Hour Forty-Eight

The clock in the waiting room was a cheap round plastic one, with a white face and a red second hand, and for two days I did nothing but watch it.

I do not wish to give the impression that I was calm. I was not. But I have discovered over the years that when the mind has nothing it can do, it will seize upon the nearest thing it can count, and cling to it, as a drowning man will cling to an oar. I counted that clock. I knew every tick of it. I knew that the second hand stuttered, very slightly, at the nine; that the minute hand ran two or three seconds slow; that a thin crack ran across the glass above the six. And I knew, because I had written it on the back of my hand in ballpoint, the hour at which a boy had put a small brown glass tube to his lips, and begun the long walk down.

Four o'clock, Sunday morning.

Beneath it I had written a number. I changed it every hour.

…

The antidote went in at hour thirty-one.

I was not in the room. They don't permit it. I stood at the glass of the ICU doors with my forehead against the cold pane and watched through a gap in the blind. A nurse in blue scrubs checked a label and read it aloud to another. A tall stooped man in a white coat took a clear bag from her and held it up to the light and squinted at it. Then he reached up and hung it from a hook, and ran the line down, and Dr. Nolan Pierce, who is not an emotional man, put two fingers to his lips and laid them for a moment on the plastic.

I saw him do it.

I did not tell anyone.

Then he came out, and pulled the door shut behind him, and took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

"It's in," he said.

"What are his chances?"

"I told you. Eighty percent. If it's early." He looked at his watch. "It's not early. It's the back end of the window. Call it sixty." He saw my face. "That's a good number, Dr. Vaughn. Don't let it frighten you. I've had worse and sent them home to their wives."

"What do we do now?"

"We wait. The first twelve hours tell us whether the liver's going to take it. The next twelve tell us about the kidneys. After forty-eight—" He shrugged. "If he's through forty-eight, I'll tell you he'll live. I won't tell you before."

"Why forty-eight?"

"Because that's when it either holds or goes." He put his glasses back on. "Go and sit down. There's a coffee machine on the left. It's terrible, but it's hot."

…

We sat in shifts.

I had not expected company. I had thought it would be I alone, in that harsh, bright, sterile room with its rows of orange plastic chairs and its rack of old magazines. But I think there is a kind of gravity in such places. Others began to arrive, singly, without a word, and sit down.

Leo came first. He had changed his shirt. He sat in the chair on my left with his knees apart and his big hands loose, and stared at the TV screen in the corner with an expression of profound disinterest, and did not say a word for an hour. At the end of it he said: "My wife made sandwiches."

They were egg and watercress. They were excellent.

Vera Lindqvist came at nine on the second night, in her gray cardigan, with a thermos. She poured out tea into the cap and gave it to me without a word, and sat down on my right, and put her hand over mine on the arm of the chair. She stayed till two. Somewhere around midnight she said, in a low voice, to nobody, "I have read that statement eleven times." And after a while: "I'd thought I was a person who believed in the system."

"You are."

"I was." She gave a dry little laugh. "And now I'm a person who knows exactly where the screws are loose. It's a different thing." She pressed my hand. "I'm not sure I like it. But I think it's better."

Ryder slept in the corner for six hours with his head against the wall and a jacket over his face. He woke with a start, looked at the clock, and said, "How long?"

"Hour forty-three."

"Oh." He sat up. "Oh, good. Is that good?"

"I do not know," I said.

Briona Lang came and went. She was on the telephone nine hours in ten. But she stood for a while at the window each time she passed, with her arms folded and her eyes on the doors of the unit, and once, at about one in the morning, she turned to me and said, quite abruptly, "I took the evidence."

"Yes."

"I locked it up. I sealed that room. If I hadn't, you'd have had your numbers at four o'clock the day before. You'd have had a day." Her jaw was tight. "I've been thinking about that."

"You opened it in eleven minutes."

"I shouldn't have had to."

"You did." I looked at her. "That is the thing about a rule, Agent Lang. It is a very good thing and a very bad thing. One cannot do without it, and one must be prepared to break it. I have not found a rule for knowing which."

She almost smiled.

"I'm told I'm too rigid," she said.

"So am I."

…

It was hour forty-six when the first nurse came out.

It was a young woman with a blond ponytail. She looked about nineteen. She came out through the double doors at two in the morning with a clipboard under her arm and a look of cautious radiance, as of a person who has been given a secret and told to keep it for another five minutes. She did not look at me. She went straight to the telephone on the wall and picked it up.

Then she put it down again, and came across the room.

"Dr. Vaughn?"

"Yes."

"His bilirubin's down." She said it in a rush. "It's been going up for twelve hours and it's turned. And the enzymes. Dr. Pierce says to tell you the numbers are, he said to say, 'moving the right way.' Those were his words." She glanced at the clipboard. "He's awake. A little. He asked what time it was."

"What did you tell him?"

"I said it was morning. He said, 'Is Dr. Vaughn there?'"

I could not speak.

"He says he'd like you to come in when it's time," said the nurse. "But it's not time. We're to let him sleep." She looked at me anxiously. "I'm sorry. I thought you'd want to know."

"Thank you," I said. "It was the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a week."

She flushed to the roots of her hair and fled.

…

At ten past three, Vera came back from the lobby.

She had gone down for more tea. She came up the corridor with the thermos in one hand and a padded envelope in the other, walking slowly, reading the front of it. The night guard, she said, had given it to her. A woman had left it at the desk at midnight, a stout woman in a green anorak with a child's rain boots in a bag, who would not give her name and had asked only that it should be put into the hands of Dr. Vaughn and nobody else. She held it out to me. It was not heavy. There was no return address. The label was written in a round, careful, childish hand, in purple felt-tip, with every letter separately formed.

I opened it.

Inside was a single sheet of paper. It had been folded in four. It was a drawing.

It was done in wax crayon, on cheap white sugar paper. It showed a blue sky, with a green stripe of grass at the foot, and a yellow sun with spokes. On the grass were two figures, one tall and one small, holding hands. The tall one had a long black coat and spiky brown hair. The small one wore a red dress and had two pigtails, and a very large smile. Between them, floating in the blue, there was a star: a big, lopsided, orange five-pointed star, with the point of each ray carefully outlined in black.

And at the foot of the star, in a neat row, there were three small dots.

They had been made with the tip of a crayon, pressed hard. They were separate. They were evenly spaced.

Under the star, in the same purple felt-tip, was a line of printing.

DEAR DOCTER ATTICUS. I SAW YOU ON THE TV. MY BROTHER SAYS THE THREE KNOKS MEAN I AM HERE. I DID THEM FOR YOU. I HOPE THE BOY IS NOT DEAD. LOVE ELLIE KINCAID AGE 8 AND 3 MONTHS.

…

I do not know how long I sat looking at it.

I know that Leo took it from my hand, after a time, and held it at arm's length, and read it, and made a noise in his throat. I know that Vera put her hand over her mouth. I know that I was not looking at the paper, but at the three small dots, which were orange, and slightly smeared, and had been put on with such concentration that the paper had torn a little under the crayon.

I did them for you.

She had been found in a cistern, a girl of eight, in a basement in Kensington, in the dark, in a dry well of old stone, where a man had left her for four days without water. She had knocked on the wall. Slow, slow, slow. Because her brother had done it. Because she had been told, once, by somebody who was very much loved, that it meant I'm here. And someone had heard.

She was eight and three months. And she had seen a stranger on a television, standing in front of a camera in a crumpled suit, and had understood in an instant what he was saying; and had gone and got her crayons.

My hand, I found, had closed on the arm of the chair.

I opened it. I turned the palm up. And on the plastic, in the cold light of a hospital waiting room at a quarter past three on a Tuesday morning, I knocked, with my knuckle.

One.

Two.

Three.

Slowly. Slowly. Like someone saying good night.

Leo looked at me. He did not say anything. He took the drawing, and found a piece of tape in his pocket, and went across the room to the pin board by the door, among the notices about hand hygiene and the lost-property box. He stuck it up, at eye level, with a large careful thumb. He stood back.

It looked rather well.

…

"Doctor."

It was Dr. Pierce. He had come out of the swing doors so quietly that I had not noticed him, and was standing in the middle of the room with his hands in the pockets of his white coat, and his glasses pushed up, and the expression of a very tired man who is about to say something he is a little afraid of saying. He looked at the clock.

It said a quarter past three.

I looked at the back of my hand. The number I had written there, in ballpoint, was 47:15. My heart gave a single sickening heave.

"Dr. Pierce."

"He's holding." He cleared his throat. "He's through the kidney window. His pressure's steady. The liver's turned. It's early yet, and I'd not sign my name to anything. But I'll tell you what I think." He took a breath. "I'll tell you at forty-eight. In forty-five minutes. If he's still where he is."

"And if he is?"

"Then I'll tell you he'll live."

I nodded. I did not trust my voice.

"Sit down, Dr. Vaughn," said Nolan Pierce, gently. "You look as though you might fall."

I sat down. And for forty-five minutes I did not watch the clock at all. I looked at a child's drawing on a pin board, and counted three dots, and then counted them again.

At forty-eight hours exactly, to the second, the door of the unit swung open.

Dr. Pierce stood in it. He did not say anything. He only looked across the room at me, and nodded once, a tight, brief, grave nod, such as one man gives another across a battlefield.

"He'll live," he said.