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 front lobby was bright and overheated and smelled of wet boots. The receptionist had gone home hours ago; her desk was tidied, her chair pushed in. The wall of sanatorium photographs ran along the corridor to the stairs, sepia and silver in their black frames: the building going up in 1924 with men on scaffolds; patients in wool blankets on the long porches, faces turned to the sun; a Christmas pageant; the night staff of 1951, four nurses in white caps in a tiled room, smiling.

Elias didn't stop. Elias had looked at those photographs enough times that fall to know them by heart, and lately there was something about them Elias didn't like, a feeling of being looked back at. But passing the last frame Elias noticed that someone had hung a new one at the end of the row, a small one, a photocopy of a newspaper clipping in a cheap black frame: WHITLOW EAST WING SLATED FOR REMOVAL, and a date in December, and a line about the parent health system and spring and parking.

So it was real. Otto had said so in November, and nobody had believed him.

Elias climbed the stairs with the clipping still in his eyes. At the landing the radiator was knocking steadily, working hard against the cold, and the window beside it was furred with frost.

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.