Good Reasons

"Shut the door, Jose. You're letting the heat out."

He hadn't knocked. He'd stood in the corridor of the Linden House for about a minute with his hand on the frame, reading the name card in its little brass holder, MARGARET VOSS, until the voice came through the gap and did it for him.

He went in. He shut the door.

The room was smaller than he'd expected and warmer than it needed to be. A hospital bed cranked to a slant. A window onto the parking lot, a rack of lemon swabs in a paper cup, a pump on a pole that clicked every few seconds, patient as a clock. On the pillow, a woman about the size of a girl.

Her hair had gone. She had a green scarf over her head, tied at the nape by someone who'd done it kindly. Her eyes had not changed at all.

"Sit," Maggie said.

"I'm fine."

"You stand like a man who's about to leave. It makes me tired. Sit."

There was a vinyl chair by the bed. He sat on the front edge of it.

"You've lost weight," she said.

"A little."

"Don't. Sad men should eat. Somebody ought to tell you that." She moved one hand on the blanket, and he saw how it moved, a careful inch at a time, like something being carried across a floor. "Is he in the car?"

"Who?"

"Don't be tedious."

"He wouldn't come in."

"No." Her mouth bent. "He'd rather be right than be here. He's got that from his mother. I never said it wasn't a gift."

The pump clicked. Jose looked at the window. A man in the lot was walking slowly from a station wagon with a bag of oranges.

"Your wife was here Tuesday," Maggie said.

He turned his head.

"Lilies. I told her I can't stand lilies. She took them to the nurses' station and they thanked her for it. Very correct girl." She watched him. "She didn't tell you."

"No."

"Of course she didn't. You two don't tell each other much, do you?" It sounded almost fond. "I used to think that was how you knew it would last."

"Maggie."

"She asked if I was comfortable. People ask the dying that when they want to know how long."

"I didn't come about Camille."

"Then you came about something." She tipped her chin at his jacket. "You've kept your hand over that pocket since you sat down."

He looked. His left hand lay flat across his chest, covering the inside pocket. He took it away.

"It's a piece of paper," he said.

"Everything is."

He took it out. He had printed it that morning at a copy shop, one page, folded in four. When he opened it, the creases had left white lines across the signature block, and he held it where she could see, because he didn't think she'd take it from him.

She didn't look at it for long.

"Margaret A. Voss," she said. "The *g.* I always hated that *g.*"

"It's dated the thirteenth."

"I know what it's dated."

"Two days after he died."

"I'm aware."

"Eugene Pell is the witness."

"Gene was always a good witness." Her eyes went from the page to his face. "Honest, steady. A man who never said more than he saw."

"Where was Elias that day?"

"Where was he?" She said it as if it were an odd question, a little rude. "In the ground, I should think. That's the usual place."

"He wasn't."

Nothing moved in her face. The pump clicked twice.

"The grave's empty, Maggie."

"Is it."

"Rainer dug it up. I held the flashlight."

"That's a thing to do with a Sunday," she said.

"Were you in the house?"

"Which house?"

"Tamarack. The thirteenth. You were upstairs. You signed that." He turned the page so she could see it again. "Rainer says you never climbed to the third floor that week because the stairs were too much. He told me you didn't know."

"Did he?"

"He believed it."

"He believes a lot of things." She said it gently. "It keeps him working."

"So you did know."

"I never could manage those stairs," Maggie said.

He stared at her.

It wasn't a yes. It wasn't a no. She lay there with the green scarf and the pump and the lemon swabs, perfectly composed, and every word she'd said could be read either way, and he understood that she'd been doing it for sixty years. To social workers, to bankers, to boys who'd lied about the pills. She'd had practice.

"Why would you sign it?" he said.

"People sign what's put in front of them."

"I know. I've done it."

"Then you know it isn't an answer." She closed her eyes for a second, and he saw how thin the lids were, bruise-colored, almost clear. "Ask what you came to ask, Jose. I haven't got the time for you to work up to it."

"Did you know he was alive?"

She opened her eyes.

"I'm going to tell you what I believe," she said. "I'll say it once. After that I'd like my ice."

He didn't move.

"Family is the only real protection a person gets. The law doesn't love you. The bank doesn't love you. A husband is an arrangement, and I include my own, God rest him. What you three had, in that house, with the heating that never worked and that ghastly wallpaper, that was the only thing I ever built that stayed standing." Her voice didn't rise. It had never needed to. "I'd have done anything to keep it that way. I would have signed anything."

"That's not what I asked."

"No." A small, dry breath, close to a laugh. "It isn't."

"Maggie. Was he alive?"

"Some graves stay empty for good reasons."

The pump clicked.

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a sentence."

She reached out for the cup of ice chips on the tray. Her hand shook and the cup tipped, and he got there before it fell, and for a second his fingers were around hers on the plastic. They were cold. Almost weightless. She let him hold the cup while she took one chip between two fingers and put it on her tongue.

"Thank you," she said. "You were always the one who caught things."

He set the cup down. His hands wouldn't stay still, so he put them under his knees.

"Rainer killed someone," he said.

It came out of him flat and sudden, and he heard it land. He had not meant to say it. He had not known it was in his mouth.

Maggie didn't flinch. She didn't ask who. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at the window, at the lot, at the man with the oranges getting into a different car.

"Did he," she said.

"You're not surprised."

"I'm seventy-one, Jose. I've stopped being surprised by the things people do for love." She swallowed the ice. "It's the things they do for convenience that still get me."

The nurse's shoes passed in the hall and went on.

"I'm going to ask you something," Maggie said. "And I want you to think before you answer it. I won't be here long enough for you to take it back."

"All right."

"You've been looking at that page as though it's the worst thing you'll find. It isn't. It's only the first. There's a good deal more and it's all of a piece." She turned her face to him. "Are you ready to be the kind of man who can keep a secret that large?"

"What secret?"

The corner of her mouth moved.

"Good," she said. "That's the right answer."

"I didn't give an answer."

"No. But you didn't say *no,* either." She let her head sink back into the pillow. The eyes closed. "Come back on Thursday. By yourself. Don't tell your wife. Don't bring anything in writing."

"And Rainer?"

"Rainer is welcome whenever he can stand it."

"What happens Thursday?"

"I find out whether I've chosen right."

She lay still. For a moment he thought she'd gone to sleep. The pump clicked. A cart rattled past in the corridor with a sound like cutlery.

"Maggie."

"Take the page with you," she said, without opening her eyes. "I'd hate for the nurse to find it."

He folded it along its old creases. He put it in his pocket and didn't take his hand away.