THE CELLAR WIFE

Three Weeks

He was not the man in the suit.

He was younger, and he was not wearing a suit, and he was standing in the doorway with rain on his shoulders and his hands at his sides, and the room emptied around him, which told her he was either the family's hired g*n or the family.

The doctor got up. The nurse got up. The man in the suit did not.

"Mr. Callahan," the doctor said. "The family asked that—"

"Out," he said again, and this time the man in the suit went too.

The door closed. The beeping went on. He crossed the room and stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her for a long time without saying anything, and she looked back, because it was the only thing she could do.

He did not own the room. That was the first thing she noticed. He was standing in it the way you stand in somebody else's kitchen.

He straightened the blanket where it had come loose, with two fingers, the way a man folds a letter, and then he left.

Nobody ever explained him. The doctor had used his name on the first morning, and in the three weeks that followed nobody said anything else about him, which in a house like this meant he was either nothing or he was everything.

It took her three weeks to learn how to hold a pen. It took her forty minutes to get a woman fired.

The pen came last. Week one was eyelids, and the shape of a room she had never been in, and the names. Week two was the left hand, which worked, and the right hand, which did not, and the small humiliation of learning that she could not write her own name in a way that anybody would know.

Week three was the pen.

She stole it off the dinner tray. A black ballpoint, Sinclair Group property, which meant it was overpriced and badly made and nobody would miss it.

The first thing she wrote came out in letters the size of a child's, and she tore the page up. The second thing she wrote was her own name, on the inside of a menu card, where nobody would look. Wren. She looked at it for a while.

Then she wrote the other name under it. Vivienne. Slow, left-handed, wrong.

Two names on one card. One she was not allowed to use anymore. One that had never been hers. She folded the card in half and pushed it under the mattress, and it stayed there.

There was a mirror in the bathroom. She had been in that room for three weeks and had not once stood in front of it. She had a list, and looking was not on the list.

She found her face in the window glass instead, on the third night, with the lamp off. That was not a decision. Most things were not.

A girl. Twenty-two at the most. Thin in a way that had nothing to do with any ledger she had ever kept. Dark hair pulled back off a forehead with a small old scar at the hairline.

Wren looked at her for a long time, and the girl looked back, and neither of them moved, because there was only one of them.

Then she did the arithmetic on it, the way she did the arithmetic on everything. This was the face she would have at thirty. At forty. This was the face somebody would kiss, and somebody would put in the ground, and nobody in the world would ever connect it to the woman who had signed the invoice for a room eight feet by twelve.

She had spent her whole life wanting her name on something. She had been handed a face that belonged to somebody else.

Yours, she thought, at the girl in the glass. I know it is yours. I will keep it in good order until I have finished.

That was the first promise she made in the new body, and she made it to a window.

They had moved her home in the second week. The hospital had nothing left to give her and the family had a floor of its own, so a private ambulance brought her out to Kestrel House and put her in the master suite, and nobody asked her about any of it.

Kestrel House ran on a woman named Ilse Kern, who had been head of household for nineteen years and did the ordering from a desk in the sitting room built onto the suite, and the sitting room shared a wall with the bedroom, because that was how it had been arranged when the girl was seventeen and everybody still thought she would wake up.

Nobody had moved the desk. So every Tuesday at seven, Wren lay in the dark and listened to Mrs. Kern order groceries, linen, flowers, diesel, and medical supplies. And every Tuesday at seven, Wren counted.

Twelve cases of a renal supplement a month. Nine hundred and forty dollars a case. A woman in a coma needs two a month, maybe less.

Wren heard twelve.

She heard it again the following month. Twelve. And the month after that, twelve.

Ten cases a month at nine hundred and forty dollars, over sixty-four months. She did it the way her father had taught her, out loud, inside her own head, and it came to six hundred and one thousand six hundred dollars. She rounded it down, because a number that size did not need any help being frightening.

Nobody steals six hundred thousand dollars over five years on their own. That was a pipeline, and a pipeline has a hand at the end of it, and hands change.

It took her four days to find the hand that was on it now. It belonged to a night nurse named Della Breen, who came on at ten and left at seven, and who signed the supply requests herself. Breen had logged forty-one shifts in the last year that the door log said she had never worked. And Wren had the door log, because she had learned to listen to the security desk telephone in the corridor, and to the way the man on it said nobody when somebody had come in.

She wrote it down. Left hand, bad letters. Four names, a column of numbers, and a date at the bottom.

Then she had to get it out of the room, and that was the hard part, because in a house like that the only people who came through the door were people who were paid to come through the door.

She had watched all of them for three weeks. There was exactly one man who was not paid to be there. The one from the first morning. He came on Sundays, every other week, and stayed ten minutes, and the staff left him alone, and in all of that time nobody had ever said what he was to anybody in this house.

She had no reason to trust him. It was a bad bet.

She made it anyway, because she had one working hand and no other move.

He sat down in the chair and put his hands on his knees and said, "Number three warehouse is still leaking."

Wren put the folded page into his hand.

He looked at it for a while. He turned it over. He looked at her, and she looked back at him with everything she had, which was one working hand and two eyes, and she watched him decide.

Then he folded it in half, and put it in his coat, and said, "Okay."

By seven the next morning, Della Breen was outside on the gravel with a cardboard box and a security man holding her elbow.

She did not take it quietly. She stood out there in her uniform and her cardigan and shouted at the house for four minutes, and then she stopped, and turned, and looked straight at the corner window on the ground floor, where she knew the room was.

She said it loud enough for the whole drive to hear.

"She couldn't count. I did that girl's chart for two years and she couldn't count. Somebody ought to know that before they give her anything. Ask anybody. She couldn't do six times nine."

Then the security man walked her to the gate.

Inside, Mrs. Kern was standing in the hall with a delivery clipboard in her hands. She did not move. She did not say anything.

She looked toward the corner room, and went back to work.