Chapter 14 First Word

He didn't die.

He had a bad first night instead. I sat at the nurses' station on six until four in the morning and watched his heart rate climb out of the thirties as the extra doses washed out of him and the taper held the rest.

Sunday, a low fever that came to nothing. No seizure. Not one.

Tuesday he slept fourteen hours straight. Wednesday he asked for water by glaring at the pitcher.

Thursday morning, when I came in at seven with my coffee and my penlight, he followed the light across the room with his whole face, eyes and chin and eyebrows all going after it together.

"Good morning," I said. "Show-off."

He made a noise that was nearly a laugh.

---

His room looked down on the hospital courtyard. Someone had planted crocuses around the bench there years ago, and this week they had come up all at once, purple and white and a yellow so loud it looked artificial. Edmund liked the window. I'd had the bed turned so he could see it.

I checked his chart first. Lorazepam down another step overnight, on schedule. Heart rate seventy-two, sinus rhythm with his old atrial fibrillation flickering in and out. Blood pressure sensible. Oxygen sensible.

The PRN line, the one that had said agitation in Ursula Blythe's neat hand all through March, had been struck out and initialed by me, and under it someone on nights had written pt calm, watching TV, refused Jell-O. I liked that nurse already.

Then I sat on the bed rail, which you are not supposed to do, and took his right hand.

It was cool and heavy, and the fingers curled in on themselves. I opened them one at a time and laid them flat across my palm. His left hand found my other wrist and closed on it.

"Let's try," I said.

His lids were up now, all the way, and the eyes underneath were pale blue and furious and completely present. The glassy shine had gone. When he tracked my finger there was no lazy jerk at the end of the movement. His pupils snapped down in the light like anyone's.

He opened his mouth.

"Mm," he said. His face screwed up. "Mm. Mm."

"Good."

"Nn." He shook his head, hard, angry at himself. The sound fell apart. His mouth kept moving after it, shaping something his voice wasn't following. His grip on my wrist got tighter, and then tighter, and the monitor started to tick upward.

I began to hum.

It was one of Helen's, a shanty she used to sing while she ironed, about a sailor who never came back, which she'd made comic by changing the words. I kept it slower than she ever sang it. Edmund's hand stayed clamped on my wrist. But his breathing began to come down to match the tune, in and out, and the monitor slid back from ninety to eighty to seventy-five.

"There," I said, when I stopped. "Your brain knows what it wants to say. It just can't find the door. We'll find it."

He gave me the look of a man who's been told the house is on fire and advised to take the stairs.

---

Rhys had come every evening.

Saturday he'd arrived at eight and stood at the window in his buttoned coat for forty minutes. He didn't sit. He said "Dr. Fairley" on the way in and "Dr. Fairley" on the way out. Sunday the same. Monday Edmund slept through his whole hour, and Rhys watched him sleep.

Tuesday he brought a travel chessboard with magnetic pieces and set it on the window ledge without comment.

Wednesday he moved the white king's pawn two squares while Edmund watched, then left.

The nurses had started timing him. "Your ex," one of them said to me on Wednesday, all innocence, "is regular as a heart monitor." I told her that was the least romantic sentence I'd heard in a decade, and she said, "I didn't say romantic, Doctor," and went off to hang a bag of potassium.

Thursday he came at six. I was still there, because I wanted to see what Edmund did with his voice at the end of a day. His sounds had more breath behind them in the afternoons.

Rhys lifted two fingers to me from the doorway. I lifted one back. Neither of us had said anything that wasn't a title or a time since he'd signed the transfer form at one in the morning in black tie, and I was content to leave it there.

He went to the window. Edmund had moved a black pawn that afternoon, with a physical therapist's help, and Rhys stood over the reply for longer than one pawn deserved.

I was on the bed rail again. I had Edmund's right hand. I'd been asking him yes-or-no questions about his breakfast, and then, out of nowhere, he let go of my wrist with his left hand and pointed at me.

At my face.

His mouth was fighting, his lips coming together and parting, the cords in his neck standing up. He made the mm sound again. It broke. He made it again. His eyes never left mine.

I didn't hum this time. I didn't want to give him a tune. I wanted to see what he had.

"Take your time," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Mm," Edmund said. "Mmm. Ah."

At the window, Rhys turned around.

"Mar," Edmund said. The sound came out wet and torn. He dragged in another breath. His finger was shaking in front of my face but it didn't drop. "Mar. Go."

His whole face was working now, his forehead, his weak right cheek trying to follow the left. He shut his eyes, opened them, found me again.

"Margot," he said.

It was whole. It was ugly, slurred at the end, too loud for the room, and it was absolutely my name, aimed at my face from a foot away by a man who hadn't said a word to anyone in five years.

Rhys didn't move. He was standing in front of the window with the evening behind him and the crocuses going blue in the dusk below, and he had stopped in the middle of whatever he'd been about to do, one hand half out of his pocket.

I didn't let go of Edmund's hand.

"Yes," I said. "Hello. You took your time."

Edmund laughed. It came out as a cough and then a wheeze and then a sort of bark, and tears ran out of the corners of his eyes, and he squeezed my hand so hard with his good one that I felt the bones grind. He said it again, "Margot," quieter, just to see if it was still there, and it was.

I looked across the bed at Rhys.

He was looking at his grandfather. Then he turned to me, and for a second, before he put his face back together, he had the expression of someone who'd come home to his own front hall and found every piece of furniture moved six inches to the left.

"He knows you," Rhys said.

"He always did."

---

The door opened without a knock.

Delphine came in on a wave of cold air from the corridor, in a camel coat and a cream silk scarf, her silver bob perfect, her cheeks pink from the cold. She had an armful of flowers wrapped in brown paper and tied with garden twine, and her eyes were already wet.

"I heard," she said. "Sweetheart. The charge nurse called the house. I came straight from the greenhouse, look at me, I've still got soil under my nails." She held up one hand to show us, though her nails were spotless. "Oh, Edmund. Oh, he's back."

She crossed to the bed. I got off the rail and stepped aside, because that is what you do when the family arrives.

"Edmund," she said, bending over him. "It's Delphine. Can you say my name, my dear? Can you try?"

She had asked him the way you ask a toddler to wave bye-bye for the grandparents. I filed it, one abnormal value on a lab sheet that's otherwise clean.

Edmund didn't try. He looked at her. His left hand had gone back to the blanket and lay there.

"He's tired," Delphine said to Rhys, straightening. "Of course he's tired. All this excitement." She turned to me with her whole face soft and grateful, and pressed the flowers into my arms.

"Margot. I don't know how to thank you. I truly don't. Whatever's past is past. Nothing's out at Larkmoor yet but the camellias, so I had the florist in town make something up on my way. I told her spring flowers. I thought he should have something cheerful."

They were lilies, mostly, heavy-scented, the pollen already loose and staining the brown paper orange. And in the middle, taller than everything else, rising out of the lilies, was a single spike of purple flowers. Bells. Dozens of them, freckled dark inside, opening from the bottom up.

I knew them from a pharmacology lecture in my second year of medical school. The professor had brought one in a jar of water and set it on the lectern and said, Ladies and gentlemen, before there was a pharmaceutical industry, there was this, and it has killed more gardeners than it has cured.

Foxglove. Digitalis purpurea. The plant digoxin came from.

I gave it the glance you'd give any flower, and not a second more.

"They're beautiful," I said. "Lilies are hard on the patients, though. The scent. We don't allow them in the rooms on this floor." That was a lie, but it was a lie the nurses would back. "I'll take them out to the nurses' station. Everyone will enjoy them there."

"Oh, of course," Delphine said at once. "Of course. I should have thought. You'd know." She smiled at me. It was a lovely smile. It reached her eyes. I had seen her give the same smile to waiters. "You always did know about these things."

"I'll be right back."

I carried the bouquet out into the corridor. I didn't take it to the station. I took it to the soiled utility room at the end of the hall and laid it on the steel counter, and I took the foxglove out of it with my fingers in a fold of brown paper so I didn't touch the stem.

I stood there with it. My heart was going faster than it should have been. I made myself breathe in, slow, in time with nothing.

A florist might put a foxglove in a spring bouquet without thinking. Half the cottage gardens in New England grow it. It's in every flower market by March.

A woman who had sat beside the bed of a man poisoned with digoxin, who had heard the paramedics say the word in her own ballroom, who had brought me a cashmere cardigan in the ICU and told me there was always an explanation, would look at what she was carrying before she put it in my arms.

Unless she had looked. And if anyone ever asked, it would be the florist's mistake. I could already hear her say so, soft and appalled, with her hand at her throat.

I wrapped the spike in paper towels and sealed it in a specimen bag, and then, because evidence belongs where you can find it again, I put it in the deep pocket of my white coat. I put the lilies in a water jug at the station. The night nurse said they were gorgeous and asked who they were from, and I said, "Family."

Then I went back.

---

Delphine had pulled the chair up to the bed. Rhys was still standing by the window, though he'd half turned so he could see her. She'd drawn Edmund's good hand into her lap and was stroking it, talking in that soft voice of hers, telling him about the greenhouse, about the camellias coming out on the terrace, about how the whole house had been waiting for him.

"Conrad sends his love. Gideon's been so worried." She patted the hand. "We'll have you home before you know it. In your own room, with your own things. Ursula's keeping it all just as you like it."

At the name, Edmund's hand jerked in hers.

"There," Delphine said to Rhys, pleased. "He's reacting. He knows us." She turned back to the bed and leaned close and smiled down at him, the kind smile, the waiter smile. "Don't you, my dear? You know who I am."

Edmund was looking up at her.

From the foot of the bed I could see his face. All the work had gone out of it. All the fight he'd put into my name. What was left was flat and old and wide awake, and his eyes were fixed on her face and didn't move. I had seen that look before, on patients' faces, when the person who hurt them walked into the room.

He pulled his hand out of hers. It took him two tries.

"No," Edmund said. "No."