Carolyn called me on the cellular phone she’d smuggled in, leaving that last patient in coma and coming across the meadow in the dead of night when there was no moon. She let me know that Frank had gone, then returned again with his daughter-in-law, a woman named Erica Plummer. She said he seemed happier now and that the two were making plans, and she kept me posted on most everything else that was going on at the Manor, and I needed to hear these things, to keep in some human contact in my isolation. I had no Arthur coming anymore, and no Manor, and I was sick to death of walking through my tilted rooms, napping fitfully in daylight so I could keep watch at night. Once a reporter from some national exploitation journal made it almost to the porch, and he was insistent until I showed him the rifle. The porch itself had sunk a few feet, really to my advantage, though the constantly bursting water pipes in the basement had kept me down there and vulnerable to quick assault. I had to keep going up and checking, but there’d been nothing for quite a while. They’d concentrated their efforts on the lighthouse move, once they’d gotten the go-ahead. Then the men had returned from Tampico, and I had something else to keep me occupied.
“Oil,” Carolyn said, her voice so squeaky through the awkward instrument that I thought it might be someone else.
“What?” I said. “Who is this?”
She told me of the man then who had been in the solarium, behind the screen, that one with the stony face that I’d been interested in. His name was Carlos Ébano, and he’d come back with the men from Tampico, and she’d found out he was John’s grandson. Others had come back with them, Gino’s daughter and her husband too, who turned out to be John’s son. Larry was there, the only one unattached once Frank had returned with Erica, and he’d left for a while to go to Philadelphia, then had come back again, and it was he who had told her about the oil and the money that had come from it, enough to buy the Manor and to support all of them in it, and enough left over to help in the AIDS projects he was involved with in Philadelphia. And there was enough too to keep the last man alive, and to tend to him, and this was part of the negotiations with the owners and with the Veterans Administration, funds set aside for doctors on call and professional around-the-clock care, and she told me this was where I might come back into things. I knew, had the man died while the others were away, the doctors would have been freed from their contract and would have sold the place. Thus the man was a kind of savior in his longevity, my savior, and I’ve been careful and gentle in the tending of his skeletal body now that I’ve returned to my place at the Manor once again.
Carlos has had a room built on the sunny side, windows overlooking the lighthouse on its new cement pad, and could the man awaken, free of his deep coma, he could see the tourists walking the road toward it and climbing up into it, their shifting images in their colorful clothing through the glass tower at the light itself below the witch’s hat. I see that, and so does Carolyn at the beginning of her evening hours. Theresa, the old woman hired for the graveyard shift, sees nothing beyond the room itself, but it’s a beautiful room, the medical properties of the hospital bed hidden by a dust ruffle, hardwood floors and historical pictures on the walls, and even a canopy, and she’s thoroughly intent on the care of the man anyway, and wouldn’t notice. She was a nun, back in her past somewhere, and the uniform she wears looks like the undergarments of a nun and may well be that. I see her in the early morning, when I relieve her, bending over the man in the white skeleton emerging through his skin, she too in white, but for the grey-flecked and still raven hair gathered in a bun at her neck. She’s looking down into the face of impending death already resurrecting into the calavera, curious, I think, as she herself approaches that, and sometimes Larry passes the room, up early, and looks in at her with his own curiosity. Larry will be leaving soon, after the party, and so will John, and I can see that Gino is getting itchy.
It was a month ago, and early morning, and I was sitting in my kitchen drinking herbal tea. The sun was coming up into a clear June sky, but the barricades were still rainswept after a night of heavy weather, and I could see the drops falling in a slant in the wind, rosy red in the blinking lights, and could hear drops tapping on the floor in the hallway and plopping in the full metal pot I’d placed on the carpet in the living room. Then I couldn’t hear that, and when I rose and limped across the tilted floor to the screen door, I saw the rain had stopped, and so had the wind, and I could see the blanket of shine on the meadow disappearing in a broad moving wave as sun dried the grasses and bearberry and the meadow darkened into its variety of subtle color once again. And then I saw a spot of yellow in the grasses, and it was moving, and behind it, on the roadway that ran through the meadow from the Manor to the barricades, I saw Arthur’s dark limousine, and could see the window shades were up and that there were people in the backseat.
The spot of yellow was a dog, but I could only recognize that in her gait once she had left the meadow and slanted to the roadway, then trotted up in front of the limousine to reach the barricades ahead of it. A very small dog, and she walked right under the wooden sawhorses and headed toward the porch without hesitation, and by the time she had reached the first tilted step I had pulled the screen open and was standing in the doorway holding the rifle and looking down at her.
The dog looked up at me, a Chihuahua dyed yellow, identical to the one that had tapped on my knee in that agora in Tampico years ago, and I felt myself tilting more than was necessary in the twisted doorway and had to reach out for the frame with my free hand to steady myself, though the dog seemed to take nothing from this possible cue and just stared up at me, her head cocked to the side, eyes full of expectancy and resolve. Then she climbed up the porch stairs, slowly, and once she had reached me and had looked up my leg and into my face again, she rose on her hind legs and placed her paws on my shin, then stretched her body, bowing her back and yawning, then kicked gently away, turning, and came down to the sill beside me, facing out to the drive as I was, one forepaw planted on the toe of my tennis shoe, and when I looked up from her and out toward the barricades again I saw the man I’d been interested in, months ago, in the solarium.
Arthur stood at the limousine’s open door, and I saw him touch his hat brim and saw Gino at the fender on the other side, grinning at me, as the other passenger stepped between the horses of the barricade and started up the drive. The breeze had died completely, and the sun was coming up over the far rise where the meadow met the escarpment that fell down to the sea, but it was a soft sun and I was not blinded and could see the buttons on his linen shirt and the edge of the thick knot of ebony hair, and might have seen all of it had he turned his head.
He didn’t turn his head, though he lowered it from time to time to watch his footing in the stones, and when he raised it again his brow was broad in shadow as I remembered it, looking down at him in his bed, and I was nervous in the doorway, wondering about the reason for his coming, though when he reached the bottom step and then looked up and spoke to me I found there was no reason for concern.