Chapter 8: Two Rooms

Hoyt lived above his shop on Fourth Street, up a flight of narrow stairs with a coil of orange cable still hanging on the rail.

He had beaten us there by ten minutes.

When I helped my mother through the door, he had already turned down the bed in the only bedroom and put two glasses of water on the nightstand.

"I'll take the couch," he said.

"You will not," Ellen said. "Margo takes the couch. You stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours."

She lowered herself onto his pillows, and her eyes closed almost at once.

I pulled the blanket up to her chin and stood looking at her.

In the car I had asked how she knew where Hoyt lived.

She had said, "Later, baby," and I had let it go because she could barely sit up.

The nurse from the fourth floor had pushed a paper bag into my hands at the dock.

Ellen's pills, the label said.

I took the bottles out in the kitchen and set them in a row on the counter under the light.

There were four of them.

I read the first label, and then I read it again.

"Hoyt."

He came and stood beside me with a dish towel over one shoulder.

"The sheet from her chart says five milligrams," I said. "This bottle says ten."

"Which pill?"

"The little white one. The one she takes at night."

He picked it up, turned it in the light, and put it down.

He did not look surprised, and I noticed that.

"I'll photograph all four," he said. "And you'll take them to a pharmacist tomorrow, not the hospital's."

"You don't seem shocked."

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