Page 95 of Soft Erasure

Adherence: 71 → 68.

Three points. A session with him might have called it grief.

The file would call it something with the word stable folded into it, because the machine could not hear the difference between a woman coming down and a woman going under.

It had a number, and a direction.

Sixty-eight put me under the pool line. I knew the font the sign would be in.

The last time the number crossed under seventy he had been in my kitchen about it before the morning was out. Braced on the counter, both hands on the edge of it, wanting to know what the two points had cost me.

He had not needed a readout to find it. He had needed me to say it out loud.

Nobody came to ask this time. The sign would go up on its own.

That was the radius, tightening. Not a hand reaching for me.

A line already drawn, a number crossing it, and a door somewhere logging the crossing without anyone at a desk lifting a phone to make it true.

I had done everything the label asked. Water first. One tablet. The hour it named.

The number went down anyway, because it had never been measuring the tablet.

It measured the grief underneath, and the grief didn’t care what I fed it or when.

Four days to Wednesday.

A physician’s name in a file, approved, unspent, and a text on a face-down phone.

And the line at the top of the label, which I read one more time before the room started to go, and which was not addressed to anyone.

Refills authorized: as required by protocol.

Nobody had to decide it again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Hallway Tape

Sunday I got up and went down the service stair to look at a door I already knew was shut.

The sheet was taped to the glass. I didn’t need to read it.

I had read one of these before, at sixty-nine, and come back up to a man standing in my kitchen who had not asked to be there.

Sixty-nine had bought me a man in my kitchen. Sixty-eight bought me nothing.

I came back up and the rooms were as I had left them. The marble took the light. The orchid wanted nothing.

Nobody had come to ask and nobody was going to. The only thing that had changed between the two mornings was which side of the wanting he was standing on.

The bottle sat where I had left it, cap loose, one count lighter. Nobody had taken my permission. Nobody had asked for it either.

They had printed the words on a label, set it on my counter, and left it to my own hand to close. The hand had closed it.

There was no version of the night before in which anyone had held me down.

I put it in the cabinet. Not to hide it.