Night Shift

Carol makes the appointment and drives him there herself, because otherwise he will not go. She says so in the car.

"You wouldn't go, Dad."

"I'd go," Walt says.

"You say what all the time now. You say it to Mom forty times a day. I counted at Easter."

He doesn't argue. He watches the wipers.

The audiologist is a young man with soft hands and a cold. He fits the things into Walt's ears, taps something on a laptop, and the room comes up around him like water rising in a tub. The hum of the light. Carol's coat when she crosses her legs. His own breathing, which he has not heard in years and which sounds to him like an old dog.

"How's that?" the young man says.

"Loud," Walt says. Even his voice is loud. It sits in the front of his head.

On the drive home he hears the turn signal. He'd forgotten the turn signal made a sound. He hears the tires on the wet road, a plane somewhere, Carol humming under her breath to the radio. He doesn't tell her to stop.

Ruth is at the front door when they pull in. She has her cardigan on over her nightgown, though it's three in the afternoon. She watches him come up the walk.

"Well," she says. "Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you."

She puts her hand flat on his cheek, quick and light, the way she'd check a burner. Something happens in her face and goes away again.

"Good," she says. "That's good, Walt."

Carol stays for coffee. The kettle screams and Walt jumps and the two women laugh at him. He hears Ruth's slippers on the linoleum, a sound like someone shuffling cards. He hears the clock in the hall. He sits at the table and lets it all come at him.

That night, in the bathroom, Ruth tells him to take them out.

"I want to see what it's like."

"You'll wear down the battery," she says. "The man said. Put them in the dish."

"The man said I could sleep in them if I wanted."

She stands there with her toothbrush. She looks at him in the mirror.

"Suit yourself," she says, and goes to bed.

He lies in the dark and listens. The fridge downstairs, a long low note that stops and starts again. Water moving in the pipes. A car far off on the wet road. Ruth beside him, breathing short. She's not asleep. He listens to all of it. It's like being young.

Then he hears the other one.

It's slow. Slower than a person. It comes from her side of the room, from the corner by the wardrobe where the armchair is. In, and a long time, and out.

He thinks it's Ruth. He turns his head on the pillow and listens to Ruth, and Ruth is breathing too, quick and shallow, the way she does when she's lying awake.

Two of them. Hers, and the slow one.

He listens for the next breath. It comes, patient and deep. Ruth's hand moves under the blanket, finding the edge of the mattress. Her fingers curl around it.

"Walt?" she whispers.

"Yes?"

"Nothing."

He waits until her breathing settles, though it never quite does. After a while he reaches over and takes the aids out and puts them in the dish on the nightstand. It's quiet, the old quiet, and he sleeps.

In the daytime it's fine. In the daytime he's a man who can hear. He hears the neighbor's dog and the neighbor telling the dog to shut up. He hears the mail come through the slot. He has Ruth turn the radio down now instead of up, and she does it, and looks at him.

"Look at you," she says.

He likes the birds best. He didn't know there were so many of them.

At night he leaves the aids in.

The breathing is there every night. It isn't loud. He has to lie very still for it. He holds his own breath to make sure it isn't him. He counts. Ruth breathes five times, six, to its one.

He begins to recognize the interval. The silence after it. The slight delay before the next inhale.

On Thursday he gets up at two and takes the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. He goes upstairs.

There's the armchair, Ruth's cardigan over one arm. There's the wardrobe. There's the radiator under the window, cold. He puts his hand on the radiator. He kneels down, and he hears his knees crack, and he looks under the chair. Dust. A button off something.

"Walt." Ruth is up on one elbow. "What are you doing?"

"Did you hear that?"

"It's the house," she says. "It's an old house. Come back to bed."

He stands. In the flashlight's beam, Ruth is looking not at him but at the space behind him.

He turns. There's nothing there except the chair.

When he looks back, she has pulled the covers to her chin.

He comes back to bed. She turns toward him, which she doesn't usually do, and puts her arm across his chest. She holds on hard. Her fingers press into his shirt, one by one, until they find the fabric and close.

In the morning she is slow on the stairs. At breakfast he sees her wrists when she reaches for the butter. Marks, purple going yellow at the edges. Four on one side. One on the other.

"What happened to you?"

She pulls her sleeves down. "Cupboard," she says. "The one over the sink. It sticks."

He gets up and opens the cupboard over the sink and closes it again. It doesn't stick.

"It sticks sometimes," Ruth says.

She starts sleeping in the afternoons. In forty-one years she has never slept in the afternoon. After lunch she lies down on the sofa under the blanket and goes out like a light. Before she closes her eyes, she checks the kitchen clock and draws the blanket over her hands.

Walt sits in his chair and listens to her. He makes sure it's only her. In the day, it's only her. He reads the paper. He can hear himself turning the pages.

At night he wakes to her gasping. It isn't a scream. It's like someone coming up from under water. She sits up with her hand on her chest.

"Bad dream," she says, before he can ask.

He looks toward the corner. The breathing goes on. It isn't in the corner anymore. He thinks it might be at the foot of the bed.

The next afternoon he asks her about the marks.

"You catch yourself on something?" he says.

She folds a tea towel, carefully matching the corners. "Don't fuss."

"I'm not fussing."

"You are. You've started fussing about everything."

He wants to say that he has only started hearing everything. Instead, he watches her fold the towel again, though the corners are already together.

It goes on like that for two weeks. He'd never say this to anyone, but he gets so he waits for the night. He gets so he wants it, the way you want to press on a bad tooth.

He tells himself he wants to understand. He knows that's not all of it.

Then one night it changes.

It's after three. Ruth has finally gone under; her breathing has gone long. And the slow one isn't slow anymore. It's quicker. It's the breathing of something that has been anticipating, actively waiting. It's close. It's beside the bed, on her side. He would swear to it. It's standing there, over her.

He says it before he decides to.

"Who's there?"

The breathing stops.

Everything stops. Downstairs the fridge picks that moment to cut out. The pipes go still. There is nothing at all. He can hear the blood in his own ears, which the young man said he might, a kind of wind.

Then the foot of the bed goes down.

He feels it through the mattress. A weight, settling, the way a cat settles, only more than any cat. The springs make a small sound. Then the weight moves. It comes up the bed on Ruth's side, slowly, and the mattress tips toward her, and he has to put his hand out flat to keep from rolling into her.

Ruth makes a sound.

It's in her throat. It isn't a word. It's the sound of somebody trying to make a word with their mouth held shut. Her body is rigid beside him, stiff as a board. He says her name. He shakes her shoulder. The sound goes on, mm, mm, mm, and he understands she's trying to say his name.

He turns on the lamp.

There's nothing. There's Ruth on her back with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, her hands in fists at her sides. Then all the air goes out of her at once, and she turns away from him onto her side and pulls her knees up.

"Ruth."

"Turn it off."

"Ruth, what was—"

"Turn off the light, Walt."

He turns it off. In the dark, he reaches for her, but she flinches before his hand touches her shoulder. He leaves it there, suspended between them, then draws it back.

He doesn't sleep again.

In the morning she doesn't make breakfast. She sits at the kitchen table in her cardigan with both hands around a cup she isn't drinking from. He makes the coffee himself. He makes it wrong, and she doesn't say anything about it.

"Last night," he says.

"Why did you say anything?"

She doesn't look at him. Her voice is flat and very quiet, and he hears every bit of it.

"Why did you have to say anything?"

He has been married to her forty-one years. She has never spoken to him like that.

"I heard something," he says. "There was something in the room."

She gets up and puts the cup in the sink and goes upstairs. He hears every step. At the top, she pauses. For a moment he thinks she'll turn around and speak to him. Instead, he hears the bedroom door close.

He sits there at the table with the bad coffee.

Carol calls on Sunday like she always does. Ruth is lying down, so Walt takes it.

"How are the ears?"

"Fine. They're fine."

"You sound good. You sound like you're actually listening." She laughs. "How's Mom?"

"Your mother's not sleeping."

"She never slept," Carol says. "She used to call me, did you know that? When I first moved out. Three, four in the morning. Back when you were on nights at the plant."

"What would she call about?"

"Nothing. That was the thing. She'd just want me to stay on the line. She'd say, just talk to me, honey, tell me anything. I'd be falling asleep at my desk." Carol is quiet a second. "I always figured she was lonely. Was she lonely, Dad?"

"I don't know," he says.

He worked nights at the plant eleven years. He'd come home at seven and she'd be up and dressed, with the coffee on and the radio going. He used to tell people his wife was an early riser. He'd kiss her cheek, take his coffee to the kitchen, and ask what she'd done that morning. She'd say, "Oh, nothing much."

He thinks of all those mornings now. The dark outside the windows. Ruth already dressed. The radio turned up. The cardigan, even in summer.

After the call he goes upstairs. Ruth is asleep on top of the covers in the afternoon light, her mouth open a little. He stands and looks at her a long time. She's smaller than she was. He doesn't know when that happened.

He sits down in the armchair in the corner. He has never sat in it. It's hers, for her stockings and her cardigan. He puts his hands on the arms. The right arm is worn through. The fabric has gone shiny and then gone altogether, and the wood shows in a patch the size of a palm. He fits his hand to it. His fingers go where other fingers have gone, many nights, a long time, holding on.

He thinks about his ears. How they went, the last ten years, so slow he didn't notice until he did. How Ruth never once told him to have them seen to. Carol nagged. Carol made the appointment. Ruth said, He hears what he needs to. Ruth said, Leave him be.

He remembers Ruth saying those words in the kitchen one morning when Carol was visiting. He'd been in the next room, and he hadn't paid much attention. He'd thought they were talking about the television.

He thinks about the stairs. She has fallen on them twice since the aids. She said she missed a step. He thinks about her wrists. Four on one side and one on the other. Like a hand.

He thinks about the flashlight in his own hand, and Ruth looking past him into the corner. He thinks about his voice in the dark. Who's there? And what came up the bed after.

When she wakes he's still in the chair.

"Walt."

She sees where he's sitting. She sees his hand on the arm of the chair.

"How long?" he says.

She sits up slowly. She smooths the bedspread beside her. She smooths it and smooths it.

"Was it before Carol?" he says. "Ruth. Was it before we had Carol?"

She doesn't answer that. She looks at his ears, at the two small beige things in them. She looks at them a long time.

"It's easier," she says, "when it's only me."

He waits. Her eyes move to the corner, then back to him.

She gets up and goes down to start the dinner. He hears her on every stair, one at a time, holding the rail.

That night he takes them out in the bathroom without being told.

He holds them in his palm. They don't weigh anything. You could lose them, he thinks, easy as that. You could drop them down the sink. He looks at the sink for a while. Then he carries them into the bedroom and puts them in the dish on the nightstand, side by side.

Ruth watches him do it. She doesn't say anything. She gets into bed and turns off her lamp and lies on her back.

It's quiet. Not all the way. There's a thin high ringing he's had for years and forgot about. Under that, nothing. He can't hear the fridge. He can't hear the pipes. He can't hear Ruth. He lies in it the way he lay in it for ten years and tries to make it what it was.

It isn't what it was. Before, the quiet was empty. Now he knows what's in it.

He keeps his eyes open. The window is a gray square. He lies there an hour, maybe more. He has no way of telling.

Then the foot of the bed goes down.

He doesn't hear it. He feels it. The mattress giving. A slow weight settling at their feet. The tilt toward her side. Ruth goes hard beside him.

Her hand finds his under the blanket. It finds it right away, like she knew where it was the whole time. She grips. Her nails go into his palm. She holds on the way she held the arm of that chair.

He could turn on the lamp. He could put them back in. He could say something, anything. He could say her name.

He closes his eyes. He makes his breathing long and even, like a sleeping man. He lets his hand go loose in hers.

After a while her grip changes. It isn't holding on anymore. It's patting. Small pats on the back of his hand, the way you'd settle a child.

It's alright. It's alright. Go to sleep.

He lies there and is asleep for her.

And then, close, at his ear, on his own side of the bed where there has never been anything, there's warmth. A breath. He can't hear it. He will never hear it again. But he feels it on his neck, damp and slow, and then the next one, and the next. Patient. The way you breathe beside someone you have all the time in the world for.

Ruth's hand stops patting.

Neither of them moves.