Chapter 32: Seven Forty
The building on Wabash is four storeys of gray brick with a dental laboratory on the ground floor and a directory in the lobby with three names painted out.
I got there at ten past seven, because I had costed the bus wrong in my own favor.
Thirty minutes on a step in September at that hour is a long time to hold a sheet of paper flat.
I had it in a plastic document wallet taken from the estate office, which is theft, and I am leaving it in this account.
Dr. Elias Moreno is fifty-four and looks like a man who has been indoors for thirty years.
He came down himself and let me in, in a coat over a jumper, carrying two coffees he had bought on the corner, and he had to try the door twice because the lock sticks below ten degrees.
He gave me one without asking and never mentioned it again.
The waiting room had the chairs stacked.
We sat in his consulting room with the blind down and the overhead light on.
He cleared the desk with his forearm, properly, the way you clear a bench before a job.
“Put it there.”
I put the sheet down and flattened it with both hands.
He did not speak for four minutes. I timed it, because I time things, and because there was a clock behind him with a second hand.
Then he took a pencil, not a pen, and started at the top left.
The first thing he did was attack it.
I had expected — and I am ashamed of this — I had expected him to be shocked.
“How did you time the durations?”
“Phone stopwatch. Started at the first stridor. Stopped when the breathing was even for ten seconds.”
“Always the same phone?”
“Yes.”
“Always you?”
“Yes.”
He wrote something. “That is a serious problem, and it is also the only reason this is worth anything. Do you know why?”
I said because there is only one observer.
“Because there is only one observer,” he said, “and she is consistent. Consistency is worth more than independence at this stage. It will be worth a great deal less later.”
He went down the durations with the pencil, saying them out loud, the way you read a column you intend to add up. “Forty-one. Thirty-eight. Fifty-five. Sixty-two.”
“Did they get longer?”
I said I had not looked. I had recorded each one and sent it and gone back to bed, and in six months it had never occurred to me to compare a Tuesday in April with a Tuesday in July.
“They got longer,” he said. “Not steadily. But the last five are the five longest, and that is a fact about the child, not about the calendar, and it is the fact that concerns me this morning.”
He turned the sheet ninety degrees and read the innocent column, the whole of it, twice, moving the pencil down the margin without marking anything.
“You wrote this first.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if I wrote the other one first I would have spent the night defending it.”
He put the pencil down. It is the only time in eleven months I saw him do anything that was not economical.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“Three years of nursing school.”
“Which school?”
I told him the name of the school. He asked why I had not finished, and I told him that too, because it is one sentence and I have had four years to get it down to one.
My father got ill in my third year and somebody had to earn.
He did not say anything sympathetic, and I was grateful.
He said: “Column four. Tell me how you got it.”
So I told him about a marbled ledger on a shelf over a dry store.
About one hundred and seventy-six rows. About copying all of them instead of nineteen. About the eleven question marks and the definition at the top of the page.
He listened the way a man listens to directions for a road he is going to drive later.
“Who keeps the ledger?”
“Roz Achebe. Twenty-eight years.”
“Does she know what you used it for?”
I said she knew I had copied it. I had not told her why. She had told me why, which is not the same thing.
He almost smiled. Then he asked the question I had not prepared for.
“Miss Carter. Have you told the father?”
I said I had told him the number nineteen in a hallway, and he had offered me a reference.
Dr. Moreno looked at the sheet for a while. Somewhere below us a van was reversing, and the beeping went on for the whole of it.
“Sixty-one nights out of a hundred and seventy-six,” he said. “Thirty-five percent.”
“Yes.”
“And seventeen out of nineteen.”
“Yes.”
He squared the sheet against the edge of the desk, the way you handle something you have decided to be careful with.
“I want to be clear that I am not agreeing with you,” he said. “I am agreeing that this has to be explained.”