Chapter 23 The Back Stairs

CUP. TREE. MARGOT.

The words were written on the whiteboard at the foot of Edmund's bed in blue marker, in tall careful capitals, with a little drawing beside each one: a cup with steam coming off it, a lollipop tree, and a stick figure with a scribble of dark hair and what I chose to believe was a stethoscope rather than a noose.

Edmund was sitting up against his pillows, glaring at the board, hunting for the trick in it.

Philip's peppermint was still in my coat pocket. I'd put it there yesterday by the window and hadn't taken it out, and I hadn't eaten it, and every time my hand went into that pocket for my pen my fingers found the cellophane twist and stopped. I didn't know why I hadn't thrown it away. I hung the coat on the back of the door.

"He's been looking at that since ten," said the woman by the window. "He hates it. It's very good for him."

Yvette Moreau was thirty-eight and wore her dark hair cropped close and a cardigan the color of a tomato. She was the speech and language therapist Okafor had found for Edmund, at my request, from the rehab unit downstairs. She had a warm, clear voice that carried without being loud, and she'd been with him every afternoon since Monday.

"I'm only here for his heart," I said. "Pretend I'm furniture."

"Furniture's welcome. Sit there. You can be the audience." She pulled her chair up to the bed. "Edmund. We're going to do some singing. You love singing. I can tell."

Edmund gave her a look that could have stripped paint.

---

I did my check while she set up. Heart rate seventy, a little irregular, his old atrial fibrillation coming and going. Blood pressure fine. Lungs clear.

The last step of the lorazepam taper had gone in on Tuesday and his face had stayed awake, and his eyes, when I shone my light across them, followed it right to the edge without that sliding jerk. I wrote it in the chart and took the chair in the corner. I was there for twenty minutes, technically. I stayed for an hour.

Yvette's method was called melodic intonation. The part of the brain that makes speech was damaged on the left, she told me while she worked, but music lives mostly on the right, and sometimes a sung word gets out through a door the spoken one can't find.

"The front stairs have fallen in," she said. "So we go around the back."

She took Edmund's left hand and tapped it on the blanket, in rhythm, and sang two notes, high and low, a mother calling a child in from the garden.

"*Good* mor-*ning*."

Edmund stared at her. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He shut it, furious.

I was humming, I found. Just the two notes, under my breath, as I did at the operating table. I stopped. Yvette glanced at me and grinned.

"No, keep going. He likes it. Look at him."

His eyes were on me. So I hummed it again, low, along with her, and on the fourth time through a sound came out of him that was cracked and off-key and nearly a tune.

"*Goo...* mor... *ning*."

"Yes! Again."

"*Good*... *morning*," Edmund sang. Clearer. His eyes had gone wide and bright.

"He understands everything," Yvette said to me, not lowering her voice, because she never talked over his head. "He's not slow. He's locked. Our job is to find the back stairs." She tapped the board. "Now. Edmund. What do you like to play?"

He jabbed his left hand toward the window ledge where the travel chessboard sat, the white king's pawn and the black knight still where they'd been left.

"Say it," Yvette said. "Don't sing it this time."

"Ch," said Edmund. "Ch. Ch."

He shut his eyes. He opened them.

"*Chess*," he said.

It came out hard and flat, half a cough, but it was a spoken word, and he heard it. His good fist pounded the mattress three times, *bang, bang, bang*, so the bed rail rattled, and he threw his head back against the pillows and made a noise of pure triumph that brought a nurse to the door.

"He's fine," said Yvette and I together.

The nurse went away. Edmund lay there beaming at the ceiling with half his face, and I sat in my corner and found I was doing it too, and didn't bother to stop.

Before she left the bed, Yvette uncapped her marker and added a fourth word to the board, under my stick figure, in the same tall capitals. CHESS. She didn't draw anything beside it. Edmund watched her do it, and when she stepped back, he nodded at it once, a man approving a signature.

---

Gideon arrived at three with a guitar case and a paper bag of doughnuts.

I'd known him a little, before. He'd been fourteen when I married his brother, a lanky boy who lived in his headphones and came down to dinner at Larkmoor only when someone sent for him.

Seventeen at the gala. I'd passed him on the back stairs that night, I remembered, going up with his guitar as I was coming down. He'd said "Hey, Margot," and argued with me about a saying, which was more than most of them had said to me all night.

He was twenty-two now and had grown into his height. He had Delphine's fine bones and Conrad's dark hair, worn too long, and a gray hoodie with a hole in the cuff that he'd put his thumb through.

He stopped in the doorway when he saw me. His face went through surprise and awkwardness and then landed, with evident relief, on a grin.

"Dr. Fairley. Wow. Hi. Do I call you that? I feel like I should call you that."

"Margot's fine."

"Margot." He came in and put the doughnuts on the tray table. "I brought these for Granddad, but he's not allowed sugar, so they're for me. I'm Gideon. You know that. Sorry. I'm nervous. I've never met a celebrity."

"I'm not a celebrity."

"You're in a *column.*" He dropped into the chair by the bed and opened the guitar case. "So I'm an uncle. Apparently. I read it on my phone in a sandwich shop and nearly choked on a pickle."

He looked up at me with Delphine's eyes, which on him were somehow entirely different, open and anxious and amused at himself. "Do I have to be good at it?"

"It helps."

"What are they like?"

"Pippa will tell you what she thinks of you inside ten seconds. Felix will make up his mind in about a month."

"A month." He considered this. "I can do a month. I don't have a lot on."

"Okay. I'll practice." He tuned a string. "I should tell you up front. I dropped out of Brown. Last spring. Junior year. So I'm the official family disappointment now." He strummed a chord and winced at it and tuned again. "Which really takes the pressure off Rhys. You're welcome, Rhys."

Edmund made a noise from the bed that might have been a laugh. Gideon looked up at him and his whole face softened.

"Hey, Granddad. You look awake. You look really awake." He put his hand on the old man's arm for a second. "Want some songs?"

He picked out a few notes, looking for one. Then, without lifting his head, he said, "Rhys dropped the custody thing. Last week. In court."

"I was there."

"Right. Obviously. Sorry." He made a face at himself. "Mom came home from it and went straight out to the greenhouse and didn't come in for dinner. Dad said she was upset for Rhys. That he wasn't himself." He picked a string. "I kind of thought he was being more himself than usual. But nobody asks me things. I'm the guitar guy."

"What's he like?" I said. "When he's himself."

Gideon thought about it seriously, which I hadn't expected.

"He used to take me out on the boat," he said. "When I was little. Before Granddad got sick. He never talked. He'd just hand me a rope and let me pull it, and then he'd say *good*, and that one word was a big deal." He shrugged. "It was, kind of."

He played the old ones. I didn't know most of them. They were songs from Edmund's youth, sea songs and dance-hall songs and one or two I thought might be hymns, and Gideon played them simply, without showing off. Yvette, who had stayed, sat up straight in her chair with her pen ready.

On the third song Edmund began to sing.

Only fragments. A word, a half line, the end of a phrase. "*...the harbor...*" and "*...home again...*" and "*...the bonny...*"

But they were sung, and they were in tune, more or less, and his face as he sang them was a face I hadn't seen since the study at Larkmoor five years ago, bent over a chessboard, about to say something that would make his grandson look at me properly.

Yvette was writing furiously in her notebook. Gideon played on with his head bent over the strings and his eyes shut.

I sat in the corner and held my own hands in my lap, and I liked him. I liked him at once and entirely, this nervous funny boy in a torn hoodie singing hymns to his grandfather, and I hadn't expected to like any Calloway again.

---

The tea came at four.

It came on a hospital tray, carried in by one of the afternoon aides, a young man in pale green who set it down on the overbed table with care. The tea itself was ordinary hospital tea, from the ward kitchen, a pot of it, with a jug of milk.

I'd checked with the charge nurse on the first day, because I check everything now. Edmund's food and drink came from the hospital kitchen and nowhere else, by my order, since the night he came in.

But the cup and the saucer weren't hospital.

They were bone china, white, so fine it was nearly translucent, with a band of gold leaves around the rim. A teacup and saucer and a matching little pot for the milk, set out on a folded linen napkin.

"Mrs. Calloway sent them over," the aide said, a little shyly. "From the house. With a note to the nurses. She said he'd feel more at home with his own china."

I knew the pattern. I'd known it since my first dinner at Larkmoor in 2018, when I'd been so frightened of the cups I'd barely let mine touch its saucer. I'd known it on the night of the gala, when I warmed the pot in the butler's pantry and carried the tray to the study and set it at his elbow. The same band of gold leaves.

Edmund had stopped singing. His eyes had gone to the cup.

"Thank you," I said to the aide, and he went out.

I poured. Hospital tea, from a hospital pot, into Delphine's china. I added a little milk. I held my wrist against the side of the cup to test the heat, as Helen had taught me to test a baby's bottle, and it was warm, not hot, safe for a man whose swallow was still unreliable. Then I picked up the cup and saucer together and turned.

Gideon had stopped playing to make room. He was sitting nearest, on Edmund's left.

"Hold it for him?" I said. "Left side. He can manage the cup if someone steadies the saucer."

"Sure." Gideon put the guitar down against the bed. He reached out with both hands, still humming the last tune, and took the saucer from me, and the cup on it, and looked down.

The smile stayed on his face for a second after the rest of him had stopped.

I saw his eyes go to the rim, and the band of gold leaves, and the pale tea moving in the cup. I saw his hands. They were still holding it. And then they weren't holding anything at all.

Gideon dropped the cup and went white.