She Never Sleeps First

She Never Sleeps First

Morning in Milton came up under a flat gray fog.

I sat at the dining table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold in my hands. Emily was at the stove with her back to me.

That morning I wasn't looking at her the way a husband looks at his wife. The night before had turned me into something else, and by breakfast I had settled into it. I watched her the way I watch a stranger I plan to use in a book, cold and exact, and I knew what that made me.

I started making a list of her habits. For 11 years I had read every item on it as ordinary care, and now I ran it again and it came out different.

Emily got up exactly 20 minutes before I did. Never late, never once lying in bed past it. She came out of sleep without a sound and cleared away every trace of herself before I opened my eyes.

Every morning she carried her phone into the bathroom. Then the faucet went on all the way. The water ran steady and loud, enough to cover anything smaller than itself, a keyboard or a voice held low.

There was also her purse. In 11 years she had never once let me hold it. Coming out of the supermarket with both hands full, two heavy bags cutting into her fingers, she still kept that small purse pressed against her side. She would take the ache in her wrists before she'd hand it to me for five seconds.

Her kitchen ran in a fixed order. Burner first, then the kettle filled to the line stamped inside it, then the window over the sink cracked two inches whatever the temperature was outside. She wiped the counter down before she cooked instead of after, always left to right, and hung the cloth over the oven bar with the seam turned out. Seven minutes, and in 11 years I had never seen her run it in a different sequence.

I watched her fingers work the knife through a loaf on the board. The blade came down on the wood, tock... tock..., at an even rate.

The radio stayed off. She had cut the loaf end to end, 14 slices laid out in a row along the board, and the two of us had never gone through more than four in a morning. She stacked them on a plate, covered the plate, and put it in the refrigerator.

Who is this woman? Is this the wife I have slept next to and trusted for 20 years, all the way from Albany to here? The hand that works the oil into me every night, is that really about helping me "sleep better"?

I needed to do something with it.

When Emily went out to the back yard for kindling, I went into the bedroom. Her purse sat on the edge of the dresser. I listened for the back door and drew the metal zipper open slowly so the teeth wouldn't make noise.

Nothing in it but the usual things, until my fingers found something hard and cold sitting flat against the bottom.

I took it out.

A glass bottle of oil, dark brown, small enough to close my hand around. No label. No barcode. The metal cap turned on a thread pattern I had never seen on anything sold in a store.

I opened it. Musty herbs and cold mint came up out of the neck, the smell that was on her hands every night, with something sweet and thick sitting under it. I tipped the bottle and put one clear drop on the back of my left hand.

The skin went numb where the drop landed. No burn, just cold spreading out underneath until the whole hand had nothing in it. It ran 40 seconds and then let go.

I got the cap back on. Then I carried the bottle down to the kitchen, took a zip-top sandwich bag out of the drawer by the sink, and tipped maybe a quarter of the oil into one corner of it. I pressed the air out, sealed it, set the bottle back in her purse with the cap turned toward the seam the way it had been lying, and pushed the bag to the back of my desk drawer under a box of printer paper.

Before I put the bottle back I stood it on the counter beside a wooden ruler and took four photographs with my phone, two of the fill line and the cap threads and two of the glass from the side with the window light coming through it. On the bag I wrote the date, the time, and her initials in marker, then slid that bag inside a second one and wrote the same three things again. The box of bags in the drawer had been opened and three were gone.

In the bathroom I ran the faucet all the way open and worked soap over both hands. I washed them three times, scrubbing the back of the left one until the skin came up red. Forty seconds of nothing, which was about how long it took me to go under on the nights Emily worked the oil into my temples.

In the study I opened a composition book to a clean page and put the numbers down: one drop, back of the left hand, 9:52:00; hand gone at 9:52:04; feeling back at 9:52:44. I dated the bottom of the page and signed it. Then I carried the book out to the car and locked it in the trunk under the spare tire cover, since a desk drawer in my own house was not a hiding place.

Back in the study, I picked up the desk phone and called Michael.

"Michael," I said the second he picked up. "I need you to do something for me. Now."

"What's going on, James?" Michael asked. "You want me to send the new manuscript over to the publisher?"

"No. I want you to pull every medical record, every insurance claim, every doctor's bill of mine the agency has paid in the last 11 years. All of it. Send me copies."

He didn't say anything for a few seconds. The sound of paper moving on his end stopped.

"Eleven years of medical records?" Michael said. "For what, James? Is there something wrong with your policy? Or your health—"

"Don't ask," I said. "Just do it. Before tomorrow."

I hung up before he could answer. Eleven years of paper, and I was going to take it apart one layer at a time.

I stood at the desk without sitting down. The handset hadn't seated in the cradle, and the dial tone kept going, tone... tone..., in the quiet room. I couldn't stay still with it. I needed an actual answer. Something I could put on a table.

I took the car keys off the desk and went down the stairs fast.

Emily was in the hallway. She looked up when she saw me pulling on my coat. I said something to her without looking at her face and went past her and out the door.

The wind came off the river straight into my face. I got in the car and turned the key hard. The engine came over dry and caught. I backed out of the empty yard and put the sedan on the highway north toward Albany, where Dr. Evelyn Reed's office had been sitting closed for 10 years.

Route 9W ran north along the west bank with the river out of sight behind the trees. The sign past the Marlboro line gave Kingston at 18 and Albany at 68. Leaves lay down on the shoulder in wet black mats, and the dash read 47 degrees.

The car went into the gray fog. The white dashes down the middle of the road ran under the front end and kept coming, like film going through too fast.

Past Kingston I moved onto the Thruway and held the car at 71. A Stewart's went by with all eight pumps lit at 11:40 in the morning and a man standing out in front of it in shirtsleeves. Somebody had left a child's sneaker on the guardrail near the Saugerties exit, laced, standing upright, and it was out of the mirror before I finished looking at it.

The steady shake of the wheel and the tires going over the asphalt put me back in a winter night three years ago. A piece of it came loose, and in it was something I should have seen at the time.

That week I hadn't slept in days. I lay on my back and watched the hand on the wind-up clock by the bed come around to 2:15 a.m.

Emily sat down on the edge of the mattress. She didn't say anything, just took out the bottle and worked her index finger in slow circles at both of my temples.

I blinked once. One blink.

When my eyes opened again, the minute hand had moved over to 2:45 a.m.

Thirty minutes had gone by inside one blink. No dream. No falling asleep, no edge to it. Thirty minutes of nothing at all, as if somebody had put me on pause. Emily smoothed my hair back and said:

"You went out for half an hour, see? The herb oil's starting to work."

I believed her. I was tired enough to be grateful for it.

On the highway that afternoon the rest of the picture came back. In the dresser mirror behind her, her phone was lit with a call that had just ended, and the duration on it read 30:00. On the index finger she had left lying on the edge of the blanket there was a gray smear that hadn't dried yet, and it gave off a solvent smell that ran right over the herbs.

Then the thought showed up and stayed. She had been using a compound to shut me off for half an hour every night. Why, though? Why 30 minutes? What does anybody get done in 30 minutes?

The wheel came around a few inches under my hands. The car crossed the center line once, and I brought it back and pulled in at the curb in front of an old commercial building in Albany.

The meter took quarters and I had two, which bought 40 minutes. I sat with the engine off long enough for the glass to fog on the inside, then wiped a circle clear with my sleeve. Four stories, stone front, a brass plate beside the entrance with the tenants etched into it and three of the lines scratched through.

I got out of the car and carried the cold up to the third-floor hallway.

The clary sage smell that used to fill Dr. Reed's office was gone. In its place, dust and the damp of a room nobody had opened in a long time.

Under the dust there was lemon polish, and further under that, rubber tubing and alcohol. I had come up to the third floor and turned left without reading any of the numbers on the doors. The hallway went 30 feet to a window with wire running through the glass, and the light coming back off it made the carpet look wet.

A seal had been pasted across the wooden door, stained, the edges curled up with moisture. The iron mailbox next to it was stuffed full of bills and envelopes nobody had come for.

A waiting room chair sat against the wall four feet to the left of the door, green vinyl, one front leg standing off the carpet on the bare boards. It was turned to face the stairs. Every other chair from that office was gone and nobody had taken the last one down.

I stood in front of the sealed door and read the notice twice without taking any of it in. Dr. Reed was gone. The one person who could have opened up 11 years for me had been cut out of the line.

Beside the mailbox the super had stacked three cardboard boxes of clear-out, taped shut except for the top one. A desk calendar from the year the office closed lay open on it, the block kind that stands on its own. Every Thursday that October had J.M. written in at 4:00, six weeks running, in Dr. Reed's small hand. I put it back the way it had been lying and went to the stairs.

I turned around and went down the polished stone stairs, which had a film of dust on every tread.

The ground floor of the building held a small coffee shop, dim, the air heavy with over-roasted beans and somebody's cigarette smoke. I knew the woman behind the counter, the receptionist from Dr. Reed's office.

I came up to the counter and got my voice working.

"Excuse me. I'm James Miller, I was a patient of Dr. Evelyn Reed's. I recognize you, you used to work at her office. Could I ask you a few things about Dr. Evelyn Reed?"

She had been drying a glass and her hands stopped. The glass came down against the wood edge of the counter with a short clink.

She looked up at me. Before she said anything she turned her head and checked the empty room, both directions, then leaned in over the counter and brought her voice down as far as it would go.

"You don't know, Mr. Miller?" she said. "Dr. Reed passed away."

The cooler under the counter came on and ran.

"She's... she's dead?"

"A bad wreck out on Route 9W, 10 days ago," she said, keeping it low, as if the room could hear her. "The car went off the road and hit a concrete post and burned. Nobody got out. The police called it a brake failure."

I put a hand on the edge of the counter. Ten days back was the same week GhostInk's manuscripts started arriving and my temper started coming apart. I've written coincidences into books, and I wouldn't have used that one.

She looked at me for a few seconds without deciding. Then she bent down and slid open a wooden drawer under the counter.

She brought out a brown Kraft envelope, sealed with glue that had gone hard.

The paper had yellowed. Across the front, in Dr. Reed's small careful hand, were three words: "For James Miller."

"Dr. Reed left this with me," she said, pushing the envelope into my hand. Her fingers were cold where they touched my skin. "She left it the afternoon after your first hypnosis session, 10 years ago. She was very clear about it. 'If James Miller ever comes back here looking for me, give him this.'"

I closed my hand around the envelope. The stiff edge of it cut a line into my palm and I didn't let go.

The chairs in the coffee shop were upholstered in the same green vinyl as the one in the third-floor hallway. I counted six of them on the way to the door. Outside, the meter had nine minutes left on it.

I got into the car and pulled the door shut hard. The inside of it took the traffic noise off the street and swallowed it.

My palms were wet and cold. I used a fingertip to tear open the edge of the brown Kraft envelope. The paper came apart loud in the closed car.

I had expected a cassette or a thick medical file. What came out was one sheet of letter paper, handwritten, yellowed at the edges.

I held the sheet up in front of me. Dr. Evelyn Reed's black ink ran small and even across it, and I could read every word.

She had written it up right after my session:

"Patient James Miller went under at 14 minutes. The clinical response after that was abnormal. When I asked him to go back to his childhood in Milton, his heart rate dropped sharply. The voice that came out of him was not his voice. It was a child's, and it was flat. I have played the recording back four times to be sure, and I have no medical explanation for it."

The paper started ticking against the steering wheel, fast and small, and I had to lay it flat on my knee to keep reading. At the bottom of the page Dr. Reed had put one line inside quotation marks. It was the sentence I said that night, word for word, while I was under:

"Don't call me James. I'm the one on the floor."