The Last Person She Trusted

Chapter One

The register had been in a flood in 1911 and somebody had dried it by a stove.

That was the whole story of it, and Lia had worked it out in the first ten minutes, before she had opened the cover. The board was cockled along the fore-edge and flat at the spine. The bottom third of the text block had gone hard and slightly translucent, the way paper goes when it has been wet and then heated fast. Whoever had done it had meant well. In 1911 you dried a parish register by a stove because the alternative was watching it rot, and nobody in Beauchêne County had a conservator to call.

She had the raking light set low from the left so the surface threw its own shadows. Under it the cockling came up like a relief map, and the burn line along the bottom edge showed as a change in gloss rather than a change in color.

The building was closed. It was the third Monday in February and the society kept the statutory holidays like everyone else, which meant the front door was locked and the heat was down to fifteen and Lia had the vault to herself and a space heater at her feet. She had asked for the day. Fern had said yes without asking why, which was one of the reasons Lia liked her.

Fern came in anyway, at half past ten, in her coat, carrying two coffees.

"You're not here," Lia said.

"Neither are you." Fern set one of the cups down well away from the bench, on the shelf where the cups went, which she had learned in the first week and had never once got wrong. "How bad is it?"

"It's not bad. It's just done."

"That's not an answer."

Lia moved the lamp a few degrees and let the light come across the page from a different angle. "The 1874 to 1889 section is fine. Foxed, but fine. Everything after 1889 got wet and then got dried too fast, and the fibres set in the shape they were in when they cooked. So the paper's brittle at the bottom edge, and the ink's still there, and I can read all of it."

"So you can fix it."

"No."

Fern waited. She was good at that. Fifty-eight years old and she had run the society for nineteen of them, and she had a habit of standing perfectly still until somebody explained themselves, which worked on almost everybody and had worked on Lia twice already.

"I can stabilize it," Lia said. "I can wash the acid out of the paper if the ink will let me, which it might not. I can line the worst leaves so they stop breaking when you turn them. I can put the whole thing in a box that will hold the humidity steady, and I can write down exactly what I did and when I did it, so that in forty years somebody can undo it if they need to."

"That's fixing it."

"That's stabilizing it." She sat back. Her right hand had gone stiff and she flexed it once against her thigh, under the bench, out of habit. "The burn line stays. Stabilize, don't restore. That's the whole trade in three words and it's on the wall of every lab I've ever worked in."

"Why not?"

"Because what it looked like new isn't information. What happened to it is."

Fern picked up her own coffee. "Put that in the grant application," she said.

"You put it in the grant application."

"They don't give money to people who say no." She was already halfway to the door. "The board's meeting on the twenty-first of April. That's when they vote on the building."

"I know."

"You don't know, you've been told." Fern paused with her hand on the frame. "There's a difference and you'll find out what it is in April."

She went. Lia heard her in the outer office for a while, moving boxes that did not need moving, and then the front door, and then the particular quiet of a bank building with nobody in it.

The vault had been the bank's vault. It still had the door, a foot of steel on a hinge you could not have moved with a car, propped permanently open with a wooden wedge that had been cut for the purpose sometime in the seventies. Inside, the room held temperature better than anywhere else in the county, which was the entire reason Lia's bench was in it and the reason the county's paper had survived at all. The first week she had said something about being locked in with the money and Fern had laughed politely and neither of them had said it again.

She went back to the 1891 leaves.

The work was a condition report and nothing else. Before anything was washed or lined or so much as lifted, somebody had to sit down with the object and write what it was and what had happened to it, leaf by leaf, in language another conservator could use in thirty years. She had a printed form and she did not use it. She used a ruled notebook and a column layout she had worked out for herself in her second year, and the columns were what she had done, what she had observed, and what she was inferring, and the third column was narrow on purpose.

Leaf 114. Tear, 31 mm, fore-edge, closed, old. Somebody had mended it with a strip of gummed brown paper, probably in the fifties, and the gum had gone dark and had pulled the fibres either side of it into a ridge you could feel through a glove. The mend was worse than the tear. It usually was.

Leaf 115. A baptism in March 1891 with the mother's name entered and then struck through and entered again, differently, three letters longer. Nobody had ever explained that and nobody ever would. She wrote it down in the middle column and left the right-hand column empty.

Leaf 116 to 124, all the same: brittle along the bottom forty millimeters, ink stable, no loss. She did the transmitted-light check on 119 because the sheet had a shadow in it, and the shadow was a watermark and not a thinning, and she wrote that down too.

By noon she had done eleven leaves out of about four hundred, and that was a normal morning, and she was not discouraged by it because the thing about a four-hundred-leaf register was that you did not do it in a day and everybody involved knew that except the funders.

She ate a sandwich standing up in the outer office because you did not eat in the vault.

Afterward she went back and did another six. The light in the vault was hers, from the lamps, so the weather outside did not reach her, and when she finally came out into the front office the windows had gone the flat white of a February afternoon and it had started to snow in the fine dry way that means it is too cold to snow properly.

She walked. It was a few minutes to the house if she took the main street and thirteen if she went along the river, and she went along the river.

The river was frozen right across and had been since the second week of January. Somebody had a shack out on it about two hundred meters down, green, with a skidoo parked beside it and a line of black holes drilled in a rough arc, and there was a man out there in a snowmobile suit doing nothing much. The path along the bank had been packed down by dogs and walkers into something you could walk on if you did not mind the camber. Every fifty meters or so a maple stood out of the snow with a scar on it at chest height from the ice in ninety-eight, twenty years of new wood grown over the wound and the wound still legible in the shape of the crown, because a tree that has lost a third of itself never gets it back symmetrically.

By the corner at Rue Principale her hand had gone bad.

The cold did that. It had always done that, since the winter she was seventeen, when she had gone down on the ice outside the Hale place and broken something in the back of her hand and had it set eleven days later by a locum at the district hospital who had told her, cheerfully, that it would ache in the cold for the rest of her life. He had been right. She put the hand in her pocket and kept walking, and by the second block it had settled into the dull version of itself, the one she could work through.

The house was on Rue Sainte-Anne, brick, 1911, one of six on the street that had gone up the same year for the same reason and had been aging at slightly different rates ever since. Leni had bought it in 2009. There was a light on in the kitchen and the front room was dark, the way it was every evening, because nobody used the front room.

The mudroom was warm. She got her boots off and hung her coat on the fourth hook and there was garlic and something else in the air, thyme maybe, and the radio was on low.

"There she is," Leni said. "You're frozen."

"It's not that cold."

"It's minus nineteen with the wind." Leni had her sleeves pushed up and a dish towel over one shoulder and she was doing three things at the stove without appearing to hurry at any of them. Forty-three years old, and she had their mother's forearms and their mother's way of standing at a stove, which Lia had noticed for the first time about a year ago and had not mentioned. "Sit down. Don't help."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to hover."

Lia sat. The kitchen table seated six and never had, in the nine years Leni had owned it and in the six weeks Lia had been in the house. There was a stack of Leni's work folders at the far end, squared off, and a mug, and the county paper folded to the crossword with about a third of it done in pencil.

"Oh," Leni said, over her shoulder. "Your dentist. They called here at four because they couldn't get you."

"They have my cell."

"They have the house because the house is what's on the file from before." Leni turned the heat down under something. "Anyway. They wanted to move you to the eighth, which is a Thursday, which is your Ottawa day, so I said no and they've got you on the sixth at ten to four instead. You'll be done before the light goes."

Lia looked at the back of her sister's head.

"That's good," she said. "Thanks."

"Well." Leni said it the way she said most things, without weight, already onto the next item. "It's ridiculous that they call the house."

"It is."

"I've got it." She lifted the pan off the heat and set it on the board and looked around for the thing she was looking for, and Lia handed it to her before she had asked, and Leni took it without comment.

They ate at about six. Leni talked about a client on the eleventh line whose son had put in a stairlift without telling anybody and had installed it over the outlet the oxygen concentrator was plugged into, and the way she told it was funny without being cruel about the son, who she said was doing his best and doing it badly, which she said was most people.

"So what happens," Lia said.

"So an electrician goes out Thursday and puts a second outlet in on the other wall, and I pay for it out of a fund that isn't for that, and nobody says anything about it ever again."

"Can you do that?"

"I've done it four times." Leni reached over and took the bread. "There's a line in the budget called client safety supports and it's got about nine hundred dollars in it and it exists because I put it there in 2014 and wrote a paragraph nobody has read since."

Lia told her about the register and the stove in 1911. Leni said, that's terrible, and meant it, and then said, but they saved it though.

"They saved it."

"Then it's not terrible, it's just ugly." Leni got up for the salt. "That's most saving. You should hear what a hip replacement looks like."

"I'd rather not."

"No, you wouldn't." She sat back down. "Are you sleeping?"

"Some."

"That's a no in a coat."

"It's a some." Lia turned her fork over. "It's better than January."

"January was a low bar." Leni let it go, which she always did, on the first pass. "There's a thing at the hall on the tenth of March. Fundraiser, cash bar, terrible food. You should come, you'd hate it, but you'd have met about forty people and then you'd never have to meet them again."

"That's the pitch?"

"That's the pitch."

"I'll come."

"You will not."

"I'll come," Lia said, and Leni looked at her for a second with the salt in her hand and something crossed her face and went, and she said, "well, all right then," and got on with her supper.

Afterward Leni did the dishes and would not be argued with. Lia stood in the doorway with a tea towel doing nothing, listening to the water and the radio, and outside the window the snow had stopped and the sky had cleared and gone that hard blue-black it goes at forty-five degrees north in February when the temperature is still falling.

It was a good evening. That was the thing she would come back to later, and there was nothing underneath it. It was simply a good evening in a warm kitchen with her sister, six weeks after her marriage had finished and she had come home with four boxes and no plan, and Leni had made up the box room without being asked and had never once said anything about it.

Chapter Two

The Rivière-Est car was a gray Impreza with a scrape along the passenger door that Leni had never had done, and it smelled faintly of the hand sanitizer she kept in the cup holder.

"You don't have to come," Leni said.

"I know."

"I mean you'll be bored."

"I've been in a vault by myself for six weeks. Bore me."

So Lia came, on the Tuesday, because it was a day she had nothing and because there was a part of her that had never actually seen her sister work. She had known what Leni did the way you know what somebody does. Case manager. Home and community care. Fifteen years. She had said it at parties in Ottawa for a decade without any picture behind it.

The picture, it turned out, was a lot of driving.

The first call was nine kilometers north on a road the plow had done once and given up on. A man called Bertrand, seventy-one, who had come home from the district hospital eight days before with a wound on his heel that was not closing and a wife who had died in 2016 and a kitchen that had one clean cup in it.

Leni did not say anything about the kitchen. She got him talking about the Sabres, who were having a bad year, and while he talked she got his sock off and looked at the heel and got the sock back on and got a photograph of it on her phone in about ninety seconds without ever making it the subject of the visit. She wrote for four minutes at the table. She asked him three questions that sounded like conversation and were not: what he had eaten yesterday, when the nurse had last come, and whether he had been up on the stepladder again.

He said no about the stepladder in a way that meant yes.

"Bertrand."

"It was two steps."

"It's a ladder, it doesn't know how many steps you used." She was writing. "The bulb in the hall. Leave it. I'll get somebody."

"I'm not a cripple."

"You've got a hole in your foot the size of a dime and you're standing on the other one at the top of a ladder in the dark." She closed the folder. "Also there's a cup shortage in this house and I'm going to send Diane in on Thursday and she is going to be unbearable about it, so wash something before she comes."

He laughed. He was still laughing when they got the door shut, and he was standing at the window when the car pulled out, and he lifted his hand.

"His heel's infected," Leni said, on the road.

"He looked fine."

"They always look fine. That's the whole job." She had her phone in the cradle and she was already dictating something. "He'll be in hospital by the weekend and he'd have been in hospital by the weekend either way, but this way he goes in on a referral instead of an ambulance, and he keeps his house."

At the second one, a bungalow outside the village with a ramp built out of two-by-eights and good intentions, a woman named Thérèse who was eighty-six and sharp as a tack had been on the wrong dose of something for nine days because the pharmacy had filled a changed script against the old blister pack and nobody had caught it. Lia sat in the front room with her coat on and listened to her sister on the phone in the kitchen.

It took under four minutes. Leni did not raise her voice and she did not once say anything that sounded like a threat. She said the drug and the dose and the date of the change, and then she said the date of the fill, and then she stopped talking and let the person on the other end do the arithmetic themselves, which took about two seconds and did more than any amount of shouting would have.

At the end of it the pharmacy was sending a courier out that afternoon with a corrected pack and a written med rec, and the family physician's office had agreed to a call at five that Leni did not have to chase, and Thérèse had been told none of it in a way that would frighten her.

What Thérèse had been told was that there was a mix-up with the packaging and a new one was coming and would she please not take anything out of the old one after lunch.

"You lied to her," Lia said, on the step, before they were properly out of earshot.

"I did not."

"You said packaging."

"It was a packaging error. That is precisely and exactly what it was." Leni pulled her gloves on. "If I tell an eighty-six-year-old woman with a heart condition that she's had nine days of the wrong dose, her blood pressure goes up in the next ninety seconds and I have made her worse for the sake of my own conscience. I'll tell her on Friday when the numbers are back and I know what it did."

"And if she asks?"

"Then I'll tell her Tuesday. She won't ask." Leni got the car door open. "She asked me about my mother instead. Did you hear that?"

"Yes."

"Nobody's asked me about our mother in about six years." She said it perfectly evenly, dropping into the seat, reaching for the belt. "Anyway. She's a sharp one. Get in, you're going blue."

"How did you do that," Lia said, in the car.

"Do what."

"The five o'clock call. They don't do those."

"They do for me." Leni checked her mirror and pulled out. "I don't waste their time. If I call, it's real. So when I call, they pick up." She said it flatly, the way she would have said the road was icy. "It took about ten years."

The fourth call was twenty minutes and most of it was a woman in her fifties standing in a driveway in a cardigan explaining, at length and with tears at the end of it, why she could not have her mother at home any more, while her mother sat inside in a chair by the window watching a bird feeder.

Leni listened to the whole thing without once looking at the car.

At the end of it she said, "You're not asking me for permission," which was apparently the correct sentence, because the woman put her hands over her face and stood there in her own driveway in February and cried properly for about fifteen seconds and then stopped and said, "no," and wiped her face with the heel of her hand and said, "no, I'm not."

"Good. Because I can't give it to you and it wouldn't be worth anything if I could." Leni got a card out. "Marronnier has a waiting list and I'm not going to lie to you about how long. But there's a respite bed and I can get you two weeks in April, and you're going to take it, and you're going to feel sick about taking it, and then you're going to sleep for four days."

In the car Lia said, "Does she get the bed?"

"She gets the bed."

"You didn't check."

"I don't have to check," Leni said. "I'm the one who allocates it."

They stopped at the pharmacy on the main street on the way back, because Leni had a form to drop, and Lia went in with her because it was too cold to sit in the car.

The girl behind the counter said, "Oh, hi," to Leni before the door had shut, and then, "hang on," and went into the back, and came out with a white paper bag stapled at the top with a printed label on it.

She handed it to Leni.

Leni put it in her bag. "Thanks, Kayla."

"No problem."

The label had Lia's name on it. Lia read it upside down across the counter from four feet away, EULALIA MERCER, and the date, and the name of the thing, which she had been taking since 2011, which she had a repeat for at a pharmacy in Ottawa that she had not got around to transferring.

Nobody asked her anything. She had not signed anything. The girl had already turned to the next person.

In the car Leni said, "I picked up your repeat, it's in the bag," and put the heat on, and pulled out onto Principale.

"When did you transfer it?"

"When you moved in. You had four days left on it." Leni signaled. "It was going to run out on the Friday and the office was shut."

Which was true. It had been going to run out on the Friday and the office had been shut, and Lia had known that at the time and had been too tired to do anything about it, and had said something out loud about it in this car in early January.

"Right," Lia said.

She sat with the heat coming up around her ankles and looked out at the river, which was white all the way across and had a skidoo track down the middle of it, and thought about the fact that she had not said thank you, and then about the fact that the thing she actually wanted to say was different from thank you and she could not have put it in a sentence.

She did not say either. She decided that in the car, somewhere between the bridge and the turn, and it was a decision, made and finished, and she did not give herself a reason for it.

She said, "That woman's son. With the stairlift."

"He'll do it again," Leni said. "Different thing next time. Same son."

"How do you stand it?"

"He's not doing it to me." Leni took the turn onto Sainte-Anne. "That's the trick, and it took me about eight years to learn it and I still lose it twice a year. Nobody in this job is doing anything to me. They're doing it to the person in the chair and they think they're doing it out of love, and they're mostly right, and it's mostly still wrong." She pulled in. "You get to be furious about it for ninety seconds in the car. Then you write the note."

She turned the engine off and the heat died and the cold started coming through the glass immediately.

"Is that what this is," Lia said. "The ninety seconds."

Leni looked at her.

"No," she said. "This is the part where I go inside and put the kettle on. You're getting the good version of me today."

She got out. Lia sat for another moment with the white paper bag on the seat between them, and then picked it up, and went in.