Wednesday, 12:00 a.m.
The phone wanted a PIN.
I had it. He had told me once, years ago, in the truck, with his hands on the wheel and a sandwich in his lap and his own phone ringing on the dash: zero three one one, get that, would you. When I asked him later what it was, a birthday, an anniversary, he said it was what he'd put on the first phone that ever asked him for one, and he'd never seen a reason to change it. That was the whole answer. He never saw a reason to change most things. It was one of the reasons I married him.
Zero, three, one, one. The screen opened.
I stood beside the bed with the light of it in my face and went looking, the way I'd go through a horse's history on the clinic system before I lay a hand on it. His contacts were what I'd have guessed: clients by farm name, the feed mill, the tire place, me. Hanne with no surname and no picture. The number on my arm was not in there under any name at all. I went into his messages. The thread with the number held one line, and nothing above it. No earlier conversation. No reply. Just the question, arrived at 11:59, sitting on the white screen like a stone on a sheet.
Don't wake him, the voice had said. Because then you'll have told him.
If he woke in the morning and picked up his phone, the first thing he'd see would be that line. And then he'd have been told, and I'd be the one who had let it happen.
I photographed the screen with my own phone first, the line and the time, arm's length, like something that might go off. Then I held my thumb on the thread until his phone offered to delete it, and I let it. The screen went back to his other conversations, the Brenners wanting Thursday instead of Friday, the farm store saying his order was in, me asking if he wanted the rest of the noodles. I turned the phone face down on the charger, lined it up with the edge of the nightstand where it had been, and stepped back.
I have lied to clients about how much it would hurt. In eleven years I had kept one thing from him, and it was a number on a bank statement. This was the second.
He breathed. The catch at the top. Tansy had gone back under the bed. The hall clock ticked on the wall outside, and in the barn a mare with two liters of oil in her was standing tied to a ring on her own.
I went down, and on the fourth stair I put my foot square in the middle of the tread on purpose and let it knock. Nothing moved upstairs.
* The yard light had drawn every moth in the county. The gravel was wet now, and so were my socks, because I had walked out of the kitchen without my boots and didn't go back for them.
Pilot turned her head when I came in, the whites of her eyes showing. I unclipped the lead and put my palm flat on her neck, and she let her breath go against my shoulder, hot and grassy.
"Sorry, old girl. I'm back."
I took the monitor receiver off the shelf and clipped it to my belt, which I had never done in two and a half years. It sat against my hip and hissed, and inside the hiss, small and far off, my husband breathed.
Then I got the stethoscope in my ears and went back to work.
Her left side, which had been a shut room at half past eleven, was talking. Not much, a low mutter and a pop, but it was there, and when I moved up the flank it came again, longer, a sound like a drain clearing. On the right the thin trickle had thickened into a proper gurgle. I stood with my forehead on her warm side and listened to her gut remember what it was for, and I hadn't done a thing to make it happen. The oil wasn't through her yet. The banamine I'd given at ten wouldn't have done it. Sometimes they turn and you never know why. You write it down and you're grateful.
11:40, oil given, the whiteboard said. I wrote under it 12:25 gut sounds returning, left and right and my hand looked like somebody else's.
My forearm still said the number. I held it next to the whiteboard and read it twice. The last four digits meant nothing. The 715 meant anyone. I thought about the voice saying Hatchery Road and the note on your practice like a loan officer reading off a screen. I thought about the line of text on Callum's phone, and how I'd read it one word at a time, as if whoever sent it had wanted me to sit there and watch it land.
Noon on Thursday.
I did not know who had phoned me. I did not know who it thought it was holding. I had a man in my bed who had not woken when I came up the stairs, and a question on his phone that I had wiped away, and a mare whose belly was coming back from the dead for no reason I could name. None of those things fit together. I stood in the aisle and tried them against each other like keys on a strange ring.
The monitor breathed on my hip. In, and the catch, and out.
In.
I waited for the catch. It didn't come. The hiss went on, empty, the plastic noise of nothing.
Ten seconds. Pilot shifted her weight and the stall door rattled and I put my hand up flat, quiet, to a horse, as if she would understand.
Twenty. It happens. People hold a breath in their sleep and let it go. I had sat up with the sound of it all through the chest-infection winter.
Thirty.
I was already running.
* The gravel took the skin off the soles of my feet and I didn't feel it. The kitchen door banged back against the wall. I went up the stairs two at a time with no thought for which of them talked, and the fourth one clacked under me like a gun going off, and nothing upstairs answered it.
He was on his back. He had rolled, some time in the last half hour, off his left side and onto his back, and his head had tipped with his chin down onto his chest, and in the strip of hall light his face was the color of a wet paper sack. His lips were gray. His chest was lifting. It was trying. It heaved against something and nothing moved in or out, and the cords stood out in his neck.
I know that. I know it from foals, from a dog on a table, from a pony with a strangles abscess the size of an orange closing its throat. The breath goes in and does not come out because the door is shut.
Don't wake him.
I got the heel of my hand on his breastbone, made a fist and ground my knuckles into it, hard. "Callum. Cal." Nothing. I got on the bed on my knees beside his head and put my fingers behind the angles of his jaw, under his ears, and pulled it forward and up, lifting his tongue off the back of his throat.
He dragged in air with a noise like a boot pulled out of mud.
Then another. His whole body bucked with it. His eyes came open and didn't see me and he turned his head and was sick, all at once, over my wrist and the pillow and the edge of the quilt. I had him over onto his side before the second heave, my hand spread on his back, holding him there. The smell was sour and thin. There wasn't much in him.
"That's it," I said. "That's it, get it out. Good."
He coughed and spat and lay with his cheek in it, breathing, great ragged pulls, and the gray began to go out of his face from the lips inward.
His eyes found me in the dark. They were wet, and wide, and nothing in them knew who I was.
"Wren?" he said. His voice was a scrape. "Is it cold?"
I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. I didn't know anyone called Wren.
"Is it," he said, and his eyes closed, and he was asleep again, on his side, with one hand fisted in the sheet.
I stayed on my knees on the bed with my hand on his back until my own breath came down. Then I got a towel from the bathroom and cleaned his face and my wrist and took the pillowcase off and turned the quilt back from the mess, and did it all without him stirring, as if I were turning a horse that had gone down in its stall. I propped him with the spare pillow behind his back so he couldn't roll again.
Then I sat on the floor beside the bed, my back against the nightstand, and put two fingers on the inside of his wrist.
Slow, and even, and there. Under my other hand, through the plastic on my hip, the monitor gave me back the same breath a half second late, like an echo off a barn wall.
My own phone was out before I knew I'd reached for it, my thumb on the nine. The ambulance sits in Marten Falls, nine miles off, twenty-five minutes at night if the driver is awake. The county keeps one car after dark, and every kitchen scanner from here to the lake hears where it's sent. No police, no clinic. They'd send the one car, and the voice would know before the gravel settled. And he was breathing. He lay on his side with a monitor on my hip, and I could watch him closer than any hallway in any ER would, one gurney out of nine. I put the phone in my pocket.
Wren.
I tried it against everything I had of him, and it didn't catch on anything. Not a client. Not a horse, and he'd have said a horse's name like that. Not a name from the eleven years I'd been sleeping on the right side of this bed.
My phone buzzed in my shirt pocket at 1:04.
Not his. Mine. The number on my arm.
Is he sleeping, Hanne?
I looked at the man on his side, and the ruined pillowcase in a heap by the door, and my own wrist, pink from scrubbing. Anyone could know to ask that now. Not at half past twelve. I looked toward the window, at the dark glass and my own shape in it, and there was nothing out there I could name.
I typed Yes.
I held my thumb over it for a while. I did not type anything else. I sent it.
It was true. He was sleeping.
* At half past one I went down to the kitchen for water, and found his pill bottle by the sink.
He keeps it in the door pocket of his truck, for the shoulder, and it had come in with him and been set down beside the dish rack, the way he sets down whatever's in his hand when he's tired. Tramadol, fifty milligrams, his name, a pharmacy in Marten Falls. One at night, two when it's bad. It had been bad yesterday; I'd seen him roll the shoulder getting out of the truck.
Tramadol. An opioid, a mild one. Two of them and a man with a bad airway on his back would do what I'd just watched.
I tipped the bottle out into my palm under the light over the sink.
They weren't white.
Tramadol fifty is a plain white capsule-shaped tablet with a number stamped in it, and I had seen them in his hand a hundred times. These were a soft powder blue. Small ovals, smaller than they should have been, maybe fifteen of them lying in the crease of my hand like beads off a child's bracelet.
I got my phone out and opened the pill-identifier app I use when a client hands me a baggie and says the dog got into Grandpa's. I laid one on the white counter and photographed it, front, then back. The little wheel went round.
Insufficient imprint. Possible benzodiazepine.
I picked the tablet up and turned it under the light, close to my eye. There should have been letters on it, or a number, or a score line. Where they should have been, both faces were flat and faintly dull, crossed with fine parallel scratches, like a hoof after the rasp.
I tipped out another, and another. Every one of them. Blue, and the faces taken off them, carefully, one at a time.