Della
At ten past six on Friday morning I was in the Sentra with the phone in the footwell, because I'd taken a left, and I had a list.
One. A man had said four hundred words of mine back to me at four o'clock, the first line only, in my voice, half a step up and ironed flat. It was perfect. It was the worst thing anyone had ever done to me with a compliment. Two. As far as I knew there were two copies of those words in the world, and Royce had one. Three. Royce sent the commander notes. Royce knew about the grandmother, and the grandmother had only ever been said on one line, and so whatever I said to Ronnie, I said to Royce. Four. I couldn't say sorry on the channel.
I could say plenty on the channel. I'd said it all night. I'd said his name, and the time, and had he eaten, and I'd said it into a line with a man on the other end who'd stopped breathing out loud.
I sat in the car park in the grey light with the control room lit up across the tarmac, and I read the stream on my phone. It had been on a card since five. A cartoon wrench. Brief maintenance break, back soon. Under it the comments were going up the screen like a fire in a stairwell, two million people asking where the commander was and why he'd stopped doing the voice.
I needed something warm on that screen by lunch, and the only warm thing I had was a widow. And I needed a way to Ronnie that wasn't a wire.
I made myself stay till ten to eight. I counted that as something I did. Then I told Kip I was going for a coffee, and he said, "Basically?" and I said, "No. A coffee," and went.
The Tolliver house was a low white seventies house on a street in Cocoa Beach with the ocean at the end of it, a lanai on the side, and a screened pool at the back with the lights kept off. In the front window, a Good Luck Mack banner, a small edition of the one on the Publix, already going yellow at one corner.
I got to the door at ten to nine, rang once, and it opened before the bell had finished.
"I saw the car from the kitchen," said Bette. She was in a cardigan and slacks and she had a jam jar in her hand, and it was nine in the morning. "Nobody parks a rental like that. Like it's got a warrant."
"Mrs Tolliver."
"You look like hell." She turned and went back inside and left the door open. "Sit down. You're making the photographs nervous."
They were all over the kitchen. Every inch of wall between the cream cupboards, framed, six deep, a man with a grin in front of a rocket, a man with a grin in front of a president, the same man with the same grin in front of a very small fish. The calendar from the tyre company said it was still October. Bette put a jar in front of me. Iced tea. It smelled of tea, and of something else that had come out of a different bottle.
"He broke all the glasses," said Bette, nodding at the jar. "Being charming. Waving his hands. Forty years. Now we drink out of jam." She looked at the jar. "Forty years. Did I say forty?"
"You did."
"Well. It was forty."
I sat. I drank. I said it at once, because I'm bad at coffee and worse at kitchens.
"Mrs Tolliver. I need a second call. Twelve minutes, on the stream, you and the commander. He's stopped talking, the stream's on a card, and there are two million people wondering if he's dead."
"No," said Bette.
"I'd keep it short."
"No." She sat across from me with her jar in both hands. "I did one. It was the nicest thing I've done in a month and I couldn't eat after. The boy was good. I'd say he was very good. He said leave 'em. Nobody's said leave 'em to me since the Sunday." She took a sip. "I am not doing it twice. I'll be a woman who cried on the television. I'd like to be a woman who cried once."
"I wouldn't ask if it wasn't on fire."
"Everything's on fire. That's your word. You say it like you're ordering."
"He's stopped talking and it's my fault."
I hadn't planned that. It wasn't on the list. It came out of me flat and quick, and Bette put the jar down.
"What did you do?"
"I wrote a statement. In case it came out. It says the man in that seat made himself up and the company never met him. It's got my name on it." I looked at the wall of photographs, at a thousand Macks. "It's very good, Mrs Tolliver. That's the part I can't stand."
"And he's seen it."
"He said the first line to me at four this morning, in my voice."
"He does your voice."
"He does everyone's."
"Tolliver would've hated that," said Bette. "He'd have loved it and hated it." Then she didn't say anything for a long time. A tap dripped in the sink. Through the open door at the back of the kitchen, the utility door, I could see into the garage, and what I could see in the garage was Mack Tolliver, life size, in cardboard, grinning at me from beside a big white chest freezer. A giveaway from the visitor centre. Nine years old. I looked at him and I looked away, and he was still there in the corner of my eye, so I said, under my breath, "Sorry."
"He does that to people," said Bette, not turning round. "Leave him."
She got up. She went to a shelf above the toaster where a model of the capsule stood on a little stand, a foot high, white and neat, with a hinged nose. She flipped the nose up with her thumb, put two fingers inside, and took out a brown bottle. She set it on the table between the jars.
It was a prescription bottle. It had a white cap and a white label, and the label had her name on it. Bette Tolliver. Take one at bedtime. It was empty.
"I found that by the lounger," said Bette. "On the little table, next to a glass. The cap was off. I take two, because one doesn't touch me. He took none. He never took a pill in his life. He said pills were for people who wanted to stop thinking, and he had nothing he wanted to stop." Her voice was dry as a cracker. "Ten past five on Monday morning. I woke up and the bed was cold. I came out and he was in the water."
I didn't say anything. I said, "Christ," very quietly.
"I'm a nurse, Ms Quint. I knew before I got down the steps. And I looked at the little table, and the bottle, and I thought, oh, you stupid man. A week before you fly."
"Mrs Tolliver."
"Tolliver didn't do feelings. He did weather reports about feelings. Fair, he'd say. Fair, with a chance of regret." She picked up the bottle and turned it so the label faced the light. "He kept saying he owed Rafe's girls. Ros and Tess. Every week since the spring. He'd say it at the sink. He'd say it in his sleep. I owe the girls. I owe Ros. And I thought, there it is. That's what he thought he owed."
"And you called the office."
"I called the office before I called anyone. The boys from the office came." Her mouth shut on it. "That's all I'm saying about that."
"No ambulance."
"If an ambulance comes, a man with a clipboard writes down what it is. And then it's in the Orlando paper, and Rafe's girls read it over breakfast. And Halyard's got a widow who cries on the television for a hero, or a widow who found her own bottle by the pool, and one of those gets a settlement and one of them doesn't." She looked at me. "I'm sixty-three. I'd like to eat. I said fine in the cold room because your man in the suit meant nobody would look under the sheet while it was going on. That's all it was. I'm not proud."
I looked at the bottle. A very small brown thing, empty, on a kitchen table between two jam jars, and it explained everything. The coroner who couldn't be hurried. How fast she'd said fine. A man who was quiet in his last week. Rafe's girls.
I'd been hunting all week for what was wrong in that house, and it had been in a toy.
"He left you a message," I said. "Eight minutes to midnight. From the pool."
"Nineteen seconds. It's on my phone. It's been on my phone since the Monday." She didn't look at it. "I slept through it. I took two."
"I've got it too. It was in the folder. I never listened."
"Good," said Bette. "One of us should have a little sense."
"Did he leave a note?"
"Not a note." She dried her eyes with a tea towel, hard, like she was scrubbing a pan, and she didn't look at me while she did it. "He wrote speeches he never gave. They're in the freezer. Don't ask."
I didn't ask.
"Mrs Tolliver," I said.
"What."
"I'm going to say something and I'm not going to be good at it."
"You've never been good at anything, dear, you've been fast."
"I forgive you." It came out in the low voice. The real one, Atlanta all through, no half step on it. I hadn't known it was in there. "It's not mine to. I'm doing it anyway. I wrote a lie and put it in a drawer for the day it was useful. You hid a bottle so two girls wouldn't read about it over breakfast. I'm not the person who gets to put those on a scale." I took a breath. "Fine. That's it. Fine."
Bette Tolliver looked at me over the jar for a good ten seconds.
"You've a face like a slammed door," she said. "Drink your tea."
I called the media people from her kitchen table. Family calls ran through them, and a man's apology could ride on one.
"Halyard Family Liaison," said a person, and I had the voice on before I'd decided to. Half a step up. Smooth as a plate.
"Hello. It's Marjorie Whitcomb. I'm Hazel Whitcomb's niece. She declined her call on Thursday, I think, she's a very private woman, but I'd love to give her a surprise."
"Is this for the stream?"
"God, no. She'd die. Private. No cameras, no feed. She's seventy-four. She cries easily."
"There's an unused slot," said the person, after a keyboard sound, "at nine fifteen. Twelve minutes. I'll put you through to her tablet."
"Wonderful."
Bette looked at me over the rim of the jar. "That," she said, "is the worst thing I've heard anybody do to a telephone."
At nine fifteen a link opened on my own phone, propped against the sugar bowl. It took a moment to find itself. Then there was a pair of glasses, and another pair of glasses pushed up in grey hair, and behind them a round thing, grey and pocked, as big as a dinner plate in a porthole. A voice came out of it a little late.
"Marjorie," said Hazel.
I opened my mouth, and she said, "How lovely. You have lost weight."
"Mrs Whitcomb," I said, and then, in the real voice, because the other one was suddenly too heavy to pick up, "Hazel. It's Della Quint. I'm sorry. I made up a niece."
"I gathered. I have never had one by that name." Her face did not change. I don't do faces, but I do dry, and hers was the driest thing I'd ever seen on a phone. "It was efficient. Mr Mabry is asleep. The others are close. I would ask you to be quick and to be quiet, and not to say anything about the commander's circumstances."
"I won't."
"You are about to."
"I'm about to," I said. "He's stopped talking. You know. I need you to give him something. Tell him I wrote it before I knew him. Tell him I'm sorry. Tell him—" and here my voice went, and I took it back, and put it down on the table like a thing I'd found. "Tell him this is my real voice."
The Moon sat behind her, enormous and grey.
"What did you write?" said Hazel.
"The statement. The one that calls him an impostor. My name's on it."
"I see. And did you believe it when you wrote it?"
I'd have liked to say no. I'd have liked to do a lot of things. "I thought I might need it."
"That is not the same as no."
"No," I said. "No. I didn't believe it."
"Thank you. That is the first thing anyone on the ground has told me that I did not have to check." She looked at something off the side of the screen. At the back of her, in the cabin, somebody turned in a sleeping bag. "I shall tell him. I do not undertake to tell him now. I shall tell him when he is ready. Not when you are."
"Hazel, I can't. I can't wait."
"I am aware, Marjorie. That is the difficulty with you."
She cut the link at twelve minutes to the second, because I'd been told it would run to twelve and she'd taken a pencil out to time it.
Bette saw me out. She stood on the step in her cardigan with a jar in each hand, and she said, "When he's talking again, ring me. I'll talk to the television."
"I will."
"And stop apologising to the cardboard," said Bette. "It's undignified, for both of you."
I got in the Sentra. I put the phone in its mount, and the mount held for about a hundred yards, and then I took the left onto A1A and the phone shot off and hit the footwell. I left it there. It lay on its back, lit, with the stream on a card and a cartoon wrench and the commander nowhere. I drove up the coast with my hands at ten and two, like a woman taking a test, and I counted the minutes Hazel might take, and I got to four.