The Other Mother

Theodora wakes at two in the afternoon, which is the first sign that something is wrong, since she has never in her life slept through a school day. Her head feels packed with wet wool. The room tilts when she turns it. On the bedside table, where nothing stood last night, there is a glass of water with a straw in it, two small tablets on a folded napkin and a thermometer. They are laid out in a row as neatly as instruments on a tray.

Her father is three time zones away at a conference he could not move. He rang yesterday, sounding guilty, and Theodora said she was fine, which in retrospect was her second mistake. The first was assuming that being fine and being alone were the same thing. For two years, ever since Tabitha moved in with her careful boxes and her mild, level voice, Theodora has run a campaign of cool, polished politeness. "Thanks," she says to the dinners. "Sure," she says to the questions. She has never once said anything that could be quoted back to her.

Tabitha appears in the doorway without being called, as though she had been measuring the silence from the hall. She works on a hospital ward, a fact Theodora has always filed under reasons she is boring. She does the next ten minutes the way Theodora imagines she does them there: a hand on the forehead, two fingers on the wrist, a few quiet questions that are not really questions. When did it start. Any pain here. Can you swallow. "Thirty-nine point one," she reads at last, and her face does absolutely nothing. It is that nothing, more than any alarm, that makes Theodora's stomach drop.

"It's probably the flu that's going round," Tabitha says. "But I've rung the doctor's line, and a nurse will call back within the hour. If it climbs, we go in. If it doesn't, we wait." She says we. Theodora hears it and tries to file it under the usual heading, and the heading no longer fits.

The afternoon passes in small, precise efficiencies. Tabitha changes the pillowcase without making her sit up. She appears with a soup that is almost entirely broth, because, she explains, "the first rule is to keep it down, not to enjoy it." An hour later she appears with a second thermometer, as if she does not trust the first. Only when the glass is set down does Theodora notice the thing itself: it is on the left, the side her hand always reaches for. Tabitha has been paying attention for two years to a person who has spent that time looking straight past her.

Towards evening the fever breaks. Propped against two pillows in the damp, rinsed-out quiet that follows, Theodora listens to Tabitha moving in the corridor outside, folding something, pausing, folding again. Had it been the other way round, she knows exactly what she would have done, and the knowledge sits in her chest like a swallowed stone. She would have knocked once, said "Do you need anything?" and gone back to her room.

"You don't have to stay," she says, when Tabitha comes in for the tray. It is meant to be the old voice, the cool one, but it comes out cracked.

"I know I don't," says Tabitha.

For a while neither of them speaks. The streetlight comes on outside, orange against the curtain. Then Theodora, who has not asked this woman for anything in two years, turns her face to the wall and says, "Could you stay until I'm asleep?"

Tabitha pulls the desk chair over to the bed and sits down. She does not say a word.