Of course, everybody bought everything through the mail now. You could furnish a house in three days if you spent enough time on the phone. And that's what she'd done, weeks and weeks ago, she'd said the previous night, after confessing that she'd closed on the house way back in July, when he was away on business, actually signed a mortgage agreement. When she was worried that she was getting sicker, but before things really started to get worse. And that was when he told her that he'd paid off the house, that Ted Fullman had taken care of everything. By five o'clock that same afternoon, she could consider the Vista del Muerte house and property paid for, forever and ever. She had actually clapped her hands and kissed him. "Oh, Charlie!" The only caveat, according to Ted, was that the property could not be transferred after the death of the surviving spouse to children or any other heirs, and your executors had to sell the property to a buyer previously approved by the Vista del Mar Admissions Committee. A nice little controlled-supply scam, but Ellie and Charlie were ahead on the demographics, Julia had pointed out. The great boomer bulge followed them; there'd be no shortage of potential buyers when the time came. Ellie had hugged him tearfully, pleased that he accepted the place, her decision, this course of action. "I knew this would be fine," she'd said in relief, "I knew."
She was also, he knew, not saying anything about what she thought she remembered reading in their apartment, and the reason was simple. It was gone. As asked, Lionel had dropped Towers's report down the trash chute, telling no one, not even Mrs. Ravich when she returned the next day after her humiliating lipstick-and-nightgown episode, and so, when she could not find the document anywhere, not in the kitchen or the bedroom or Charlie's office, she'd begun to wonder if she'd made it up-fevered it into her pillsy imagination. This he'd surmised upon his return, because not only did she not say anything about the document, but she'd thrown away all her lovely sleeping aids. "I had a bit of drop-off while you were gone" was all that Ellie would tell him, adding only that Dr. Berger was surprised at the mixing and matching of medications to which she'd confessed. "I did get a bit confused about things, but Julia picked me up and took me to Dr. Berger's and I feel really rather good now."
She looked good, too, sitting in the leather seat of the Lexus, her hair pulled back, a kiss of color on her mouth, eyes bright as she inspected the old maple trees. But a lot is going on in there, he told himself, not just happy excitement, but fear and self-doubt. "Perhaps dementia, certainly rising anxiety," Julia had reported to him when he called her from the plane. "What about that piece of paper she thinks she read?" Charlie had asked slyly. "Oh, I don't know, Dad," Julia had answered. "I was over there and looked for it but never found anything. The doctor says that if she was so anxious and possibly a little addicted to the sleeping pills and also perhaps having the first touch of Alzheimer's, then she might have been in a highly suggestible state. He's had patients see things on television and then swear it happened to them that same day." At age fifty-seven? Wasn't that just too young? "I asked him the same thing, Daddy." Julia had sighed bravely, the weight of daughterly responsibility all too clear. "The test results will be back in a few more days. She'll be okay for the short term. She just needs a great deal of reassurance." Reassurance. Yes. Hence the payoff by Ted Fullman, hence Charlie's willingness to be driven in a company car straight from JFK the afternoon before to the new house, where Ellie had been waiting.
"Canada geese." Ellie pointed again as Charlie eased the car around the community lake. "They actually expanded what was a farmer's pond. They said that it used to get cold enough to skate over every winter. The farmer would measure the ice, and if it was three inches thick, then everybody could skate on it."
She wants to be here, he told himself. She knows that if she becomes sicker they will take care of her-because he would not. Not really. Not with a full and easy heart, not with a company to run. She knows I'm just a selfish bastard, Charlie thought, so she's planned accordingly. Very wise, his wife. They'd seen the long-term-care facility, which appeared rather well staffed, and which included not just the acute-care ward, the beds and dining rooms and physical-therapy facilities, but an operating room. Why? he'd asked their guide, the Director of Admissions, a grayster with the soft, soap-clean pleasantness of a retired minister. The man had smiled euphemistically over his half-frames. Why an operating room? Why not? To nip out all the things old people sprouted, the moldy malignancies and ferny polyps and porridge lumps. To perform the colonoscopic cauterizations and Goodyear blimp angioplasties, to reset hips broken on winter ice, to yank up guts falling through hernias into the scrotum, to saw off the bunions of old ladies, to section bowels rotten with cancer, to spoon out the bacon grease clogging the carotid arteries. To keep the Vista del Muerte population alive, their annual fees rolling in.
The entire development spread over some nine hundred acres, and Ellie was eager for him to see all of it. Already they'd inspected the Vista del Mar Community Hall, the business services center, the travel/insurance/brokerage/real-estate agency, the game room, the outdoor pool, the indoor pool, the basketball court, the twenty tennis courts, the three automatic bank machines, the homeowners' association offices. The common buildings, linked by useless picket fences, all smelled like new hotels. The staff wore green uniforms with VdM gold-monogrammed on the shirt breast, and they smiled easily and often, which suggested that they were well paid or terrorized by their superiors or both. The grounds crew seemed to number in the dozens, and everywhere was raking leaves, pruning trees, mulching garden beds. He let the car nose along softly. They passed from the golf course into one of the five residential clusters, and in this one, the oldest, or rather the first one sold out, the trees had started to fill in and the houses already were weathered. It occurred to him that the VdM executives probably tracked the geographical demographics of the place, making sure that not too many of the oldest residents clustered in one neighborhood or block, thus spreading the die-out rate through the whole facility. The elderly expired more often in the colder six months, the common flu knocking off a regular percentage, and so, he surmised, each spring the VdM management could look forward to new selling opportunities spread across their facility. Clever, he thought, somebody very clever put this whole place together.
And how much would all of this cleverness cost him? The night before, he'd inspected the paperwork. He estimated two million dollars, when it was said and done. Two million, yes, sir. Thank you, Sir Henry, for you know not what you have done for me. The membership fee was two hundred and fifty thousand, the house was a million, the landscaping fifty thousand, the furniture-no antiques, either-would top out around two hundred thousand, the in-ground heated forty-foot pool ("Our own," Ellie said, "otherwise you won't do it.") would run about one hundred and fifty, including the decking, cabana, and below-ground pool-machinery room. She was already talking about a guest cottage and a tennis court. Julia loved tennis, played at Yale. He hadn't even asked yet about the property taxes, but figured forty or fifty thousand a year. Real money. But easy money, thanks to Sir Henry Lai and his mouthful of red vomit. Blessings on you, Chinky billionaire-sir. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Vista del Muerte. I am a true bastard, he thought. Good for me.