Once we had left the room and stepped down the hallway, I could hear voices that grew clearer when we made the turn into a broader hallway and were heading for what had been the Manor’s central spine.
“The place is shaped like a cross,” Carlos said. “The long part’s the solarium and ward, with the nurse’s station, bathroom, storage closets, and a kitchen at the end. Well, they were that, but we’ve made changes, added another crossbeam and a few rooms.”
He was whispering, though there seemed no reason for it, leaning close to my shoulder, and the wine sloshed in my glass as he brushed against me. Then we reached the small foyer at the building’s center, open doorways to the left and right, and when we turned into what had been the solarium, I saw the profile of Erica Plummer as she looked out the row of windows and down into the meadow beyond. A heavy, old man stood at her side, the face of a bulldog when he heard us and turned around, and I soon found out he was her father-in-law, a man named Frank. Erica had heard us and turned too, smiling, and she came across the room to join us, reaching up to kiss me on the cheek. She looked fine. The frosting on her hair was gone, as well as the heavy makeup, and she wore a flowery summer dress, light and loose, that allowed for a freedom of movement that was evident in her quick steps and broad gestures.
“That’s where I lay,” Carlos said, pointing to the room’s side, but I could see no evidence of a place for him. The space was decked out as a kind of game room or lounge, hardwood tables, one with a chessboard set into its laminated surface, another holding a carousel of poker chips and decks of cards. The chairs were soft recliners, end tables beside them, and a refrigerator and sink and bar, all in a dull, brushed stainless steel, lined the wall where Carlos had pointed. The room had been painted in a warm, dusty grey, and the window frames were bright white, announcing the view, and a couch had been placed before the windows, and there were bowls of dips and chips on the new ledge that covered the cold radiators below the frames.
“You had to see it before,” Frank said, as we shook hands. Then I saw him take Erica’s hand, and she smiled up at me.
“We live here now!” she said.
Her face held the pleasure of a teenager, and I thought at least I’d done something right as a private citizen detective, though I knew I’d had only a small part in her redemption, and that just at the very start of it.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Everything’s open today.”
I could see out the window beyond them, the play of wind in the yellow canopy tent near the meadow’s edge, tables under it and a few people standing and talking beside them. I saw men in white uniforms, carrying platters heavy with food, and a photographer in strange clothing working at his tripod, out under the sun to the tent’s side. Carlos touched me on the arm then, and we turned, and the four of us left the room and headed through the doorway and into what had been the open ward.
It was still open, a long graceful rectangle, but there were no beds now and what had been a low ceiling had been cut away to show the freshly sanded beams that rose in the cathedral space. Couches and easy chairs rested in various arrangements, and there were rich oriental carpets in the spaces between them, and at the end of the room a large stone fireplace had been constructed, a heavy brass fender and a peacock screen on the brick apron before it. The room had the feel of a hunting lodge or a common room in some hotel. There was even ash wainscotting along the walls, a dozen or more tall brass urns holding cattails and thin, feathery reeds.
“It’s a little weird,” Carlos said, and Frank laughed and said, “a community effort,” and Erica laughed too and said, “but we like it.”
“That’s Carolyn, and the suits are two of the asshole doctors,” Frank said, almost loud enough for them to hear.
“Easy,” Carlos said, and Erica laughed uncertainly, and when I looked over at her I saw she was blushing.
The men were small and soft, both balding prematurely, and the woman in the crisp white A-line was at least a head taller than both of them. They were standing beside the fireplace, talking, and I could see her white stockings and tennis shoes and the black pager hung at her hip and thought I could hear a faint shushing as she turned in conversation and her thighs brushed against each other. She wore a little white hat, pinned at the top of her head, holding her blond hair up, and I could see wisps of it that had fallen to brush her neck, and when we reached them she turned and grinned at us and the two doctors smiled and lifted their glasses and complimented Carlos and Frank too on the renovation. One of them was slightly fish-eyed, a pupil dancing and distorted through his thick glasses. We left the transformed ward then, glanced in at the modern kitchen, then came to the new wing, a row of rooms off a gracefully curving hallway, all the doors, but the one at the far end, open.
“This is mine,” Erica said, when we got there, a quiet and spare little room with windows looking out on a field of wildflowers and scrub oak, light flooding in to bathe shapes in the wallpaper, a geometric mural of open fans and fabric swatches like figures in a New England quilt.
We looked into other rooms, each with its own private design, homey and particular, and across from the closed door at the end of the hall, we entered a large shower room, sauna and hot tub to either side, and beyond that an exercise room, a large one, full of mats and machines, weights and stationary bikes and treadmills, and when we left there, Frank and Erica smiled and said good-bye, see you soon, and then went out the glass door leading to a small patio at the wing’s end, and Carlos and I stood before the closed door and he explained that the pager on Carolyn’s hip was a monitor.
“That way, she can get out and around on her shift and still be vigilant.”
The bed sat in the center of the room, a dust ruffle hiding the fact that it was a hospital bed, and the canopy that hung high over it was attached to the ceiling and allowed free access to both side of the bed. There was a row of machines against the wall, an oxygen unit, heart monitor, and a suction pump, each dressed in a cloth covering that rendered it more like a piece of furniture than a medicinal station, and the sounds of our feet were softened by modern Scandinavian carpets that covered the wooden floor. I could see the lighthouse on its new cement pad through the windows as we crossed to the bed. It was September already, but still there were tourists visible through the glass cupola, others waiting in line near the base.
“I want you to look up into the canopy,” Carlos said, as we approached the bed’s side. “It was Larry’s idea, and it’s something special.”
And it was that, and it was only after I had looked up for a long time and my neck grew stiff that I lowered my eyes to see the figure in his repose, head on the pillow in a position where he might look up too, though more comfortably than I had. I put my fingers on the bed, touching a coverlet made of the finest woven cotton, soft as a diaper, and could feel the embossment of leaf and flower figures in the stitching, and I could feel the faint beat of the man’s pulse at the bones of his wrist through them. I leaned in over his chest, expecting the medicinal, but there was nothing, no issue of breath, though my head was near his chin when I turned and looked up.
The hanging canopy was like a large open umbrella or the dome of the sky, and it was lined in a dark blue fabric the color of night’s sky, figures of stars sewn in at the circular border and in what seemed strategic places in the blue field that was otherwise empty in the spaces between the photographs, and I saw immediately, in a faded ferrotype, that the man had been born in Idaho before the turn of the century: a newborn in a quilted crib, head framed in a white bonnet, and the stiff figures of a mother in bell-shaped dress, his father wearing a stovepipe. They were standing before a sign announcing a granary and its location, and the date of birth had been penned in the vacancy at the building’s side.