15. Rachel

The nurse came in at a quarter to eight with the blood pressure cuff over her shoulder like a scarf. She was the nurse Rachel saw the most of, a short woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a badge that said KIM, and she talked the whole time she worked, mostly to the machines.

"Look at you, awake. That's twice today." She wrapped the cuff around Rachel's good arm and pumped it. "Pain, one to ten."

"Six."

"You said six yesterday. You've said six all week."

"It's still six."

"Okay. Six." Kim wrote it on the whiteboard across from the bed, under the date, which said SUNDAY 9/14 in green marker with a smiley face next to it. The cuff let go of Rachel's arm in short sighs. "Your mom called. She'll be here in the morning. And that detective called again, the one from Fontana. I told him what I told him Thursday, when she's up to it. You up to it?"

"I don't know."

"That's an answer." Kim checked the IV and the bag on the hook and the tape on the back of Rachel's hand. "He's nice enough. He brought donuts for the station on Wednesday, which is either nice or very smart."

Rachel watched her hands. They were small and dry, and there was a ring on the thumb, which Rachel had never seen on a grown woman. Kim had about two weeks. There was something in her chest, high up and on the left. It was small and had been there for years, and it was going to stop being small. Kim didn't know. She was humming under her breath and writing on the whiteboard.

It had been like that since the ambulance. The man who had splinted her fingers on the kitchen floor had less than the woman beside him, the one called Crystal, who had asked Rachel her name. The doctor who had come on the second day, when Rachel first understood that she was awake and not dreaming it, had years and years. An old man they had wheeled past her door that morning had until the weekend. Rachel didn't look for it. It came with the face, the way the color of somebody's shirt came with them. The first few days she had thought it was the drugs. Later she had thought it was the thing in her head that had shifted on the tile, and that a piece of it had come loose and was going to stay loose. She hadn't told anyone. You didn't tell a hospital that you could see how long the nurses had.

"You need anything? Water? I can raise you up a little."

"I'm okay."

"You are not okay, honey, you're on the third floor of the county hospital." Kim patted the blanket over Rachel's shin, carefully. "Press the button if you want me."

She took the cuff and went. Through the open door Rachel heard her say a few words to somebody at the station and laugh. Out the window, three floors down, the lights had come on in the parking lot, and a man was walking between the cars with a balloon on a string, looking for his car.

She lay there and counted the ceiling tiles, which she had done every evening. There were forty-two with holes in them and two without, by the window, where somebody had put in new ones.

It came a little after eight.

It made no sound, but it was as big as if the whole sky were cracking open over the building, and it went through her from the top of her head to her heels. For less than a second there was a place she had never been, a room with a floor and a light, and somebody lying down. Then it was gone, and she was looking at the ceiling tiles with her mouth open.

Out the window the man with the balloon had found his car. Nothing in the lot was moving, and nobody was looking up. Down the hall Kim laughed at something at the station.

When the lights went down in the hall, she said her name into the dark, very low, and her address, and her birthday, December eleventh, and Mom's phone number. It was all there. She said it again to be sure, and it was still there, and she lay with her hands in the blanket and waited to sleep.

On Monday a physical therapist named Andre came with a walker he didn't intend to use and a wheelchair he did. He was young and tall and had a lanyard full of keys and a voice he used for old people. He got her sitting on the edge of the bed with her feet hanging, which took twenty minutes and made the room go white at the edges twice, and after that he got her into the chair. She sat in it for four minutes. He timed it and wrote it down. Four minutes.

"Tomorrow, five."

He took her down the hall and back. The doors stood open on both sides. In every room there was somebody, and every somebody came with a number. A man with a tube in his nose had a year. A woman asleep with her mouth open had longer than Rachel could see the end of. In the room at the end, by the fire door, an old woman lay with her face to the wall and the TV off. She had until the end of the week, maybe less. There was nobody in the visitor chair. There was nothing on the windowsill, no card or flowers. The whiteboard across from her bed had only the date on it.

"Who's that?"

"Mrs. Garza." Andre turned the chair around in a wide arc. "She's nice. She doesn't talk much."

"Does anybody come?"

"Not that I've seen."

Back in her room he lifted her into bed like a box marked fragile, and she lay with her eyes shut while the white went back out of the corners of the room.

The detective came on Tuesday at two. Mom came fifteen minutes early. She stood in the doorway for a second before she came in, the way she had every day since Rachel woke up. She was checking which Rachel was in the bed. She came and sat in the visitor chair and put her purse on her knees.

Mom looked at the clock over the door. "He called me. He said it won't take long."

"Okay."

"You don't have to say anything you don't remember." She was looking at the IV pole.

"Okay."

They didn't say anything else. They had not said anything else for nine days. Mom came every day, morning or evening, sometimes both. She asked how Rachel had slept and what the doctor had said, and whether the food was any good. Rachel answered. Somewhere around the third day it had become clear that this was what they talked about now. The kitchen was in the room with them the whole time, like the TV nobody had turned on.

Mom had a long time. Rachel had seen it the first morning, when Mom came around the curtain, before she knew what it was she was seeing, and her chest had let go so hard it hurt her ribs.

Every day since, Mom had asked if she should bring the boys. Every day Rachel said not yet, not with her face like this. Some nights she lay awake and tried to picture Josh in the doorway, and she couldn't get past the moment when she would see it on him.

Detective Ochoa was older than Rachel had pictured him, with gray in his mustache and a sport coat that was too warm for September. He knocked on the open door before he came in. He shook Mom's hand and asked if he could sit. When there wasn't another chair, he got one from the hall and set it at the foot of the bed, so he wouldn't be standing over her. He had a small notebook and a pen with a dentist's name on it. He set a little recorder on the tray table and asked Rachel if that was okay.

He also had a long time. Twenty years, more. She saw it and let it go.

"I'm sorry about all this. I'll try to make it quick. I talked to your mom already, the night it happened and again last week. I just need to hear it from you. Whatever you've got. If you don't remember, that's an answer too."

"Okay."

"Sunday the seventh. You came home from work."

"Yeah."

"What time, about?"

"Nine-fifteen. I had till nine-thirty."

He wrote that down. "Who said nine-thirty?"

"Brent."

"Okay. You came in. Then what?"

The recorder had a red light on it, very small. "There was a plate on the floor. Broken. He was at the table, and Mom was at the sink." She kept her eyes on the light. "I said some stuff to him. About the family. And he got up."

"What kind of stuff?"

"That everybody thinks he's nice." Her voice went small and level. "He didn't like it."

"Then what happened?"

"He hit me." She lifted the hand with the splints a little off the blanket. "He hit me a lot. He put my face in the wall. I was on the floor, and he kicked me, and he stepped on my hand." She stopped. "And then it went black."

Ochoa waited. He was good at it. There was nothing in his face that pushed.

"And then?"

"And then somebody was holding me." She looked at him now. "I thought it was Mom. I found out after, I think it was the ambulance people. There was a woman. She asked me my name. But it's all in pieces, and I don't know what happened when. I don't really know what order anything was in."

"You don't remember anything happening to Mr. Sisk."

"No."

"Nothing at all. Between the floor and the ambulance."

"It was black."

Out of the side of her eye she saw Mom's hands on the purse. They had gone still.

Ochoa wrote for a while. He turned a page back and read what was there, and turned it again.

"Rachel, I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to know you're not in any trouble. Was there anyone else in the house? Anybody you didn't know?"

"My brothers. They were upstairs."

"Anybody else."

"No."

"Did Mr. Sisk take anything that night that you know of? Pills. Anything like that. Did he have anything he was sick with?"

"He had a beer. He wasn't drinking it."

He looked at her, and at Mom. "Mrs. Sisk, you said he was hitting her and he wouldn't stop, and then you didn't see what happened to him. You were on the floor by the sink."

"Yes." Mom's voice was steady. "I don't know what happened to him."

"Okay." Ochoa clicked the pen a few times without writing. "I'll be honest with you both, because I'd want somebody to be honest with me. The medical examiner doesn't know either. I've been doing this a long time." He stopped there. He picked the recorder up off the tray table and turned it off. "Thank you. I know that wasn't easy."

He put the chair back in the hall where he had found it. At the door he turned around.

"If anything comes back to you. Anything at all. Your mom has my number."

When he was gone, Mom sat a while longer with the purse on her knees. She got up and put her hand on Rachel's foot through the blanket and kept it there.

"They're releasing him Thursday. To the funeral home."

"Okay."

"The funeral's Saturday. At church."

Mom's hand stayed on her foot a little longer, and she took it away. "I'll come tomorrow."

Mrs. Garza's door was open that afternoon, and Rachel asked Andre to take her past it on the way back from the dayroom. He did, and she looked in. Mrs. Garza lay facing the wall. A day or two now. Less.

That night Rachel lay in bed with the call button in her good hand and didn't press it. Ten o'clock came, and eleven. The night nurse was new and young and didn't know her. Nobody was going to bring a girl with a cracked skull and two cracked ribs and a hand full of splints down the hall at eleven at night to sit with a stranger. She couldn't think of a reason to give. At a quarter to twelve she pressed it.

"I can't sleep. Can I sit up in the chair for a while? Can you take me down the hall?"

"It's almost midnight."

"I know."

"Where down the hall?"

"The end. Mrs. Garza. Nobody comes to see her."

The nurse looked at her a while longer and went and got the wheelchair. Getting into it was slow. The nurse lifted, and Rachel's ribs caught fire on the right side, and the room went white at the edges and stayed white. She sat in the chair breathing in little sips and waiting for it to go back to being a room. The nurse waited too. She pushed Rachel down the hall, past the dark doors and the beeping and a man somewhere talking in his sleep, to the room at the end, and parked her beside the bed and put the brakes on.

"Twenty minutes. Then you're going back."

Mrs. Garza was asleep. She was small, smaller than she had looked from the door. Her hair was white and braided, which somebody must have done for her, an aide probably, because there was nobody else. Her hands were on top of the blanket. Rachel didn't touch them. A day. Maybe less. She couldn't tell any closer than that. She sat there in the chair with her ribs burning and listened to Mrs. Garza breathe. The breaths came slow and even and didn't change. After twenty minutes the nurse came back. Rachel asked for a few more. The nurse said no and wheeled her back up the hall. Rachel lay in bed until morning, wide awake, sure that she had been wrong, sure that she had sat there for nothing and it would happen while she slept.

It didn't. Mrs. Garza was there Wednesday morning, facing the wall.

On Wednesday night it was Kim who answered the button. "You're kidding me." She went and got the chair. She took Rachel down at a quarter to ten and stood in the doorway for a minute with her arms folded, looking at Mrs. Garza and at Rachel, and went back to the station without saying how long Rachel could stay.

Mrs. Garza was awake this time. Her eyes were open, dark and wet, and they moved when the chair came in, and found Rachel, and stayed on her. Rachel didn't know what to say to her. She had sat with old people every night for months and never known what to say, and it had never mattered, because you didn't say anything, you cut up the fish and stirred the thickener into the juice and sat.

"Hi. I'm Rachel. I'm from down the hall."

Mrs. Garza looked at her. Her lips moved a little. Rachel reached out with her left hand and put it on top of the blanket next to Mrs. Garza's, not on it, next to it, close enough that the old woman could take it if she wanted. After a while Mrs. Garza's fingers moved over the blanket and found the side of Rachel's hand and stayed there. They were cool and very light, like paper.

It was close now. Rachel could feel it. Mrs. Garza's breathing changed. It went shallow and quick, with long gaps between, and every gap Rachel waited, and every gap the breath came back. The hall outside was quiet. Somebody's TV was on low, a man selling knives. Rachel sat with her ribs on fire and Mrs. Garza's fingers against her hand and didn't call anyone. There was nobody to call. Mrs. Garza didn't want anyone else, and the TV down the hall went on about the knives, how they would cut through a can and then a tomato, and the breaths got farther apart, and Rachel thought of Mr. Bettencourt in fourteen, and of whether anybody had been with him at the end, and decided somebody must have been, Lourdes, Lourdes would have been, and Mrs. Garza breathed in and the gap came and went on and went on.

The fingers on Rachel's hand didn't change. They were still cool and still light.

Then Mrs. Garza sat up.

She was also lying where she had been lying, eyes half closed, mouth fallen a little open. The one sitting up was just above her, the way you'd sit up from a nap. The braid was there, and the small face, but there was no tube in her nose. Her eyes were clear and dry. She looked down at herself on the pillow without much interest, the way you'd look at a coat you had taken off. She looked at Rachel.

Rachel didn't move. She didn't breathe.

Mrs. Garza looked at her for a while and smiled. It was a small, polite smile, the kind you'd give somebody who had held a door for you at the post office, and she leaned forward a little and said, "Thank you, dear."

Her voice was dry and light and ordinary, a little hoarse, an old woman's voice. The man on the TV down the hall went on about the knives.

"You're welcome." She didn't know what else you said.

Mrs. Garza looked toward the window. Then she wasn't there, and there was only Mrs. Garza on the pillow with her mouth a little open and her fingers against the side of Rachel's hand.

Rachel sat there. Nothing in her hurt for a minute. She only noticed when it all came back, the ribs and the face and the hand, and she sat in it and didn't press anything. It had been so easy. It was the lightest she had felt since the bike ride home along Baseline, with the moths around the lights.

Mrs. Garza had gotten to go. Rachel had gone too. She was almost sure of it. She remembered the tile cool under her cheek and the grout running off toward the table legs, and the sounds going out one at a time, the sink and the sprinklers, tick, tick, each one farther off. Her eyes had opened, and Brent was on his knees in the china, and nobody had asked her.

The old feeling came up, the mean one, the one from the driveway with the tongs. Mrs. Garza had taken hers off and left it on the pillow. Rachel had been put back into hers, and nobody was going to take it off her.

She sat with Mrs. Garza's fingers going cold against the side of her hand. Okay, she thought. If I have to wear it.

She went looking for a time when it had fit her. The ride home along Baseline came first, the night of the kitchen, with the heat coming up off the road and the moths around the lights at the taco place. She had been light that night, but only because she had left something behind on Magnolia. Her body had just been carrying her home.

Then it came by itself.

She was six. She was on the sidewalk on a street in Bakersfield with a pink bike that had been somebody else's, and the training wheels had come off that morning, and her dad was behind her holding the back of the seat. He was running. She could hear him breathing behind her, and his sneakers on the sidewalk, and he was saying pedal, pedal, pedal, Rach, keep pedaling, and the street was going by, the cracks in the concrete, a lawn, a garden hose, a dog behind a fence going crazy. She was pedaling, and she was going so fast, and his voice was getting farther away, pedal, and she didn't understand why until she looked back. He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk half a block behind her with his hands up in the air, laughing, and he wasn't holding anything. Nobody was holding anything. She was doing it. Her whole body was doing it, her legs and her hands on the grips and her back and her eyes, and it was all hers and all working, and the bike went where she pointed it.

She stayed there. She didn't know how long. The sidewalk went on and on, and her legs went around, and the sun was on her arms.

It started in her ribs. They were on fire, until the fire changed. It pulled and itched deep in, the way a cut does when it's getting better, but all at once and everywhere. It spread down into her stomach and hips. In her face the swollen side drew tight and hot before it loosened. The hand in the splints ached so hard she almost cried out, until it only throbbed. Her head was clear. It had not been clear for ten days, and she hadn't known it. Now it was. It was like opening a window in a room where something had been burning.

It stopped before it was done. She felt it stop. Her ribs hurt. So did her hand and her face, but it was the ordinary kind of hurt now. She knew what to do with that kind.

Her feet. She could feel her feet on the footrests of the chair, the cold metal through her socks.

She took her hand away from Mrs. Garza's. She put it on the bed rail and pulled. It hurt. She came up anyway, out of the chair, her good hand on the rail and the splinted one flat on the edge of the mattress. The room didn't go white. Her knees shook. The IV line pulled at the back of her hand, and she let it. She stood beside Mrs. Garza's bed, swaying, with the gown hanging off her and the floor cold under her feet. She reached over with her good hand and pressed Mrs. Garza's call button.

Kim came at a trot and stopped in the doorway. "Sit down. Honey. Sit down right now." She was across the room before she had finished saying it. One hand went around Rachel's elbow and the other pulled the chair in behind her knees, and she let her down into it with her whole weight braced, the way you'd lower something you were afraid to drop. She checked the IV line and the tape on the back of Rachel's hand before she turned to the bed.

She put two fingers on Mrs. Garza's neck and stood that way, looking at her watch, though she didn't need to.

"How long ago?"

"A few minutes."

Kim nodded. Her eyes went from Rachel to the rail where Rachel's hand had been. Her mouth opened and stayed open. She took Rachel back up the hall first and lifted her into bed. She fixed the blanket and stood there with her hand on the rail.

"How did you get up?"

"I stood up."

"On Monday you sat in a chair for four minutes." Kim looked at the shape of Rachel's feet under the blanket, and at her face, at the swollen side that wasn't as swollen anymore. "Four minutes, honey."

Rachel didn't have anything to tell her.

Kim looked at the door, and down the hall past it, toward the room at the end. "Two nights in a row you asked to go sit with her. Nobody asks to go down there." She turned back. "You knew."

"I guessed."

Kim didn't go. Rachel looked at the ring on her thumb, and the reading glasses on the chain, and the place high up on the left side of her chest.

"Get somebody to look at your heart."

Kim's hand went to her chest, to the place. She took it away again.

"Okay, honey." She turned off the light on her way out.

On Thursday morning the doctor came, the one who had years and years. Somebody had told him. He pressed on her ribs in four places and asked if that hurt. It did, but less than it should have, and she could see him thinking that. He had her sit on the edge of the bed and follow his finger with her eyes. She squeezed his hands. She told him what day it was. He sent her down for pictures of her head and chest.

When the results came back, he stood at the foot of the bed with a printout and read it twice. "Same as Monday's. Same fractures. Same everything." He looked at her sitting up against the pillows with nobody holding her. "Concussions can lift all at once sometimes. And you're seventeen."

He said it like a man closing a drawer. He was still writing in the chart when he went out the door.

Mom came at noon. Rachel saw her stop at the station, and the doctor come out from behind it, and the two of them stand in the hall while he talked and Mom nodded. Rachel was in the chair by the window, by herself, where Andre had left her an hour before. Mom stopped in the doorway with her purse in both hands and looked at her for a long time before she came in and sat down and asked how she had slept.

That afternoon Andre brought the walker he hadn't intended to use, and she used it, to the door and back, twice. He stood with the stopwatch hanging from his hand and forgot to stop it.

"Okay." He looked at the stopwatch. "Okay. Do it again. I want Monica to see this." He went out into the hall and came back with another therapist, and Rachel did it again, and he wrote it down in big letters and underlined it.

That night Rachel tried again. She lay in the dark and went looking for the sidewalk in Bakersfield, and found it, the cracks in the concrete and the garden hose and the dog behind the fence. Her dad was behind her saying pedal. She could see all of it. Nothing happened in her ribs. She tried until the window went gray, and every time it was only a memory, the way it had been for eleven years.

On Friday morning the nurse who came with the cuff was somebody Rachel didn't know. She was tall and had a badge that said PAT, and she didn't hum.

"Kim's not in?"

Pat looked up from the whiteboard. "You didn't hear?" She capped the marker. "Kim's upstairs. She took her own pulse at the station the other night, just for something to do, and didn't like it. She hooked herself up to the monitor in the break room, and it was all over the place. They admitted her yesterday. Something with her heart." She stood holding the marker. "Lucky, she said. She just happened to check."

The smiley face from Sunday had been wiped off the whiteboard, and Pat had written the date in blue, plain, FRIDAY 9/19, and nothing else. Kim was somewhere upstairs. Rachel wanted to see her face. She wanted to look at it and see what was there now.

"Pain, one to ten."

"Four."

Pat wrote it on the whiteboard and drew nothing next to it. Rachel's mouth pulled up at one corner, against the stitches, and she let it.

They came at four on Saturday, all three of them, still in the clothes from church. The boys stopped in the doorway. They had on new white shirts, the kind with the cardboard still in the collar, buttoned all the way up, and Caleb had pulled his tie loose already, and Josh's was straight. Mom had a hand on each of their backs. She had on a black dress Rachel had never seen and the low black shoes she wore to church, and she pushed them a little, and they came in.

Rachel didn't have time to look away, and it wouldn't have helped. It came with their faces, like it always did. Caleb had so long she couldn't see the end of it. Josh had the same.

She had held on for thirteen days, and now she couldn't. It came up out of her all at once. Every sob caught on the right side where the rib was. She cried anyway, with her mouth open and her face pulling at the stitches.

Josh came around the bed fast. He didn't know where to put his hands. He looked at the splints and the IV and the tape. In the end he put his forehead down on the blanket next to her and took her good hand in both of his. He held on, and his back shook. His fingernails were bitten down so far the skin around them was pink.

"I heard you," he said into the blanket. "I heard you say it."

Caleb stayed by the door. He looked at the window and the floor, and at Rachel. His face did what Josh's had done, only slower, and he fought it the whole way. In the end he came too. He stood on the other side of the bed with his tie loose and put one finger on the back of her splinted hand, very carefully, as if it might go off.

Mom stood at the foot of the bed with her purse in both hands and watched them, dry-eyed. It took a long time. When it was over, Josh's breathing had gone slow against the blanket, and Rachel's face was wet down into the neck of the gown. Her ribs throbbed with every breath.

After a while Mom sat down in the chair and pulled Caleb onto her knee, though he was too big for it and knew it. He let her. She put her hand on the back of his neck and left it there, and he leaned back against her with his loose tie and his shirt coming untucked.

Josh lifted his head. His face was blotchy, and he was still holding her hand. "They had a picture of Dad. With the fish. From Lake Perris."

"Yeah?"

"It was a big one."

"It wasn't that big," Caleb said to the window.

"It was big."

"Boys." Mom didn't put much into it, and they stopped.

Rachel looked at Josh's hand on hers and at the white shirt. Somebody had ironed it, Grandma probably, who had driven down from Bakersfield on the Monday and was sleeping in Rachel's room, Mom had said, because there wasn't anywhere else. Somebody had done up Josh's top button and stood behind him at the mirror and made sure. Caleb was sitting on Mom's knee with her hand on his neck. They had lost their dad, and everybody in that church had shaken their hands and told them they were brave, and they had come out of it in new shirts with somebody's hand on the back of their necks. Rachel lay there with the IV in the back of her hand. The old feeling came up in her again, the mean one, and it didn't care that they were ten.

Josh squeezed her hand. "Are you coming home?"

"Yeah. Soon."

"When?"

"I don't know. When they let me."

He nodded and went on holding her hand. They didn't know the rest. They knew what she had said. Nobody had told them what had happened after, to their dad, because nobody knew but her and Mom, and she didn't know what Mom had told them instead. She didn't ask.

Mom had brought her phone. She took it out of her purse with the charger wound around it and set it on the tray table.

"It was in your backpack. I charged it."

The backpack. Under the table, where he had thrown it.

"Thanks."

They stayed an hour. Caleb got bored and wanted to know if the bed went up and down, and Mom let him press the button until Rachel said stop. Josh went to the bathroom and came back with his hands wet and wiped them on his new shirt. When they left, Mom stopped in the doorway with the boys in front of her and looked back at the bed.

"Tomorrow after church."

The door closed slowly on its arm, and Rachel heard Josh asking a question in the hall, and Mom's voice answering, low and patient, until the elevator took them.

On Sunday, a little after eleven, Pat put her head in the door. "There's a lady at the station asking for you. Says she knows you from your job. The nursing home."

Rachel's first thought was Lourdes. "Filipina? Kind of short?"

"No. White lady. Fifties. She's not on your list, so I can't let her back. You're a minor and there's a police thing. Only family. You want me to tell her something?"

"What's her name?"

"Hang on." Pat went away and came back. "Theresa Albright."

Rachel didn't know anybody named Theresa. "I don't know her."

"I'll tell her."

"No. Wait. My mom's coming after church. She can wait for my mom, if she wants."

Pat shrugged and went. Through the narrow window in the door Rachel could see a piece of the hallway and the corner of the nurses' station. For a while there was nothing there but people going past, until a woman came and stood across the hall with her back to the wall, close enough that Rachel could see her through the glass, and waited.

It was Shirley's daughter.

Rachel knew her right away, from the Sundays at Cedar Mesa, the slacks and the way she stood in the dayroom door before she went in. She knew her another way too, like her own front door in the dark. The Sunday before, a little after eight, the sky had broken open over the building, and there had been a floor and a light and somebody lying down. It had been this woman. And there was nothing on her. Every face that had come through that door for two weeks had brought its number with it, and so had every face in the hall. Rachel looked and looked. It was like looking at a wall where a picture used to hang. Shirley's daughter stood across the hall with her purse over her shoulder, and there was nothing written on her at all.

Mom came at twenty past twelve in her church clothes. Rachel saw her stop at the station, and Pat point, and Mom turn and look at the woman across the hall. Shirley's daughter came off the wall. Mom didn't move toward her. Shirley's daughter came the rest of the way, and they stood in front of the door, half in and half out of the narrow window, and talked.

Rachel couldn't hear any of it. She saw Shirley's daughter talk and talk while Mom listened with her arms folded. She saw Mom say a few words. Shirley's daughter shook her head, touched her own chest, and talked again. Mom looked at the floor. She looked through the glass at Rachel, for longer than Rachel was used to. She turned back, said something, and opened the door.

"Rachel." Mom stood aside. "This is Theresa. She's Shirley's daughter, from the home. She wants to talk to you."

The woman came in and stopped at the foot of the bed. "Terry. Everybody calls me Terry."

She was smaller than Rachel remembered, or she had gotten smaller. She had on gray slacks and a cardigan buttoned wrong, one button off all the way down, so the hem stood a little higher on one side. Her hair was pulled back in a clip that had slid down to the nape of her neck. She held a manila folder against her chest with both arms, the way kids carried their notebooks on the first day of school. She smelled of the sanitizer from the dispenser in the lobby. Her eyes went to Rachel's face and stayed there, and didn't go anywhere else, not to the splints or the stitches or the window.

"Hi."

"Hi." Terry looked at the visitor chair, and at Mom, and Mom nodded, and Terry sat down on the front edge of it with the folder on her knees. "I'm sorry. I'm not very good at this. I had a thing I was going to say, and I wrote it down, and I left it in the car."

"It's okay."

"You used to sit with my mom."

"Yeah."

"Every night you worked. Between dinner and the dishes." Terry opened the folder and closed it again without looking at what was inside. "I didn't know that. I was there every Sunday, and I didn't know it. They told me after. The nurse with the bun told me, and Marvin."

"Lourdes. The nurse."

"Lourdes." Terry said it carefully, getting it right. "I thanked you. Do you remember that? The last time. I said, 'You're from the kitchen, right? Thanks for sitting with her.'"

"I remember."

"I didn't look at you. I looked at your shirt." Terry's hands lay on the folder. "I tried to remember your face afterward, and I couldn't. There was a shirt and a hairnet, and nothing. That's why I came. One of the reasons."

Mom had stayed standing by the door. Rachel didn't look at her.

"How's Shirley?"

Terry's face crumpled for a second and came straight back. "She asks for you. She's been asking all week. Every night at a quarter past seven she stands in the door of the dayroom and looks down the hall to the kitchen. She asks the aides if Ruthie's coming." Terry pushed the clip back up her head, and it slid back down. "She calls you Ruthie. You know that."

"Yeah."

"Ruthie's her sister. Aunt Ruthie. She lives in Ohio." Terry almost laughed. "So when Mom said Ruthie, I thought she meant Ruthie. Ruthie calls every other Sunday. When Mom asked for her, I said, 'She's fine, Mom, she called last week.' And Mom got mad at me. She said, 'Not that Ruthie. The other one. With the bicycle.'"

Rachel looked at the ceiling. There were forty-two tiles with holes in them and two without.

"I told her stuff. That night. Before you came."

"I know. She told me." Terry looked at the folder, not at Rachel. "After you left. She took my hand. Hard. She taught first grade for thirty-five years, and she can still hold on to you like you're about to run into the street." She stopped. "She said, 'The man is hurting the girl.'" Rachel didn't move.

"I said, 'Which girl, Mom?' She said Ruthie. She said, 'He's hurting her. You tell a grown-up.'" Terry turned the folder a quarter turn on her knees. "Aunt Ruthie was married to a man who hit her, back when I was a kid. That's what I heard. And they give you a brochure when your mother moves in. There's a page about the evenings. How they get confused when it gets dark, and you're not supposed to argue, you're supposed to reassure and redirect. So I knew what it was. I patted her hand, and I put on the TV."

By the door Mom had gone still. Terry's hands lay flat on the folder. "She said, 'Now. He's doing it now.' And I went home."

In the hall a cart went by with a rattle of trays.

"She remembered. She doesn't remember her own address."

"She remembered you. She doesn't remember me most days." Terry looked down at the folder. "She told the only grown-up she had, and it was me."

"I'm going to get a coffee." Mom went out. The door closed slowly behind her on its arm. Through the narrow window Rachel watched her walk past the station and out of the strip of hall she could see. She didn't hear the elevator.

Terry looked at the door and back. "I shouldn't have said that in front of her."

"It's okay."

"It was the thing I wrote down. In the car." Terry turned the folder around in her hands. "I'm sorry. That's what it said. Under all the other stuff. It said I'm sorry, and then it said ask her if she needs anything. I always make a list."

"I don't need anything."

"Okay." Terry looked at her. "I'm going to ask anyway, later. That's how I am."

Rachel went on looking at her. At the cardigan and the clip, and at the place on her face where the number should have been.

"What? Do I have something on me?"

"No."

Terry sat on the edge of the chair with the folder on her knees and waited, and Rachel saw that she was going to go on waiting. It was a different kind of waiting than the detective's. She looked like she had decided to do it and was doing it.

"That's the thing. There's nothing on you." Rachel hadn't said it out loud before, and it came out flat and quick. "I can see it. On everybody. How long they've got. Since I woke up in the ambulance. Everybody. The doctor. The guy who brings the food. My brothers. My mom. I thought there was something wrong with my head."

Terry sat there.

"You're the only one I can't."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know." Rachel looked at the blank where the number should be. "It's good. It's quiet."

Terry took that in. She looked like she was filing it.

"There was a lady down the hall. Mrs. Garza. Nobody came to see her." Rachel looked at the window. "I knew she had a day or two. So I sat with her. Wednesday night. She died while I was there."

Terry's fingers stopped on the edge of the folder.

"I saw her. After. She sat up. She said thank you."

Rachel waited for her to say it was the drugs, or a dream, or the thing in her head. She waited for the brochure.

"What did she look like?"

Rachel told her. The braid and the clear, dry eyes. The coat taken off. Terry listened and didn't interrupt, and when Rachel was done, Terry looked at the folder for so long that Rachel thought she was going to get up and go.

"Did she say anything else?"

"No. Just thank you. She called me dear."

"Okay." Terry looked up. "I'm glad you were there."

"And the nurse. Kim. She had a week, maybe two. It was in her heart. I told her to get it looked at." Rachel heard how it sounded and said it anyway. "She's upstairs. They admitted her Thursday."

She didn't tell her about the chair.

"There's something else." Rachel looked at the blank where the number should be. "Last Sunday, a little after eight. It was like the whole sky cracking open. And for a second I saw a floor. A light. Somebody lying down." She stopped. "It was you."

Terry looked up from the folder. Out in the hall the cart came back the other way.

"My mom's house. I was on the floor." Her voice had gone very small. "Nobody knows that."

Terry opened the folder, and this time she looked inside. There was a printout from a website and a map with a route drawn on it in blue pen, and a sheet of lined paper with a list on it that Rachel couldn't read upside down. Terry closed it again.

"I didn't find you in the phone book."

"Okay."

"I mean, I tried. I called the hospitals. They wouldn't tell me anything. You're a minor. I didn't know your last name." She stopped. "That's not true. I found your last name. It was on a website about the high school, the honor roll from last spring. But I knew where you were before that." She looked at the window. "I can see things. Places. I sit somewhere and I'm also somewhere else. It started then. She's selling the house, I was there by myself, and then I was also in the dayroom, watching her. I could see the pattern on her blouse. And I tried to go to you, to the girl from the kitchen, and I got the shirt and the hairnet and nothing else. Because I'd never looked at you."

"And then?"

"Then I had your name. Your whole name. And I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at my work on Thursday, and I thought about it, and I was here. In this room. You were asleep. I could see the parking lot out the window and the sign on the building across it." Terry put her hand flat on the folder. "I don't know what that is. I'm fifty-four. I process claims."

Rachel had to shut her eyes. Her throat went tight, so fast it was almost like being sick. She hadn't known how heavy it was until somebody lifted the edge of it. She wasn't broken. Or if she was broken, she wasn't the only one, and the other one was sitting in the visitor chair in a cardigan buttoned wrong. And under that, right away, the other thing: Terry could go anywhere. Terry could sit in a parking lot and be in a dayroom, could look at her mother's face, could find a girl in a hospital from twenty miles off. Rachel could lie here and see when people were going to die.

"That's better than mine."

"I don't know about that."

"It is."

Terry thought about it. "It didn't help me with you. Not till I knew your name."

They sat there. Out the window the parking lot shone white in the noon sun, and the cars were too bright to look at.

Terry looked at her. "So it isn't only me."

"No."

"Do you think there's more? People like us?"

Rachel looked at the blank on her. "I don't know."

Terry sat back in the chair for the first time since she had sat down. Her eyes went around the room, over the whiteboard and the TV on its arm, and came back.

"I don't know what we are."

"Me neither."

"I'm not good at not knowing things."

"I'm used to it."

Terry laughed, once, through her nose, and put her hand over her mouth before it could get away from her again. Mom came back with a coffee she hadn't drunk any of. She stood at the foot of the bed holding it, and Terry got up out of the chair and offered it to her, and Mom shook her head.

"I should go. I go to Mom on Sundays. I'm going there now."

"Tell her," Rachel said, and stopped.

"I'll tell her. I'll tell her you're in the hospital and you're getting better, and you're coming back."

"I'm coming back."

"I'll tell her."

Mom set the coffee on the windowsill and opened her purse. She took out a card from the gift shop downstairs, with a watercolor of a bird on a branch on the front and nothing written inside. Mom must have bought it for somebody else. She held it out, and a pen after it.

"For your mother. From Rachel."

Rachel took the card and the pen. She opened the card on her knee, on top of the blanket, and held it flat with the splinted hand. Her writing came out shaky and too big, the letters leaning, because it was her left hand. She wrote one word and closed it.

Terry took it and opened it and read it.

Ruthie.

She put the card inside the folder, carefully, against the list. She took a pen out of her own purse and wrote her number on the back of the map, tore the corner off and gave it to Mom, and wrote it again on a second scrap for Rachel.

"In case."

"In case what?"

"I don't know. In case one of us figures out what this is."

At the door she stopped, with the folder against her chest. "Do you need anything? I said I'd ask."

"No."

"Okay."

She went. Through the narrow window Rachel watched her walk past the station with her clip sliding down, and out of sight. After a while the elevator chimed.

Mom stayed. A little before two the weekend doctor came in, a woman Rachel hadn't seen before, with short gray hair and a tablet she read from. Rachel's head was stable, she said. Her numbers were good. She was up and walking, which was more than they had expected, a good deal more. There was no reason to keep her. If tonight was quiet, she could go home tomorrow, with a follow-up in a week for the head and somebody to look at the hand.

"Tomorrow," Mom said.

"If tonight's quiet."

When the doctor had gone, Mom sat with her purse on her knees and looked at the door. "Grandma can take the couch. You'll have your room."

"Okay."

Mom turned the purse strap around her finger. "They put in a new floor. In the kitchen. The insurance paid for it. They took the whole thing up." She stopped. "It's a light gray. They said the grout was the hard part."

Rachel looked at the ceiling. She counted the tiles. Forty-two with holes in them and two without, by the window, where somebody had put in new ones.