eyes, and what is left behind is dull, and tired, and unsurprised. He closes his lids. He opens them.

"Nothing," says Conrad. "A song my wife used to sing."

"Is she the one who's dead?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry," I whisper.

"Yes," he says. "So am I."

He rises. His knee cracks. He turns away from me, pulling on his gloves, finger by finger, and I watch the back of his head, the new light hair, the elegant stranger's neck. At the door he stops, with his hand on the latch.

"Take care of yourself, Miss Reeve."

"Thank you, Mr. Pryce."

The door opens. It shuts.

I sit on the bed. For a very long time I don't move at all.

Then I look down at my left hand, where it lies on the quilt, and I see that it has gone perfectly still. It has stopped. The tapping is over.

And on the back of it, just below the knuckle, there is a single tear.

I don't know when I cried.

I watch it a while. Then I lift the hand, very slowly, and I put the tear into my mouth. And I taste the salt of it, and I think, with an absolutely clear and dreadful calm:

He will do anything for the person who sings it.

And now I know that he'd do it again.