The Night Before

Elspeth

On the fourth of January I telephone a stranger in Ohio and tell her that her daughter is dead.

I do it from the hall at Wickhollow, on the black bakelite instrument, at nine in the evening, standing on the bottom stair with the cord wound round my fingers and the whole old house breathing around me in the dark. Marcus is in the kitchen, mending a rope. Kestrel is upstairs in his mother's room with the door open, asleep, with a rug over his knees and a walnut clock ticking on the dresser; he has been asleep since four. I let him. It is the second day in his life that he has done such a thing in daylight, and he did it with the faint embarrassed haste of a man who has been told he may.

I have the number on the back of a hymnal flyleaf.

Ruth Ashby. Findlay, Ohio.

Tamar wrote it down on Saturday night, from a hospital bed in Poughkeepsie, with a ballpoint in her left hand because her right is in a cast to the elbow. She has a broken pelvis, three cracked ribs, and a concussion. A green Subaru is lying in a ditch off Route 9 with its roof stove in. She was found by a snowplow driver at six forty-five, hanging upside down in her seatbelt, with her phone in her fist and a cat in a carrier on the back seat, which was unharmed. She told the paramedic that her name was Tamar Quinn, and that it was Friday, and that she had a story to file.

She has checked in every twelve hours. She says she will check in every twelve hours until she dies, or until it is over, whichever is first. She says that she has not been this angry since the third grade.

I dial.

It rings.

It rings a long time. I count the rings. Eight. Nine. In the kitchen, Marcus's rope goes still. I think of a little clapboard house at the edge of a town in the middle of a flat country, under a sky I have never seen. I think of a porch.

She keeps a light on.

Eleven. Twelve.

"Hello?"

It is a small voice. Old, and a little hoarse, and wary. It has the flat vowels of the Midwest, and a catch in the throat that is not quite a cough. In the background, I hear a television murmuring.

"Hello," says Ruth Ashby again. "Who's there?"

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes.

…

I had rehearsed.

I'd like to say that. I had gone over it on the stairs, on the stone path to the barn, in the kitchen while Marcus cut bread. I had written it out on a leaf from Kestrel's black pocketbook and burned the leaf in the stove. My name is Elspeth Calder. I was a patient at the same hospital as your daughter. I am so sorry to call you out of the blue. I had it perfectly. I knew where to put the pauses.

"Hello?"

"Mrs. Ashby," I say.

"Yes?"

"My name is Elspeth."

"Elspeth." She tries it. "I don't believe I know an Elspeth."

"No."

"Is it about the church? I told the girl, I can't do Thursdays."

"No, ma'am. It's about Callie."

The television goes on murmuring.

I hear her breathe. It is a single, light, catching breath, in and out. When she speaks again the hoarseness is gone, and her voice has gone small and clear and quite flat, the voice of a woman who has stood a long time at the edge of a high place and has finally been told to look down.

"Callie?"

"Yes."

"Is she..." A pause. "Have you seen her?"

"No, ma'am."

"Oh."

"I'm so sorry."

"Is she coming home?"

"Mrs. Ashby."

"Because I've kept the light on," says Ruth Ashby. "I've kept it on every night. The porch one. The man from the electric company says I'm going to be ruined, but I said, it's one bulb. She'll want to see it from the road." She laughs. It's a dry little sound. "She always was terrible with directions."

I close my eyes.

"She wasn't running away," I say.

"What?"

"She didn't run away. I need you to know that. I need you to hear me." My voice is shaking. "Callie didn't leave you. She never meant to. She was taken, Mrs. Ashby, against her will, to a hospital in New York. Because she found something at her job. She was clever, and brave, and she did the right thing, and they put her away for it."

Silence.

"She wrote a letter," I say. "I've got it. It's in my pocket. It's on a piece of paper from a prescription pad, in pencil, and it's folded in eights. She wrote it in the dark. She says her name is Callie Ashby, and she's twenty-nine, and she's from Findlay. She says that you keep a porch light on."

The silence has changed.

It is a different kind of silence now. It has weight. It has a sound, very faint, like a tide going out; and I realize with a cold shock that she is weeping, with her hand pressed over the mouthpiece, in a house a thousand miles away, so quietly that I can hear only the edge of it.

"She said," I whisper. "She said to tell you she was good at her job."

"She was," says Ruth Ashby, thickly. "She was so good."

"She said—"

"Is she dead?"

I hold the receiver.

I hold it with both hands, against my ear, as though it were something alive. I can see my reflection in the dark pane of the fanlight over the door: a thin pale woman in a borrowed gray dress with a cropped black head and a mouth that is trying not to move.

Tell the truth, I think. Tell it exactly. Tell it once.

"I don't know," I say. "I think so. I think she died in the Quiet Room, twenty months ago, in the same room where they put me. I think they hid her. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know where she is."

…

She doesn't speak for a long time.

I let her. I stand on the bottom stair with the cord round my fingers and I do not say a word. I hear the television go off. I hear a chair creak. I hear, faintly, a clock somewhere in the house in Findlay, a plain kitchen clock with a plain tick, counting the seconds.

"Twenty months," says Ruth Ashby.

"Yes."

"I rang the police every week."

"I'm sure you did."

"They said she was an adult. They said she'd gone off with a man. A boyfriend. I said she didn't have a boyfriend." Her voice trembles. "I said, my Callie wouldn't. She'd have rung."

"She would."

"I said it to the Foundation. I wrote them a letter. A young man rang me up, a very polite young man, and said he was so sorry, they'd had a note from her saying she'd taken a leave." A breath. "He said it was a family matter. He said I wasn't to worry. He said they'd see I was all right."

I close my eyes.

"A man called Mr. Marrow," says Ruth Ashby. "The director himself. He sent a check."

"How much?"

"A thousand dollars."

I stand with my forehead against the cold plaster.

"I never cashed it," she says. "I've still got it. It's in the Bible. I thought: if I cash it, it means I've taken it." She makes a small sound, half a laugh, half a sob. "Isn't that a foolish thing?"

"No, ma'am."

"I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"You're telling me," I say, "because someone ought to hear it."

"Who are you?"

"I'm a woman who got out."

"And is that all?"

"No." I draw a breath. "Mrs. Ashby, tomorrow night, there is going to be a party. In New York. At a hotel, with cameras. Hundreds of people. And a man is going to stand up in front of them, and say what he did. He's going to say it on a live television feed, in his own voice, and the whole world is going to hear it."

"What man?"

"The one who sent you the check."

There is a pause.

"I'd like to watch that," says Ruth Ashby.

"I'll see to it that you can."

"Is there a number?"

"A friend of mine will ring you. Her name is Tamar. She's in the hospital, but she's very stubborn. She'll give you the link."

"I don't have a computer."

"Then she'll find you a television."

"I've got a television," says Ruth Ashby, with sudden dry dignity. "I'm not a savage."

I laugh.

It comes out of me like a crack in a wall. It is high, and wet, and astonished. I put my hand over my mouth and lean back against the stair-rail with the tears running down my face, and on the other end of the line, a thousand miles away, I hear a small gasp that turns, absurdly, into an echoing laugh.

"Oh, dear," says Ruth Ashby. "Oh, dear. I haven't done that in a while."

"Neither have I."

"Elspeth."

"Yes?"

"Thank you for telling me."

"I..."

"No. Listen. I've been waiting twenty months for somebody to tell me something." Her voice is perfectly steady. "Even this. Even this is better. I know where I am now. I know what the thing is. I can stand on it." A pause. "Will you do something for me?"

"Anything."

"When you've done it. When it's over. Will you tell me where she is?"

I swallow.

"I'll find her," I say. "I promise. If it takes the rest of my life."

"That's all right, dear," says Ruth Ashby. "I'm not in a hurry."

She hangs up.

I stand with the dead receiver in my hand.

Then, very carefully, as one handles a thing that might break, I put it back in its cradle, and sit down on the bottom stair, and put my head on my knees.

…

He finds me there at ten.

He comes down the stair in his stockinged feet, with the quilt round his shoulders and his hair standing up on one side. He sees me. He stops. For a moment he stands on the landing with his hand on the rail, looking down at me, and I look up, and neither of us says anything.

Then he comes down, and sits on the stair beside me.

He does not put his arm round me. He sits with his shoulder against mine and his long hands hanging between his knees, and after a while he says:

"You rang her."

"Yes."

"I thought you might."

"Is it..." I wipe my face with the back of my wrist. "Was it a mistake?"

"I do not know." He considers. "I think it was a debt."

"Is there a difference?"

"A mistake is something you have done wrong." He looks at the floor. "A debt is something you have not yet done right."

"You and your aphorisms."

"I have had thirty-one years to compose them." A faint smile. "It is the only art I have."

I lean my head against his shoulder.

He is warm. He smells of woodsmoke and old wool and, under it, of the clean sharp lemon that has not left his skin in all the weeks I have known him. I feel the slow even rise and fall of his breath. I feel his heartbeat against my arm.

Sixty-one.

It is the number I have been listening for since the first week in the study, when I put two fingers on his wrist. It is his resting rate. It is what a man's heart does when he is at peace.

I count it, and I hold on.

…

At midnight, Miriam arrives.

She comes in a taxi, with a driver who looks afraid of her, and a long black garment bag over one arm, and a leather bag over the other. She is in the camel coat and the cashmere scarf and her gray hair is slicked back from her forehead. She comes into the kitchen like a wind into a room. She looks at the table, at the range, at Marcus in his chair, at Kestrel in a blanket, at me. She says, "Well. It's more primitive than I had hoped."

"You're early," says Kestrel.

"It's a very bad road."

She unbuttons her coat. "I have been in a hospital waiting room for fourteen hours with a young woman who will not stop filing. She has a laptop on her stomach. She has a nurse threatening to confiscate it. I told the nurse I'd have her disbarred."

"You are not a physician."

"I'd have found a way."

She puts the garment bag on the table.

I look at it. I don't know why my heart should begin to beat so fast. It is only a bag: long, black, zipped, with a silver tag on the handle. It lies on the deal table among the cups and the plates of toast, and I look at it, and I know what is in it before she touches the zip.

"Don't," I say.

"Elspeth."

"Don't open it."

"You'll have to see it sometime."

"I know."

"Then see it now."

She draws the zip.

…

It is green.

It is not the green velvet. It is not the ninety-one-dollar thing I bought at a sample sale in a white dress-bag, eight years ago, with the hem taken up by Dennis's wife. It's silk. It is a deep, quiet, bottle-dark green, the color of the underside of a leaf, cut on the bias so that it moves like water when it is lifted. It has long sleeves and a high neck, and a back that goes to the waist and stops. There is no beading. There is no lace. There is nothing at all in the whole length of it but the color and the cut, and a single narrow belt of black.

I stand with my hand at my throat.

"It was made to measure," says Miriam, "from the photographs. A woman in the Garment District. A friend of mine, whose husband I once kept out of jail. She did it in three days and wouldn't take a cent." She lifts it out, on its padded hanger, and holds it up against the light. "I told her the lady was a former client who'd lost a great deal of weight. I didn't say why."

"It's the same color."

"It is."

"As the first one."

"Yes. I thought you would want it."

I touch the silk.

It is cool, and slippery, and heavier than it looks. I run my fingers down it from shoulder to hem, and under my fingertips I feel something that is not cloth: a vague, deep, bodily memory of a flight of marble stairs, and a ballroom, and a man in a mask who held out his hand.

"Why?"

"Because," says Miriam, "the last time you wore green to that hotel, a man took something from you. I thought that you should go back and take it."

I look at her.

She looks at me with her black fierce eyes. And in them, steady as a lamp in a window, I see everything I have been trying to say to myself in the dark.

"I'll need a mask," I say.

"You'll have three."

She unzips the leather bag.

…

We sit up until three.

There are five of us round the deal table, if one counts a walnut clock: Miriam, Kestrel, Marcus, me. We lay it out as an army lays out a campaign. A hotel plan, borrowed from the city. A guest list, the real one, with the fifty-two names that matter ringed in red. A diagram of the ballroom at the Sable Court, drawn from memory on the back of a grocery bill, with a cross for the stage and a cross for the press room and a cross, in the middle of the dance floor, for the table where Conrad Marrow will sit.

Kestrel speaks.

He speaks as I have never heard him: low, level, exact, with his long finger moving over the paper. He tells us the hour at which the quartet will play. The name of the second violinist, who has been paid. The key in which the Little Lantern will be arranged, which is not the key in which it is sung. He tells us the order of the toasts. He tells us that at eleven fifty-two, when the senator rises to unmask, the lights in the ballroom will be lowered for the traditional count to midnight, and that for the duration of one minute, in the dark, three hundred people will be looking in the same direction.

"The stage," says Miriam.

"The stage."

"And Conrad?"

"Will be on it." Kestrel's eyes lift. "Cordelia has put him on the program. Mr. Pryce, Executive Director, to say a few words. He will be seated at the head table, in the first row, at the edge of the light."

"And you?"

"I shall be at his elbow. As his physician."

"And I," I say, "will come up behind."

Silence.

They look at me.

"I've been thinking," I say. "I've been thinking about what Ambrose said. About how the key works. It isn't enough to hear the tune. It needs the phrase. It needs the voice that taught it." I draw a breath. "He needs to hear me say it. Not a recording. Not a tube in a wall. Me. Close enough to feel the breath."

"Elspeth," says Kestrel.

"I know."

"It is nine feet of open floor. Under three chandeliers. In a room of three hundred."

"I know."

"If he looks round—"

"He won't."

"You cannot know that."

"I can," I say. "I lived with him for seven years. He has never once looked round at a sound he wanted to hear."

He is silent.

Miriam is silent. Marcus, in his corner, has stopped mending his rope.

And I understand, with the clear cold knowledge that comes only in the small hours, that I am the only person at this table who has ever been truly afraid of the man I am talking about; and the only one who is not afraid of him now.

"I'll wear the green," I say. "I'll wear the silver mask. And I will walk up to him in the dark, in front of everyone he has ever lied to, and I will whisper two words in his ear."

"Which two?"

"You know which."

…

At half past three, I go outside.

The snow has stopped. The sky is clear. Over the roof of the barn, over the black line of the hills, the stars are enormous: they hang in the cold like lamps, thick as sugar, crowding to the edge of the world. I stand in the yard in my borrowed coat with the frozen snow squeaking under my boots and my breath going up in a long white plume.

The stars are very fine.

I tilt back my head.

I have not looked at the sky since the fourteenth of October. I realize that, standing there. For eleven weeks I have lived under ceilings and plaster and glass, under painted branches and pressed tin; I have not once seen the whole night. And it is here, now, all of it, vast and cold and ordinary and perfectly clear.

I find the Plough.

I find the Pole Star. I find Orion, on his side, chasing the Pleiades over the barn.

It was a clear night, you know.

"Dennis," I say, aloud.

My voice sounds small.

"I'm going to do it tomorrow. I wanted you to know." I press my mitten to my mouth. "I don't think it will bring you back. I don't think anything will. I know what you'd say. You'd say a number's a number. You'd say don't make it personal."

The wind stirs.

"I'm making it personal."

I wait. Nothing answers. A last scrap of snow slides off the barn roof and falls with a soft thump.

"Callie, too," I say. "And Bridget. And Rosalind, whom I never met. And a woman in Findlay with a porch light." I draw a breath. "I'm going to take it all. Every last cent. And I'm going to make them pay it to the penny."

And somewhere under the stars, in a mill of silver, there is a faint, sweet, impossible sound like a spoon on glass.

I turn my head.

It is the clock.

It is on the kitchen windowsill, where Marcus has put it, with the light behind it. I can see it through the glass, a small dark shape on the sill with a gleam on its brass face. It is ticking. And at half past three, on the fifth of January, in a house on a hill in the dark, it strikes the half-hour, a single bright note.

No tune. No song.

Just a note, hanging in the cold air above the snow.

I count it.

One.

I go in.