The Whitlow Record

The ice was going out.

Mara heard it before she saw it, getting out of the car in the staff lot at a quarter to seven on Monday evening: a low, restless sound from the direction of the lake, like a crowd murmuring in a big hall, rising and falling. All winter the lake had lain white and silent below the bluff. Now, in the third week of April, a south wind had broken it into plates, and the plates were grinding against each other and piling up on the shore in heaps as tall as a man, clinking and groaning and sighing, glittering in the last of the light. The air smelled of wet earth and meltwater. Somewhere a gull was complaining.

Above the lot the old sanatorium stood as it had stood for a hundred years: four storeys of dark brick, the cupola, the long porches where patients had once lain wrapped in blankets breathing the lake air. It looked the same as it had looked on Mara's first night in September.

Except for the fence.

It ran around the east wing in a long silver line, eight feet of chain-link on concrete feet, hung every twenty yards with orange signs: DANGER. DEMOLITION AREA. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Inside the fence, on the torn-up lawn, a yellow excavator sat with its long arm folded, like a heron asleep. Beside it stood a green dumpster the size of a boxcar, empty, waiting.

On the glass of the staff door someone had taped a notice from the parent system. Mara had read it a dozen times over the past month and read it again now, because it was impossible not to. East Wing demolition will commence Friday, April 24. Asbestos survey and interior inspection Wednesday, April 22, 4:00 p.m. Staff are reminded that the east wing is closed. We thank you for your patience during this exciting transition.

Exciting. Mara looked at the long dark flank of the east wing, the tall blind windows, the old green copper gutters. Somewhere in there, past the fire door at the end of the second-floor corridor, past a stub of storage and a plain white wall, was sixty feet of building nobody had walked in thirty years. By Saturday it would be in the dumpster.

The door opened before Mara could reach for it, and Noreen came out.

She was dressed for spring already, in a lilac raincoat over her cardigan, with her knitting bag on one arm and her car keys in her hand, and when she saw Mara her whole face lit up, the way it always did. "There you are, dear. I left bars in the lounge. Lemon." She glanced past Mara at the fence, and at the yellow machine, and her smile stayed where it was, but something behind it went still. "Isn't it awful. A hundred years." She patted Mara's arm. "Well. We'll all be glad when it's done."

"Will we?" said Mara.

Noreen looked at her for a moment, kindly, carefully. Then she laughed her warm laugh and said, "Mind the ice on the steps. It's still out there in the shade," and went down to her car.

Mara walked along the fence in the dusk, the lake murmuring on the left, the dark brick on the right. The ground was soft and the grass was coming up pale green through last year's brown. Through the chain-link the east wing looked closer than it did from the lot, and older: the mortar crumbling at the corners, the ground-floor windows boarded, a crack running up the brick from a basement vent like a line on a map.

At the far corner Mara stopped. On the second floor, at the very end of the wing, there was a window different from the others: bricked up flush, a pale rectangle in the dark wall, the new brick a slightly different red. Mara had never noticed it before. It was exactly where a long room would end, if there were a long room there, facing the lake.

A car door slammed in the lot. Mara looked round. Noreen's car sat with its engine running and its lights off, and Noreen sat behind the wheel, not moving, looking up at the same window. After a while the headlights came on, and the car backed out and went slowly down the drive.

The lab was bright and warm and humming, the screens coming alive one by one, the station ready. Teddy was already there, back on nights with Mara after a long, strange winter, with his feet on the desk and his phone in his hand and a lemon bar balanced on his knee. He looked up and grinned.

"Last week of the old place," he said. "You ready?"

Mara hung up her coat and looked at the board. Twelve rooms, and only two of them booked for the week, and one of those two was Room 6, which had a name beside it that made Mara stop and read it twice. It seemed right, somehow, that it should end like this: the old names coming back, one by one, as if the building were calling in its debts before it went.

"Ready as I'll ever be," said Mara.

Outside, down on the shore, the ice went on grinding and settling in the dark, piling itself up against the land, one plate over another, like something that had been held down all winter and had finally, all at once, let go.