Not On My Floor

Chapter 7:

I was so cold I couldn't remember my own name, and then I could, and that was worse.

"Jane." A hand on my jaw, turning my face. "Jane, look at me. What's my name?"

I tried. My teeth were a machine and my jaw was doing all the work and nothing was coming out right.

"Mar—"

"Close enough. Stay with me."

The fire was going and it wasn't enough. I could see it from the floor, the flames doing their thing behind the iron grate, and I could feel the heat on my face, and my back was freezing. My back was against ice. The whole left side of me was against ice.

"That's not —" I got out. "That's not right. The floor's not—"

"I know." Margaret was up and moving, and I heard her at the hearth, and I heard the poker, and then she was back and something heavy and warm got laid down along my back.

Rocks. Heated rocks, wrapped in cloth, and the heat of them went through the blanket and into my spine and my whole body arched off the floor like a fish.

"There. There. That's what I thought." Her hands were moving again, one on my forehead, one at my wrist. "You're ice through and through and the fire's not reaching you."

"Cold," I said.

"I know you're cold."

"No, it's —" My teeth chattered so hard it hurt my jaw hinge. "It's inside. It's in the middle of me."

Her hand stopped on my forehead.

She didn't say anything for a second. Then she got up again and this time I heard her moving fast, cupboards banging, and she came back and there was a cup at my mouth and a hand behind my head.

"Drink. All of it. Don't you dare spit it out."

It was the bitter stuff, worse than before, and I got it down in three goes and my stomach rolled and I held it.

"Good," she said. "Good girl."

The shivering got worse.

That's not the way it's supposed to go. The shivering is supposed to slow down when the heat gets in. Mine got worse. It went up through me and took my arms and my legs and my hands and I couldn't hold onto anything and I could hear myself making a sound I didn't like.

Then the room changed.

I don't know how else to say it. The ceiling beams were there and then the ceiling was a hall. The firelight was firelight and then it was three hundred candles. And there was a laugh, that laugh, coming out of the corners of the room where the wood was dark, and I turned my head on the floor to get away from it and Karl was standing over me with the rain coming down between us.

"You could have said something," he said.

"Get away."

"Like you knew it was coming."

"Get away from me—"

"Jane."

"You said it in front of three hundred people—"

"Jane." Hands on my shoulders, holding me down, and the hall was gone, and it was the cottage, and Margaret's face was six inches from mine. "Nobody's here. There's nobody here but me. Look at my face. Look at it."

I looked at her face.

Old. Grey hair coming loose. Her mouth was set hard and her eyes were wet and she was breathing like she'd been running.

"There you are," she said.

"Where's my—" My voice was a croak. "Where's my wolf."

Her hands tightened on my shoulders.

"Margaret. Where's my wolf. I keep calling her and there's—" My breath caught. "There's a room. There's a room in me and she's not in it."

"Not now."

"Where is she—"

"Not now, Jane." Her voice cracked right down the middle. "I will answer you. I swear on my mother's grave I'll answer you. But not while you're shaking apart on my floor in the middle of the night, because you'll remember it wrong and I'll say it wrong and then we've both got a problem."

I lay there and looked up at her.

"You know," I said.

She didn't say no.

"You know what's wrong with me."

Her jaw worked. She sat back on her heels and pushed her hair out of her face with the back of her hand and looked at me and the firelight was all over the wrinkles and the wet.

"I know some things," she said. "And I'm going to tell you some of them. Tomorrow. Not tonight."

"Tomorrow's the whole problem, Margaret. There's no tomorrow if I—"

"You're not going to die on my floor."

"You don't know that—"

"I do."

She stood up.

"Up," she said. "Come on. We're moving."

I looked up at her. Standing over me in a wool dress with her sleeves pushed up and her hands on her hips like I was a sack of flour she was figuring out where to put.

"I can't," I said.

"You don't have to. I'm not asking you to." She bent down and got her hands under my arms. "You just have to be limp."

"Margaret—"

"Limp, Jane. That's the whole job. Just be limp."

She pulled.

I came up off the floor.

That's when I understood what she was doing, and the understanding went through me slow, because I was heavy and stupid with fever and my head was rolling. She was carrying me. Sixty-something years old and a handspan shorter than me and she'd gotten me off the floor and she was carrying me.

"Put me down," I said.

"No."

"Margaret. Put me down. I'm going to—"

"No."

Her breath was coming hard. I could hear it right by my ear, that flat wheezing pull of an old woman who's overdone it, and her arms under my back and my knees were shaking, and I could feel the whole of her straining.

"You're going to hurt yourself—"

"I've carried worse."

"You haven't carried me—"

"Jane." She stopped. Right there in the middle of her own floor with me in her arms. "You weigh what you weigh and I am not putting you down."

She started walking.

Four steps. Five. The fire went past on my right and I could feel the heat of it on my face and then it was behind me and the cold came back around my shoulders.

"Almost," she said. Not to me. To herself. "Almost."

"Margaret."

"Shut up."

"Margaret, I'm sorry—"

"Shut up," she said, and her voice was wet. "You didn't do anything. You fell down in my yard. That's all you did." She took another step. "Nineteen years I've kept that room and nobody's ever—" She stopped herself. "Almost. There."

The bed came up under me.

She went down with me. Not a drop, not a plop — she went down with me, all the way, one knee on the mattress and then the other, and she set me down on her own pillows like I was something that could break, and her arms were still under me when my back hit the blanket.

Then she just stayed there. Hanging over me. Breathing.

"There," she said, when she had the air for it.

"Your back," I said.

"My back's fine."

"Your back is not fine."

"My back has been worse since before you were born." She straightened up, and I saw her hand go to her hip and press, and I saw her face do something she didn't want it to do, and then she let go and it was gone. "Roll over. Toward the wall. You're sleeping on your side tonight."

"Why?"

"Because if you're sick in your sleep, I want you on your side so you don't choke on it."

"Oh," I said.

"Yeah. Oh."

I rolled.

The bed was soft. My mother's bed hadn't been soft — hers had a bad spring on the left and you learned not to sleep on the left. This bed was soft and there were two pillows and I got my head on one of them and it smelled like lavender and dust and an old woman's hair.

Two pillows.

Two blankets folded at the foot, and she was pulling one of them up over me now, and there were two of them because one person does not own two folded blankets at the foot of a bed.

"Margaret," I said.

"Sleep."

"Who else lives here?"

Her hands stopped on the blanket.

"Nobody," she said. "Nobody lives here."

She went and dragged the second chair over. The one at the table, the one that had been pulled out a little, and I heard it scrape and then it was beside the bed and she sat down in it with a grunt she didn't bother hiding.

"Sleep," she said again.

The fire settled. My shivering was slowing now, finally, the way it should, and the heat had gotten into me and gone all the way through and my hands were starting to hurt, which meant blood, which meant I was going to live.

I watched her through my eyelashes.

She sat in that chair beside the bed with her hands in her lap and her eyes on me and the fire behind her, and every few minutes she'd lean over and put the back of her hand against my forehead.

She did it six times before I fell asleep. I counted.

---

The fever dreams were bad and I don't want to talk about most of them.

There was one. The hall, the candles, the laugh, and then a door opening on a road, and me standing at the tree line with my hand flat on a trunk and the pack lights going out one by one behind me.

And a voice in the dark saying almost.

I woke up at dawn.

The fire was down to red. The room was grey and cold and the window was a pale square, and my mouth tasted like copper and roots, and I lay in Margaret's bed on my side and felt my own heartbeat going along steady for the first time in a night and a half.

Margaret was asleep in the chair.

She'd fallen asleep sitting up — head tipped back, mouth open a little, hands still in her lap. Her hair had come all the way out of whatever she'd done to it and was hanging down over her shoulder. There was a blanket over her knees that she hadn't had before.

She'd been awake all night. She'd carried me. She was sixty-something and she'd carried me across her own floor and then sat up all night in a chair to watch me breathe.

I lay there and looked at her and something in my chest turned over that had nothing to do with my wolf.

I turned my head on the pillow.

The headboard was right there. Old wood, dark with years, and I hadn't seen it in the dark the night before, and now the dawn was coming through the window and I could see it plain.

There was carving on it.

Two sets of initials, cut into the wood with a knife — a real knife, by the look, not a proper carving tool. The first set was up near the top, old, the edges gone soft and smooth with handling, like a thing that had been touched a thousand times.

The second set was lower. Newer. The cuts still sharp.

I lay there and looked at the top set, and my stomach dropped out of me.

I'd seen those letters before.

There was a bracelet. My mother's bracelet, with a flat silver plate on it, and the plate had letters on it, worn nearly to nothing from being worn every day of her life, and I'd asked her what they stood for when I was seven and she'd said that's me, that's my name, before.

I put my hand out.

The wood was cold. I ran my thumb over the cuts at the top of the headboard, back and forth, and they were the letters on the bracelet, and the cuts were deep and the edges were smooth and the wood under my thumb was warm from my own hand.

I've kept that room for nineteen years.

Margaret shifted in the chair.

I didn't look at her. I kept my thumb on the letters and I lay there in her bed under her blanket with the dawn coming in and my heart going like a rabbit, and I said it out loud, quiet, into the pillow.

"Whose bed am I in?"

Chapter (7) Ends.