Wednesday, 6:25 p.m.
The house office is a room off the kitchen the size of a walk-in cooler, with a desk, a file cabinet and my vet-school binders, and I laid the films out on it under the lamp with the lightbox from the truck humming at my elbow.
He was on the couch in the next room, on his side, one hand open. The receiver sat on the blotter turned down low. Through it came the room: the long pull, the catch, the letting-go. Underneath, faint and bright, the oximeter's small tick for every beat of his heart.
I read the panoramic first. I read it as I'd read a horse's cheek teeth: left to right, one end of the arch to the other, no story, only what's there. A face the width of a boy's. The dark crescent of the sinuses. Upper arch, all present and correct, small, close-set. Lower arch, the same on the front. And at the back of the lower jaw on both sides, where a person of that age ought to have had a pair of slim new premolars standing up in the gap, there were two big squared-off baby molars, broad-rooted, worn shiny on their tops. They had held their ground. Beneath them was bone. Clean, dark, unbroken. No bud. No crown coming up under the root. Nothing had ever been going to come.
Then I turned to the tablet, to the two gray obliques of my husband's head, taken at a fraction of a fraction of a horse's dose.
Premolars. Both sides. Long, slim, sound, each in its socket with a root that went down into the bone like a fence post set by a man who cared. The roots of an adult, forty-four years old.
I put my finger on the screen and traced the root of the left one, from the crown to the tip, and then on the film I touched the empty place where its brother should have been.
"You can't grow a tooth you were never going to have," I said, out loud, in a room with a man asleep behind the wall.
It didn't prove anything I could afford to say. It proved that the films the voice had put in my mailbox were not a picture of the man on my couch. Not whose they were. A label is a piece of paper, and this one had been torn and pasted and lettered by somebody who had all the time in the world. But the label said REEVE, and the voice had said you will know, and the voice had been right about ten years and ten months.
I wanted someone to tell me I was wrong. That's a peculiar thing to want, after a day like that one. I wanted an old professor with a bad temper to hold it up and say Sorley, you've read it upside down. Alone in that room I could argue with myself for hours. I needed a stranger's eyes and a stranger's mouth, and I needed them in the next hour, and there was one person within walking distance who read films for a living.
Rule four. I wouldn't tell him a thing. I'd show him teeth. Teeth don't have names.
I put the panoramic and the two bitewings and the two prints from the tablet in a manila folder, and the lightbox under my arm. Callum's oximeter said 96. I set the receiver's volume to the lowest notch it had and put it in my breast pocket, against my chest, where I could feel more than hear.
* The Brask place has been Emil Tiede's since January of last year, three hundred yards east across the road, a square gray farmhouse with the porch falling off, and two donkeys, Ivy and Hob, in the paddock by the gate. The week he moved in he'd come over with a plate of shortbread and stayed an hour and forty minutes. I'd been dodging him for a year and a half. He is a kind old man who cannot stop.
The donkeys were at the fence. Hob put his whole dark head over the rail and looked at me with the melancholy of a bishop. Behind him Ivy, the gray jenny, stood with her ears at half-mast, waiting her turn to be ignored. In the upstairs window, on the road side, a pair of binoculars stood on a tripod, aimed down Hatchery Road at nothing. Cranes, he'd told me once. Sandhills come through in April.
It was 6:55. In my pocket, at the gate, the breath came through the receiver clear and slow. At the porch it was fainter. But it was there.
"Dr. Sorley!" He had the door open before I knocked. Seventy-one, small and neat, a cardigan the color of oatmeal buttoned one hole out, bifocals pushed up on his forehead and forgotten. "Hanne, isn't it? I'm Emil. We've established it three times. Come in, come in, I've got a kettle on. I was just saying to Hob."
The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and wet wool, with a donkey somewhere underneath. A scanner on the windowsill above the sink was reading a road and a number to nobody. "Retirement present to myself," he said, turning it down without looking. "Thirty years in a dark room reading other people's emergencies. I find I miss them."
"I need a favor," I said. "A quick one. I'd like you to read some films."
"Films." His whole face changed. It was the face of a man handed a bicycle after ten years without one. "Whose?"
"A patient's."
"You treat horses."
"A favor for a friend." I held out the folder. "I need to know if these are the same mouth."
I got the lightbox out. He waved it off. He took the films out of the folder and carried them to the window over the sink and held the panoramic up to the daylight with his chin tucked in. He looked at my two prints on the tablet and made a small sound of professional pain.
"This," he said, "was taken with a plate designed for a horse's fetlock."
"Yes."
"Under-exposed, which is a kindness to the patient. No grid. You've been at some pains, haven't you." He put the panoramic up again. His mouth pursed. "How old is the second patient?"
"Forty-four."
"And the first, when this was taken?"
"A boy. About thirty years ago."
He took his time. In the paddock a donkey brayed, one long sawing note, and the scanner said something about a cow on the county road.
"I won't ask what a horse doctor is doing with a child's panoramic in a sleeve with the top torn off," he said. "I'll ask it four times, in different words, and you will refuse, and we shall both feel we've been thorough." He turned to look at me and the bifocals came down off his forehead at last and settled on his nose. "These aren't the same mouth."
"Not close. Look here, and here." A finger, not touching. "Your adult has both lower premolars, well seated, good roots. This one has none. He has the baby molars still standing, and no buds under them, nothing, he never made them. It's not rare. A few percent of the population. The same thing that gives people no wisdom teeth, only worse luck." He lowered the film. "Whoever this is, he isn't that." He held it up to the light again. "And he's young. Fourteen, fifteen. A small mouth for a boy."
"You're sure."
"Madam, I'm never sure. I'm seventy-one and I'm a radiologist. It's why we're insufferable." He almost smiled. "But I'd put my license on it, if I still had one."
The room didn't tilt. I'd thought it would. I'd read it myself half an hour before, at a desk, in the lamp, and I'd told myself it would feel different when somebody else said it, and it didn't feel different at all.
Or the sleeve wasn't the boy. I tried that one. I set it up beside the other and stared. A label is a piece of paper. But somebody had gone to trouble to say Reeve, and to be right about ten years and ten months, and to be right about a woman named Inga.
My hands were going. I put them under my arms.
"You're shaking," Tiede said.
"It's been a long day."
"Sit. Sit! I'll make the coffee properly." He took the kettle off. "I have three kinds, and I mean to be offended if you refuse."
I stayed too long. There was a chair and a cup and a kind old man talking, and if I got up I'd have to go and be the person I was on the other side of the road. Under his voice, against my chest, the receiver drew its breath and let it go, and I let the old man's talk run over me and listened under it. He talked. A department down south, and the years he'd run it, and the department that had run him out. His wife, who had died the winter before he retired. The donkeys, who'd been a mistake and were the best thing he had ever done. He asked too much. Whose was it, and did I know its provenance, and was it a legal matter, because there were forensic odontologists in Madison who'd be delighted, and was someone dead? Is that what this is, an identification?*
"Nobody's dead," I said.
"You said that as if you were checking."
"A patient's," I said, for the fifth time.
He put a cup in front of me. Somewhere in the second cup I put a question to him, because I'd been carrying it across the road like a hot dish.
"Did you happen to see anyone down at my mailbox today?"
"At your mailbox." He considered it with real pleasure. "A pickup stopped there about one. I was out with the donkeys. I heard it more than saw it. You know how it is, they all sound alike now, a sort of grumble."
"Did it stop long?"
"Long enough for a man to open a door."
"What kind of pickup?"
"My dear, I don't know a Ford from a Chevy at a distance. I know a donkey from a horse." He blew on his coffee. "I'm afraid I'm more use with a mandible."
I'd read a card that afternoon that said Dr. T sold the practice and went, and the man across the table had a name that began with the same letter, and a doctor's way of looking at you over his glasses. The card was from 2019. I set the two side by side and couldn't make either one go away.
"I'd better go," I said.
"Not till you've had the shortbread." He got up to find it. He stood at the counter with his back to me and a tin in his hands, and he said it idly, to the tin, in the tone of a man remarking on the weather.
"Your husband sleeps like a bandsaw, doesn't he?"
Something behind my breastbone took it. It went in the way a splinter goes in under a nail, and I didn't look at it. I had one thing in my head at a time by then and it was already full. The scanner read out a road number. In my pocket, against my chest, the oximeter ticked.
"Here," he said, and put the tin in front of me. "Take some for him."
I looked at the clock on his stove. It was ten past eight. Seventeen hours had turned into a little under sixteen, and I'd spent the difference on shortbread.
* He walked me to the gate. He talked the whole way down the path, and he was still talking when I got through it. I left him with a hand on Hob's neck, under a sky going gold, and behind me the old man's voice said something about the light, and I didn't hear it.
The low sun lay across Hatchery Road, long and level, and the air had gone soft with dust and cut hay. Beyond the bend to the south a haze of dust hung over the gravel, gold and slow to settle. Nothing was on the road.
The receiver breathed in my pocket. I held it to my breastbone the whole three hundred yards.
Our pasture gate was open.
It's a pipe gate, and it hangs on a chain I hook myself every night. It stood back against the fence with its chain trailing in the grass. I looked through it and the field beyond was green and gold and still, and empty. No hoof, no whinny, not the sound of six horses going anywhere.
I went up the lane at a walk that turned into something else. The yard was empty. The barn stood with its big door rolled back on the aisle and the light inside it pooled on the concrete. At the back, the paddock gates, all three of them, stood open. From the corner of the barn they showed as three long gaps in the fence with the evening coming through.
Every gate on the place stood open, and the fields were empty.