The Ledger

Chapter 9: Three Things

Chapter 9: Three Things

24

The first I heard of her was through the door.

Voices in the hall, kept low, which in a hospital is never for the person in the bed. Tommy's, then a woman's, then Tommy's going up, then a nurse saying sir, sir. Something hit the floor. A folder, I found out later, full of notes from a specialist she'd gone and got without asking anybody. Tommy kicked it down the hall. That's his version. I believe it.

She didn't answer him. Not that day, not the day after. That was the one thing she did that whole week that I had any use for.

I couldn't see the door from where they had me. I could hear everything that happened in it.

By the second morning I had a different room. It faced the water, and there was a chair in it that pulled out into something like a bed, and I hadn't asked for either and neither had Tommy.

Then the food started. Three meals a day in brown bags, from a place on Clark I would have picked myself if I'd been the one picking. Tommy wouldn't throw them out with me watching. He put them on the windowsill and they sat there and sweated and then stopped sweating, and a nurse took them away, and the next three came the same way.

Then the doctors. A man came in one morning who'd driven in from out of state and had my scans in a folder of his own. He had me follow a light with one eye and then the other one, and he wrote the whole time, and when he was done he shut the folder and carried it out with him, and nobody ever read me a word of what was in it.

She was out in the hall the whole time. I asked Tommy once whether she ever slept.

"I don't care," he said.

Then Tommy took a shower.

Four days in that chair and he hadn't left the building. I told him to go. He stood in the doorway doing the arithmetic on it and then he went, and he was gone twenty minutes.

She came in and sat down in his chair.

I had one eye and about half of the other one. Whatever her face was doing in that doorway, I wasn't going to spend a working eye finding out.

"Ethan," she said. "It was me. All of it was me, and I've been standing in that hallway because I know I don't get to ask for this."

Then she talked for a long time.

She had never talked that long. Three years with her and I'd have said she couldn't. She'd answer you in seven words and you'd come out of it feeling like you'd had a whole conversation and lost it.

"I grew up in a house where nothing happens," she said. "Not bad things. Nothing. Nobody in my family has ever put a hand on anybody. My father doesn't shake hands with his own children. I was told when I was nine which families I'd be allowed to marry into, and after that, every few months, somebody would say one of those names across the table, just to watch what my face did. I don't believe in any of it. Love is a thing people made up so they don't have to say out loud what's actually under there. Then I met you. You didn't know what I was. Three years, and there wasn't one day of it I was sure you'd still be standing there if the money hadn't been mine, and I needed to know. That's what I was doing. That's all I was ever doing. You're the only person who ever walked out on me, and you were right to, and I know what it cost you, and I'm asking to pay it back. I'll stay. I'll stay as long as there's anything to stay for."

I let it sit in the room a while.

"It doesn't mean anything now," I said.

"I pulled the video. It went up and I killed it. The specialists. Whatever comes next, I'll do it, and I'll do it whether you ever speak to me again or not."

"I loved you," I said. "That part was real. It stopped the day I found out what you were doing, and it hasn't come back. I've had a long time in this bed and nothing else to do with it and I've checked."

She didn't move.

"You could have had me on my knees," I said. "I know that. You wore his ring in front of me and I went home and shut the door and never said one word about it to anybody. That was mine to carry. What Tommy got for it is different. He has a plate in his wrist and a scar over his eye because he said out loud what you'd done to me, and you were never in the room for it. You reached past me and put your hands on the only person I had left."

"Ethan—"

"Be a person," I said. "Try being human for once."

She stayed in the chair. I couldn't see her face well enough to say anything about it, and I've stopped guessing, because for three years I guessed and every time I landed on a version that made her easier to live with.

"I'm not going to say the thing you came in here for," I said. "And I'd rather you weren't in his chair when he comes back up, because there's going to be a scene when he gets back and I don't have it in me today."

She stood up. She put the chair back under the window where Tommy keeps it, and she went out, and she didn't come in again.

25

I'll give her this much. After that she did everything I asked her to do. All of it, exactly. She did it from the hallway.

Tommy brought the rest of it in a piece at a time. That's how he does things. He turns the television off first and checks whether I'm awake, and if I'm not, he waits, and I have never had anybody else who waits.

Some of it I'd asked for and some of it I hadn't.

For six weeks, right up until it broke, there was one thing I wanted, which was for somebody to say it out loud where people could hear it. Then somebody did, and I was in a bed I couldn't get out of, turning it over, looking for whatever I was supposed to feel about it.

I didn't find it. Whatever it was, it wasn't there.

What came out was everything. Who she'd been when we met, the account, the months of me getting moved off every job I touched. The shop put my drawings up — Ray's shop, four months of work out where anybody with a screen could see it — not for the money, to make them look at what she'd done with me. I could turn my head toward the wall and not see them.

Hale was down a fifth by the end of the week. The family came down on her the way they do, quiet and all at once, and when they were done with it, Marcus had the harbor project and the office that came with it. People had been sending things to her office. Tommy said flowers at first, then corrected himself, and they weren't flowers. He said she'd aged ten years. I had half an eye and I wasn't going to spend it correcting him.

"Say what you want," Tommy said. "I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm sorry about any of it."

"I wouldn't believe you if you did."

I sent Tommy for coffee. It took two tries to get him out of the room, and the doctor came through while he was gone, which was the point.

He stood at the end of the bed with the chart in his hand and kept looking at it, like there might be another page under there, and he was quiet for a while. Then he said soon.

He said some people go on for days and some go on for weeks, and that if he gave me a number he'd be making it up, and that the reason they don't give you numbers is that they're wrong about the numbers.

"Okay," I said.

He shook my hand on the way out, which they don't do.

I didn't tell Tommy what he said. Tommy didn't ask, which is how I knew he'd already asked somebody else.

26

Tommy came back with two coffees and drank both of them.

I waited until the nurse had pulled the door shut.

"Three things," I said.

"Don't."

"Three things, and one of them is small. First. The thirty thousand. It came out of an account with both our names on it and it went to a club, and I want it back in a courtroom, not in an envelope somebody hands you in a parking lot. Get a lawyer. An actual one, with a letterhead and a number you can look up. Ten of it is yours. That isn't a question and you don't get to argue it, because you've missed a week of work and you're going to miss more. The other twenty goes to somebody it does something for. I don't have parents. You know that better than anybody. I never had a house. There are people out there who need twenty thousand dollars more than a stone in a lawn does, and that's what I want done with it."

He had his head down.

"Second. Keep her away from me. Not in the room, not at the service, not standing at a stone. If she asks where I am, you don't tell her. The boxes in your closet don't go to her either. They don't go anywhere. That's the one I can't do anything about from where I'm going, so it's on you."

"Okay," he said. Flat.

"Third. I want to go out clean. Larkspur. Suite 355 up there isn't a suite. It's a business the club keeps off its books, and there's a server who's been keeping his own paper on what goes into that room and who pays for it, because he doesn't like carrying it. He'll answer a straight question. Take it to the board. Use my name if it moves them."

"Okay."

"There's a bus ticket in my wallet," I said. "It's been in there a while. Keep it."

He didn't ask where it went. He said okay a third time and he got the word out flat, no air in it at all.

I'd never seen Tommy cry. I saw it. I told him I'd never seen him do that and he told me to shut up, which was the right answer.

I don't remember much of what came after. There was a night that was worse and a morning that was better, which fooled everybody but me. She was still out there. I could hear the chair in the hall every time she moved. Tommy sat where he could reach my hand without getting up, and he didn't talk, which he has never once done in his life, and I let him, because it was costing him more than it was costing me.

Two days on, or maybe one, I started losing the room. Not the way you lose a thing inside a room. The room was there and I was in it and there was less of it every time I opened my eyes.

Past the door somebody was crying, and it wasn't him.

I closed my eyes because they were tired.

The light on the wall opposite the bed got smaller. I couldn't find it after that.

Author’s Note

She gets twenty minutes while Tommy's in the shower, and she spends them explaining three years — the house where nothing ever happened, the names said across the table just to watch her face. Ethan hears all of it out and still won't say the thing she came in for. "Be a person," he tells her. He's spent his life being careful with facts and almost never with people, and that line is the closest he gets to both at once. Did he owe her anything in that room?

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