“For a personnel manager,” he said, “you know an awful lot about the patients.”
“I spent time on all these floors,” she said. “Ernie started out on three. After a month, they downgraded his condition and moved him to two. He spent his last ten years on the first floor.”
He stopped walking and waited for her to do the same. When she turned to him, he asked, “Do you know what floor Danny will be on?”
She said, “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?”
He shook his head.
All the wiseass gone now, she said, “He’ll be in my husband’s old room.”
THEY DIDN’T SPAR much after that. They breezed through the second floor, the patients looking paler and more fragile than their counterparts upstairs. Nora had a penchant for narrating the proximate cause of each catastrophe before them. He heard about drug overdoses and viral attacks, embolisms and encephalitis and diabetes, hepatitis and botched suicide.
He was brought to the bedside of Mr. Lawrence Belmonte, who got lost in the woods during a hunting trip in Maine last March and suffered a near fatal case of hypothermia. He lost both his feet and all trace of consciousness. Sweeney was paraded before the bed of Mrs. Honey Lieb, who’d been shipped up from Fort Myers after she failed to wake from her gallstone procedure. He gazed upon the comely face of Ms. Tara Russell, a twenty-four-year-old media consultant from Atlanta who fell ill at a conference in Michigan, was hospitalized for what one doctor still insists was Legionnaires’ Disease, slipped into a coma the night she was admitted, and ended up unaware, alone, and in the void, floating here in the Peck Clinic.
“Such a shame,” Nora said, patting Ms. Russell’s leg through the sheet. “You say it over and over. It becomes a little prayer.”
THINGS WERE DIFFERENT on the first floor. There were only three wardrooms and only three beds to each room. And though the rooms had long ago been gutted and refitted for such purposes, they retained a residential feel. It was darker down here. The walls preserved a lot of the house’s original heavy wood and the floors were covered with an old-fashioned carpeting rather than tile or rubber.
The wardrooms were located in the rear of the building and as they walked down the central hall, Sweeney could feel Nora tensing. She stopped in the door of 101 and Sweeney entered first. There were three beds, two on the back wall and one on the front. All three of the patients had gone decerebrate, the arms rigid, bent at the elbow and locked. The hands clenched into fists and pulled up to the chest. The legs raised up into a fetal crouch.
Sweeney made himself move deeper into the room. He stopped at the foot of the first bed and saw a middle-aged woman, eyes blasted open, staring at the ceiling. His eyes followed down her body. When he came to the gastrostomy tube snaking out from beneath the sheet, he turned to another bed. A young man, maybe early twenties, though it was hard to say. The gauntness obscured age, made them all into skeletal angels.
Nora had stopped volunteering stories, so Sweeney asked, “What’s his deal?”
“Spring break,” she said. “Daytona. About five years ago. He tried to jump into the hotel swimming pool from his balcony.”
The third patient was suspended in a Stryker frame.
Nora saw him looking and said, “Bedsores.”
Sweeney said, “Take me to Danny’s room.”
They exited 101, moved past 102 without looking inside, and entered 103.
“Do they always leave the lights on?” Sweeney asked.
“It’s easier,” Nora said, “on the doctor’s eyes.”
The first two beds were empty.
“Which one will be his?” Sweeney asked.
“I’m sure you can take your pick,” Nora said. “Would you like to meet his roommate?”
Instead of answering, he approached the occupied bed. He began to run through the routine, to pull in the deep breath and crack the first two knuckles of his right hand with his thumb. But what he found at the far end of the room was not what he expected.
“She’s been here three years,” Nora said, at his side now. “Her name’s Irene Moore.”
There was no decerebrate rigidity here. No swollen or shaven head. No sunken cheeks, no mummified extremities. The eyes were closed. She was turned on her side, dressed in a white cotton nightgown.
“And what’s her story?” Sweeney heard himself say.
“Unfortunately,” Nora said, “no one really knows. She went to sleep one night and she never woke up. There was no head trauma. No drug or alcohol overdose. And as far as they can tell, no stroke or seizure. Dr. Peck says it’s got to be viral. But he’s guessing if you ask me.”
“Does she have family?”
“She’s got a husband. Ex-husband now. In the beginning he was here all the time. He took an apartment in the city. He’s a lawyer in New York. Lots of money. He tried to commute back and forth for a while. But after a year, when she wasn’t responding to any of the therapies. .”
She trailed off, then added, “He still pays the bills, though. I’ll give him that.”
Sweeney asked, “No kids?”
“No. And her parents have been gone forever.”
He nodded, started to turn toward the empty beds and heard Nora say, “Irene, dear?” as if she were talking to someone with a hearing impairment. She was leaning over the comatose woman, rubbing her arm and tucking some hair behind an ear. “Irene, this is Mr. Sweeney. But we just call him Sweeney. His boy Danny is going to be sharing the room. You’ll be meeting Danny tomorrow.”
Normally, Sweeney found such displays patronizing and showy. He’d seen a lot of it at the St. Joseph and thought it more for the benefit of the visitor than the patient. As if she sensed his disdain, Nora looked backward at him, still rubbing Irene’s arm, and said, “She hears me, you know.”
“Just like your husband,” he said before he could catch himself.
“That’s right,” Nora said and turned her face back to Irene Moore. “Just like my husband.”
The window for apology slipped past and, not knowing what else to do, Sweeney walked down to the first bed in the ward and said, “I think this one will be good for Danny.”
Then he took the rolled comic book from his back pocket and placed it under the bed’s pillow.
THEY WERE SILENT on the ride down to the basement. But when the elevator opened onto a dim junkyard, Nora said, “Oh, this is going to be just charming.” They stepped into a storage area crammed with piles of furniture and equipment — gurneys, desks, IV poles — some of them shrouded with tarps and sheets.
“One of these days,” Nora said, “somebody’s got to clean this place out.” She fished in her jacket pocket and brought out a set of keys and they made their way through the maze to the door in front of them. She had a little trouble with the lock. Sweeney took the keys from her and managed to turn the bolt.
They stepped into the apartment.
Nora said, “I’m guessing you got a bargain on the place.”
Sweeney found a light switch, flipped it, and said, “This is what closed the deal.”
He’d meant it to be funny. The ceiling light flickered, then caught, and the room took on a yellow tinge.
“It’s not as big as I expected,” he said.
“That’s always been my experience,” Nora said, moving to the box windows up near the ceiling, pulling back the minidrapes and sending clouds of dust into the air. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “You’ve got a real talent for punishing yourself.”
Over the phone, Dr. Peck had called it a “three-room efficiency” and used the word “cozy.” But the kitchen was really just a galley along the rear wall that housed an antique stove and refrigerator. In general, the apartment looked like the set of a 1950s sitcom about a bachelor janitor.