The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 19: A Woman Who Isn’t Done Being Difficult

The first thing I noticed was that breathing had become a job.

Every breath took planning. I had to pull it in through two thin plastic prongs under my nose, hold it, and hope the lungs behind my ribs would do something with it. They did, barely. The air tasted of rubber and lavender, and there was a steady hiss somewhere to my left, a machine doing most of the work I couldn’t.

I opened my eyes. A ceiling tile with a water stain shaped like Florida. A window, and past it a gray parking lot and bare trees. A pole beside the bed with a pump on it, a small green light blinking in time with something I could feel in my left arm, a slow cool drip.

Margaret Doyle, the memories said, and for once they arrived politely, in order, like somebody handing me a file. Seventy-eight. Retired school librarian. Widowed eleven years. Pancreatic cancer, stage four, diagnosed in June. Mercy Hospital, Palliative Care, Room 412.

Then, at the very back of the file, folded up small like something kept in a wallet: Colleen.

I lifted my hand off the blanket. It was the hand of an old woman, spotted and thin, with the skin loose over the bones, a hospital band hanging off the wrist like a bracelet from a bigger person. I looked at it for a long time. I’d been Rian, and I’d been Victor, and I’d gotten used to the shape of borrowed bodies. This one was different. It was so light. Everything in it had been spent.

“Good,” said a voice, very dry and very clear. “You’re awake. Now you can get out.”

I didn’t answer, because I hadn’t decided who that was.

It came from the back of my skull, from the same dim place where Victor’s lamp had burned. But where Victor had been a quiet man on a floor and Rian a scared boy behind frosted glass, this was somebody sitting upright in a hard chair, arms crossed, with the posture of a woman who has ended a great many arguments and does not intend to lose this one.

“I’m not leaving,” I said, aloud. The voice that came out was thin and papery, but there was steel under it. Maggie’s steel, not mine.

I wasn’t asking.

“I don’t think you get to.”

I know what you are. The voice was almost conversational. I’m old, I’m not stupid. I woke up Tuesday and there was something in the corner of the room that wasn’t the radiator. A gray thing, standing very still. I asked it if it was an angel, and it said no. I asked if it was death, and it said not exactly. And then it said it was sending someone. A pause, bone dry. I told it I didn’t want anyone.

“What did it say?”

That I wouldn’t be asked.

I had to laugh, and it hurt. It came out as a wet cough that shook the whole bed, and a pain I’d been ignoring woke up under my ribs and took a long, slow look around. I pressed the button on the cord at the side of the bed before I thought about it.

The Intercessor was in the window.

He stood against the gray glass with his hands behind his back, looking down at the parking lot like a man waiting for a train. Even in this light I couldn’t hold his face, though I thought, maybe, the jaw was a bit softer than it had been.

“You could have told me she’d seen you,” I said.

“She’s the third this year.” He didn’t turn. “Dying people see more than they should. It’s rarely useful.”

Don’t talk about me as if I’m furniture, Maggie said, from the back of my head.

***

The nurse came in a minute later. She was in her thirties, with a ponytail and tired, kind eyes, and a name tag that read Dani. She checked the pump, the cannula, the numbers on a screen I couldn’t see, all in the quick, sure motions of somebody who had done it ten thousand times.

“Pain?”

“Manageable.”

“On a scale?”

“Four.” It was Maggie’s answer, and it was a lie. I felt her put it there with a little twist of contempt, the way you’d put down a coin you didn’t mean to spend. The real number was closer to seven.

“Mm-hm.” Dani didn’t buy it either. She adjusted something on the pump and gave my hand a squeeze. “Your daughter called again this morning.”

The cold that went through me wasn’t mine.

“I didn’t ask her to,” Maggie said, through my mouth. It came out so fast I’d barely drawn breath. “Don’t put her through. If she calls again, tell her I’m sleeping.”

“Mrs. Doyle—”

“Margaret.”

“Margaret.” Dani’s mouth tightened. “She called three times yesterday. She wants to fly out. She said the last time you two spoke was—”

“I know when it was.”

“She just wants to see you.”

“I’m sure she does.” My voice had gone cool and clipped, the voice of a woman who had told a thousand students to please lower your voice. “She can want it from Phoenix.”

There was a silence. Dani looked at me for a long moment, and in it I could see the whole history of this conversation, how many times they’d had it, how patiently she’d taken it.

“I’ll tell her you’re resting,” she said finally. “But I won’t tell her you said no. I can’t do that part for you.”

“Then don’t.”

She left. The door clicked shut. The hiss of the oxygen went on.

Good, Maggie said, satisfied.

“No,” I said, to the empty room. “Not good.”

I beg your pardon?

I looked down at the old hands, at the loose skin and the hospital band with its small printed name. I thought about Rian on the trestle, about a boy who couldn’t say it, and Victor on a roof with a note that said no one else knew. Both of them had gone to the edge on their own terms. Both had needed someone to take the other end.

“What did she do?” I asked. “Colleen. Fourteen years. What was it?”

The back of my head went very quiet.

It wasn’t the silence of someone who had no answer. It was the silence of someone who had one and had spent fourteen years making sure nobody asked for it. I felt Maggie’s arms tighten across her chest, the chair legs scrape.

Get out of my head, she said, very softly.

In the window, the Intercessor turned around, and in the hard gray light off the glass, I thought I saw him smile.

“There it is,” he said. “Welcome to the hard one.”