Chapter 51: The Cabinet
Corinne Devlin’s stock sheet is pinned inside the cupboard door with a brass drawing pin she brought herself.
Ruled, dated the fourteenth, signed, with her license number under the signature.
On Thursday morning I read it during my hour, standing up, which I was not entitled to do.
She watched me do it and said nothing, which I have thought about since.
Nine oral syringes, five milliliter. Vitamin D drops, level marked with tape on the day the bottle was opened.
Acetaminophen suspension, two-thirds, opened 14 September. The salbutamol inhaler and spacer from May, unused.
Barrier cream, saline, one thermometer, one box of bandages. Counted, reconciled, initialed.
She had done in ninety minutes what I had wanted done since March and had no standing to ask for.
Every bottle accounted for. Every level where it should be.
My theory took a blow there that it did not deserve to survive.
It survived anyway, because of a photograph I had taken on the tenth of October.
I have to write this part properly, because it is the worst thing I did that autumn.
On the tenth I was still on the third floor and the interim arrangements did not exist.
The housekeeper sent me to the east wing for towels, which was ordinary, and I went, which was ordinary.
There is a guest bathroom on that corridor with a mirrored cabinet over the basin.
I opened it.
Nobody sent me to open it.
I stood in a bathroom that was not mine, on a floor I had no business on, and I opened a stranger’s cabinet with two fingers.
Seven things in it.
Aspirin. Dental floss. A tube of arnica. Two travel bottles of hotel shampoo. A comb.
And a fifty-count bottle of an over-the-counter sleep aid, about half gone.
The safety seal was broken and the cap was not quite straight.
I looked at it for perhaps forty seconds without touching it.
Then I photographed it. Front, back, and the lot number stamped into the shoulder of the plastic.
I wrote the lot number and the fill number on the inside of my left wrist in laundry marker.
A wrist cannot be searched without a person noticing.
I did not open it. I did not count what was in it.
That is the only part of that morning I got right.
Then I put the towels under my arm and went down the back stairs with my ears burning.
For twelve days the photograph sat in my phone and I neither looked at it nor deleted it.
That is its own kind of answer.
On Thursday the twenty-second I looked at it.
Here is what I had by nine that morning, in three lines on the floor.
A route: four things by mouth, all of them carried.
A window: eleven minutes on a landing, unwatched, every evening since March.
An object: half a bottle of something that makes people sleep, in a wing where nobody has ever complained of sleeping badly.
Three facts, one under another, and the shape they made looked like a case.
It was not a case.
It was three true things that happened to be true in the same building at the same time, which is what a building is.
I did not know the difference yet. Nobody had explained it to me in a way that had cost me anything.
I put the kettle on and read those three lines about forty times and got warmer and warmer.
I am not going to dress that up.
I was twenty-six, I had four hundred and eighty dollars, and four institutions had told me no in a fortnight.
A person in that state does not weigh a photograph. She holds it.
At ten I had my hour and he was in a very good mood and I was no use to him at all.
He put the bead ball in my lap and took it back again, which is a game and not a mistake.
He did it eleven times. I counted them instead of playing.
At twenty past ten a van came onto the gravel and he went still for a second at the sound.
He does that when a door opens. One second, and then he decides.
Do not fill that second. It is the only advice about him I have ever given anybody.
At 11:00 I signed out, because she writes the time she sees on her own watch.
That afternoon the family office sent four lines to eleven addresses.
The ceremony arranged for the twenty-fourth of October is postponed. No further date at this time.
Postponed. Not canceled.
Nobody in that house said the word again for the rest of the year.
Roz read it over my shoulder, put a pan down, and said one sentence.
“That woman is not going anywhere, and now she has nothing to do all day.”
At six o’clock I typed three hundred words to Dr. Moreno and attached two photographs.
The last line said: I think it goes in by mouth, and I think I know in which eleven minutes.