The Angel on the Roof

Plains of Abraham

Had he known everything then that he’d know later, Vann still would have called it a coincidence, nothing more. His was a compact, layered mind with only a few compartments connected. He had been married three times and was unmarried now, and this morning he couldn’t shake Irene, his second wife, from his mind. He shaved and dressed for work, tightened the covers, and slid the bed back under the sofa, all the while swatting at thoughts of Irene, the force of his swipes banging doors and walls, making him feel clumsy and off-balance. Thinking about problems only aggravates problems, but the way these random scraps of memory, emotion, and reflection flew at him — even now, four years after the divorce from Irene, with the lump of a whole third marriage and divorce in between — was strange. Vann and Irene had not seen or spoken to each other in person once in those years.

It was a coincidence, that’s all, and would have been one even if Vann had known that on this particular morning, a Wednesday in November, Irene, who was forty-eight years old and close to a hundred pounds overweight and suffering from severe coronary disease, who normally would herself be getting ready for work, was instead being prepared at Saranac Lake General Hospital for open-heart surgery. The procedure, to be performed by the highly regarded vascular surgeon, Dr. Carl Ransome, was to be a multiple bypass. It was a dangerous, although not an uncommon operation, even up here in the north-country, and had Irene not collapsed in pain two days earlier while grocery-shopping at the Grand Union in Lake Placid with her daughter Frances, the procedure would have been put off until she had lost a considerable part of her excess weight. Too late for that now.

“Jesus,” Dr. Ransome had said to the night nurse, after visiting Irene in her room for the first time, “this’ll be like flaying a goddamned whale.” The nurse winced and looked away, and the young surgeon strode whistling down the corridor.

Vann stirred a cup of instant coffee and wondered if he ever crowded Irene’s mornings the way she did his. Probably not. Irene was tougher than he, a big-bellied joker who had seemed nothing but relieved when he left her, although he himself had been almost surprised by his departure, as if she had tricked him into it.

“Good riddance,” she liked saying to Frances, her daughter. “Never marry a construction man, doll baby. They’re hound dogs with hardhats,” she said.

Vann wasn’t quite that bad. He was one of those men who protect themselves by dividing themselves. He regarded love and work as opposites — he loved to work but had to work at love. Yet, with Irene, what Vann thought of as love had come easy, at least at first. When they married, Irene and Vann had been in their mid-thirties, lonely, and still shaky from the aftershocks of belligerent first divorces, and for a few years they had managed to meet each other’s needs almost without trying. Vann was a small man, wiry, with muscles like doorknobs, and back then he had liked Irene’s size, her soft amplitude. He had regarded her as a large woman, not fat. And she had liked and admired his crisp, intense precision, his pale crew-cut hair, his tight smile.

To please her, and to suit himself, too, he had come in off the road and for a while kept his tools in the trunk of his car and worked locally. He started his own one-man plumbing and heating business, limited mostly to small repairs and renovations, operating out of an office and shop that he built into the basement of Irene’s house in Lake Placid. Frances, who was barely a teenager then, had resented Vann’s sudden, large, hard presence in her mother’s life and home and stayed away at boarding school, except for holidays, which was fine by Vann, especially since Irene’s first husband was paying the tuition.

Irene quit her job at the real estate office and kept Vann’s books. But after four barely break-even and two losing years in a row, his credit at the bank ran out, and the business collapsed, and Vann went on the road again. Soon he saw his needs differently. He guessed Irene saw her needs differently then, too. He knew he had disappointed her. He allowed himself a couple of short-term dalliances, and she found out about one. He told her about one other. He drank a lot, maybe too much, and there were some dalliances he barely remembered. Those he kept to himself. A year later, they were divorced.

Vann had known from the moment he and Irene first spoke of marriage that if he failed at this, his second shot at romance and domestic bliss, he would have to revise his whole view of life with women. This was going to be his second and probably last chance to get love and marriage right. Vann knew that much. You can’t make a fresh start on anything in life three times. By then, if a man gets divorced and still goes on marrying, he’s chasing something other than romance and domestic life, he’s after something strictly private. Vann had gone on anyhow. And now, in spite of the third divorce, or perhaps because of it, whenever he told himself the story of his life, the significance of his second marriage remained a mystery to him and a persistent irritant. Vann remembered his ten years with Irene the way men remember their war years: the chapter in the story of his life so far that was both luminous and threatening and loomed way too large to ignore.

He picked up his coffee cup and went outside and stood on the rickety, tilted porch of the cottage, where he deliberately studied the smear of pink in the eastern sky and the rippling ribbons of light on the small, manmade lake in front of him. Lake Flower. Weird name for a lake. He decided that it was going to be a fine day. Which pleased him. He’d scheduled the ductwork test for today and did not want to run it in a nasty, bone-chilling, autumn rain. Vann was field superintendent for Sam Guy, the mechanical contractor out of Lake Placid, on the addition to the Saranac Lake General Hospital. Tomorrow, if today’s test went smoothly — he had no reason to think it wouldn’t — he’d have the heat turned on in the new wing. After that they’d be working comfortably inside.

It was still dark — dark, and cold, a few degrees below freezing— when he got into his truck and drove from the Harbor Hill Cottages on Lake Flower out to the hospital, and despite his studied attempts to block her out, here came Irene again. He remembered how they used to sit around the supper table and laugh together. She had a loose, large face and no restrictions on distorting it to imitate fools and stupid people. Her tongue was rough as a wood rasp, and she had a particular dislike of Sam Guy, who, the day after Vann’s business folded, had hired him and sent him back on the road. “That man needs you because without you he can’t pour pee from a boot,” she’d declare, and she’d yank one of her own boots off and hold it over her head and peer up into it quizzically.

Vann had never known a woman that funny. Toward the end, however, she had started turning her humor on him, and from then on there was no more laughing at Irene’s comical faces and surprising words. His only recourse had been to slam the door behind him, while she shouted, “G’wan, go! Good riddance to bad rubbish!”

He switchbacked along tree-lined streets, crossing the ridge west of the narrow lakeside strip of hotels, motels, stores, and restaurants, and entered a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses and duplexes. The pale light from his headlights bounced off frost that clung like a skin to yellowed lawns, glassed-in porches, and steeply pitched rooftops. Gray strands of smoke floated from chimneys, and kitchen lights shone from windows. Jesus, family life. Which, despite all, Vann still thought of as normal life. And a proper breakfast. Vann could almost smell eggs and bacon frying. Moms, dads, and kids cranking up their day together: he could hear their cheerful, sleepy voices.

Vann had lived that sort of morning, but not for nearly fifteen years now; and he missed it. Who wouldn’t? Way back in the beginning, up in Plattsburgh, with his own mom and dad, he’d been one of the kids at the table; then later, for a few years, with his first wife, Evelyn, and the boys, he had been the dad. But family life had slipped from his grasp without his having noticed, as if, closing his eyes to drink from a spring, he’d lost a handful of clear water and was unable afterwards to imagine a way to regain it. The spring must have dried up. A man can’t blame his hands, can he?

Instead, he’d learned to focus his thoughts on how, when he was in his twenties and married to Evelyn and the boys were young, he simply had not appreciated his good luck. That was all. Evelyn had remarried happily and wisely right after the divorce, and the boys, Neil and Charlie, raised more by their stepfather than by Vann, had turned into young men themselves — gone from him forever, or so it seemed. A postcard now and then was all, and the occasional embarrassed holiday phone call. Nothing, of course, from Evelyn — his child bride, as he referred to her — but that, especially as the years passed, was only as it should be.

The way he viewed it, Vann’s main sin in life had been not to have appreciated his good luck back when he had it. If he had, he probably would have behaved differently. His was a sin of omission, then. To reason that way seemed more practical to him and more dignified than to wallow in regret. It helped him look forward to the future. It had helped him marry Irene. And it had eased his divorce from Inger, his third wife. The Norwegian, was how he thought of her now.

At the variety store where Broadway turned onto Route 86, he picked up a Daily Enterprise and coffee to go and a fresh pack of Marlboros. He was driving one of Sam Guy’s company pickups, a spruce green three-quarter-ton Jimmy, brand-new. It had been assigned to him directly from the dealer, and though he liked to pretend, at least to himself, that the vehicle belonged to him and not his boss, Vann would not have said aloud that it was his. That wasn’t his style. He was forty-nine, too old to say he owned what he didn’t. And too honest.

Besides, he didn’t need to lie: he was making payments to the Buick dealer in Plattsburgh on a low-mileage, two-year-old, black Riviera that he’d bought last spring to celebrate his divorce from the Norwegian. She’d gotten sole ownership of the house he’d built for them in Keene Valley, but she was also stuck with the mortgage, which gave him some satisfaction. His monthly payments for the car had worked out to six dollars less than his monthly alimony checks, a coincidence Vann found oddly satisfying and slightly humorous, although, when he told people about it, no one else thought it funny or even interesting, which puzzled him.

The Norwegian had gotten his previous car, a rusted-out AMC Eagle, but she was welcome to that, too. The Riviera was loaded. A prestige car. It cheered Vann to be seen driving it, and he hoped that over the summer the Norwegian, who was a legal aide for the Adirondack Park Agency in Ray Brook, had accidentally spotted him in the Riviera once or twice. He didn’t particularly want to see her, but he sure hoped that she had seen him and had noted that Vann Moore, yes indeedy, was doing just fine, thanks.

Out on Route 86 a few miles west of town, he turned right at Lake Colby and pulled into the hospital parking lot, drove to the rear of the three-story brick building, and passed along the edge of the rutted field to the company trailer, where he parked next to a stack of steel pipe. From the outside, the new wing, a large cube designed to merge discreetly with the existing hospital building, appeared finished — walls, roof, and windows cemented solidly into place. Despite appearances, however, the structure was little more than a shell. The masons hadn’t started the interior walls yet, the plumbers hadn’t set any of the fixtures or run the aboveground water, vacuum, and air lines, and the electricians were still hanging overhead conduit. The painters hadn’t even hauled their trailer to the site.

The ductwork for the air-conditioning and heat was finished, though. Three days ahead of schedule. Vann was a good super. He’d risen in the ranks from journeyman pipe fitter to foreman to super. He’d run his own business and could read drawings and engineering specs, could do estimates for new work in Sam Guy’s office in Lake Placid when the weather turned bad and everyone else got laid off. And he was a good boss, respected and liked by his men. Sam Guy regarded Vann as his right hand and had no compunctions about saying so, and he paid him appropriately. To people who wondered about Vann’s way of life, and there were a few, Sam said that if Vann hadn’t been tagged over the years with alimony payments and hadn’t lost three houses, one to each wife, he’d be living well on what he earned as a super. He wouldn’t be renting furnished rooms and shabby, unused vacation cottages, following the work from town to town across the northcountry. To Vann, however, the opposite was true: if he hadn’t followed the work, he’d not have been divorced three times.

Inside the hospital, in the physicians’ scrub room, Dr. Ransome and his assistant this morning, Dr. Clark Rabideau, the resident cardiologist who was Irene’s regular physician, and Dr. Alan Wheelwright, the anesthesiologist, were discussing the incoming governor’s environmental policies while they slowly, methodically washed their hands and arms.

Their patient, Irene Moore, dozy with sedatives, her torso shaved from chin to crotch, was being wheeled on a gurney down the long, windowless, second-floor hallway from her room to the main operating room at the end. Her twenty-year-old daughter Frances sat alone by the window in Irene’s room, flipping through a copy of Cosmopolitan. Frances was a tall, big-hipped girl, a second-year student at Saint Lawrence University, planning to major in psychology. Her straight, slate-colored hair fell limply to her shoulders, and her square face was tight with anxiety.

With her mother unconscious, or nearly so, Frances felt suddenly, helplessly alone. I’m over my head in this, she said to herself, way over, and quickly turned the pages, one after the other. What the hell am I supposed to be thinking about? What?

It was nearly daylight. In the northeast, the flattened sky over Whiteface Mountain was pale gray. In the southeast, over Mounts Marcy and Algonquin, a bank of clouds tinted pink was breaking apart, promising a clear day. The other workers were rumbling onto the job site, electricians, masons, plumbers, steamfitters, driving their own cars and pickups, while the foremen and supers arrived in company vehicles. It was light enough for Vann, smoking in his truck, sipping his coffee, to read the front page of the paper and check the NFL scores. It got his mind finally off Irene.

He folded his paper and left the warm truck, but as he crossed to the trailer, key in hand, he glanced out across Lake Colby at the pink morning sky and the dark line of pines below, and the scenery sent him drifting again. He remembered an afternoon four years ago, shortly after the divorce. He was running the public high school job over in Elizabethtown and living in the Arsenal Motel on Route 9N at the edge of town, and one Friday when he drove in from work, a large flat package was waiting for him at the front desk.

Vann knew at once that it was from Irene — he recognized her handwriting and the return address, their old Lake Placid address. He lugged the crate back to his room and lay it flat on the bed and studied it for a while. What the hell kind of joke was she playing on him this time?

Finally, he pried open the crate and removed several layers of brown paper and plastic bubble wrap from the object inside. It was a large, framed picture. He recognized it instantly, and felt a rush of fear that made his heart pound, as if he had unwrapped a bomb. It was a signed color photograph by a well-known local photographer of Adirondack scenery. Very expensive, he knew. A few years back, when they were still happily married, he and Irene had strolled into a Lake Placid crafts shop, and Vann had glanced up at a picture on the wall and had felt himself leap straight up and into it, as if into someone’s dream. It was called Plains of Abraham and the scene was of a late summer day, looking across a field of tall grasses and wildflowers toward Mount Algonquin. The golden field, wide and flat, lay in sunshine in the foreground at eye level. A dark, jagged line of trees cut across the middle, and the craggy, plum-colored mountain towered in the distance, a pure and endless blue sky behind and above it.

This was the first and the only picture that Vann had ever wanted to own. He asked the saleswoman how much, figuring he could maybe spring for a hundred bucks.

“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” she said.

He felt his ears and face flush. “Pretty pricey,” he said and moved quickly on to the maple cutting boards and ceramic bowls.

For months afterwards, Irene had teased him about it, imitating his high, thin voice and pursed lips. “Pretty-pricey,” she chirped, checking out a restaurant menu. Or speculating about local real estate: “Pretty-pricey.” But she had seen the strange, distant, pained look on her husband’s face as he gazed at the picture on the wall of the crafts shop. And now here it was before him, as if staring at him from his bed, while he stood over it, confused, frightened, stubbornly resisting awe. He no more wanted to live with that picture than he wanted to live with the woman who had sent it to him. It made him feel invaded, trapped, guilty. Just as she did. If he kept it, what was he supposed to do, write her a thank-you note? What he should do, he thought, is return the picture to the crafts shop and pocket the money himself. Serve Irene right.

He took down the large print of an antlered deer that hung above his bed in the motel room and replaced it with Plains of Abraham and stepped back to examine it. It was like a window that opened onto a world larger and more inviting than any he had ever seen. No, the picture was too personal between him and Irene and too mysterious to return for cash, he decided. He would wrap it up and recrate the thing and mail it back to her tomorrow. She’s so damned smart, let her figure out why she sent it to him.

He washed and changed out of his work clothes and went for supper and a few drinks at the Ausable Inn in Keene Valley, where he’d arranged to meet Inger, the Norwegian, whom at that time he’d not quite decided to marry, although he was sleeping with her three and four nights a week. He didn’t return to the motel until halfway through the next day, Saturday, and by then, hungover, fuddled with sex and sleeplessness, he had all but forgotten the picture. But when he entered the small room and saw the photograph hanging above his bed, he remembered everything. He sat down on the chair facing it, and his eyes filled with tears. He could not believe that he was actually crying. Crying over what? An overpriced picture of some scenery? A damned divorce? An ex-wife?

He took down the photograph and rehung the deer print. Carefully, he wrapped the picture, returned it to its crate, and stuck the crate into his closet, where it remained more or less forgotten for the entire summer. When the school job was finished and Vann moved seventy miles south to Glens Falls, where a shopping mall was going in, he lugged the picture along and stashed it in the back of his motel room closet down there. He still owned the thing, although it remained in its crate, and the crate stayed in his closet, hidden, barely acknowledged by Vann, except when one job was over and he packed to move to the next. He’d pull it out and sit on the bed and study Irene’s original mailing label as if it could somehow tell him why he couldn’t seem to get rid of the damned thing.

To Irene, her mind and body muffled by sedatives, the washed-out blue tile walls of the operating room looked almost soft, as if covered with terry cloth. The operating table, shaped like a cross, was in the middle of the room under a bank of white lights. Irene felt her body being eased off the cart by a female nurse and the two male attendants who had brought her here. They arranged themselves alongside her in a line and slid her smoothly onto the table. Her body felt like cold butter. She could see what was happening, but it seemed to be going on elsewhere, in a room beyond glass, and to someone else. Her arms were extended and strapped down, and a long, dark blue curtain was drawn around her upper and lower parts, leaving only her enormous trunk exposed.

“We’re outa here, Dale,” one of the attendants said, and Irene heard the squeaky wheels of the cart and the swish of the closing door.

Hidden behind her, Alan Wheelwright, the anesthesiologist, in a blue cotton gown and cap and white surgical mask, stood at the head of the table preparing bags of blood for transfusion, while the nurse, her flecked green eyes expressionless above her mask, swabbed Irene’s belly with orange antiseptic, covering her mounded body from hip to throat, back to front, humming as she worked, as if she were home alone painting her toenails. Then, into each of Irene’s thick, chalk white arms, the nurse inserted an intravenous catheter.

Irene saw a man’s face, which she recognized, despite the mask, as Dr. Rabideau’s, and next to him another man, taller, with bushy white eyebrows, whom she did not recognize but felt she should. There were more nurses now, and the room suddenly seemed crowded and small. A man laughed, genuinely pleased. Someone sang, I’m forever blowing bubbles.

She wondered where in the room Vann was standing. Maybe he was one of the people in the masks. She looked at the eyes; she knew Vann’s eyes. Her own eyelids seemed to be semitransparent sheets, shutting over and over, in layers. She blinked and left a film; then another. She wondered if her eyes had been shut for a long time already.

What we have here, folks, is hard labor.

Vann’s eyes were sapphire blue and crinkly at the corners, even when he wasn’t smiling, like now.

Break out the retractors, Dale. We have liftoff.

Vann was down in the dim basement of the new wing, a huge, cold, open space cluttered with cinder blocks, unused rolls of pink insulation, and stacks of conduit. It took him several tries, but finally he got the gas-powered Briggs & Stratton compressor chugging smoothly. The pump was tied to the overhead ductwork through a three-quarter-inch gate valve with a pressure gauge, which Vann had installed strictly for the purposes of the test. He had a kid, Tommy Farr, to help him, but Vann made the connections himself, using Tommy to hand him the tools as he needed them — hose clamps, screwdriver, pipe joint compound, stillson wrench. His bare hands were red and stiff from the cold; Vann didn’t like working with gloves.

The rest of his crew was scattered over the first and second floors of the wing, installing plumbing fixtures in the lavatories and running the vacuum and oxygen lines. The sheet-metal guys had been released for a new job, a supermarket in a minimall over in Tupper Lake. He figured if any blowouts or blocks in the ductwork showed up, he and Tommy could locate and fix them themselves. He wasn’t worried. It was a routine test under fairly low pressure, twenty-five pounds per square inch. It wasn’t as if the ducts were going to carry water. Just heated air from the large, dark furnace that sat ready to be fired in a shadowed corner of the basement and cooled air from the crated air-conditioning units that had been lifted to the rooftop by crane a week ago.

“All right, Tommy,” Vann said, and he stood away from the valve and handed the skinny kid the wrench. “You wanna do the honors?” Vann lit a cigarette, clenched it between his lips, and inhaled deeply and stuck his chilled hands into his jacket pockets.

“Just turn the sucker on?”

“Let ’er rip. When you hit twenty-five PSI’s on the gate valve gauge, close ’er up.”

The kid knelt down and with one large hand slowly opened the valve and released a jet of compressed air into the pipeline that led to the threaded gate valve soldered to the side of the sheet-metal duct directly overhead. That duct in turn led from the cold furnace behind them to elaborate crosses and intersections at several places in the basement, which split into smaller ducts that passed through the reinforced concrete ceiling on to the floors above. At each floor the ducts split again and snaked between and above the yet-to-be installed walls and ceilings of the new rooms and corridors. These ducts, carefully blocked and baffled at the openings, turns, T’s, and Y’s, eventually crossed out of the new wing into the old hospital and tied into its system, which carried heated air from the outdated but still adequate furnace in the basement of the main wing of the hospital to the one hundred fifty private and semiprivate rooms and wards, the scrub rooms and surgeons’ dressing rooms, the physical therapy center, the operating rooms, the emergency room, the maternity ward and nursery, and all the large and small, public and private lavatories, the janitors’ closets, kitchens, dining rooms, nurses’ lounges, computer center, labs, billing offices, administrative offices, and the gift shop and florist shop, which was closed this early in the day, and the nearly empty waiting rooms, and even into the large, glass-fronted lobby, where Frances, the daughter of Irene Moore, was at this moment strolling from the hospital, down the steps to the parking lot. Frances was on a run into town for some small present to greet her mom when she woke, something sentimental and silly, like a teddy bear, that her mom would pretend to hate, the way she always did, but Frances knew that her mom would store the gift in a secret drawer so that she could take it out and look at it whenever she wanted to realize anew how much her daughter loved her.

Something was going wrong. The first sign was a cool puff of air that carried a gray plume of ash — probably cigarette ash — from a wall register into the cafeteria on the first floor of the old wing. A janitor leaned against his mop and with some annoyance watched the gray powder float onto his clean floor.

In a laboratory on the second floor, bits of dirt fell from the ceiling vent onto the head and shoulders of a puzzled technician, causing her to jump from her seat and stare at the vent for a moment. When no further debris fell, she sat back down and resumed cataloging urine samples.

Then along one corridor after another and in the maternity ward and in several of the private rooms, on all three floors of the hospital, nurses, doctors, maintenance people, and even some patients began to see tiny scraps of paper, ashes, shreds of pink insulation, metal filings, sawdust, and unidentifiable bits of dirt fly from the registers and ceiling vents, float through the air, and land on sheets and pillows, sterilization cabinets, stainless steel counters, computers, desks, spotless equipment and tools of all kinds, dusting hairdos, nurses’ caps, starched white uniforms, and even falling onto the breakfast trays. Nurses, doctors, administrators, and staff people strode up and down hallways and made phone calls, trying to locate the cause of this invasion of flying debris. Attendants grabbed sheets and blankets and covered the newborn infants in the nursery and patients in the wards, shouting orders and firing angry questions at one another, while patients pressed their buzzers and hollered for help and brushed the floating bits of dirt and trash away from their faces, bandages, casts, and bedding. Those patients who were mobile ran, limped, and rolled in wheelchairs from their rooms and wards to the hallways and nurses’ stations, demanding to know what was happening, had there been an explosion? Was there a fire?

In the operating room, Dr. Rabideau shouted, Close her up! For Christ’s sake, close her up and get her the hell out of here!

Down in the cold basement of the new wing, Vann stood in the light of a single bulb and puzzled over the gauge on his compressor. He rubbed his cigarette out on the cement floor.

“She’s not holding any pressure at all now. Not a damn bit,” he said to Tommy Farr. “Something’s open that shouldn’t be. Or else we’ve got one hell of a blowout someplace,” he said and reached up and shut off the air to the main duct. He switched off the compressor motor, and the basement was suddenly silent.

“How we gonna find out what’s open?” Tommy asked.

“We got to check everything that’s supposed to be closed. One of you guys must’ve left a cap off one of the register openings.”

“Hey, not me! I ain’t no sheet-metal guy. I was in the trailer counting fittings all day Friday.”

“I know, I know. I just need somebody to blame,” Vann said smiling. He clapped the kid on the shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get the drawings from the trailer. We’ll go room to room and check every vent until we find the missing cap. Then we’ll cap ’er and try again.”

Vann had done his job the way he was supposed to, and his men had done theirs. He could not have known what had occurred beyond the thick fire wall that separated the new wing from the old, could not have known that over there, when he finally shut his compressor down, the debris had instantly ceased to fall. And he could not have known that seconds after Doctors Ransome, Rabideau, and Wheel-wright in a panic had closed their incisions and rushed her from the operating room, his ex-wife Irene had gone into cardiac arrest in the recovery room. They had managed to get her heart pumping again and her blood pressure back, but an embolism had formed in her left carotid artery and had started working its way toward her neck. Shortly after noon, a blood vessel between the left temporal and parietal lobes of her brain burst, and Irene Moore suffered a massive stroke and immediately lapsed into a coma.

The only surgeon in the area capable of removing the clot from her brain was driving over from Plattsburgh. They hoped to have the operating room cleaned up and ready for him by early evening. With her heart condition, however, and the trauma inflicted on her by the interrupted surgery this morning, and the likelihood of still more embolisms, the anticoagulants, and now the stroke, “I’m sorry, but it truly does not look good,” Dr. Rabideau told Frances.

She did not know where to turn for consolation or advice. She was the only one left in the world who loved her mother, and her mother was the only one left who loved her. Frances’s father, Irene’s long-gone first husband, had his new life, a new wife and new kids out in California. Irene’s second husband, Vann, had his new life, too, Frances supposed. He and Frances had never liked each other much, anyhow.

A little after lunch, the supervisor of maintenance in the hospital found Vann on the second floor of the new wing, still tracing the overhead ducts with Tommy Farr. The supervisor, Fred Noelle, was a man in his mid-sixties who had worked for the hospital since high school. He knew every inch of the old building, every valve, switch, pump, and fitting, and had been an especially useful consultant when they were designing the addition. Cautiously, Fred asked Vann if earlier this morning he might have done something in the way of connecting the heat and ventilation ducts of the new wing to the ducts of the old. Tied them together, say, and then opened them up, maybe. Fred knew there were lawsuits coming. A lot of finger-pointing and denials.

“No,” Vann said. “Why? You got problems over there?”

“Have we got problems? Yes, we’ve got problems. We’ll be cleaning the place up for the rest of the year.” He was a balding, heavyset man with a face like a bull terrier, and he looked very worried.

“What the hell happened?” Vann asked him.

Fred told him. “They got crap on patients, in the labs, all over. Even in the operating rooms.”

Vann was silent. Then he spoke slowly and clearly, directing his words to the kid but speaking mainly for Fred Noelle’s benefit. “It couldn’t have been us. There are baffles between the two systems, blocks, and they don’t come out till after we get everything installed and blown out and balanced and the whole wing is nice and clean and ready for use. Then we open it to the old system. And that won’t be till next summer,” he said, his voice rising. He knew he was telling the truth. He also knew that he was dead wrong.

Somewhere, somehow, one of the baffles between the two networks had not been installed by his men, or else had been left off the drawing by the mechanical engineer who had designed the system for the architect. Either way, Vann knew the fault was his. This morning, before cranking up the compressor, on the off chance that one of his sheet-metal guys had screwed up, he should have checked the baffles, every damned one of them. No one ever did that, but he should’ve.

He placed the drawing on the floor and got down on his hands and knees to examine it. “See,” he said to Fred. “Take a look right here. Baffle. And here. Baffle. And here,” he said, pointing to each of the places where the ducts crossed through the thick wall between the two wings of the hospital.

But then he saw it. No baffle. The mechanical engineer had made a terrible mistake, and Vann, back when they’d installed the ducts, hadn’t caught it.

Fred got down beside him, and he saw it, too. “Uh-oh,” he said, and he placed his fingertip where a barrier should have been indicated and where, instead, the drawing showed a main duct flowing through the old exterior wall and connecting directly to the heat and ventilation system of the hospital. A straight shot.

Tommy squatted down on the other side of Vann and furrowed his brow and studied the drawing. “Bad, huh, Vann?”

Vann followed Fred Noelle out of the structure and across the parking lot and through the main entrance of the hospital. They went straight to the large carpeted office of Dr. Christian Snyder, the hospital director. Fred made the introductions, and Dr. Snyder got up and shook Vann’s hand firmly.

“We think we got this thing figured out,” Fred said. Dr. Snyder was a crisply efficient fellow in his early forties with blond, blow-dried hair. He wore a dark, pin-striped suit and to Vann looked more like a down-state lawyer than a physician. Fred unrolled the drawing on Dr. Snyder’s large mahogany desk, and the three men stood side by side and examined the plan together, while Fred described Vann’s test and how it was supposed to work and how it had failed.

“You’re the subcontractor for the sheet-metal work?” Dr. Snyder said to Vann.

“No. No, I’m just the field super for him. Sam Guy, he’s the sub-contractor.”

“I see. But you’re responsible for the installation.”

“Well, yes. But I just follow the drawings, the blueprints.”

“Right. And this morning you were testing the new ductwork, blowing compressed air through it, right?”

“Yes, but I didn’t realize…”

Dr. Snyder cut him off. “I understand.” He went around his desk, sat down heavily and picked up a pencil and tapped his teeth with it. “Fred, will you be able to attend a meeting here this evening? Seven-thirty, say?”

Fred said sure, and Dr. Snyder reached for his phone. Vann picked up the drawing and started to roll it up. “Please, leave that here,” Dr. Snyder said, and then he was speaking to his secretary, “Celia, for that meeting with Baumbach, Beech, and Warren? Fred Noelle, who’s in charge of maintenance, he’ll be joining us.”

He glanced up at Vann as if surprised to see him still standing there. “You can go, if you want. Thanks for your help. We’ll be in touch,” he said to Vann, and went back to his telephone.

Outside in the lobby, alone, Vann pulled out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips.

“Sir! No smoking!” the receptionist barked at him, and he shoved the cigarette back into the pack and made for the door.

On the steps he stopped and lit up and looked across the road at Lake Colby and the pine trees and hills beyond. There was a stiff, cold breeze off the lake, and it was starting to get dark. Vann checked his watch. Three thirty-five. Off to his left he saw a woman with her back to him, also smoking and regarding the scenery. Vann couldn’t remember when he had done anything this bad. Not at work, anyhow. In life, sure — he’d messed up his life, messed it up lots of ways, most people do. But, Jesus, never at work.

The woman tossed her cigarette onto the parking lot below and turned to go back inside, and Vann recognized her — Frances, his exwife’s daughter. He realized that he was glad to see her and blurted, “Hey, Frances! What’re you doing here?” Startled, she looked up at him, and he saw that she was crying. “Wow, what’s the matter, kid? What’s happened?” he said, and took a step toward her. She was taller than he remembered, a few inches taller than he, and heavier. Her face was swollen and red and wet with tears. “Is it your mom?”

She nodded yes, like a child, and he reached out to her. She kept her arms tight to her sides but let him hold her close. He was all she had; he would have to be enough.

“Come on inside and sit down, honey, and tell me what’s happened,” Vann said, and with one arm around her, he walked her back into the lobby, where they sat down on one of the blond sofas by the window. “Jeez,” he said, “I don’t have a handkerchief.”

“That’s okay, I got a tissue.” She pulled a wrinkled tissue from her purse and wiped her cheeks.

“So tell me what happened, Frances. What’s wrong with your mom?”

She hesitated a second. Then she inhaled deeply and said, “I don’t understand it. She’s in a coma. She went in for open-heart surgery this morning, and something happened, something went wrong, and they had to bring her out in the middle of it.”

“Oh,” Vann said. “Oh, Jesus.” He lowered his head. He put his hands over his face and closed his eyes behind them.

“There were complications. She had a stroke. The doctors don’t think she’ll come out of it,” she said, and started to cry again.

Vann took his hands away from his face and sat there staring at the floor. The beige carpet was decorated with the outlines of orange and dark green rectangles. Vann let his gaze follow the interlocking colored lines from his feet out to the middle of the room and then back again. Out and back, out and back. There were six or eight other people seated in the sofas and chairs scattered around the lobby, reading magazines or talking quietly with one another, waiting for news of their mothers and fathers, their husbands and wives and children in the rooms above.

“Do you think maybe could I go and see her?” he said in a low voice.

“I don’t think so. She’s in intensive care, Vann. She won’t even know you’re there. I saw her a little while ago, but she didn’t know it was me in the room.”

Slowly Vann got to his feet and moved away from Frances toward the receptionist by the elevator. He wanted to see Irene. He could say it to himself. It didn’t matter if she knew he was there or not, he had to see her. He needed to fill his mind with her actual, physical presence. No fading memories of her, no tangled feelings of guilt for things done and undone, no dimly remembered hurts and resentments. Too late for all that. He needed to look at her literal existence, see her in the here and now, and take full-faced whatever terrible thoughts and feelings came to him there.

“I need to see my wife,” he said to the receptionist. “She’s in intensive care.”

The woman peered at him over her horn-rimmed glasses. “Who’s your wife?”

“Irene. Irene Moore.”

He signed the book that the woman pushed at him and stepped quickly toward the elevator. “Third floor,” she said. He got into the elevator, turned, and saw Frances seated across the lobby looking mournfully at him. Then the door slid closed.

At the nurses’ station outside the intensive care unit an elderly nurse pointed him down a hallway to a closed door. “Second bed on the right. You can’t miss her, she’s the only one there.”

The room was dark, windowless, lit only by the wall lamp above the bedstead. Irene’s body was very large; it filled the bed. Vann didn’t remember her as that big. She made him feel suddenly small, shrunken, fragile. There were IV stands and oxygen tanks and tubes that snaked in and out of her body and several thick black wires attached to cabinet-sized machines that blinked and whirred, monitoring her blood pressure, heart, and breathing.

For a long time he stood at the foot of the bed peering through the network of tubes and wires at his ex-wife’s wide, round body. She was covered to her neck by a sheet. Her thick arms lay limp and white outside the sheet. A tube dripped clear liquid into a vein at one wrist. On the other wrist she wore a plastic identification band.

No wedding ring, he noticed. He looked down at his own left hand. No wedding ring there, either. Irene, you’re the one I loved. He said the words silently to himself, straight out. And I’m only loving you now. And, Jesus, look at what I’ve done to you, before I could love you.

What’s that love worth now, I wonder. To you or me or anybody?

He felt a strong wind blow over him, and he had to grab hold of the metal bedframe to keep from staggering backwards. The wind was warm, like a huge breath, an exhalation, and though it pummeled him, he wasn’t afraid of it. He turned sideways and made his way along the bed. The wind abated, and he found himself looking down at Irene’s face. There was a tube in her slightly open mouth and another in one of her nostrils. Her eyes were closed. Somewhere behind her face, Irene was curled in on herself like a child, naked, huddled in the darkness, alone, waiting.

Vann slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and stood with his feet apart and looked down on the woman he had been able to love for only a moment. He stood there for a long time, long after he had ceased to love her and had only the memory of it left. Then he turned away from her.

When he emerged from the elevator to the lobby, he quickly looked around for Frances and found her seated in a far corner of the room, slumped in a chair with her head on one arm and her eyes closed as if asleep. He sat down next to her, and her eyes fluttered open.

“Did you see her?” Frances asked.

“Yeah. I did. I saw her.”

“She didn’t know you were there, did she?”

“No. No, she didn’t,” he said. “But that didn’t matter.”

“Where’re you going now, Vann? From here.”

“Well, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d wait here, Frances. Keep you company. If you don’t mind, I mean.”

The girl didn’t answer him. They both knew that Irene was going to die, probably before morning. Like a father, Vann would wait here with her and help the girl endure her mother’s death. He thought of the big framed picture that Irene had sent him and that he had carted around with him these last few years from one job to the next, wondering what to do with the thing. Plains of Abraham. What kind of name was that, anyhow? The picture was of a mountain. Maybe he would give it to Frances. He’d just give it to her and say that her mother had bought it for him years ago because she knew he loved it, and he hoped that Frances liked it enough to hang it where she could see it every day, and he could see it sometimes, too, if she’d let him.

People coming into the lobby were brushing snow off their shoulders and hats. Vann looked out the window at the parking lot and the lake. It had been snowing for a while, and the cars in the lot were covered with powdery white sheets. Sam Guy would fire him, no doubt about it, and both Vann and Sam would be lucky if no one sued them. Vann would go back to working locally out of his car, like he’d done when he first married Irene. He was coming in off the road, too late, maybe, to make anyone happy, but here he was anyhow, trying.