Wednesday, 10:45 p.m.
The headlamp lives on the visor of the truck with its strap wound round it. It was still on red, where I'd left it Tuesday night in the barn so the light wouldn't trouble the mare's eyes, and I pulled it over my head and stood at the open box in a small dark-red room the size of my own two hands.
Under red light everything is one color. The bottles stood in their row, the lettering on them black on black, the steel of the box the shade of old blood. I found the fifty-milliliter bottle by its shape and its heft. ACE, in my own marker, on a strip of tape. I found a syringe and a needle. I didn't put the lamp to white.
If the man in your bed leaves that house, I will not need Callum Reeve.
The dose is not hard to work out. He is eighty-five kilos in the summer and ninety in the winter, a hundred and ninety pounds if he's been at the pie. Acepromazine for a dog that size, if you wanted the dog only drowsy, is about four milligrams: four-tenths of a milliliter. That was the careful dose. I wasn't being careful. Ace lasts six hours, and I needed thirteen. So I doubled it, and then I doubled that, because ace forgives; every vet who has ever pushed it will tell you so, you can give a horse five times what you ought to and get a horse that stands there swaying and thinking about the weather. Point four, point eight, one point six. I made it one and a half. It was a nice round number, and it lay in the barrel of the syringe as a dark nothing I couldn't see.
It drew thin. The plunger came back under my thumb with no drag at all, like drawing water from a bucket. I let it go, as you let a small strange noise go when you're already late.
I capped the needle, put the syringe in my back pocket, and put the bottle in my barn jacket with the spare key on its orange twine and a flip phone with one contact in it. The lid of the box came down on the pink and the xylazine and the Antisedan, and I closed the padlock this time and heard it click.
* He was awake.
I could tell from the yard. The front room had another light on in it, and when I opened the back door the hiss of the transmitter was there and over it his voice, saying my name up into the house to see if the house would answer.
"Han?"
"Here."
He was sitting up on the couch in the throw with his hair on end and the oximeter clip in his fingers, turning it over and over as if it were a coin from another country. His eyes were clear. All the puffiness had gone out of them, and they were his, rueful and a little sheepish, the eyes of a man who has slept through a fire drill. He was clear but slow, as though he'd been under six hours and hadn't got all the way up.
"What time is it?"
"Ten to eleven."
"Night?"
"Night."
"Jesus." He held up the clip. "Why was I wearing a clothespin with a light on it?"
"Your breathing. After last night. I wanted a number."
"Huh." He looked at it. He looked at the transmitter on the floor by the couch, the little gray box with its row of green lights, and looked away. "I slept the whole day like somebody hit me with a shovel. I don't remember tea. I remember a kettle." He rubbed both hands down his face. "I was a jerk this afternoon. About the mail. You were right to be scared and I was right to be angry, and I don't know which of us I'm sorrier for."
"I read your mail."
"I know. We'll get to it." He tipped his head at the receiver on my belt. "You've had that thing on your hip for two days. Remember when you brought it home?"
I sat down on the arm of the couch, because my legs had decided it.
It was January, two winters ago. He'd had a chest infection that wouldn't shift, three weeks of a cough like a tractor turning over, and he'd refused a doctor as he refuses everything, on principle. One night at three I woke to a silence and put my hand on his chest and it wasn't moving. Ten seconds. Then he dragged a breath in and rolled over and went on sleeping. The sleep clinic gave it a name and a mask with a hose, and he wore the mask four nights and said it made him feel like a fighter pilot with a mortgage. I drove to the farm store and came back with the plainest monitor on the shelf, no camera and no app, because I trust nothing I can't take apart with a screwdriver.
"You came in like you'd won a prize bull," he said.
"I was terrified."
"I know. That's why I let you keep it." He put the clip down. He leaned his head on my hip, on the receiver, so that the small hiss of it came from both of us. "You smell like iodine."
"I know."
"Just checking you knew."
I put my hand in his hair, at the temple, where the salt comes in. I had a syringe in my back pocket. It lay against my leg like a small, patient animal.
"Come to bed," he said. "You look like you've been dragged behind something."
"In a minute."
* The phone went at 11:05. It was the Port Ashby number I'd dialed at three that afternoon. I stood up so fast the throw slid off him.
"I've got to take this. It's a client."
In the kitchen I shut the door with my heel and answered with my back against it.
The sound came first. Wind, a great flat roar of it, and under the wind an engine, a big slow diesel lugging against something, and a hollow clanging as if a chain were being dragged across a deck.
"Is he dead?" a woman said. Her voice was low and scraped, a smoker's voice pitched to go over weather. "Is that why you're calling? You called at three. I'm at the wheel and I can't do anything about it until morning, so say it."
"He's not dead. He's on the couch, he's fine."
"Then what the hell are you calling me for," she said.
"Dagny?"
"Who else?"
"I need to ask you something," I said, "and I need you not to ask me why. Is my husband your brother?"
The engine lugged. The chain rang. It went on for so long that I thought the line had dropped, and then she said, quite quietly, with all the scrape gone out of her:
"I haven't laid eyes on Callum in twenty-four years. Send me a picture."
"I—"
"A picture," she said. "Now. Not one of the old ones, I don't want one of yours. Him, tonight, whatever he's doing. I'll know."
"I'll send it."
"Do that," Dagny Reeve said, and I heard her draw on a cigarette, and then I was holding a dead phone.
I stood in the dark kitchen for a moment with my head against the door. Somewhere in the yard the moths were still working the light.
He was standing when I came back in, with one hand on the arm of the couch and the throw in a heap at his feet. I lifted the phone.
"Hold still."
"Why?"
"Humor me."
"You're going to put me on the fridge." He squinted into the lamp anyway, and his face did the thing it does when a client aims a camera at him, not a smile, a polite flinch. He hasn't a single photograph of himself on this whole property but a class picture with thirteen other men in it. "We don't have anything on the fridge."
"That's not a rule. That's a hole."
"That's what I said."
I took it, and looked at what I'd got: a tired man in a T-shirt in yellow lamplight, salt at the temples, the scar pale on the left of his mouth, a red mark on his fingertip where the clip had been. I sent it to the Port Ashby number at 11:09. The little word under it changed from Sending to Delivered. Nothing came back.
* He went into the kitchen for water. I followed him because I couldn't not.
He ran the tap, drank off a glass, and set it in the sink. Then he saw the bottle. It stood by the dish rack, label to the wall, where he'd put it back that morning. He picked it up and held it, and rattled it once.
"I woke up this morning and couldn't find the coffee filters," he said. "In my own kitchen. I don't know what that was, but it wasn't the shoulder." He looked at me. "These make me stupid. I'm done with them."
He didn't open it. He tipped up the lid of the trash under the sink and dropped the bottle in, whole, and put the lid down on it.
It should have relieved me. I stood in the doorway with my hands empty, hearing the small dry rattle of pills settle in a bag of coffee grounds, and I thought: He doesn't know what they are. He hadn't looked.
"Han." He'd turned around. He had his back against the sink, and he wasn't smiling now. "There's someone I have to talk to before I can talk to you."
"An hour," he said. "I'll be back in an hour. I'd rather do it right than do it bad. I know how that sounds."
"Who?"
"I can't say yet." He looked at the hook by the back door, where his keys weren't. He looked at me. It was the hoof look, and I watched him read the jacket pocket with my hand in it. "You took them this afternoon. I let you. I figured you'd tell me when you could." His voice didn't rise. "I'm asking you now."
Someone I have to talk to. I had a flip phone in my other pocket with one contact in it and three messages I had never written back to. Tuesday? Noon. She doesn't know. I thought of a voice, level, courteous, saying If the man in your bed leaves that house, I will not need Callum Reeve. I thought of a man I'd been married to for ten years and ten months, in his boots with the laces done, driving north at midnight to go and ask somebody something.
The keys were against my hip. His brass tag from the farrier school. I could feel the edge of it through the canvas.
"Have something warm first," I said.
It came out in the voice I use on owners who want to take a colicky horse home. He blinked. He looked, for a moment, more tired than I'd ever seen him, and the fight went out of his shoulders.
"You're not going to tell me where they are."
"Have something warm."
"Han." He said it patiently. "Then I'll walk to Emil's and borrow the Volvo. It's three hundred yards."
Three hundred yards. He'd be at Emil Tiede's table in four minutes, across from someone who can't stop talking, and know would be loose in the air.
"Ten minutes," I said. "Then we'll see."
I put the milk on. It was the little dented saucepan, the one we've had since the first apartment, and I stood over it with a wooden spoon and watched it start to shiver. He sat at the table with the cards and the films pushed aside to make room for his elbows, and he did not touch a single one of them.
I spooned in the cocoa from the tin, and too much sugar, because he likes it too sweet. My back was to him. The syringe came out of my pocket and back in, and out again, and I held its tip to the milk in the pan and pressed, and it went in like water into water. No color. No cloud. I stirred. The spoon went around and around.
I carried it over and put it into his hands.
He drank with his eyes on my face. "That's the good stuff," he said. He started talking about the Brenners' mare with the cracked quarter, and how he'd have to go at it from the toe, and what Dale had said about it, and I sat across from him and answered in the right places. By the bottom of the mug his sentences had come a little apart at the edges. By the bottom of the mug he'd stopped looking at the hook.
"I'll go up," he said at twenty-five past. "Just a minute. Then I'll go." He said it to the table, and I said yes, that's right, go and lie down, I'll be up. I carried the transmitter up ahead of him and set it back on the dresser, and he went up the stairs after me one hand on the rail, and lay down on top of the quilt in his clothes, on his left side, facing the window.
"An hour," he said.
"An hour."
I kissed his temple. I'd got as far as the top of the stairs when I remembered the oximeter, and I went down for it and came back up and clipped it on his finger while he slept. The screen gave two dashes. Five hours on one set of batteries, and the spares were in a drawer at the clinic. I turned the receiver on my belt up to full. It was the only instrument I had left, and I stood a minute at the foot of the bed reading his back: ribs, rate, the set of the head. Then I went down and put the mug in the sink and ran the water.
I had my hands in it at 11:38, when the receiver on my belt changed its note. The breath went in. It was a long one, longer than his, and it caught at the top, and I stood with my hands in the water and waited for the rest of it. The tap ran. The receiver hissed. The rest of it didn't come.