Sleeping on the Seawall

By the end of May the thing on Delia's throat had become a thing on Delia.

It was not one mark. That was the part that took Ruth longest to accept, because a single mark is an accident and two marks are a story. There were four by the twenty-eighth, small, neat, paired, placed in a line down the left side of her neck like the buttons of a shirt, and the skin around them had gone a pale grey that made the whole of her look underlit.

The local doctor came twice and said anemia and then said possible anemia and then said he would like her to go to the city for a workup, and Beverly did not take her, because Beverly had once had a doctor tell her something in a room in Tampa and had never gone back into a room with a doctor in it since.

"She's not anemic," Ruth said to him on the porch, catching him at the car. "Look at the marks."

"I looked at the marks."

"And?"

"And I am a general practitioner in a town of four thousand people," he said, not unkindly. "I have seen that mark four times in thirty-one years. Three of them were a spider. One of them was a young woman who wanted her mother to look at her." He got into the car. "Take her up to the city. Take her to somebody who has seen more than I have, and if they tell you it's a spider, believe them, because the alternative is that I have to explain to the county how I know what I think I know."

On the third of June she went out again.

Ruth was sleeping in the front room by then, on the daybed, because Delia had stopped answering from the top of the stairs when you called. She woke at twenty past two to the sound of the front door, which was not a sound so much as a change in the pressure of the house, and she was up and out of the bed and on the porch in under ten seconds and there was nobody on the porch and the gate was swinging.

She found her on the seawall, four hundred yards down, at the low end where the drop is twenty feet to the water and the town has had eleven signs stolen off the railing in the last decade.

Delia was standing on the wall with her arms out.

Not flailing. Out, and level, and steady, the way a child stands when a father is teaching her a thing and holding her wrist underneath without touching it. Her nightdress was one soaked panel. The wind was coming off the water hard enough to move the whole weight of her hair sideways. She was talking, with her chin up, to the fog.

Ruth climbed up onto the wall on the town side and did not touch her and stood beside her and said her name twice, then three times, and on the fourth try Delia stopped talking, and lowered her arms, and turned her head and looked not at Ruth but at the middle distance past her, and said something in a voice that was nearly her own.

"Tell him I'll come down."

"Delia."

"Tell him it's only the wall." She put her hand out, and her hand closed on nothing, and she came down off the wall into Ruth's arms, and she was asleep before her feet were on the promenade, and she stayed asleep through the walk up the hill and through being undressed and put into the bed and through the phone call Ruth made from the kitchen at three in the morning.

Ruth called Adrian Vance because he was the only person she knew who owned a car and an institution and could be asked a question at three in the morning without it becoming a whole thing.

He came the next evening.

He did all the correct things. He examined her with the door open. He took a history, and he was careful, and he asked Beverly about her own sleep, and he asked Ruth what she had seen, and he wrote down the answer in a small notebook, and then he stood at the window of the front room for a long time with the blank grey rectangle of the window frame above the desk and said nothing at all.

"Is she on anything?" he said at last.

"I searched her medicine cabinet," Ruth said. "She's on a vitamin and an antihistamine."

"You went through the medicine cabinet."

"I keep the record," Ruth said. "Somebody in this town has to."

Adrian Vance looked at her with real attention for the first time, and it was the look of a man finding out that a room has a load-bearing wall in it. "Write it down," he said. "Everything. Times, dates, what she said, what the weather was, who was in the house. Don't summarize. Summaries are where the truth goes to hide."

"I already am."

"I know you are," he said. "That's why I'm asking you."

He came back with the other two on the ninth of June, and the three of them stood in the narrow hall of a house with a sick woman in it, and it was, Ruth would think later, the last ordinary evening of all their lives.

Grant Halloway brought flowers that were too formal for the room and stood holding them without being asked to put them down. Rico Barrera brought a length of copper pipe and a wrench and fixed the downstairs tap, which had been dripping since April, and when Beverly asked him why he was fixing a tap in a house where a woman was ill he said: "Because it'll be dripping whether she's ill or not, and I'd rather she be ill in a house where the tap works," and Beverly Hartley fell a little in love with him on the spot and never entirely stopped.

And Adrian Vance sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand and asked her, in the tone of a man asking about a train timetable, what she had been dreaming.

"Nothing," Delia said. "I don't dream, Adrian. That's the thing. I go down and there's no water down there. I put my head on the pillow and the next thing is morning." She turned her face on the pillow. "Except that I keep waking up with a taste in my mouth. Like when you lick a penny."

"Every night?"

"Most." She smiled at him. "You're the psychiatrist. Tell me what I'm repressing."

"I'd have to charge you," he said, "and you'd have to be insane, and you're not insane, Delia, you're anemic. But I'd like to run some blood, if you'll let me, and if I'm wrong I'll buy this house from you and let you keep living in it rent free."

"Done."

He looked at the marks on her throat once more before he left, and on the porch, in front of Ruth, he said one sentence to Grant and Rico that he had not said in the room, and that he would spend the rest of his life wishing he had said sooner.

"I want a second set of eyes on this. Not a GP. The best blood man in the city."

"In the city," Rico said. "For a spider."

"For a spider," Adrian said, and put on his coat, and drove away, and the three of them would not be together in the same room again until the night at the vault.