The Second Key

Elspeth

On the last night of the year I do the worst thing I have ever done.

I do not know it at the time. I want that understood. At ten o'clock, when the bulbs go out in the corridor and the white room comes down around me like the inside of an egg, I lie on the cot with my hands at my sides and tell myself that it is a plan. A tactic. A step in an argument that began on the nineteenth of December in the light of a storm lantern, when a man held out his palm and I took it.

A mirror, I had said.

I had meant it. I had meant that I would show him himself. That I would hold up, for once, a clean glass, and make him look.

I had not thought about what is at the back of a mirror.

…

The day was long.

It is hard to explain the days in the white room. They do not pass. They accumulate, like snow, a flake at a time, until one looks up and finds that the whole landscape has been covered. Teague brought me porridge at seven. A silent woman in a gray apron took the tray at eight. At ten, Hollis came and stood at the bottle-glass window for twenty minutes, looking in without expression, as a man looks into an aquarium, and went away.

I did not move.

I sat on the cot with my knees drawn up and the gray blanket round my shoulders and hummed to myself, very softly, the first three bars of "Greensleeves." I let my eyes go glassy. I let a thread of spittle run down my chin. I practiced, over and over, the expression of a girl who has been told that she is bad and believes it.

It is a good expression. I have it by heart now.

At noon, someone slid a book under the door. It was a small blue hymnal, with a ribbon. I opened it. On the flyleaf, in pencil, in a hand I knew, was written a single line.

To-night. Eleven. — A.

I closed the book and sat holding it in both hands.

He is afraid, I thought. He has written it down, and put it under a door, in a building full of enemies. He is a man who has never in his life committed a thing to paper without a second copy, and he has done it for me.

That is what I mean about the worst thing.

…

At five minutes to eleven, the wall opens.

I am ready. I have been ready for an hour. I am lying on the cot in the gray cardigan and the flannel skirt, with my shoes on under the blanket and my face to the wall, and when the scrape comes I am up in one movement and across the floor and into the dark rectangle before the plaster has stopped moving.

He doesn't say anything.

He takes my hand. He leads me down the brick steps by lantern light, the way a man leads a woman down to a cellar to see something he has made, and I follow, counting, and when we reach the fork at sixty-three I say, "Wait."

He waits.

"What is it?"

"Nothing." I look at the east passage, the black round mouth of it, and the faint draft that comes from the far end, smelling of coal and snow. "I wanted to know it was there."

"It is there."

"Yes."

We go west.

…

The Orchard is warm.

He has lit the stove, a small iron thing in the corner that I had not seen before, and the glass walls have fogged a little, so that the dried branches seem to be dissolving in mist. On the low table by the chaise there is a tray. A pot of tea. Two cups. A plate of shortbread, cut in fingers. And on the shelf above the brass clock, between two volumes of Freud, a small walnut case with a pierced brass face.

I stop.

"Marcus left it in the corridor," says Kestrel. "I took the liberty."

"You said it was yours."

"I did." He does not meet my eyes. "I find that I would like it to be."

I cross to it. I put out my hand and touch the case with my fingertips. The walnut is cool. Through the glass window in the base I can see the bright comb of the Swiss movement turning, and the tiny brass pendulum swinging, and I can hear it, thin and clear and quick, over the slow heavy thud of the brass clock beside it.

Tick-tick-tick-tick.

A bird, trapped in a box.

"You wound it."

"Yes." A pause. "It will play at eleven."

I look at my wrist, where there is no watch. I look at the brass clock. The hands say two minutes to.

"Sit," I say.

…

He doesn't sleep.

I knew that. I have read his file, which he gave me himself; I know the dosage of zolpidem, which has not worked since the age of twenty-eight, and the amount of Scotch, which he has stopped counting. I know that on the nights he lies down he lies on his back, rigid, with his hands folded on his breast like a figure on a tomb, and listens to the house tick, until four.

He sits on the chaise with his shoes off and his jacket on the floor, and I sit beside him, and for a while neither of us says anything. He pours the tea. I drink it. It is hot and smoky and tastes of bergamot. He eats a finger of shortbread in four bites, deliberately, as though it were a medical procedure.

At eleven, the little clock strikes.

It begins as a chime: a single bright note, high and clear. Then a pause. Then a trickle of silver that is not a chord but a remembering, the pins of the cylinder plucking the comb one by one, so softly that the first notes seem to come from inside one's own head.

Lit-tle lan-tern.

Lit-tle light.

Kestrel goes still.

I watch him. I watch the long gray face turn, slowly, toward the sound, with the look of a man who has heard his own name spoken in an empty house. His eyes close. His chest rises, and holds.

The tune ends.

In the hush, the stove ticks.

"I have been very tired," he says, very low, "for a long time."

"I know."

"I did not know it could sound like that."

"Like what?"

"Like permission."

…

I take his hand.

I draw him down, as I might draw down a child, until his head lies in my lap on the cream leather with his long legs trailing off the end of the chaise. He is much too tall for it. He doesn't care. He turns his face against my stomach, and I feel him shudder, once, from the crown to the heel, and go loose.

I stroke his hair.

It is thick and cool and faintly oily, smelling of cedar. It is gray at the temples, and at the crown, in the lamplight, I see that there are white threads. He is forty-one years old. He looks, for the first time, like a boy who has been up all night.

I begin to hum.

I do not decide to. It starts low in my chest, a vibration more than a sound, and it comes up my throat in three-four time. I do not give it words. I only let the tune run, the simple falling line of it, up two, down three, up again, as one lets a thread run out through the fingers. I hum it very softly. I hum it slowly. I hum it in the voice I used on a bed in Yonkers, to a doll I had put to bed.

My left hand, on his sleeve, gives one small tap.

I falter. I lift it away, and breathe, and go on.

And under the tune, with the part of my mind that has never in its life been silent, I begin the count.

One. The hum falls. His breath falls with it.

Two. The pendulum swings.

Three. I lay two fingers on the back of his left hand.

Tap. Tap.

His breath catches.

I stop.

I wait. In the glass walls the fog is gathering, thicker, slowly turning to beads on the panes. The little clock ticks. His hand lies open on my knee. I turn it palm up and, very lightly, press my thumb into the center.

He sighs.

It is a long, long sigh, a boy's, and under my hand I feel the whole great structure of him unlock, rib by rib.

Now, I think.

I bend my head to his ear.

"Glass Orchard," I say.

…

I will tell you the mechanism.

I want you to have it exactly, because it is the one thing in this account I am sure of. I read it in his own book, in the margin, in his own small upright hand, in the library at midnight: Phrase + melody. Never one without the other. A conjunction cue. Pair a word with a tune, again and again, while the subject is in the deepest state of ease available, and the two fuse. After a time, either alone is weak, and both together are irresistible.

He built it for Conrad. He built it out of nothing, in a mirrored room, in February, to give a man eight hours of sleep.

I did not build anything.

I borrowed it.

I said the words he had said to Conrad, in the voice he had learned from the tape, to a man who had fallen into the arms of my song; and I paired them with the tune that was his own undoing. I did it again. I did it a third time. And with each repetition I felt him slide a little farther from the hard, bright, watchful surface of himself, down into the warm and silent place he had built for other people and never once entered.

Glass Orchard.

The hum. The tune.

Glass Orchard.

I counted forty-one.

I counted forty-one repetitions, in a voice I could hardly hear, over the course of fifty minutes, in a room warm as a bath, with my hand in the hair of a man who trusted me. And when the count was done, I added a last thing, which was not in the book.

"Ambrose," I said.

"Yes."

His voice was a murmur. A thread of breath.

"When you hear me sing this, you will sleep."

"Yes."

"You will sleep deeply. You will sleep without dreams. You will wake when I tell you to."

"Yes."

"And you will always, always, be able to hear me."

A pause.

"Always," said Kestrel.

I took my hand away from his hair.

I sat with it in my lap and looked at it. It was quite steady. It did not shake. It was the hand of a very good forensic accountant who had just completed an excellent piece of work.

I looked at the sleeping man.

At the long gray face, the soft mouth, the shadows under the closed eyes. The cooling cup beside him. The shortbread. The little clock on the shelf, with its brass pendulum swinging. The look of him: wrung out, unguarded, at peace.

I have taken his insomnia, I thought, and given it back to him as a leash.

…

I do not weep.

I would like to say I do. It would be more fitting. But I have lost the trick of it, somewhere in the last eight weeks, as one loses the trick of whistling; and I sit very straight on the edge of the chaise with my hands pressed between my knees, and my eyes dry as stones, and I let it come.

It is not grief. It is not even guilt. It is the thing underneath them, the cold plain flat knowledge that I have crossed a line, and that on the other side of it I am exactly who I swore I would never be.

I had thought there would be some difference.

I had thought that being right would make it clean.

Dennis, I think. Callie. Bridget.

Nobody asked you either.

I stand up.

I cross the glass floor, and at the far side, where the branches thicken, I lean my forehead against the frosted pane. The glass is cold. I can feel the pulse in my temple beating against it.

It is a mirror, I tell myself. That is all. He asked for a mirror.

Well. Look.

…

At midnight, a distant bell begins.

It comes from the village, thin and clear on the frozen air, and it is answered at once by another from the hill and a third from beyond the lake. They strike twelve, one after another, in a ragged peal; and underneath them, from very far off, I hear a sound like a series of dull claps. Fireworks, in a field. The year turning over.

I look at the man on the chaise.

He lies on his back with one arm flung out. His breathing is slow and deep. A small frown has settled between his brows, and I watch it deepen, and then I see his lips move.

"No," says Kestrel.

I go cold.

"No. Don't go in."

He is still asleep. His eyes move under the lids. His hand has closed on the leather in a fist.

"Don't go in. Mother. There's a needle."

I cross the floor in three steps. I kneel by the chaise, and take his clenched hand in mine, and press my other palm to his cheek.

"Ambrose."

"Rosa."

"It's Elspeth."

"I wasn't supposed to be there," whispers Kestrel. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wasn't supposed to..."

"Sh."

I begin to hum.

The tune is out of me before I think. It slides into the dark of the room like a hand into water, and I feel him hear it, I feel it go down through the layers of him like a stone dropped in a well. His fist uncurls. His face loosens. His breath, which had caught, goes out in a long, long tremor.

"Little lantern," I sing, under my breath. "Little light."

He is quiet.

"Carry me home through the night."

He turns his face into my hand.

"There," I say. "You're all right. You're home."

I kneel there for a long time, with my cheek against his hair.

…

I leave at half past five.

I do it carefully. I have worked out the timing: Teague on his rounds at six, the silent woman at seven, Hollis whenever he pleases. I draw the tartan rug up to Kestrel's chin and lay the little walnut clock where he can see it when he wakes. I write a note on a leaf from his black pocketbook, in my own hand, in block capitals, and lay it on his breast under the pencil. YOU SLEPT. SIX HOURS. I'LL SEE YOU AT NIGHT. I do not sign it.

Then I take the lantern, and go.

The tunnel is colder than it was. My breath hangs in front of me. The red brick drips. I count a hundred and eleven steps in the dark, and at the top I put my shoulder to the pivoting wall, and ease it back, and slip into the white room like a ghost into a house.

The cot is as I left it.

I slide under the blanket, in my clothes, with my shoes on.

I lie there.

At five fifty-eight, the bottle-glass window darkens.

Someone is standing outside it. A bulk, a shadow, a gleam of pale face. I do not open my eyes. I breathe slowly, evenly, with my mouth a little open, as a child breathes who has been sleeping for hours. I let my left hand fall off the edge of the cot, palm up.

The shadow stays for a very long time.

Then it goes.

I lie still until the sound of the footsteps has quite gone. I lie still for another full minute, to be certain.

Then I turn my face into the thin gray pillow and, at last, quite silently, I shake.

…

At seven, the silent woman brings my breakfast.

She sets the tray on the cot and looks, for a moment, at my face. She is a heavy gray woman of fifty with a mole by her lip and a way of never speaking. She has been coming to the Quiet Room for eleven years. She has seen, I think, a good deal.

She puts something into my hand.

It is a folded square of cloth, warm from her apron pocket. I open it. Inside, wrapped in a clean napkin, are two slices of buttered toast, still hot, and a small yellow pat of butter pressed into the shape of a flower.

She turns, and goes, and does not look back.

I eat the toast.

I eat all of it. It is the best thing I have tasted in two months.

Happy New Year, Elspeth, I think.

And out of nowhere, as I sit with the crumbs in my fingers and the pale sun creeping in through the barred window, I remember what I have forgotten: a rough kind voice on a recording, saying You were always the daughter I was too stubborn to have.

I put my face in my hands.

The year has turned.

I have four days.