THE SUCCESSOR

The rooms on the harbor road were quiet in the way the bathhouse had taught them to be. The building had been built for steam and voices carrying off tile, and the Sitting had covered the tile with rugs and hung curtains where the partitions ended, and none of it quite worked, and all of it worked enough. At night the harbor sounds came in under the door — water against the pilings, a gull complaining somewhere in the dark, the far bell of a boat asking to be let through — and the rooms took those sounds and made them ordinary, which was most of the work. Alba Quintana was dying in the room at the end, the one with the window that looked onto nothing but the side of the fish smokehouse and a strip of sky. She was seventy-eight, small in the bed the way the very old get small, as if the body were giving back its extra room a little at a time. Her gift had been a weather-sense, a knowing in her joints and in the roof of her mouth when a change was coming off the water. She had told me about it in the afternoon, apologetically, the way people apologize for a party trick at a funeral. “It never once made me rich,” she said. “I knew when to bring the wash in. That is the whole of it. My husband said the Charter should have paid me for the wash alone.” She had asked the Sitting for company. That was the word on the card Peg had handed me at the desk, in Peg’s round hand: company. Not the other thing. Alba had been plain about it, Peg said, in the clear hour after supper, and Alba was plain about it again to me, with the air of a woman settling a bill before it could grow.

“You sit,” she said. “That is the arrangement. I have had a whole life of weather coming. I do not need it kept.” I said that was fine. I said company was my favorite kind of work, which was true, and she looked at me the way people look when they are deciding whether you are being kind or being honest, and decided I was being honest, and nodded once and closed her eyes for a while. Her hands were cold. That is a thing the dying do at the edges first, hands and feet going cool while the center still holds its heat, and her hands had been cold since I arrived — thin hands, the knuckles large, a wedding ring turned loose on its finger. Early in the evening, while she was still talking in stretches, I took them between mine to warm them. I run warm. I have run warm for a while now, in a way that has nothing to do with the weather or the blankets, and what my hands hold, warms. It is a small thing as these things go. It does not light a harbor or mend a cut. It warms a cup through. It warms an old woman’s hands on the last night of her life, and I have never once wished it were grander than that. Grand has its own rooms in this city, and people die in them under lights. Small fits in a chair beside a bed. Small was what the night wanted. She sighed when the warmth got into her fingers. “There,” she said. “That is a kindness with no paperwork.” “You would be surprised at the paperwork,” I said, and she made the sound that was her laughing, down to almost nothing by then, a breath with an opinion in it. We talked the way you talk on a night watch, in pieces, with long water between. She told me about the smokehouse when it had still smoked fish, and the smell getting into everyone’s wash no matter what her joints said. She told me about her husband, whose name was Tomas — she said it to the ceiling, not to me, the way you say a name to the person it belongs to, wherever they are keeping it. She asked me once if it would hurt and I said no, not this way, this way was a slowing, and I had sat with slowing before and it was mostly tiredness, and the tiredness was not the enemy. She seemed to take that the way you take a hand offered on a dock — tested it, found it steady, put her weight on it.

“The water gets quiet before a change,” she said, near midnight, out of a doze. “Did you know that? Everyone thinks it gets loud. It gets quiet. The harbor holds still and listens to itself.” “I know that water,” I said. “You would. Peg says you were a lifeguard.” “Twenty summers,” I said. “North Strand.” “Then you know.” She was satisfied with that, the way people are satisfied when the person beside the bed turns out to be from their own country. Her country was weather and wash and a harbor; mine was a stretch of sand and a tower; they were the same country at the edges, and we sat in it together while her breathing changed its mind about its rhythm, over and over, each time a little slower to come back. Later — the hour when the building had gone down to its night sounds and the nurse from the agency had looked in and looked at me and gone away again, understanding that there were two of us on watch and only one of us was being paid in sleep — Alba’s hands had gone cold again in earnest. The warmth I could give her did not stay in them long now. It went in and it went out, like heat into river water. I settled her the way you settle someone for the last part. I put my forearms along the edge of the bed, side by side, and laid her hands on them, palms down, her fingers curled lightly against my skin where the pulse is, and her other hand — she moved it herself, slow, the last deliberate thing — she laid over the sheet beside them, flat, as if she were smoothing it. She liked the sheet smoothed. She had smoothed it all evening, fussing the edge straight with a thumb. “That’s it,” she murmured. “Don’t fuss.” “I’m not fussing.” “Lifeguards fuss. It’s the whole job.” Her eyes were closed. “Standing up there fussing at the whole sea.” “Mostly we sit,” I said. “The standing is for show.” That got the breath with the opinion in it again, smaller.

Once, toward the end of the talking, she asked me to open the window a finger’s width, because a room that could not smell the harbor was a room pretending, and I did, and the cold came in with the water smell and she turned her face a fraction toward it like a plant doing its old habit in the dark. “Rain Thursday,” she said, certain, feeling it wherever she felt such things. “Tell Peg to mind the step. It floods at the step.” I said I would tell her, and I did, later, and Peg wrote that down too, in the margin of the book, because a warning from Alba Quintana about rain was not the kind of thing the Sitting had ever once ignored. After that she went down the way the tide goes out over flats — no single moment you could point to, just less and less water over the sand. Her hands stayed where she had put them. Mine stayed under hers. The room did what rooms do; the harbor did what it does; her gift, the wash-day knowing, the weather in the roof of her mouth, ended with her the way a voice ends, mid-quiet, and nothing in the room was strange. It was only sad. I want to say that plainly, because so much of what I am asked to do now is strange, and this was not. This was a woman dying in company, which is the oldest arrangement there is, and the Sitting exists because Peg Whitlock’s husband once died without it, in a corridor, in a full ward, and she decided that would not be the custom in her city if she had to build the alternative out of a bathhouse and stubbornness. I sat a while after her breathing stopped, because leaving quickly is a thing the living do for themselves. Then I laid her hands together on the sheet, smoothed where she had been smoothing, and went out to the desk to tell Peg, who was awake under a lamp with the rota books, because Peg is always awake under a lamp with the rota books. She took off her glasses. She asked if Alba had been afraid. I said no. I said she had been giving instructions. Peg smiled with her whole face and it folded the smile away again, practiced, and wrote Alba’s name in the book in her round hand, and under it the hour, and that was the record. A name, a room, an hour. It is enough of a record for a death. It is more than the sea keeps. On my way out I passed the photograph. It hangs in the corridor where the partitions end, in a frame too good for it, which means Peg framed it. Tower 9′s crew, nine years back, the last week of August: kids, mostly, sunburned to the bone, with their

whistles and their zinc and their seriousness, and me in the middle of them at twenty-nine with a face I mostly recognize. The photograph has been there as long as I have been sitting in that building and I look at it the way you look at a chart of water you no longer swim — everything in it true, none of it current. That night I looked at it a second longer than usual. Alba’s hands, cooling on my forearms, had had a particular weight — the weight of hands that have let go of holding on. In the water, nine years ago, Walt Sikes’s hand had had the opposite of that weight. He had held on the way the drowning hold on, which is with everything, and I had let him, because letting them hold on is the first thing they teach you and the hardest thing to learn to do calmly, and he had died holding my hand beyond the break with the sea going over both of us, and the drowning had gone the other way. That is all I ever think of it in one piece. The rest of the time it lives in me the way a scar lives in a knee — in weather, in use, without asking to be looked at. I put my coat on. My hands, opening the street door, did their small tremor at the edge of the cold — a shake that comes and goes in them like something passing through a wire. It has been there long enough to be a habit of the body rather than an event. I stood on the harbor road and let the night air at my face and did not hurry, because Kate was coming, and Kate does not like to find me gone and does not like to find me hurrying either. She came up the road in the ambulance-supply jacket she wears off shift, with her hair still up from work, and she fell in beside me the way she has fallen in beside me since we were both in single figures and she was the small one trotting to keep up. She is thirty-four now and a paramedic with the city, and she has picked me up off more floors than either of us discusses. “How was she?” Kate said. “Company,” I said. “She asked for company and she got it. Died like weather going out.” “Good.” She took my hand the way she takes it — not for comfort, or not only for comfort. Her fingers found my wrist and rested there a moment, and her other hand turned mine over and held it flat and still,

and we stood like that under the streetlight while the tremor moved through my hand and out the other side of it, the way she times a thing without ever looking at a clock. She keeps the chart of me in her head and in her hands. There is no paper. There will never be any paper; we agreed that without ever saying it, years ago, in the winter the shaking started, when she understood before I did that the shaking was not going to be a passing thing and I understood that she had understood, and neither of us made it into a conversation. It is a thing she knows the way she knows my blood pressure from my face and my fevers from the sound of my voice on the phone. A medic’s knowledge. A sister’s filing system. “And you?” she said. “Fevers?” “No fever. Hands cold at the end, that’s all. Hers, I mean.” “I know whose you mean.” She let my hand go and put her own in her pockets. “Tea,” she said. “You’re having tea and then you’re sleeping, and if Peg calls before noon I’ll tell her you’re dead, which will confuse her records.” “She’d write it down,” I said. “Name, room, hour.” “She would.” We started up the road toward my place, walking at the pace the night had set, which is the only pace I have ever been any good at. Behind us the bathhouse windows went dark one by one as Peg finished the book and put the building to bed. Somewhere out past the smokehouse the harbor held still and listened to itself, the way Alba said it did before a change, and I did not think anything about that, or I told myself I didn’t, which at my age amounts to the same discipline. I had done the work the way the work asks to be done. A woman had not died alone. Nothing else had happened at all.