Chapter 4: The Call About the Scan

I didn’t take it.

I want that on the record somewhere, because it was the hardest thing I did that whole week, harder than the steps, harder than saying my name is on them to a man who had never once let me finish a sentence. I stood in the doorway of a sewing room with my hand on the frame and a telephone receiver held out to me across a kitchen with my husband’s voice somewhere inside it saying the word baby, and I didn’t take it.

“Hang up,” I said.

“Lena—”

“Please hang up, Mrs. Pruitt. Teddy said not for anything.”

She looked at the receiver in her hand like she’d forgotten what it was. Then she put it back on the hook, carefully, the way she did everything, and the cord swung and settled, and the kitchen was quiet except for the two clocks arguing.

“He said it twice,” she said. “The part about the baby. He made sure I heard it.”

“I know.”

“What if it’s—”

“Then the doctor’s office will have called the doctor’s office’s number, and not him.” I was already going back into the sewing room for the grey phone. My hands weren’t shaking. I noticed that. I noticed it the way you’d notice a car in your driveway that wasn’t yours. “He has my phone. He’s had it all day. It’s face down on the arm of the couch where I left it, and if anybody called it, he’s the one who picked up.”

The after-hours line at Dr. Anand’s office was a service. A woman with a slow voice took my name and my date of birth and asked me to hold, and I held, standing by Mrs. Pruitt’s stove with my back against the counter, and Mrs. Pruitt sat down in her husband’s recliner, all the way back, for the first time I’d ever seen.

“Mrs. Whitlock? This is Patrice, I’m the nurse on call. I’ve got your chart up. What’s going on, hon?”

“Did somebody from the office call me today?”

A pause. Keys.

“No, ma’am. There’s no outgoing calls logged on your chart since your last appointment. That was the eleventh. Thirty weeks. Everything measured right where it should.” Another pause, different. “Did somebody tell you we called?”

“My husband.”

She didn’t say anything for a second, and in that second I heard her decide something.

“Okay,” Patrice said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to put you down for eight tomorrow morning, first slot, before Dr. Anand’s regular day starts, and we’re going to put you on the monitor and look at everything, not because I think there’s a problem but because you’ve had a day and I’d like you to sleep tonight. All right?”

“All right.”

“And hon? If he calls here asking about you, we don’t give out information to anybody, I don’t care whose name is on the insurance. You understand? That’s the law and it’s also just how I run my desk.”

I thanked her. I hung up. I stood by the stove for a while longer.

“Well?” said Mrs. Pruitt from the recliner.

“Nobody called.”

She closed her eyes.

“That man,” she said, “is going to hell in a handbasket, and I’m going to pack the handbasket.”

I didn’t sleep.

I lay on the daybed and listened to the clocks and at some point after midnight I got up and found the spiral notebook Mrs. Pruitt kept by the phone for grocery lists, and I tore out the page that said eggs, bread, the good butter, and on the next clean page I wrote the date, and 8:40 p.m., and called Mrs. P’s landline, said he was calling her not me, said Dr. Anand’s office had been trying to reach me, said it was about the baby, said it twice. Then under that: 8:51 p.m. Called after-hours line. Nurse Patrice. No calls logged. Appt tomorrow 8 a.m.

It was the first ledger I’d kept in three years.

I sat at Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen table with the pen in my hand for a long time after I’d finished, looking at the two lines, and I felt something that I didn’t have a word for then. It wasn’t hope. It was smaller and harder than that. It was the feeling of writing a number down in a column where it belonged.

* * *

The monitor made the sound.

I’d heard it before, every visit, but I had never heard it the way I heard it at ten past eight the next morning in a room with the lights down and Patrice’s hand on the wand and Mrs. Pruitt in the plastic chair in the corner pretending to read a pamphlet about folic acid. The sound filled the room the way rain fills a room. Fast and even and absolutely indifferent to any of us.

“There she is,” Patrice said. “One forty-two. Perfect. Look at that foot.”

I looked at the foot.

I’d like to say something about it. I don’t have anything. It was a foot, grey and white on a screen, with five toes, and it moved while I watched it, and then the whole shape of her shifted and turned away from the wand like she’d had enough of being looked at, and I laughed, out loud, one wet sound, and Mrs. Pruitt put down her pamphlet.

“Blood pressure’s up,” Patrice said, more quietly, while she wiped the gel off. “Not scary. Up. Dr. Anand’s going to want you off your feet as much as you can manage and away from whatever this is.”

“I can’t be away from it.”

“I know. I’m telling you what she’s going to say so you can nod at her.”

Dr. Anand came in for four minutes, which was three more than usual. She was a small quick woman with cold hands and a way of looking at a chart like it had said something rude to her, and she looked at mine, and then at the left side of my face, which had gone to a faint yellow at the cheekbone that I’d covered with Mrs. Pruitt’s powder and apparently hadn’t.

“One forty-two over ninety-one,” she said. “Last visit you were one eighteen over seventy-four.”

“It’s been a—”

“I heard what it’s been. Patrice tells me everything, it’s a condition of her employment.” She put the cuff on me again herself. Pumped it. Listened. Let it go. “One forty over ninety. I’m not going to say the word, because the moment I say it you’ll look it up, but I’m going to watch you for it. You come back Friday. If you get a headache that doesn’t go away when you lie down, if you see spots, if your hands swell up so your rings don’t turn, you don’t call me, you go to Ashford General and you tell them my name at the door. Say it back.”

“Headache, spots, hands, Ashford General, your name.”

“Good.” She took the cuff off. For a second her cold hand stayed on my arm. “And Mrs. Whitlock. Whoever did that to your face—I’m required to ask, and I’m going to write down what you say, and I’d like it to be the truth.”

“My husband,” I said. “On the courthouse steps. Yesterday morning. There’s a judge who saw it.”

Dr. Anand wrote that down. All of it. She wrote for longer than it took me to say it.

“Good,” she said again, and went out.

She printed the picture. She printed two, actually, without asking, and gave one to Mrs. Pruitt, who looked at it for a long time and then put it in her purse between her checkbook and her glasses case like it was a thing she’d been issued.

At the front desk, the receptionist was a girl I didn’t know, with a nose ring and an apologetic face.

“Mrs. Whitlock? I’m so sorry, I have to ask. There’s a flag on your insurance. The policy shows as terminated, effective last Friday. Dependent removed.” She turned the screen a little so I could see it, as if that would help. “Your husband called yesterday afternoon to confirm the change. Do you have another—”

“No,” I said.

“Okay. That’s okay. We can set up a payment—”

“She’s self-pay,” Mrs. Pruitt said, behind me, and put a checkbook on the counter with the sonogram still sticking out of her purse. “Starting now. What’s the damage.”

I started to say something and she pointed at me without looking.

“Thirty-one years,” she said. “I was there when you were born, Lena Cole. Your mother held my hand so hard she broke a knuckle. You can pay me back when you’re a grandmother.”

Patrice came around the end of the desk while the girl was running the card. She had a sheet of paper folded in thirds and she handed it to me the way you’d hand someone a napkin.

“Records release log,” she said, low. “You’re entitled to it. It’s your chart.” She tapped the fold. “You might want to see who’s been asking for copies, and when.”

I opened it in the car.

There were four lines on it. Three were mine, insurance things, from before. The fourth was dated March tenth. Complete record incl. admission/discharge, requested by spouse, patient ID copy on file, released by fax to—

And a number I knew. I’d dialed it a hundred times to be told he was in a meeting.

March tenth. The day after. He’d gotten the deed notarized with my license on the ninth and faxed himself the proof I’d been in a hospital bed on the tenth. He’d wanted to know exactly how big the hole was before he decided to walk over it.

* * *

Deputy Okoro chose eleven o’clock.

He picked me up at Mrs. Pruitt’s in his own car, which was a small clean sedan with a child seat in the back that he apologized for, and he drove me across town to Fairmont with the radio off. He didn’t talk much. When we got to the gates he leaned out and pressed the code into the keypad without asking me for it, and I understood that Parrish had been told to provide it and had, and that someone had decided it was better I didn’t have to say the numbers out loud.

The gates opened the way they always had. Slowly, like they were thinking about it.

I had lived behind them for three years and I had never once opened them myself. The remote lived in Grant’s car. The code lived in Grant’s head. If I wanted to leave the house on Fairmont I asked, and he drove me, or he sent a car, and when I came back the gates opened for the car and not for me, and I had stopped noticing that sometime in the first year, the way you stop noticing a sound.

Deputy Okoro noticed. He looked at the keypad and then at me and didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for both.

The house was exactly as I’d left it. That was the strange part. I’d half expected it to look different, the way a room looks different after someone’s died in it, but the hall was the hall and the light came through the tall windows onto the floor his mother had chosen, and the door to his study at the end of it was shut, and locked, the way it had been shut and locked for three years. The only locked door in the house. I’d never had a key. I’d asked once, early, and he’d laughed and kissed my forehead and said there was nothing in there but tax returns and a very ugly chair.

“I can’t open that for you, ma’am,” Deputy Okoro said, watching me look at it. “Order says your belongings. Not the house.”

“I know.”

“If there’s something in there you need, you tell Ms. Ruiz, and she asks a judge, and a judge tells me, and then I can.”

“I don’t know what’s in there. That’s the point.”

Grant wasn’t there. His car wasn’t there. There was a note on the kitchen island, under the heron letter opener, in his handwriting, that said Lena—I’ve gone to Mother’s so you can do this without me. Take whatever you need. I’m sorry about all of it. G.

Deputy Okoro read it over my shoulder.

“That’s contact,” he said. “Through a third party. The paper.” He took out his phone and photographed it. “Ma’am, you’ve got fifty-eight minutes. I’ll be in the hall. I’m not watching you, I’m watching the door.”

I went past the nursery without going in. I could see it from the hall: the grey walls his mother had chosen because grey was restful, the white crib that had been delivered and assembled by two men while I sat in the kitchen, the mobile I hadn’t picked. It looked like a photograph of a nursery. Nothing in it had ever been touched by anyone who was going to love what slept there.

I took clothes. I took the shoebox from the top of my closet with my mother’s recipe cards in it and the photographs he’d never asked to see. I took the sweater she’d knitted, the green one, that I’d never worn in that house because he said it made me look like a librarian. I went into the kitchen and took the flour tin down off the shelf and it was lighter than it should have been, and when I opened it the flour was there and the envelope wasn’t.

So he’d found it. Sometime between Friday and Tuesday morning. He’d opened the flour tin, that he had never once opened in three years, and he’d found my hearing notice, and he’d put it back and put the lid on and let me take it out every night in the shower steam and read it and think I had a secret.

I stood there holding the tin.

Then I put it in the box with the recipes, flour and all. I don’t know why. It was mine.

My phone was on the arm of the couch, face down, exactly where I’d left it. When I turned it over the screen was full. Fourteen missed calls. Not one of them from a doctor. Six from his office. Four from a number saved as Dana K. Three from a number I didn’t have saved, with a downtown prefix, and one, at 7:52 the night before, from the landline at the house on Fairmont, which meant that he had stood in this room and called the phone on the arm of this couch, four feet away, and listened to it buzz, and then gone to the wall phone in his study and called Mrs. Pruitt.

I put the phone in my pocket. Then I took it out and put it face down on the arm of the couch again, where it belonged, where he could watch it sit in the living room all night if he wanted to.

Forty minutes.

I went back to the island for the box, and that was when I saw the folder.

It was under the note. Not hidden. Grant didn’t hide things; he just put them where I’d been taught not to look. A plain green folder with a label on the tab, typed, and the label said JUNIPER COMMONS — CLOSING, and under it a date.

September second. Tuesday. Six days away.

I opened it.

I’m a bookkeeper. I was a bookkeeper. I sat at a desk by a door at Harlan Feed & Seed for seven years and I can read a loan document the way other people read a menu, and I read this one standing up with my belly against the edge of the island and my thumb pressed into my palm, and here is what it said. A bank downtown was lending Whitlock Development eleven million dollars to build forty-eight luxury residences on Juniper Lane. The loan would close on September second. The bank required, as a condition of closing, clear and marketable title to every parcel in the assembled site, including, on a schedule stapled to the back, Parcel 7, 14 Juniper Lane, acquired by quitclaim March 9.

Clear title. By Tuesday.

That was why the steps. That was why he hadn’t been able to let me get up to the second floor and ask a judge for my mother’s papers. It wasn’t about me at all. It had never once been about me. It was about a date on a folder.

I took a picture of the schedule with the grey phone. Then the first page. Then the signature page, where his name was, and his mother’s, as chair.

“Ma’am,” Deputy Okoro said from the hall. “Ten minutes.”

“I’m done,” I said, and picked up the box.

He carried it to the car. He didn’t ask what was in it and I didn’t tell him. On the way back across town he drove exactly the speed limit with both hands on the wheel, and the child seat squeaked behind us at every turn, and somewhere around the bridge he said, without looking over, “My wife says I drive like a grandmother.”

“Mrs. Pruitt drives like that.”

“Mrs. Pruitt sat in my lobby for four and a half hours yesterday and didn’t go to the bathroom once.” He almost smiled. “I’ve seen people with badges fold faster than that.”

We crossed the bridge.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“You can ask.”

“The judge. Hale. She said—on the steps, she said she couldn’t walk me to the office. She couldn’t advise me. And then she told me where the office was anyway.” I looked at the box on my knees. “Does she do that?”

Deputy Okoro thought about it for a full block.

“Judge Hale walks to work,” he said finally. “Three miles, every morning, same shoes, been doing it since before I started. She was a prosecutor before she was a judge. State’s Attorney’s office, twenty-something years ago.” He signaled, turned onto Juniper. “People say she doesn’t care much for Whitlocks. I don’t know what people mean by that. I just know she’s never once asked me to carry her coffee.”

* * *

Mrs. Pruitt’s front door was open.

Not unlocked. Open. Standing open, at one in the afternoon, onto a street where nobody left a door open, and Deputy Okoro saw it the same second I did and put his arm across me in the passenger seat like a crossing guard.

“Stay here.”

“It’s her house. She’s seventy-four, she might have just—”

“Ma’am. Please.”

He went up the walk with one hand resting on his belt. He stopped on the porch. He looked inside for a long moment, and then he turned around and looked at me through the windshield with an expression I couldn’t read, and he beckoned.

I got out with the box.

I could hear them from the porch. Mrs. Pruitt’s voice, high and tight, saying something about not in my kitchen, and another voice under it, lower, slower, a voice that had never had to be loud in its life.

I knew that voice. I’d sat across from it at eleven Thanksgivings and Christmases. It had asked me to pass the salt.

She was at the table under the lemon curtains. She’d taken the chair that faced the door. There was a cane hooked over the back of it that she didn’t need and a string of pearls at her throat that she did, and a cup of Mrs. Pruitt’s terrible coffee in front of her that she hadn’t touched, and her hands were folded on the oilcloth like the hands of someone who had arrived early for a meeting and intended to run it.

“Lena,” said Constance Whitlock. “Put that box down, dear, and sit.”

She unfolded her hands.

“We need to talk about what my son did with your mother’s house.”