She wasn’t going to drink the coffee, had only bought it because it was something to do, to witness the procedure of the cup dropping, the nozzle opening and the dark liquid spewing. Procedure was everything in this place and easier to think about than blood.

Here was another elevator. Which didn’t stop at Anouk’s floor. So a stairwell had to be located, more dark corridors and locked doors. Eventually she found Anouk’s ward but didn’t go into her room. Instead, she sat in a chair opposite the nurses’ station and pretended to drink her coffee.

Night staff, they moved fluidly, in slow motion. Two nurses, a man and a woman, worked quietly behind their curved counter, like the watch on the bridge of a ship. His head was bent to something, the light from a desk lamp reflecting off his face, and she was going through a stack of files, checking things off. The man looked up from his work and asked Nora if she needed anything and she thought, sure: how about the night shift? I’ll sit where you are and you sit where I am and then instead of this, I can just be at work right now.

She smiled at him and shook her head no, and repeated the gesture of pressing the paper cup to her lips. She rested her head against the wall and listened to the collective sleep-breathing of children. Some on this ward required machines to help them breathe, and so there was the beep and hum and mechanics of all that too. From where she sat, she could see through a half-open door someone else’s child, asleep under a thick, floral-print duvet brought from home.

White deer hairs stuck to her jeans and the shadow of blood still marked her hand. A piece of deer antler in the back of the truck with bits of flesh still clinging, hardening, at its base. Red hadn’t known what to do. But she had.

She stood up and dropped the full cup of coffee into the garbage and went to where her coat hung over the back of the chair in Anouk’s room, and she put her coat on and she kissed her daughter on the forehead and whispered goodbye in her ear and stood there watching her for a moment, and then she turned around and, with body numb and electric, she walked out of the room, and there was her thumb on the elevator button, and there was the wait for the doors to close, and there were the metallic balloons with their faces trapped behind glass, and there was the revolving door that spat her out into the cold November night tarnished yellow with streetlight, tears freezing on her cheeks and the last flakes of snow drifting down from a sky night-purple and indifferent.

23

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1898

There was a time when I thought I could mark the point in my story where what followed was irreversible; this point like a hinge, where every moment leading up to it was inconsequential but everything after had its own momentum leading to one inevitable end.