Dr. Grey's Arc

Chapter 2 of 11

Word traveled before Dr. Grey did. By the time she walked back to the lot the next morning, two women stood at the message board near the corner, reading a fresh notice someone had pinned overnight. The notice named her. It named the lot. It said a doctor had bought the ground where the funerals started. Dr. Grey stopped at the edge of the path and watched the women read it twice. One of them turned and saw her and did not look away. The news had started at the meeting house with the bell tower. A clerk there had read the deed transfer aloud at the morning announcements, the way every transfer was read. By noon people were crossing the lot to look at the half-built shell. They came in ones and twos, in coats and work boots, carrying nothing, asking questions she did not know how to answer. How many beds. When would she open. Did she take payment in trade. She kept her hands in her pockets and gave short answers. The Saint Bernard sat in the doorway of the shell and let children touch its pack. A man came across the mud in the afternoon with a bundle of boards on his shoulder. He set them down beside the frame without speaking. The boards were old, painted, pulled from somewhere else. Red, blue, yellow, the paint cracked and soft. He said his shed had come down in the fall and the wood was still good. He said his sister was one of the three last winter. Then he stepped back and waited, as if she might refuse. Dr. Grey was bad at this part. She knew it standing there. She made herself meet his eyes. She said thank you. She said the boards would hold a wall. She asked his name and wrote it on the back of an envelope from her coat. Behind him, two more people were already coming up the path with their arms full. A woman with a coil of rope. A boy dragging a sack of nails. They stopped near the boards and waited their turn. By dusk a small pile had grown beside the shell, and a short line of names ran down the back of the envelope. She stood in the doorway after they left. She had ground. She had the start of a wall. She had a list of neighbors who expected her to finish what the sign in the dirt promised. The shell behind her was still open to the wind, and winter was still coming, and every board on the pile had a face attached to it now. She had wanted to reach people before it was too late. She had not planned on them reaching her first.