The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 23: The Sentence

Did you ever once think I might have been wrong?

Nobody answered. The pump clicked. On the other side of the door, Colleen breathed in and held it.

Tell her yes, Maggie said suddenly, fast and rough. Tell her I thought so every day.

“Is it true?”

Cal.

“Is it true?”

The silence that followed was the longest yet. In the glass pane, a hand pressed flat against the wood, and the shoulder behind it began to shake in a way that was trying very hard not to.

No, Maggie said at last. It isn’t. I never thought she was wrong. That was the whole trouble.

I let that sit for a moment. Then I said, quietly, “Then we’re going to find the sentence.”

I told you, it’s gone.

“It isn’t gone. You buried it, and you buried it deep, and you’ve been walking around the spot for fourteen years.” I shifted against the pillow and closed my eyes. “I can’t dig it up for you. But I know somebody who can.”

***

I’d been carrying Rian’s Memory for nine days, and I hadn’t used it yet.

It sat in me like a key in a coat pocket. I knew the shape of it. I knew it wasn’t a skill so much as a loosened bolt, a place where saying the hard thing was possible. I’d felt it the way you feel a tooth that used to hurt.

Now I reached for it, and the bolt turned.

It came with a price. I felt that at once. Something slid out of my grip as the door swung open, small and quiet and gone before I could name it. I reached for my old foreman’s name, the one who’d said my own name like a slammed drawer, and my mind came up empty. A man’s face, thick forearms, a whistle on a lanyard. No name. It was just a hole.

I let it go. There wasn’t time to grieve a foreman.

Maggie, I said. Walk me through the room.

I won’t.

Not the words. Just the room. You said you remember it.

It was the kitchen. A grudging beat. The old house on Alder Street. It was March. The radiator was knocking. She wore the green dress because she’d come straight from a job interview, and she’d cried in the car and fixed her mascara.

Where were you standing?

At the sink. Her voice had gone distant. I was doing dishes. I always did dishes when I didn’t want to look at anyone.

And Walter?

I felt her flinch.

Walter was in the other room. In his chair. He’d been in that chair for three years by then. A long breath. He didn’t know us. The doctors said it was the kind that takes you in pieces. First the dates, then the names, then the people. By that March he could still say my name, mostly. He’d stopped saying hers.

And she wanted something.

She wanted to take him to Phoenix. Maggie’s voice thinned. She had a house with a spare room and a doctor who specialized in it. She’d done all the research. She had a folder. I remember the folder, with colored tabs. A dry, painful almost-laugh. She was thirty-one and she’d made me a folder.

What did you say?

I said no.

Why?

Because he was mine. It came out of her like a splinter. Because I’d been married to him thirty-four years and I was not going to let him die in a stranger’s guest room. And because if he went, I’d be alone in that house with the radiator. I told myself it was the first reason. It was the second.

The old hands on the blanket had curled tight.

And she pushed.

She pushed. She said I wasn’t protecting him, I was protecting me. And I turned around with a plate in my hand, and here it came, I could feel it rising through her like a stone through water, and I said...

She stopped.

Maggie.

I can’t.

You can. I held the bolt open with everything I had. You’ve got someone listening, and you’ve got four days. Say it.

It took an effort I could feel in my own ribs. When it came, it was so quiet I almost missed it.

I said, “He doesn’t even know who you are. What do you care where he dies?”

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling tile with its water stain. The window going white with afternoon. The cord, the pump, the glass pane in the door.

On the other side of it, Colleen had gone completely still.

That’s it, Maggie said. That’s what I did. She sounded eerily calm, the way people do after the worst has been said out loud. She was holding her father’s whole disease up in front of her like a candle, and I threw it in her face. Then she slammed the door and the picture fell. I stood there with the plate and told myself she was being dramatic.

And Walter?

Died three years later. Her voice cracked down the middle. I didn’t call her. I told myself she’d made her choice. I let her find out from his lawyer.

I thought about Hale on the trestle, reaching for the watch. About how people don’t hold on to a cruelty because they’re proud of it, but because they can’t set it down. They can only carry it in the dark.

It wasn’t the fight, I said. It was the funeral.

It was both.

Then you say both.

To her?

To her.

I felt her gather herself, slow, the way you gather yourself to stand after a long illness. The old shoulders squared against the pillow. The mouth, which had been a thin line for two days, softened at the edges.

I can’t walk, she said, with grim humor. You’ll have to shout.

I won’t have to.

I reached for the cord, and my thumb found the button for the door lock. Beyond the glass, a shape moved.

Margaret, said a voice at the back of my head, and it was my own, somehow older and unsteady, the way it sounds when you’re about to be brave. It’s all right. I’ll hold the other end.

She took a breath through two plastic prongs, the way she’d been taught.

“Colleen,” Maggie said, aloud, in a voice like paper catching light. “Come in.”