Register Twelve
The email came in at 7:02 on Wednesday morning, and I read it at the kitchen table with the laptop open to the day's assignments and a carafe of coffee going cold at my elbow that I hadn't poured. Adam had made it before he left and put the lid on, as he does, and his truck was already gone from the drive.
From: Office of Compliance and Ethics, Heartland Mutual Insurance Group. Subject: Data access review — request for interview.
Ms. Marsh: A routine audit of special-investigations vendor queries has identified a telephone-number search submitted under your credentials on October 16 at 12:16 p.m. The search is not associated with an open claim or an assigned file. Please be prepared to discuss its purpose at an interview on Monday, November 9, at 2:00 p.m., Grand Rapids office, conference room 4B. You may bring a colleague. Please do not alter or delete any related records.
I have not written this letter, but I have written its cousin a hundred times, to policyholders, to contractors, to one dentist, and I know how it is built. Routine means someone has already made up his mind and wants it to look like weather. Please be prepared means you are the last to know the outcome, and you may bring a colleague means that you should not.
The form has a box under Purpose of query, a dropdown, and in the dropdown between Address verification and Prior-loss history sits Suspected fraud, investigative lead. I could say that in one sentence to a man in conference room 4B, and I know how to make a search look like work, having taught two younger adjusters to do it in the voice I use with claimants. What I could not make it look like was a search with a claim behind it, and Rick Haas, who had put nothing in writing and would say nothing if asked, had left the search and me to answer for it alone.
I closed the laptop, rinsed the carafe and set it upside down on the rack, and stood there holding the dish towel until I put it down folded in thirds and found I had done it, and left it. Then I went up to the back bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the file cabinet, which had held nothing since the night I moved the folder, and looked at the photograph taped to the back panel. It was still there, but the tape at one corner had been lifted and pressed back by a thumb that had not quite found the old crease.
I took a half day. By 12:20 I was on 131 with the wipers going, and somewhere past Big Rapids I did the arithmetic I do on any loss. It was twelve days to the interview, at a company that pays for a search like mine with a termination letter and, if it is feeling thorough, a referral to the state, in a job I had taken for one reason. On the other side of the ledger there was a single message, nine words long, from a phone that somebody had bought on purpose, and the two columns did not net out. I didn't try harder. I turned the radio off, and the wipers went on keeping time.
At Birchwood the day nurse told me my mother had taken a little applesauce and had otherwise slept. She looked at me over the reading glasses and said, "You look tired, hon."
"I'm staying tonight."
"We'll find you a blanket."
I sat in the chair in 114 and watched my mother breathe until, at ten past three, Marisol came in with a fresh pitcher and a stack of wash cloths on her forearm. She was in scrubs and the navy fleece, and on the clasp of her lanyard, where a badge holder would go, the small green plastic dinosaur swung and knocked against the pitcher.
"Ms. Marsh." She smiled. "I didn't know you'd be in on a Wednesday."
"I'm going to stay a while."
"Good. That's good." She set the pitcher on the tray, turned my mother's cannula a quarter inch with two fingers, and wiped her mouth with a cloth so lightly that my mother did not stir. She was twenty-nine and small, with a clip holding back too much hair, and I had liked her since the first Sunday, when she brought me ice chips without being asked and told me not to mind the concentrator. "Have you eaten? The kitchen sends up extra on Wednesdays. I can bring you a tray."
"That would be kind."
"It's only soup." She went out, and the dinosaur went with her, and I sat looking at the door, which had swung shut behind her without a sound.
I stayed. From the chair I could see a slice of the hall through the door, and over the next four hours I watched her work it: she turned a man in 112 who could not turn himself, and sat on the edge of a bed in 118 to let a woman whose husband was dying hold her wrist while she talked about a boat trailer, and she carried a bedpan the length of the corridor with her chin up like someone carrying a cake. Nobody in that hall had ever said a hard word to her, I would have bet on it, and I had a photograph in my pocket. I ate the soup at six and a roll at eight, and at six-thirty I called Adam from the family room. He answered on the first ring and said, "How is she," and I said the same, and he said nothing for a while and then, "Marsh," and I said, "What," and he said, "Nothing. Call when you leave."
At eleven the hall lights dimmed to night. At eleven-fifteen Marisol came by with her coat over her scrubs and put her head in the door and said good night to my mother, and to me, and went down the hall, and I gave her forty seconds and followed.
The staff lot was behind the building, past the dumpsters, and it was raining hard enough that the sodium lights had haloes. Her Corolla was in the third row under a light that had burned out, and she had the door open and one leg in when I said her name across the roof of the car.
She turned. The hood was up. "Ms. Marsh? Is she —"
"She's fine. She's sleeping. May I sit down? I need five minutes."
I had to say it twice. She unlocked the passenger side, and I got in, and she got in, and the rain came down on the roof so loudly that we both waited for it to let up before either of us spoke, and it did not let up. The car smelled of french fries and baby wipes, and a booster seat sat in the back with a cracker ground into the cushion.
I took out my phone and found the frame and turned the screen toward her. Register twelve, 2:14 p.m., a woman in a navy fleece with her hood up counting cash on a belt, and a green dinosaur on a lanyard. She looked at it for what I would say was three seconds, and then she looked at the windshield.
"I'm not going to ask you whether," I said. "I'll tell you what I have. Someone bought a prepaid phone at the south Meijer on the fifth of October and activated it that afternoon, and that phone sent a message to me on the sixteenth. It was one message, and it was meant to frighten me, and I don't yet know if it succeeded." My voice was level. It was the claims voice, kind and unhurried, and it was working, and I did not stop. "A hospice aide who buys a phone so a patient can send anonymous messages to her family has made a complaint to the state, Marisol. It's one phone call. I know the number. You were certified in March."
She had her hands on the wheel at ten and two, though we were parked, and I watched the knuckles go the color of the dome light.
"I have a son," she said. "He's six."
"I know."
"It was sixty dollars. She gave me sixty dollars out of her purse in the drawer, and she said keep the change."
"Who did."
"Your mother." Her voice broke on it and came back up too high. "She said it was for her sister in Arizona. She couldn't work the buttons, her hands, so I put the number in and unlocked it for her and put it in her hand. I don't ask patients why they want to text their sisters. That's not — I don't do that. I'd never do that. She was so quiet about it, Ms. Marsh. She said she didn't have anyone else to ask."
Rain ran down the glass in sheets. I had known the answer since the door opened, or I had known the shape of it, the way you know what a wall is going to show before the drywall comes off, and it didn't help. My mother had been dying for four months and had asked no one for anything in my whole life, and she had asked a twenty-nine-year-old aide for sixty dollars' worth of phone.
Marisol was crying. I sat beside her and let her, and I did not touch her, because I was not going to call the state and had known that in the parking lot, as I know how a claim will come out before the adjustment is done, and I had said it anyway because it was the shortest way to the answer. I would like to be able to say I had been ashamed of it while I did it.
"Where's the phone now?"
"In her drawer. Under the tissues." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "I didn't read anything. I swear to God I didn't."
"I believe you." I put mine away. "Go home to your son."
"You said —"
"I said what I could do. I'm not going to." I opened the door and the rain came in. "Thank you for telling me."
She sat with her hands on the wheel. I shut the door on her and stood in the lot with my coat soaked through at the shoulders, and behind me the Corolla did not start for a full two minutes.
I sat with my mother from half past eleven until one. Once in that hour I got up and stood at the window, where the lot lay empty under its lights except for my car, and the rain came slantwise through the beams and lay down on the asphalt in a skin, and I stood there until the glass was cold against my forehead. The phone was where Marisol had said, under the tissues in the drawer of the bedside table, a black handset with a cracked corner. It took a long time to wake, and while it did headlights swung across the ceiling from the lot and went off. The thread had my number at the top and two lines under it, hers and mine. Ask your husband where he was on October 14. Then, below it, in gray: Who is this? and Delivered. There was nothing after that, and I turned it off and put it back under the tissues and closed the drawer.
The concentrator counted. The rain let up and came back, and at a quarter to one my mother's breathing changed, a short catch and then a long pull, and her eyes opened. She looked at the ceiling and not at me, at something in the corner by the vent, and her lips moved, dry, and I leaned in.
"Mom," I said. "You sent it."
Nothing.
"Why?"
Her eyes came down off the ceiling by degrees and went over the room, the tray, the pole with the pump on it, and stopped somewhere near my shoulder. She was not there, or she was there in pieces. Her voice, when it came, was a ribbon of it, with breath between each length.
"He came to see me."
I waited.
"Your husband." She stopped. The concentrator counted twice. "Three times."
"Who did?"
"He asked me." Her mouth worked, and she had to gather it. "If she had a light."
She turned her face to the wall.
I sat there with my hands between my knees and did not say anything, and I looked at the closet by the door. It stood open an inch. It no longer stuck, and I understood who had planed it.
"Adam came," she had told me in October. "He sat right where you're sitting." I had told her he had never been there and put it down to the morphine.
I left at 1:25. Marisol's Corolla was gone, and mine sat alone in the visitors' lot with the rain standing in the roof rack. I got in and started it and did not put it in gear.
It was two hours and forty minutes home at the speed limit, and I had never once in my life driven it without hurrying. I drove it now. I put the cruise on at seventy south of Cadillac and left it there, and the trucks went by me with their spray, and a Charger went by at ninety, and I let it. My hands were on the wheel at ten and two, as Marisol's had been, and I looked at them. I did not check the mirror or the app, and by Big Rapids I had stopped looking at the clock. It rained until then and stopped all at once.
"If she had a light."
It was five past four when I turned onto our street, and every window in the house was lit. I sat at the curb with the engine running and counted eleven, and no one had come out to turn any of them off.
I let myself in through the side door. The stove light was on, and the one over the sink, and in the living room every lamp was burning, and Adam lay on the couch under the one nearest the door, on his back, in his work clothes, with one boot on and the other on the floor. His arm was thrown over his eyes. His chest went up and down.
I stood in the archway. For nine years I had turned off what he left on, and I could have done it then, which would have taken me four minutes and would have told him, when he woke in the dark, that I had been home.
I didn't touch a switch. I stood there in my wet coat with the whole house burning around me.
He had known what I had, and he had been making my coffee.