Chapter 25: Nineteen
I ruled the columns with the edge of a library card, because I did not own a ruler.
Nineteen rows. Six months. One page.
Date. Onset. Duration in seconds. Colour. What I did. Recovery.
That was the order Dr. Moreno gave me in March. I kept it for half a year because he was a doctor and I was not.
The first row said 11 March, 02:14, forty-one seconds. The last said 2 September, 02:21, sixty-eight seconds.
It was the sixteenth. I had been suspended for two days.
The word they used was suspended. The word nobody used was fired.
Ethan would not let anyone else hold him.
On the fifteenth, a house of eleven staff learned that this was not a preference.
It was a fact with a volume.
He cried for four hours and ten minutes on Tuesday. Roz timed it.
So I was suspended and still living there, which is a sentence that should not exist.
My room is third floor, north end, over the laundry.
Eight feet by eleven. One window that opens four inches, because of a bracket fitted for a different child in 1994.
Half my things were still in boxes from Tuesday, when somebody began packing them and stopped.
I did not unpack them and I did not repack them. I put the page on the nearest box and looked at it.
Downstairs, the house went on.
A woman had put her heel on my stomach on Monday evening. On Wednesday the linen company still came at nine.
Serena Montigue was in the morning room with the florist.
The third-floor intercom has been broken since April in a specific way.
It does not ring. But if the morning room panel is pressed, the line opens and stays open.
The peonies would be finished by the twenty-fourth of October. She wanted something that did not look like an apology.
Six weeks. The wedding was still happening, because nobody had been charged with anything.
I kept waiting for the house to acknowledge what it knew. Houses do not acknowledge. Houses have a linen delivery.
Victor Blackwood had said lock the gates.
That night he went to the hospital. On Tuesday he saw a lawyer. On Wednesday he flew to Houston.
Being fair to him is the hardest paragraph in this account.
He was not cruel and he was not stupid. He was slow.
He believed that if he did not move until he was certain, he could not make anything worse.
Every day he did not move it got worse, in a way that never reached a document.
Slowness is a kind of violence you can practice with a clean conscience.
Ethan was in the nursery with a short cast on his left forearm.
Dark blue. I had asked for blue and the technician let me choose.
Fourteen months and four days.
He walks holding one hand. He can do seven steps alone, then sits down hard and checks your face to see whether that was funny.
He has one word. The word is ba.
Ba is the bead ball. Ba is the neighbor’s dog. Ba is also me, which I have never told anybody.
He sleeps with his left foot out of the blanket.
Cover it and he takes it out again without waking, like a man correcting a document.
Going down, he pats twice on your collarbone. Two pats, always two. Then he stops.
I had not been allowed to put him down since Sunday.
Mrs. Alden from the agency did it Monday and Tuesday. She is competent. She is fifty-one.
He would not put his head down for her.
He arched and cried the cry that comes from the bottom, and after ninety minutes she carried him along the corridor, because motion works when nothing else does.
On Tuesday night I stood inside my door with my hand flat on the wood and listened to him go past below.
I counted. Counting is what I do instead of the other thing.
Four passes. Eleven minutes.
I did not stay in that house for a principle.
I stayed because if I walked out of the gate I would never be told anything about him again.
I had written the page at the kitchen table on the fifteenth, after the hospital and the police.
Nineteen entries, in the order they happened. I had never put them side by side.
I sent each one to Dr. Moreno as it occurred, the way you post a letter, and then stopped thinking about it.
You do not read your own log. You produce it.
What I felt was not revelation. It was the feeling of a person who suspects she has been holding something the wrong way up.
Two knuckles, low down on the door.
Roz does not knock at head height, because for twenty-eight years her hands have been full.
She had a plate with bread and cold chicken. She looked at the page and did not ask what it was.
She said, “You want to keep that where nobody dusts.”