'What about the stuff in the car, the boxes and everything?'
'I can't be sure, but… well, I can, yes, I was standing there. She told him to take all of it.'
'Oh no.'
'It was just parts your father collected, wasn't it? Cans of oil and whatever else, I think.'
'You're sure, Mrs. Mehta?'
'Yes.'
'Really completely sure?'
'Why, yes, I believe I am.'
She thanked Mrs. Mehta and hung up, feeling sick. She lit the last cigarette, but her hands shook. The cigarette fell to the floor and smoked there. All I have left is Charlie, she thought, a date tonight with Charlie.
Vista del Mar Retirement Village Princeton, New Jersey September 27, 1999
Not a bad place to die! Charlie thought, inspecting the golf greens. An eightyish couple walking along the smooth black asphalt gave hearty, vitamin-commercial waves as he rolled past in the Lexus. 'See?' said Ellie from the passenger seat. 'It's really very nice. I've been wanting to show you for so long, Charlie. All these old trees, and the split-rail fences?' She gazed out the window with such sweet hope that the last of his bitterness melted. She was nearly finished decorating the house. Two dozen bushes and flowering trees would arrive the next morning, holes already dug, a bag of fertilizer hunched next to each, the last of the furniture coming the next afternoon. Ellie would spend the night to be sure everything went smoothly. So far, she'd done a perfect job. He was shocked, almost, by how much she'd completed. No doubt thinking that Julia would succeed at getting pregnant. Making a place where a grandchild could run around. Grandchild, grand children. She'd thought of everything. The sprinkler system had digital controls in the garage. She'd specified a high-speed buried-cable hookup, up to ten phone lines if he wanted. Zoned heating, automatic lights that went on when you entered a room, off when you left. A security system so artificially intelligent that it almost read your mind. She'd outfitted him with a beautiful office, too, a deep leather armchair, a lamp, a lovely Oriental in front of the fireplace. On the desk, a new computer, powerful enough to download Teknetrix data. No wonder she'd kept showing him the brochure, loosening him up, preparing him for the idea, so that it was a pleasure, not a shock. The house had beds and linen and dishes. And stationery with the new address, in his desk drawer. And stamps and pens and paper clips. And toothpaste and dishwashing cleanser and a supply of all their medications in the bathroom. And a phone with autodial numbers already programmed. And a complete set of golf clubs in the garage. He'd pulled out the driver, given it a swing in the front yard. His back felt like a dream. He'd prepared the stinky Chinese tea twice a day for three days straight. Stuff worked perfectly, made him feel loose and warm, even a little warm down there, too, a sort of volunteer half-tumescence. Anytime you need me, I'll be ready, ready for Melissa tonight, you old dog. The tea may have been mildly euphoric, too. Somebody could make a mint off this stuff-the pharmaceutical companies were probably working on it. He'd pay quite a bit, if necessary. If he didn't get the tea on time, his head would hurt. Some kind of herbal stimulant in it. So what if it was a little addictive? He had enough of the dry, crackly powder to last one more day, and had left an order with the concierge at the Peace Hotel for more to be made and sent to him. He'd lost a little weight, too. Heart beating slightly faster? Hard to tell. No one really understood those Chinese herbs. Certainly he felt like he had more energy. Ellie had seen it while he swung the club, smiled at the way he cut the air with it, assumed he was happy about the house. Mentioned the new golf shoes waiting for him in his closet. You had to hand it to her, you really did.
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
