Paperwork
Slice of Life intermission.
The tomato had stayed.
She had now eaten three sandwiches with it and said nothing, which Theo took as a verdict. He had moved tomato? to the top of his notes and deleted the question mark.
It was the third week of August, and already hot at a quarter past eight. The terrace doors stood open. The tall plant by the railing was gone, because the cleaner had been right about it. Theo set the bag and the coffees on the island, then crossed the living room to close the doors before the air conditioning gave up. On the way he looked at the pool, the way he did now. The water lay flat. A leaf had blown in from somewhere and turned slowly in the middle of it, going nowhere.
He shut the doors and came back.
"The man with the shoes runs every day," he said when she came in.
She stopped halfway to the stool. "You watched."
"I said I would. Six-fifteen. He leaves them outside the door afterward. Every day, including Sunday."
"Even in this heat?"
"Even in this heat."
She sat down and pulled her sandwich out of the bag. Her hair was dry today, tied back with something that might have been a shoelace. She ate the way she always did now, and Theo watched a little more than he used to, because there was no longer anything rude about wondering.
The business was short. Marcus had liked Friday. Marcus wanted a single by November and had said so four times in a twenty-minute call, and Theo had written it down once. The Aldine wanted an answer on the October date by the first of September.
"I'll tell you by Friday," she said.
"Friday." He typed it. "Okafor's office called. The bloodwork is fine, everything's normal. She wants to see you again in three months."
"Everything?"
"Everything. She said you have the liver of someone who's never had a drink in her life."
Morgana turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the counter. "That's nice of it."
He looked up and decided not to ask.
He was closing the laptop when she said, "Leave it open. There's something you should have on your list."
"The paramedic," she said. "The one who brought me back."
"Rusk."
She looked at him.
"His name is on the patient care report," Theo said. "The hospital sent everything over for the insurance. I read all of it." He hesitated. "C. Rusk. There was a second name, but he was the one who signed."
"Calvin," she said.
Theo typed it into a new note before he had decided to. He looked at the name on the screen and then at her.
"He was there when I came back. He was the first thing I saw." She said it plainly, the way she'd said tell him Friday. "He saw my eyes change. He knows it wasn't only the drugs leaving."
"Does he know what you are?"
"He knows enough. He knows what he saw." She tore a corner off the bread. "I went to see him after I got out. We came to an agreement."
The word sat on the counter between them. Theo had the feeling, familiar from four years of contracts, that there was a much longer document behind it.
"What kind of agreement?"
"He doesn't talk about that night. To anyone, ever. In return he got something."
"Got what?"
She took a moment, and he understood that she was choosing words for him, not hiding anything.
"People see him now," she said. "He walks into a room and they look. They listen when he talks. They remember him afterward. He's spent his whole life being the man nobody remembers, and now he isn't."
Theo thought about that. He thought about the signature on the report, small and neat and slanted, the handwriting of someone who filled in forms quickly and well and expected nobody to read them.
"That's all he asked for?"
"He didn't ask. I asked him what he wanted, and he didn't know until I said it."
"And you get?"
"Every morning, at his sunrise, something of him comes to me." She looked at the pool through the glass, then back at him. "It's what I run on. The way you run on coffee and spite."
"I run on losartan."
"And spite."
"And spite," he admitted.
He did what he always did with something large. He broke it into the parts he could act on.
"Is he a risk?"
"He's not bound," she said. "Not the way you'd think. Nothing stops him if he decides to talk. There's no clause that does anything to him."
"Then why wouldn't he?"
"Because it would cost him the only thing anyone has ever given him." She said it without cruelty, as a fact about a man she knew. "He isn't stupid, Theo. He's careful. He's been careful his whole life."
Theo typed careful under the name and felt faintly ridiculous doing it.
"Does he know about me?"
"No."
"Should he?"
"Not yet."
"Does anyone else know about him? Press, anyone?"
"Not that I know of."
"Then here's what I'll do." He was already writing. "I'll set alerts on his name together with yours, and on the hospital and the date. If anyone asks the fire department or the hospital about that night, I want to hear about it before he does. If someone calls me fishing for the medic, I never heard of him."
"Good."
"Do you want me to contact him?"
"No."
"Do you want me to do anything for him?"
She was quiet long enough that he looked up.
"If he ever calls," she said, "put him through. Whatever I'm doing."
Theo wrote that down too. In his head, for a second before he answered, she was not Morgana. Then she was again, and he said, "Okay."
She felt it form in him while he typed.
She had felt the shape of it since she said what I run on. She hadn't meant to give him that. It was too much like a door. Now it was moving behind his attention the way want always moved in people, under the work, under the list. It was slower in him than in most, and steadier. He had heard that another man gave her something every morning, and that she lived on it, and he was turning the arithmetic over the way he turned over every contract. What do you take from me. Nothing. Why not.
He didn't say it. He might not say it for weeks. She knew him well enough to know he'd want to have the question phrased correctly before he asked it.
She could have answered it now. She knew what she'd say, and roughly how it would land. She drank her coffee instead and let him finish typing.
When he closed the laptop he gathered the wrappers, folded the bag along its creases, and put it in the right bin the first time. He picked up the cardboard tray without her having to watch him remember it.
"Friday," he said at the door. "The Aldine."
"Friday."
After he'd gone she sat at the island in the cooling kitchen with the seeds of a tomato on the wax paper in front of her. Through the glass, the leaf on the pool had drifted, at last, to the edge.