Floating Staircase(58)
I climbed out of the car. The air was sharp and scented with winter. Craving a smoke, I produced a pack of Marlboros and popped one into my mouth, then chased the tip of it with my lighter, my hand cupped around it to keep out the wind.
The main thoroughfare of the hospital was shaped like a uterus. The carpeting was an institutional shade of brown orange (that specific brown orange only hospitals seem capable of duplicating), and large sodium lights fizzed above my head.
Following the numbered plaques on the walls, I turned down a long, claustrophobic hallway. There was surprisingly little lighting, and the staff was practically nonexistent. There was no receptionist at the bank of desks at the end of the hall, either. This wasn’t the section of the hospital someone came to for a routine checkup or for any type of surgical procedure. This was where people came for good when they knew they were never going to leave again. There were no checkout procedures here.
Before locating the room number Earl had given me yesterday evening over the phone, I ditched into a men’s restroom and saddled up to the sinks. That morning I’d showered hastily but hadn’t shaved or washed my hair. My face was pallid and sunken at the cheeks, where bristling black hairs like spider’s legs corkscrewed out from the flesh. Purplish crescents hung beneath my eyes, and my eyes themselves appeared bloodshot and shellacked. In brown corduroys, a thermal knit shirt with a flannel vest, and my ski parka, I looked like a vagrant who had shuffled in off the street.
“I could have at least shaved,” I muttered to my reflection. I turned on the water at one of the sinks, washed my face, and matted down my too-long hair as best I could, pulling the knots out with my fingers.
I was startled when someone exited a stall behind me. The man nodded in quiet recognition, then left without washing his hands. He must have heard me talking to myself and figured it was safer risking potential bathroom-borne disease.
Taking a deep breath, I reexamined myself in the mirror. I thought of Jodie saying, I was you, and a burning ember briefly winked into existence at the small of my back.
I was you.
Room 218 was the closed door at the end of the farthest hallway. Carrying the potted plant in both arms, I approached the door, expecting all the while to feel a hand clap me on one shoulder and ask me who I was and what I was doing here. But that never happened.
I summoned a mental picture of Althea Coulter, and what I projected was a weak, elderly woman, her charcoal eyes blazoned with milky cataracts, her lips perpetually twisted into a bitter snarl. Her hands would be like claws—the serrated hooks of a carnivorous bird—and her head would be thick and unmoving and simply there. The room was going to smell of sour breath and medication and the ghostly traces of urine. She would be asleep. And I wouldn’t be able to wake her, to ask her even a single question, and even if she was awake, she would be so far gone into a land of her own that the answers she provided (given that she provided any at all) would be of the fuzzy, make-believe, nonsensical variety. I pictured Althea Coulter as an ancient, mummified manikin, whose skin was scorched cloth and whose brain was a ball of string.
What the hell am I doing here?
Pausing outside the door, uncertain if I should knock or simply allow myself entry, I swallowed a hard lump that seemed to stick in the back of my esophagus.
I am standing on the line between fiction and reality.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
The woman in the bed was perhaps sixty, though with her sunken features, cobwebby wisps of hair, and blighted countenance, she looked like she could have been a hundred-year-old mummy rolled out on display.
I entered the room as silently as I could, careful not to let the door catch the latch too loudly as it shut. The room was dark and musty. There was an amalgam of odors clinging hotly to the air, each of them distinct and clinical: the reek of ammonia; the acrid underlying stench of urine; the insipid redolence of Althea Coulter’s stale, immobile body beneath the paper-thin hospital bedsheets. There was another smell, too—though more like the hint of a smell rather than a smell itself—and I knew without a doubt that it was the smell of impending death.
She was awake, her frail body propped up on a cushion of pillows. As I moved farther into the room, she turned absently away from the single window beside her bed (it was covered by venetian blinds, impeding any actual view of the outdoors) and acknowledged me with only the subtlest of glances. Then she returned her gaze to the sheathed window.
“Ms. Coulter?” I said. My voice was amplified in the empty room.
She didn’t say anything. In the silence, I could hear the labors of her breathing. The cogs were winding down, slowing with time.
I tried again: “How are you feeling?”
“Not hungry,” she practically croaked, her voice strained and tired. The sound was like guitar strings wound too tight.
“Oh,” I said, “I’m not with the hospital.”
Like a wooden puppet, her head slowly rotated on her thin neck until her attention settled back on me, this time with greater scrutiny. She was black, but her skin was as pale as ash, her lips white and blistered. I imagined one of the nurses attempting to draw blood from this living scarecrow only to be awarded with a puff of ancient dust as the needle broke through the dying woman’s flesh.
She didn’t need to speak; the question was in her eyes.
“My name’s Travis Glasgow. My wife and I just moved to Westlake last month. We’re in the old Dentman house.” I didn’t know where to go from here, and the woman’s urgent stare was unrelenting. I grasped at a straw. “The Steins send their regards. They wanted me to give you this, actually.” I made a gesture as if to extend the flowered plant to her, although I knew she would be unable to physically accept it.