Chapter 20
Five Things
By the second night, Ivy had a map.
It was on the back of three pages torn from the notebook, taped together with a strip of adhesive from Naomi's hospital bracelet, and it covered the whole of the table. She had drawn it in pencil, with a ruler made from the edge of the tray. It showed the corridor, the bolts, the iron stair. It showed thirty-one steps, each one numbered, with a landing at fifteen. It showed a courtyard, from memory, from the one time that Eli had let her look through the crack of a door. It showed a quay with a crane, and a gate, and two small squares labeled CAMERAS in her careful capitals, and a long low building to the west that she had marked, after some thought, KITCHEN?
"Why the question mark?" said Naomi.
"Because it smells like sausages. But I haven't seen it."
"Fair."
"You can't put things on a map if you haven't noticed them." Ivy bent over the paper, with her tongue between her teeth. "That's the rule. You can put a question mark. But you can't put a fact."
They sat at the steel table in the light of a single caged bulb. It was a little after nine on Monday night. The window was dark. Outside, far off, the foghorn lowed, and a lighter, higher note answered it from the sea, and under them both, steady and monotonous, came the quick dry breathing of the water on the stones. In the corridor, a guard coughed.
Naomi sat with her hands round a cup of cold tea and watched her daughter work.
She was struck, as she had been struck a hundred times in the last two days, by an odd sensation of looking at a stranger. It was not a bad one. She would not have called it fear. It was a kind of awe. In the thirty-odd hours of captivity the child had changed. She had not become hard, or silent, or wild. She had simply become more of herself. Every quality that had seemed charming in a twelve-year-old in a kitchen, the watching, the naming, the grave unhurried attention, had here, under pressure, been drawn out and tempered into something else, as copper is drawn into wire. She did not cry. She did not whine for home. She had asked for a pencil.
She's his, thought Naomi.
She's more his than mine.
Thank God.
The door opened at half past nine.
It was Eli, again, with a tray. He had brought it on the hour, every hour, for two days, as though by sheer regularity he could make himself a part of the furniture. He came in sideways with his head ducked. The pistol on his hip had been moved to the small of his back, and he had put on a clean shirt. He looked, she thought, as though he had not slept since Saturday.
"Soup," he said. "And bread. It's not much. Mrs. Aldous says the little one should have something light."
"Thank you, Eli."
"There's no pepper." He put down the tray. "They don't allow it. I looked." He hovered, awkward, rubbing the back of his left hand with his right thumb, so that the small blue swallow seemed to flutter. "There's a ferry horn in a minute. It's the eight-forty. Mr. Strand likes it. It means the tide's turned."
"Ivy told me."
"She's good at that."
"She is."
"Could I..." He stopped. He swallowed. "Mrs. Whitlock. Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Are you all right?"
She put down the cup.
It was a strange question, from a boy with a gun. She heard the words and for a moment could not tell whether she had misheard. Eli stood in the doorway with his long pale hands hanging, and the flat light on his face, and the tips of his ears red; and she saw what she had seen on the first day, that he was not hiding anything. He had meant it. He was asking because he did not know what else to say.
"No," said Naomi. "I'm not."
"Oh."
"I'm frightened. I'm angry. I'm tired. I'm very worried about my husband." She said it plainly. "But I'm all right in the way that matters. Do you understand?"
"Not really."
"I'm in my own body. I know what's happening. I haven't gone away." She smiled a little. "It's a thing I learned from the dying. The ones who die well are the ones who stay."
He nodded, as one nods at a foreign language, with great earnestness.
"Did you call your mother?"
The red went right up to his hairline.
"Yes," he said, very low.
"Good."
"I called her on Sunday night. From the phone at the gate. I told her I was fine." His voice cracked. "She asked what I was doing for work. I said, security. She said, that's good, honey, that's a good steady thing. And she told me about the neighbor's dog." The thin shoulders rose. "She was so happy. I almost told her. I stood there with the phone and I almost said, Mom, I'm holding a woman and a child in a room."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because she'd have heard me." He was whispering now. "And I'd have had to stop."
Nobody spoke.
In the quiet, from a long way off across the water, a deep note sounded: the ferry, coming round the point. It was a slow, melancholy, bell-like sound, rising and falling, and in the corridor outside the guard stopped coughing and listened.
"You can stop," said Naomi.
Eli stared at her.
"Whenever you want. You don't have to wait for permission." She spoke very softly. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm only telling you that the choice is yours. It's still yours, Eli. It doesn't stop being yours because you've been given a gun."
"They'd kill me."
"Maybe."
"They'd kill my mom."
"I don't think they would." She considered him, steadily. "But I know you think they would. That's how it works. They don't need to threaten you. They only need you to believe they could." A pause. "I've sat with a lot of frightened people. The ones who regret it most aren't the ones who tried and failed. They're the ones who never tried."
He turned away. He stood with his back to her and his head bowed, with one hand over his mouth. The ferry horn sounded again, nearer. After a while he said, in a muffled voice, "I'll bring more bread," and went out.
The bolts shot.
"He's going to help," said Ivy, from the table.
"Maybe."
"No. He is. I noticed." The child did not look up from her map. "He's started to breathe through his mouth. That's what Dad does when he's decided something. He takes a big breath in through his nose and lets it out like a sigh."
"You've been paying attention."
"I'm always paying attention." She considered it. "It's the same as being scared, but better."
At ten, Mrs. Aldous came with a paper cup.
She arrived in her gray uniform, with the black leather bag on her arm and her face as expressionless as a closed door. She said nothing as she entered. She crossed the floor and set the bag on the table, next to the map, and opened the clasp with two efficient clicks.
Naomi's eyes went to it at once.
It was a small bag. It was a thing she had seen a thousand times. Its inside was divided into compartments by elastic loops, and in them, in neat rows, were the tools of a trade she knew like her own handwriting: a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, a pen torch, a roll of gauze. Syringes in sealed packs. Needles. A small clear vial of liquid with a rubber cap. A paper envelope of capsules. And a flat white box with a prescription label that she could read upside down.
Lorazepam, it said. 1 mg. Take as directed.
"The child should rest," said Mrs. Aldous.
"She's resting."
"She is not. She's drawing." The gray eyes flicked, once, over the map, and away. "Mr. Strand has instructed me that she is to have something for sleep. A mild sedative. One tablet. It is quite safe. She will not be harmed."
"No."
"I beg your pardon?"
"No," said Naomi. "She won't be sedated. She's twelve. She's been through enough." She kept her voice level. "If she can't sleep, I'll sit with her. That's what a mother's for."
The nurse looked at her.
It was a long, flat, dispassionate look. It was the look of a woman who had spent forty years in rooms with the dying and had been contradicted by every kind of relative, and had learned to wait. She said nothing for several seconds. Then she took a small white tablet from the box and laid it on a paper cup on the table, between the soup and the map, and folded her hands.
"I shall leave it," she said. "In case you change your mind."
"I won't."
"It is not a threat, Mrs. Whitlock." The thin mouth moved. "I too have a daughter. I know what it is to want a child to sleep through a bad night."
"Do you?"
"She is thirty-four. A pharmacist. In Seattle." The words came out stiffly, like something rusted. "I have not seen her since 1998."
Naomi did not answer. She saw the shadow cross the nurse's face, and settle, and be put away. Mrs. Aldous closed the bag. She took her stethoscope from her pocket and listened, perfunctorily, to Ivy's chest, which Ivy permitted with the air of a duchess; she took her pulse. She wrote on a chart. She said, "Good night, Mrs. Whitlock." Then she was gone, and the bolts rattled shut.
The paper cup stood alone on the table.
Naomi looked at it for a long time.
It was a small white tablet. It had a score across the center. It lay in the cup like a seed. She knew it, as she knew most things that could stop a heart, or slow one, or soften the edges of a frightened mind for six hours. She picked it up between finger and thumb. She turned it to the light. And then, with a deliberation that surprised her, she lifted the hem of her torn yellow dress and slid it into a seam at the waist, where the stitching had split, and pressed it flat.
"Mama?" said Ivy.
"Shh."
"What are you doing?"
"Collecting." She smoothed the dress. "I'm going to ask you to be very good again, and not mention it."
"Is it for Dad?"
"It might be."
Ivy considered this, gravely, and then drew a small neat tick in the margin of her map, next to a note that Naomi could not read. "Four," she said.
"Four what?"
"Five things I noticed about Mrs. Aldous." She held up her fingers. "One, she's sad. Two, she wrote on the chart before she listened to my chest. Three, she left the bag on the table for two minutes. Four, there are more of those." She pointed her pencil at nothing. "And five..."
"Yes?"
"She counted my pulse and she didn't say anything. But her lips moved. I think she was counting backwards."
At eleven, they played the signal game.
It had been Ivy's idea. She had unfolded it in the dark, under the thin gray blanket, with her mouth against her mother's ear, in a whisper so quiet that it seemed to float. She had said: There's a girl on the cliff. She had said it as one says that a bus is coming. She had said: She looked at me. On Sunday. She had a glass thing with two eyes. It flashed. And I waved. And then she held up her hand.
What did she look like? Naomi had asked, with her heart beating.
I couldn't see. It was a long way off. A pause. But I think she was sad. And I think she's Dad's friend.
How do you know?
Because she's the first person who looked at us, said Ivy, like she was trying to help.
They had waited until the corridor was quiet. They had waited until the footsteps had passed, and the guard's cough had faded, and the foghorn had sounded three times. Then Naomi had lifted her daughter onto the table beside the window, where Naomi had scraped a patch of paint from the glass with her fingernail, a small clear round peephole the size of a coin, and Ivy had taken the brass compass from round her neck and flipped open the lid.
It was an old one. Cody's grandfather had carried it in a war. It had a cracked lens, and a needle that wavered, and on the inside of the lid, brightly polished, a little round mirror for sighting.
She held it up to the glass.
There was a lamp in the yard. It stood on a post at the corner of the quay, a tall rusty sodium light that buzzed and flickered in the mist; and it threw a long orange glare across the cobbles, and across the wet glass, and into the face of the child at the window. She tilted the lid. A bright round spot slid along the wall, trembled, and swung up into the night.
One, she whispered.
She closed the lid. She opened it.
Two. Three. Four.
A silence. She took a long breath.
Five.
The fifth flash held. It hung in the dark like a little star, orange and wavering, and then she shut the cover with a click, and they stood together at the window, mother and daughter, with their faces to the glass, and looked out into the night. The fog was lifting. Beyond the black wharf, beyond the silhouette of the crane and the long low line of the sea wall, the headland rose against the stars, a ragged, shadowy hump of gorse and rock, and along its crest, small as a pin, a thread of white light was moving.
It moved up, and stopped. It moved down. It moved up again.
One.
It went out.
Two.
Naomi stood perfectly still.
Three. Four.
A pause.
Five.
The light on the cliff held for the space of a breath, steady and white, and then, as softly as a candle being snuffed, went out. The headland was dark. The sea breathed on. In the yard, the lamp buzzed, and the mist crept back across the stones.
"She answered," said Ivy, in a voice of pure wonder.
"Yes."
"She answered."
"Yes, baby."
"That means Dad's coming. Doesn't it?"
Naomi put her arm round her. She pressed her cheek against the small warm head and closed her eyes, and for a time she did not trust herself to speak.
"I think he's closer than we know," she said.
At ten past two, the shouting began.
She was lying in the dark, awake, with Ivy asleep against her side, listening to the old building tick and settle. The foghorn had fallen silent. The clock in the tower had struck two, four minutes late, and the note had died away across the water; and she had been lying there with her eyes open, counting the seconds between the drips of a pipe, when from somewhere below the window came a sharp flat crack that she had never in her life heard before, and knew.
A gunshot.
She was up before the echo had finished. She pulled Ivy from the blanket, in the dark, and held her against her, and crossed the floor in three strides to the corner farthest from the window. She put the child behind her. She set her back to the wall. And she listened.
Another shot. Then a ragged chain of them, hard, flat, snapping, in threes. A man's voice, shouting something she could not make out. A heavy thud, as of a door. Feet in the corridor: running, a lot of them, clattering on the iron. Somewhere a siren began, a harsh rising whoop that filled the whole building with its noise; then a second, deeper, from the direction of the tower. A beam of white light struck the window from outside, sweeping across the painted glass, and through the peephole she saw it pass, a dazzling blade, over the yard, over the quay, over the black wet cobbles where two figures in dark clothing were running.
"Mom!" cried Ivy.
"Down. Get down."
"Is it Dad?"
"I don't know."
"Is it Dad?"
She did not answer. She had her eye to the hole. The light swung back, and she saw them, for a moment, in its glare: a tall figure, bareheaded, in a long dark coat, running low along the sea wall with one arm held against his chest; and beside him, small and quick, a slighter shape in gray. They were heading for the water. A volley cracked from the roof of the boat shed. The tall man turned and fired back, twice, without breaking stride, and a figure on the roof pitched forward and fell into the harbor with a long cry.
It's him, thought Naomi. It's him.
A flash. A burst of automatic fire from the north wall. She saw the slight gray figure stumble, and the tall man seize her by the arm and drag her down behind a stack of pallets. Tracer fire stitched the dark in orange lines. Searchlights crossed. A voice, enormously amplified, boomed across the yard: a pleasant, educated baritone, quite calm, as though reading a menu. Hold your fire. Hold your fire. I want them alive.
Mercer.
She could see nothing more. The beam passed on. The yard went dark. There was a roar of engines, a squeal of tires, and the sound, hard and ugly and metallic, of a heavy gate swinging shut. And then, for a long minute, there was nothing at all: only the siren winding down in the tower, and the slow hiss of the sea, and the drumming of her own heart.
In the corridor, a man was sobbing.
She knew the voice. She had known it for two days. She put Ivy down on the cot, with the blanket over her, and went to the door, and put her ear against the iron.
"Eli?" she called softly.
The sobbing stopped.
"Eli. What happened?"
A long pause. When the answer came it was thick and strange, very close to the door, as if he were sitting on the floor against it with his knees up.
"They came through the drain," he said.
"Who?"
"Two of them. A man. And a girl." A hiccuping breath. "They got into the cellar. They got as far as the stairs. They were so close, Mrs. Whitlock. They were right under us. I heard him. He said, Naomi, very soft, on the iron. I heard his voice." The boy's own voice broke. "And Mr. Mercer was waiting on the landing with eleven men."
Naomi put her forehead against the cold metal.
"They knew," whispered Eli. "They'd left the drain open. They've known for two days she was on the cliff. They wanted them to come." A sound like a laugh. "He let them get inside. He let them get all the way to the foot of the stairs. And then he turned on the lights."
"Is my husband alive?"
"I don't know."
"Eli."
"He went into the water," said the boy. "With the girl. They shot at them. I don't know. They dragged her out." A shudder. "I think they got her. I think she was hurt. But the man, the big one, I don't, nobody saw him come up."
The corridor was silent.
She stood with her face against the iron. She stood for so long that she lost track of her fingers, her feet, her knees. Behind her in the dark a small voice said, Mom? and she did not answer. She heard, in her own head, as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud, a voice on a porch in the rain. Is it going to come to my door? And another: No. I made sure of it.
Nobody saw him come up.
She did not weep. She was a nurse. She had stood at the foot of six hundred beds and learned that there is a point beyond which the body does not allow itself to grieve, but only to wait; to hold itself still, like a held note, until the doctor comes. She straightened. She smoothed the torn dress. She lifted her chin.
"Eli," she said, quite calmly. "I need you to do something for me."
"What?"
"I need you to find out if he's dead."
"I can't."
"You can. Not tonight. Tomorrow." She spoke softly and steadily, as to a frightened animal. "You'll go on your break. You'll find out which of the men were on the quay. You'll find out who was in the water. And you'll come back and tell me, and whatever you say, I'll thank you."
"What if he's dead?"
"Then I'll know."
"And if he's not?"
"Then," said Naomi, "we've got a great deal to do."
There was a long silence. Then, on the far side of the door, she heard a sound she would remember: the sound of a young man standing up. It was a small thing, a shuffle, a scrape, a sniff. But it had a weight to it. It had the weight of a decision.
"Okay," said Eli.
"Thank you."
"I'm going to get in a lot of trouble."
"Yes."
"I think I might die."
"I know," said Naomi. "I'm sorry. I'd rather you didn't."
His footsteps went away down the iron stair, uneven, deliberate, each one separate. She counted them. Thirty-one. She stood there until they had gone. Then she went back across the dark floor, and sat down on the edge of the cot, and took her daughter into her arms, and held her through what was left of the night.
"Is he dead?" said Ivy, at last, in a very small voice.
"I don't know."
"I think he's not."
"Why?"
"Because he's the Metronome," said Ivy. "And the Metronome keeps time."
Naomi looked down at her.
"Where did you hear that?"
"Mr. Strand's nurse said it. To the other nurse. In the hall. I wasn't supposed to be listening." The child yawned. "She said, They say he never misses a beat."
"And you believed her."
"I noticed her," said Ivy sleepily. "Her lips weren't moving backwards."
She slept, then, quite suddenly, with her fist clenched round the little brass compass. And Naomi sat in the dark with her back to the whitewashed wall and the pill in the seam of her dress, and listened to the sea, and waited for the morning.