Fourth Floor
The systems floor, Alcántara House
The room the systems team worked in had no window and one door and a wall of machines that made a noise like a held breath. It was always warm. People from the proper floors came down, stood in the doorway, said God, how do you sit in here all day, and went back up.
The phone was face-down on Wren’s desk when it started, which was how she kept it now.
She’d started doing that in the spring. It wasn’t the calls.
It was the half-second before them, when the hospital’s number came up and she had to read it before she knew anything. The reading was worse than whatever came after. Face-down, it just buzzed. Face-down, it could be anyone.
She turned it over.
It was the hospital.
“Your mother’s been brought in,” the voice said. “She’s comfortable. There’s no emergency.”
There was never an emergency. That was a thing they said to stop you driving badly.
Wren logged out, told the shift lead she was going, and was in the car park before she’d finished putting her coat on.
St Brendan’s, fourth floor
The ward corridor was the colour of weak tea and smelled of hand gel over something older. There was a row of moulded chairs bolted to the wall, a payphone nobody had used this century, and a vending machine with a handwritten sign taped over the coin slot.
Her father was already there, standing outside the ward with his hands behind his back, the way he stood when he was waiting for somebody else’s meeting to finish.
“She’s asleep,” Milan said. “They gave her something.”
He said it to the door, not to her.
“What happened?”
“She went down in the hall. Nothing broken.” He said it evenly, the way he read out a route. “The neighbour heard it.”
Wren looked through the window in the door. Her mother was small in the bed and her mouth was open and there was a plastic clip on her finger.
“You should go in,” Milan said.
“She’s asleep.”
“So sit with her while she’s asleep.”
“You sit with her.”
“There’s a run tonight.” He checked the new watch and then, seeing her see it, put his hand down. “Airport. It’s booked.”
“You could give it away.”
“You don’t give work away.”
That was the whole of her father’s philosophy, and it had kept them fed for as long as Wren had been alive. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard it and felt anything but tired.
“Go on then,” she said.
He put his hand on her shoulder on his way past, which he did roughly once a year, and it made her want to sit down on the floor of the corridor and not get up.
The vending machine on the fourth floor had been broken a while, and Wren kept putting coins in anyway. It gave her hands something to do. Her mother had been asleep since before she got there.
She was crouched by the coin return when she heard footsteps stop behind her.
“They told me fourth floor,” June said. “Then a man at the desk told me third. I’ve been in this building a while.”
Wren stood up too fast. “Visiting hours ended at eight.”
“I know. I read the sign.”
“Then you know you can’t be here.”
“I’m here, though.” June moved her bag higher on her shoulder. “How is she?”
“Stable.”
“Wren.”
“That’s the word they used.”
June didn’t take that. She stood there holding it, waiting, and when nothing else came she let her shoulders drop half an inch and looked away down the corridor.
She had come straight from work. Wren could tell from the shoes, and from the way she was still holding her car keys instead of putting them away.
“Who told you,” Wren said.
“Nobody told me. You didn’t answer my messages, and you always answer messages. That’s a thing about you I’ve never had to think about until tonight.” June said it lightly, and then less lightly. “So I rang the switchboard and asked whether a Kovač had been admitted, and they told me. Nobody has ever refused me anything on the phone. I’m aware of how that sounds.”
“You could have gone home.”
“I could.” June sat down in the plastic chair against the wall and put her bag on the floor. “Then I’ll sit.”
“There’s nothing to do.”
“So we’ll do nothing.” She patted the chair beside her. “Sit. You’re swaying.”
Wren hadn’t noticed she was swaying. She sat.
The chair was cold through her jeans. Down the corridor a machine beeped somewhere and stopped. Somebody laughed in a room they couldn’t see, and then that stopped too.
A woman came down the hall with a clipboard. “Kovač?”
“Yes,” Wren said.
“Just to say the deposit’s settled, so there’s nothing outstanding tonight. That came in yesterday.”
Wren looked at her.
“Came in how.”
“Cash, at the desk.” The woman turned a page without looking up. “There’s a second form for the extended stay if she’s in past the weekend. I can leave it with you now or bring it up in the morning.”
Yesterday. Her mother had gone down in the hall this evening.
Wren opened her mouth and nothing came out. She’d read enough of these forms to know exactly what the words meant. But the woman was waiting, and there was a pen, and Wren’s hands were doing something under her sleeves that she didn’t want anyone to see.
“Can I look?” June was already standing.
She took the clipboard and read it, not for long. Then she said something about a date and a reference and who had signed what. The woman answered. June asked one more thing, shorter. The woman took the clipboard back and said she’d sort it out downstairs and bring it up in the morning.
Then she was gone, and June sat down again like nothing had happened.
“They’ve dated it wrong,” she said. “Not yours to fix. She’ll sort it.”
“How did you know that?”
“I sat in rooms with people like her for years.” June shrugged, and then pulled a face at herself, as if the shrug had come out wrong. “It’s the one useful thing I got out of it.”
Wren looked at her own hands. She rolled her left sleeve up, then down, then up again.
Her father had paid a deposit the day before her mother fell.
There were reasons for that. Wren went through them in order, the way she’d go through a fault log. A standing arrangement. A bill from an earlier stay. A mistake at the desk.
Each one held for about as long as it took to think it.
“You’ve gone somewhere,” June said.
“Tired.”
“That’s not an answer, but I’ll take it.”
“You should eat something,” June said.
“Not hungry.”
“That wasn’t a question.” June stood and went down the corridor.
She came back with tea and a sandwich in plastic. She’d made the tea wrong — too much milk — and Wren drank it anyway. It was hot. Her hands shook around the cup, close enough for June to see.
Neither of them said anything about that.
“You don’t have to stay,” Wren said.
“You’ve said that three times.”
“You’ll be tired tomorrow.”
“Probably.”
The heater under the window clicked on. Wren watched a man push a cart past the end of the corridor and waited until he was gone.
She was aware, in a distant way, of the size of the thing sitting next to her. June Alcántara, late at night, on a plastic chair, on the wrong side of the city, with work in the morning.
There was a version of this where that meant something.
Wren put the version away, carefully, the way you put away a tool you’re not allowed to use.
She’d do this for anyone, she thought. She’s always been like this. It’s the same thing that makes people give her whatever she asks for.
That held better than the other reasons had.
“What did you want,” she said. “Tonight. Before you knew.”
June was quiet.
“I was going to ask about the drive books,” she said. “I’d rehearsed it in the car and everything. And then I got here and it turned out to be a completely different evening, and I’d like it noted that I didn’t ask.”
“You just did.”
“I did, didn’t I.” June laughed at herself, one breath. “God. All right. That’s on me.”
“It’s fine.”
“It isn’t, but thank you.”
Down the ward, somewhere behind a curtain, someone rang a bell and a nurse’s shoes went past, quick and quiet.
“Wren,” June said. “Whatever this is with your mum. If it gets expensive — if there’s a point where it gets expensive — you’d tell me. Wouldn’t you.”
Wren looked at the cup.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Okay.”
“It’s covered.”
“Okay,” June said again, and let it lie there, and did not ask by whom.
They sat. The corridor lights buzzed at a pitch you could only hear if you stopped talking, and after a while Wren stopped hearing it.
“Move your bag,” June said. “I’m putting my feet on the chair.”
Wren moved her bag.
June got her feet up, put her head back against the wall, and was asleep inside a minute. Wren decided not to find that endearing and found it endearing anyway.
The corridor went quiet.
After a while she took her phone out and turned it over. She opened the account she and her father used for the bills, and scrolled up — past the standing orders, past the months — to the week her mother went down in the hall.
The deposit wasn’t in there. It hadn’t come from this account at all.
Wren locked the screen and put the phone face-down on her knee, and sat in the warm corridor next to a sleeping woman, not looking at it.