Walk to the Light

They took him to University Hospital, which was nearer, and I rode in the ambulance with my knees against the stretcher and my hand on the rail.

I do not remember the journey. I remember the lights, which went over the roof of the vehicle in long blue sweeps, and the paramedic, a broad young woman with a braid, who never once stopped talking to him. Arlo, can you hear me? Arlo, stay with me, sweetheart, what did you take? Can you tell me what you took? And I remember that he answered her, politely, in a thin, patient voice, as though she had asked him the time. He said it was nothing she would know. He said he was sorry for the trouble.

By the time we reached the ramp, his eyes had gone the color of old ivory.

…

There is a kind of waiting that has no equivalent in ordinary life.

It is not the waiting of a train, or an exam, or a verdict. It has no horizon. It is a waiting in a corridor with a gray linoleum floor, under a light that hums, with a vending machine at one end and a fire door at the other, while a door in front of you remains closed. I sat there for six hours. I know because I counted the ceiling tiles, and the cracks in the linoleum, and the number of times a nurse in blue scrubs walked past and did not look at me.

Leo came at seven. He sat down beside me without a word and put a paper cup of coffee into my hands. It was scalding, and I held it, and did not drink.

"They don't know what it is," he said at last.

"I know."

"Tox screen's coming back clean. Everything on the standard panel. Nothing." He ran a hand over his face. "The kid in the white coat says it's like trying to find a particular grain in a bag of sand. He says without the name of the compound they can only treat what they see. Fluids. The liver. Support."

"Where is the vial?"

Leo looked at me.

"The glass tube from the table," I said. "And the box. The tactical team bagged them in the cellar. They'll have gone with the rest of the evidence. Where is it?"

"Quantico. Briona's people took the lot." He shifted. "It's in the queue. Ryder says it's at the top of the queue, they've flagged it. But it's a federal lab, Doc. There are four hundred items ahead of it in the building, and a chain of custody, and a form for each. They said Thursday. Maybe Wednesday, if somebody leans on someone."

"It's Monday."

"I know what day it is."

I put down the cup.

I thought of a gloved hand sweeping a small glass tube into a sack. I thought of the thought I had had, distinctly, in words, in the part of my mind where I keep such things. I should say something. I should tell them to wait.

I had said nothing. I had stood in a room two miles away with a mouth full of stone, and watched.

"It's not your fault," said Leo.

"No."

"I mean it."

"I know that you do," I said.

…

They let me in at ten past one.

It was a small room on the fourth floor, with a window onto a car park and a bed with rails. There was a tangle of tubes. There was a monitor, which drew green hills on a black screen and made a small neat sound at the peak of each. There was a smell of disinfectant, and under it, so faint that no one but myself could have caught it, the thin bitter sweetness that I had learned to dread.

Arlo Wren lay in the bed with his head turned toward the window.

They had taken off the cuffs. A single policeman stood outside the door, but it was a formality, and everyone knew it; there was nowhere for him to go. He had been washed and dressed in a pale green gown, and the blanket had been tucked up to his chest, and he looked smaller than I had thought possible. His hair was damp. His skin had gone the yellow-white of candle wax. His left hand lay on the sheet, loosely curled, and in its palm, wound twice round the fingers in a loop of clear tape, someone had put the yellow clip.

I had asked for it. I do not know why. I told the sergeant it was a matter of comfort. He had hesitated, and then looked at the boy in the bed, and gone to find a bag.

"Atticus," said Arlo.

"I'm here."

"I thought you might be." His voice was a thread. "You've been outside for hours. I could hear you. You walk with a hitch. The left foot comes down a little heavier, as though you were expecting a step."

"It's the Bristol cobbles. I had a fall as a boy."

"I knew there was a reason." He turned his head, and the effort of it showed, and smiled. "Sit down. You're making me nervous."

…

I sat.

We talked until the light had left the window. I will not tell you everything, because a great deal of it was not about anything, and I have found that the things said at the end of a life are not the things one would suppose. He did not speak of justice, or of the law. He did not ask about the case. He asked whether the cat had been fed.

"Which cat?"

"The orange one. At the lodge. She's called Biscuit." He closed his eyes. "She's not mine. She belongs to Mrs. Penhallow. But I give her the ends of the tuna."

"I will see that she is fed."

"Thank you." His fingers moved on the sheet. "And I'd like her to know I'm sorry. About the Thursdays. I don't think she'll understand, but I'd like it said."

"I'll tell her."

"You can say I was the quiet one."

"She said that."

He opened his eyes. There was a light in them for an instant, small and surprised. "Did she?"

"She said you never made a sound. She said she used to look out for you, and you'd be gone before she got to the door."

He was quiet for a long time. The monitor drew its hills.

"That's nice," he said. "That's a nice thing to be remembered for."

…

At about four the pain began, and they gave him something for it, and he slept.

I stayed. A nurse came and went. A doctor, a thin tired man with a gray beard, explained to me in a low voice that the liver was failing, that the kidneys had begun to follow, that without a specific agent there was little to do but keep him comfortable. He spoke the way doctors speak when they have already done what they can. He said, "I'm sorry. If we'd had the compound within the first day or so..."

He did not finish.

I said, "How long?"

"Hours. Perhaps a day."

I looked at the boy on the bed.

I had a thought, and I will set it down, because it is the truth. I thought: there is a vial in a box in a federal building in Virginia, and in it is the answer. And it is Monday. I thought of a different Atticus, a younger, quicker, better man, who would have turned in that cellar and said wait. And I understood, with perfect clarity, that I would not have said it. That it was exactly in that moment, with the glass door breaking and the clock stopped, that I had been least myself.

I had been the surgeon. I had been pleased.

The pen was in my pocket. I did not touch it.

…

He woke a little after nine in the evening.

The room was nearly dark. A single lamp burned on the table, and the window had gone black. I had moved my chair to the bed, and he turned his head and looked at me for a time without speaking, with his lips a little parted, as if he had forgotten who I was.

"Doctor."

"Arlo."

"Will you do something?"

"Anything."

"There's a stone." He drew a slow breath. "At Cedar Hill. In the old section, by the wall. It's got a number but no name. Section D, row nineteen. The city put it there when she—when it was done. I've been every year." He swallowed. "I'd like it to have her name on. Just her name. 'Stella Marsh.' I'd like—"

"I'll see to it."

"Don't make it big."

"No."

"She'd have hated that." He smiled, faintly. "She'd have said it was showing off."

I took his hand. It was very light. It was the hand of a bird, dry and hot, and the clip in it was a small hard thing against my fingers. I held it, and he let me.

"Is it true," he said, "what you said? In the studio. That she called for me?"

I could not lie to him.

"I don't know," I said. "I was guessing. I wanted you to answer."

"Oh." He considered this, without anger. "I thought so. You're good at it."

"I am sorry."

"Don't be." His fingers tightened a little. "It's what I told myself for fifteen years. That she'd called. It was worse, thinking she hadn't. That she was just alone." He closed his eyes. "I'll know soon, I suppose."

I said nothing. There was nothing in the world to say.

…

Toward midnight, he began to talk to someone else.

I have heard this before. It is not delirium, or not entirely. It is a loosening of the mind, a letting-go of the hand on the tiller, and the words come out of a deep place with a curious clarity, like water out of a spring. He spoke in a low murmur, with his eyes shut. He said, Yes. Yes, I'm coming. He said, Wait for me. He said, It's all right, it isn't dark. I can see you.

I leaned close.

"Is it the cellar?" I whispered.

"No." His brow cleared. "It's a hall. It's got a long floor. It's all lit up, like the refectory at Christmas. And there's somebody at the end."

"Who?"

"Small," said Arlo. "In a gray coat. With a label in the collar."

His left hand lifted from the sheet.

It rose a few inches in the lamplight, with the clip wound in the tape, and it came down against the metal rail of the bed. It made a small dry knock. Then another, a second later. Then a third, very slow.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

I sat motionless.

I knew it. I had known it since a clean small room in Germantown, and a cat on a stove, and an old woman with a rosary. I knew exactly what it was, and what it asked, and what was wanted in answer. It was the simplest thing in the world. It was a child's code for good night. It asked only to be heard.

My hand was on the rail. It had been there for hours.

I lifted it. I turned my knuckles to the cold metal.

And the monitor gave a long, level, unwavering note, and the green hills on the screen lay down like a field after a harvest.

…

I knocked anyway.

Three times, slow, on the bar of the bed, in the little room with the lamp. It was too late; I knew it was too late. A nurse had come to the door. Someone was saying something. But I did it, with my knuckles and my whole attention, as carefully as I have done anything in my life, and I held the last knock a moment longer than the others, in the way one holds the last note of a song.

I'm here.

Nobody answered.

The clip was still in his hand. They did not take it away. I think the nurse, a young man with tired eyes, saw it and understood, and drew the sheet up very gently around the fingers.

I walked out of the room and down the gray corridor and out through the doors at the end. It was the middle of the night. A light rain was falling on the car park, soft and cold. I stood in it for a long time with my face turned up, and the drops ran down my cheeks and into my collar.

I did not smell almonds.

For the first time in two months I could smell nothing at all.