The Silver Bracelet

Chapter 4 — The First Massage

When she helped him out of the tub and into the chair, he was shaking slightly. She wrapped a towel around his shoulders without comment and knelt to dry his right leg with the kind of careful, professional attention she would have given a wound. She did not look at the knee. She did not need to. He watched her do it, and after a long moment he said, in a voice stripped of all its earlier cruelty:

"You've done this before."

"Yes."

"You may call me Samuel."

She did not respond to that. She helped him into the clean clothes, wheeled him back into the bedroom, transferred him to the armchair by the window, and went to fetch his breakfast tray from Hargrove. When she came back he was looking out at the garden, his right leg elevated on its rest, and his face had gone unreadable again.

"The massage," he said, without turning. "Hargrove will have told you. Daily, half past nine. Forty minutes. The previous carer lasted six weeks. She cried."

"I won't cry."

"So they all say." He turned then, and his gray eyes found the silver bracelet on her right wrist. "Did you move it."

"I did."

"Good." He paused. "You may begin at nine thirty. Until then, sit. Read a book. The library is yours outside of Mr. Petrie's hours. Do not, under any circumstances, touch the ant farm."

"I won't."

"And, Miss Thorne —" he said, and his voice went cold again, the brief human flicker of the morning shut away — "what happens in this room stays in this room. The other staff do not need to know that I cannot wash myself. They will, of course, already know. But they do not need to hear it from you. Are we clear."

Vera met his eyes. "Crystal."

At nine twenty-five she returned to the bedroom with a bottle of almond oil she had found in the physio cabinet. Samuel was in the armchair, his right leg extended on its rest, and he had pulled up the leg of his sweatpants to expose the withered calf. He did not look at her. He looked at the ant farm on the side table, where a thin line of dark insects was carrying a fragment of something pale along a ridge of sand.

"Begin with the foot," he said. "Work up. Five minutes per zone. If you hit the scar and I tell you to stop, stop. If I tell you to leave, leave. Do not —" he paused — "do not feel sorry for me."

"I don't," Vera said quietly, because it was the truth. She did not feel sorry for him. She had felt sorry for too many people in her life who had not wanted it and who had not deserved it, and she had learned, by twenty, that pity was a luxury she could not afford to give and that the people it was offered to almost never wanted to receive. She knelt on the small cushion that had been laid out beside the chair, warmed a pool of oil between her palms, and took his right foot in both hands.

He flinched.

She did not react. She worked in the slow, deep strokes she had been taught for atrophied muscle, pressing into the arch of the foot, the ball, the heel; working up to the ankle, where the joint was thickened with old scar tissue; and then, slowly, carefully, into the calf. The muscle under her hands was cold and tight, the fibers shortened from twenty years of disuse. She could feel the old fracture sites under the skin like knots in a piece of wood.

He did not speak. He did not look at her. He watched the ants.

After twenty minutes, when she had worked her way to the lower edge of the scar, he said, very quietly: "Stop."

She stopped. She lifted her hands. She did not ask why.

He was silent for a long moment. Then, still without looking at her, he said: "You didn't apologize."

"No."

"The previous six all apologized. As if it were their fault. As if saying I'm sorry would give me back the leg."

"It wouldn't," Vera said.

"No." He turned then, and his gray eyes were steady on hers, and there was in them something she had not seen before — a bleak, exhausted curiosity, the look of a man who has been alone in a room for twenty years and has just noticed that someone else is in it. "It would not."

She finished the massage in silence. She helped him back into the wheelchair. She wheeled him to the library, where he had a conference call at ten, and she left him at the desk with his coffee and his documents and his cold, professional armor back in place. As she closed the door behind her she heard him say, in a voice that did not match the man who had just let her touch his ruined leg: "Gentlemen. Let us begin."

Hargrove was in the corridor, folding a fresh set of towels.

"Well?" he said.

"He didn't fire me."

"How remarkable," Hargrove said again, and there was, this time, the faintest ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Lunch is at twelve thirty. He will not eat with you. He will, however, ask you to bring his sandwich to the library and pretend he has forgotten you exist. Do not be fooled. He has not forgotten. He is simply not yet certain what to do with the fact that he has not."

Vera nodded. She walked back through the marble hall, past the portraits, past the long-case clock, to the staff dining room, where the cook — a stout, kind-eyed woman named Mrs. Calloway — set a plate of eggs and a slice of toast in front of her with the brisk sympathy of someone who had fed six previous carers their first meal and watched all six of them leave it half-eaten.

"Eat," Mrs. Calloway said. "You'll need it."

Vera ate. The bracelet clicked softly against the table, and outside the window the boxwood garden was bright with morning, and somewhere in the library at the end of the hall a man she did not yet know how to help was having a conference call about a company she did not yet understand, in a voice that sounded, from this distance, almost like the voice of someone who was not in pain.

She did not feel sorry for him. She did not, she realized with a small start, feel nothing, either. What she felt was closer to recognition. She had been seven years old and lying in a hospital bed with blood in her hair and no memory of who she was; he had been seven years old and lying in a hospital bed with his leg shattered and no memory of who had done it. They had both, in different ways, been ruined at the same age. The difference was that he had been given a fortune to soften the ruin, and she had been given a foster home that had used her as free labor, and neither of them had been given a single answer to the question of why.

She finished her toast. She went back to the library to fetch his sandwich plate. And when she opened the door, he looked up from his documents, and his gray eyes met hers for the space of a single second, and in that second something passed between them that neither of them had a name for — not pity, not attraction, not even, yet, friendship. Just the brief, electric acknowledgment of two people who had been broken in the same year of their lives and who, by some accident of staffing agencies and train schedules, had ended up in the same room.

"Sandwich," he said. "On the desk. Then get out."

"Yes, sir," Vera said, and set the plate down, and left, and did not, for the rest of the morning, think about why her hand, where she had held his foot, was still warm.