“If she only took one a day, how many days would it be?”
Twenty-eight.
“And if it was one every other day?”
And I stopped with my hand on the bag and I said: fifty-six. But that is not what it is for and you must not do that.
She said, “I know.” Very quietly. And she took the bag.
In the June she asked me whether tablets go off.
In the August she asked me whether a pharmacy can look up a date from the past, and I said what date, and she said never mind.
In the September she asked me what happens if somebody stops them suddenly, and that is the one that got me out from behind the counter and down the end of the aisle with her, by the hot water bottles, where the camera is but the queue is not.
And I asked her, finally, fourteen months late, what she was counting.
She said, “Nothing.” And she went to put her bag on her shoulder.
Except she had the paper bag in the same hand and the strap caught it and the whole thing went over on the floor between us.
Her school bag. Pencil case, a bottle, a reading book.
And a small blue exercise book with a rubber band round it, which came open on the tiles at my feet, face up.
Columns. Ruled by hand with a ruler. Dates down the left side.
And across the top of the first page, in biro, underlined twice, one line that I read before either of us moved.
It said: HAS TO LAST UNTIL 11 MARCH.
Then the columns. Date. How many in the box at the start of the day. How many Mum took. How many left.
Fourteen months of it. Every day. Not one gap, including Christmas Day, including a week in July when they were at her aunt’s in another county.
She had been counting her mother’s tablets every single morning before school, writing the number down, and working forward to see whether the medicine would reach the eleventh of March.
The eleventh of March is her mother’s specialist appointment. It is at a hospital ninety minutes away and it was booked, in the January of last year, for fourteen months later, which is what the waiting list was.
Marisol had worked out that she could not afford the private route, and that the only thing to do was reach that appointment.
And she had decided, on her own, without telling the surgery and without telling her daughter, to make a twenty-eight day box last a calendar month.
One a day instead of two. Then, in the bad months, one every other day.
She was not being stupid and she was not being brave. She had done a sum with a number in it and the number did not work, so she had made her own body the part of the sum that could give.
And her twelve-year-old daughter had watched her do it, from the second month, and had not said a word to anybody, and had instead got a ruler and an exercise book and started keeping the ledger.
Here is the part I cannot get out of my head.
In the back of that blue book there is a second page of sums, in a different colour biro, where she has worked out how many days short they were going to be.
