The Other Husband

At twenty-five below zero the air did strange things. It squeaked under Elias's boots in the staff lot. It stuck the inside of Elias's nose together on the first breath. It carried sound so cleanly that Elias could hear, from the car, a dog barking on the far shore of Whitlow Lake a mile and a half away, and a truck downshifting on the county road, and under everything, from the lake itself, a long low groan that rose and rose and ended in a crack like a rifle shot.

The ice. Two feet thick now and still thickening, and every night when the temperature fell it shrank and split and boomed, and the sound rolled up the lawn to the old sanatorium and rattled the glass in the long porches. Out on the white, a dozen fish houses sat in a rough village with their little windows lit, smoke going straight up from their stovepipes into a sky so clear and cold the stars looked sharp enough to cut.

Elias stood a moment by the car with the scarf pulled over his mouth and looked up at the building. Three stories of yellow brick gone gray in the starlight. Every window on the second floor lit, twelve rooms, and the monitor station glowing at the west end. And at the east end, past the last lit window, the old wing running on into the dark, its glassed-in porch blind and black, its windows frosted white from the inside.

Frosted from the inside. Elias had never noticed that before. The heated rooms had clear glass with frost ferns only at the edges. The east wing's windows were solid white, like cataracts, because nobody heated that wing, and nobody had since 1994.

The lake boomed again, closer. It was the second week of January, the dead middle of winter, the stretch of the year when the sun rose after eight and set before five and the night shift saw it only through a windshield. Elias had worked nights at Whitlow for four months now. Long enough to know every noise the building made. Long enough, lately, to have started wondering which of them to believe. Elias shivered and started walking.

The path ran along the foot of the building between banks of plowed snow higher than Elias's head, and it passed right under the east wing. Elias hadn't meant to stop there, but did, in the blue shadow of the old porch, and looked up.

Up close the frosted windows were thick with feathers of ice, layer on layer. Behind one of them, on the second floor, there was a shape pressed against the glass that might have been a stack of chairs, or a folded screen, or an old iron bedstead turned on end. It didn't move. It was only furniture. Elias knew it was only furniture.

From somewhere inside the wing, muffled by brick and glass and cold, came a sound: a single sharp tock, like a knuckle on wood. Then nothing. Then, far off down the length of the wing, another.

The building settling. Old buildings did that in the cold; the brick shrank, the timbers groaned. Elias stood in the squeaking snow and listened until his ears ached with the cold, and heard nothing more, and went on around to the side door feeling foolish and not entirely warm.

Otto had set up an electric heater at the east end of the second-floor corridor, a squat orange thing glowing on the carpet by the fire door, and was crouched beside it with his big flashlight, scowling at the east stair door.

The east stair was an old service stair that ran down to the first floor and the old kitchens. It was kept locked at night from the stair side, and the door at the top, painted cream like everything else, sat in the corridor wall just short of the fire door, beside the last room. Room 12. A draft came under it tonight that you could feel on your ankles from ten feet away.

"Stairwell's not heated," Otto said, without looking up. "Never has been. On a night like this it pulls cold right off the old wing and pushes it under the door. Pipes in there'll freeze if I don't watch 'em." He patted the heater. "This'll keep the worst off. Don't let anybody trip on it."

"Who's in 12?" said Elias.

Otto jerked his chin at the family room's door, where the name card was already slotted into its holder in Noreen's tidy printing. Brekke, R. — RBD eval. Spouse to stay (cot). Below it, smaller, in the same hand: pt. anxious re: spouse. See note.

"Couple from Lakeside," said Otto. "She's the patient. He's staying over. Nice people." He paused, and looked at Elias, and seemed to decide something. "She told the receptionist he isn't her husband."

"What?"

"That's what I heard." Otto stood up, knees cracking, and picked up his flashlight. "Receptionist said he just stood there and smiled, like he'd heard it before." He went off down the corridor toward the stairs. Behind him, beyond the east stair door, something in the unheated dark went tock, very softly, and then was still.