Magnificence (21 page)

“Thank you,” and Susan put her hand out to pat the woman’s arm. “But I’m not quite ready to discuss major renovations. Ellie looks to me like she may need real care. More than we can give her. With nurses and doctors. You know, medical help on standby in case of emergencies. Don’t you think?”

“She doesn’t
want
that,” said Angela. “She doesn’t want that at all.”

“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we move you down the hall for now. OK? We can put you both in the same room, together. We’ll set up some screens up around your beds, however you want them. The music room, maybe. Then she won’t have to navigate the stairs and you can look after her.”

And Oksana would look after both of them.

“The music room,” mused Angela. “Does it have lamps? We like to read our books in the evening. We eat cookies and drink tea and I read to her before we go to sleep. Because she can only read the large print.”

“It’s a pretty spacious room,” said Susan. “And you’d have that whole wing of the house to yourself at night.”

“Can we have tents to sleep in?”

“Tents?”

“Pink tents make a nice light inside them. We could have lamps under there. And cushions. It’s the Arabian Nights,” said Angela.

They were girls in a fairy tale—children again, listening to stories. That was how Angela saw herself with Ellen. The novels about angels coming down to earth were only the beginning. Together, as they faded out, they could step onto those sweeping dunes, they could look up at white palaces and minarets, flying carpets, clouds that bore horses with wings. They would move among the genies and camels and the thieves, the women in veils, reflecting pools and curtains of brocade.

Storytime: to sit and listen and let the years pass. How many years had it been? Five was the school district’s limit, she thought she remembered. It had been longer than that now. But before she could teach again she would have to call the teaching commission, renew her credentials, maybe work for a while at a small private school.

“Ladies? I’m going to drive Ellen up to the drugstore to refill her Adalat prescription,” said Portia.

“Wait, wait. Will you come back tonight, Ellie?” asked Angela eagerly, and rose from beside Susan.

Susan watched as they walked the oldest one slowly down the hall to the door—all five of them, long skirts swaying gently. The dog called Macho trotted at their heels.

Then she composed a letter to send to Casey and to T. She was resigning from working for him, now that they were family, now that his business had changed, now that he had become a foreign traveler and a philanthropist. She was happy for both of them, she wrote, she loved what they were doing. Or the idea of it, because truthfully, she wrote, she didn’t really understand what it was they were doing, she failed to understand the venture’s actual content. The “non-timber forest products,” the “sustainable community-based harvest models,” frankly it was pretty much Greek to her. In her mind’s eye she only saw brown men with loincloths, looking quite good. She saw women who had never heard of brassieres tapping latex out of big trees.

Despite her lack of comprehension she liked the gesture, she wrote. She liked the idea of the shower that hung from a branch and was heated by the sun, she liked the all-terrain wheelchair, she even liked the non-timber forest products that stopped you from having to cut down the trees; but there was no room for her in all of that. There was no reason for her to go into the office anymore, to draw a paycheck for sitting at an empty desk and staring at the unruly stacks of his boxes—boxes whose documents were no longer relevant anyway. She was alone in the shell of what had once been his company, and she was turning the light off, locking the door behind her, and leaving.

She was still his mother-in-law, she wrote jokily, so he had better be nice to her. She hoped all was going well in Borneo. She hoped there were no more frightening incidents of violence. Here in the city, she was digging up her yard. She was fending off lawsuits with moderate success. Her house was turning into a retirement home, though it still retained its displays of ferocity. Old people roamed the halls, forgetting everything. The old people forgot their lives, but still they kept on living them.

•

None of the others were in the house when the backhoe driver came to get her, beckoning but not saying much, wiping his dripping brow with the back of his forearm and swigging from a large bottle of orange soda. It was the end of the afternoon.

She followed him out the French doors in the back, through the pool enclosure, down the path to the grove. She saw the yellow of the digger first and then a waist-high mound of dirt piled up beyond. Then she was at the hole, standing a couple of feet back because the edge obviously wasn’t stable—the soft, dug-up earth gave under her foot when she put her weight on it. She couldn’t see in: only a small round of darkness behind the hill of soil.

“But what is it?”

“It’s a tunnel. It’s got a ladder going down.”

She peered over, her stomach turning in a quick thrill.

“But no—no manhole shaft? No metal tube that goes down? That’s what Portia said there’d be.”

“No metal tube, no. The cover was just sitting there on some cement.”

“Huh.”

“Can’t see how deep it is right now, ” he went on. “Too late in the day. The sun’s low.”

“Then we should wait till tomorrow to go in?”

He fished in a baggy pants pocket for what turned out to be a soft pack of Camels, so badly crumpled the cigarettes should be broken.

“We need to get the dirt back a ways from the opening, make sure it’s not going to fall in and collapse the thing. I can’t vouch for how safe it is even after we do that, though. That shit’s not my deal. You need to get some kind of professional in to reinforce it or test it or whatever before anyone tries to go in there.”

“But can you at least move the dirt out of the way now? So you don’t have to come back? Or is it already too dark for that?”

He flicked his lighter and lit up and she asked him for one, leaned in close so he could light it for her. After they both inhaled he shrugged and then nodded and blew out his smoke. “We got another forty-five minutes easy.”

She watched as he stubbed out his cigarette and climbed back into the digger. He pulled a lever and crunched a gear or two and the yellow arm behind the cab rose off the ground:
JCB,
read the black letters on the side. It was a claw, though she didn’t know if that was the official name. She went back to the house as he started rolling, got herself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and brought it out to drink while she watched. She looked down at the dirt, at the tracks the backhoe left in the loose piles and in the sparse grass that was flattened beneath the tires; she looked up at the light in the canopy of the trees.

It was a light she’d seen a hundred times before—a light she knew from cinematography as well as from life, a certain familiar watery flutter of sun through high-up openings in the leaves. The way it slanted down, the way it wavered through the blur of green, conferred a sense of a life unmoving yet slowly filtering memories—waiting, existing without a sign of change in the long, semi-bright moment before dark.

•

When he drove the backhoe away and her front gates closed behind him it was dusk.

Jim wasn’t coming; he had stayed late at work and she would see him later at the restaurant—a famous, touristy place where the Chinese food was bland and greasy but the good tables had an unparalleled view, on a verandah high on a hillside, overlooking the valley.

She scrounged around in the kitchen drawers till she found a flashlight with live batteries and took it out to the hole in the yard. The soil had been smoothed back and she stood a few inches from the edge, pointing the flashlight down into the hole. She saw the metal rungs of the ladder and could make out, on the walls of the tunnel, a pattern of brickwork. She didn’t think it was deep; she thought she could make out the bottom, a dim, flat floor.

If the bricks collapsed, no one would know where she was. She stood still, hesitating.

In front, headlights scoped around and then cut off as a car turned into the drive. It was someone who had the gate remote. She stood with her flashlight pointed at the house, listening. A couple of car doors slammed faintly.

The old ones had returned.

T
hey left Angela with Ellen Humboldt in the kitchen, heating up microwave dinners: chicken with small cubes of carrot, Susan noticed, which resembled the rehydrated food of astronauts or recalled the gray airplane upholstery of economy flights to Pittsburgh. Angela had once been a good cook but these days she was catering to Ellen, who preferred to eat small portions of highly processed frozen entrees. Portia and the gray lady came outside with Susan—the gray lady whose name, she realized, had been told to her enough times now that she could never ask again. She would have to listen slyly to the others until she caught it.

“So where do you think it could lead?” asked Portia, carrying her own flashlight.

There were footlights along the path, but once they came to the end of the flagstones and into the dark of the trees they needed the spots of light at their feet.

“Maybe down to an old cellar, at least,” said Susan. “On the original plans there was a basement and a wine cellar. But it’s so far from the house, Jim says there’s no way.”

“It would be better to wait till morning,” said Portia.

“I’m just going to take a quick look,” said Susan. “That’s all. Just to see what it is. Then I’ll come up the ladder again.”

She knelt next to the hole, her flashlight in a back pocket, as the lades focused their beams on the first rung of the ladder. She stretched a foot back and felt for the bar.

“What if the ladder’s unstable?” asked Portia. “You could fall down and break your neck.”

“It’s not that deep,” said Susan. “Maybe twelve feet. Maybe fourteen.”

She looked up at their faces, relieved to see that the gray lady was nodding.

“Hold on to my hand till you get down a ways,” said Portia, and reached out to Susan, who grabbed it.

“Here goes,” she said, and put her weight on the top rung. It held; it was solid. Down to the second, the third, the fourth, until she could let go of Portia’s hand and grab the top rung with both of her hands. Their flashlight spots glanced off the bricks, into her face when she looked up, blinking, and then away again. A few seconds later she felt hard ground beneath the leading foot, stepped onto it and switched on her own flashlight.

“Concrete floor,” she called up as she turned. Her magnified voice echoed.

“What do you see?” asked Portia.

“A door,” she said. She stood in a kind of simple well, nothing to see but the bricks around her, the cement beneath her feet and the gray of the door.

It was metal, with a key lock. She felt a sinking disappointment but reached out anyway and grabbed the knob—gritty with dust, but it turned without stopping and she felt the mechanism click. She pulled it toward her and it gave; cold air swept in. Ahead there was a hallway with the same concrete floor and brick walls. The end of it was too dark to see, but it seemed to lead back toward the house.

“Give me five minutes,” she yelled, turning her face up so that the old ladies were sure to hear.

“I warn you, after that it’s 911,” said Portia. “Because we’re not standing here all night, and I’m certainly not coming down.”

Susan pointed her beam at the narrow hallway’s ceiling: a naked bulb with a dangling cord. That meant it was wired. She reached up and pulled: nothing.

Maybe the bulb was out, she thought, and kept walking.

The hallway turned and she faced another door—nothing but that. It was just like the first and like the first it opened. She pulled it all the way back until it scraped the wall beside her and stopped; she stepped in. And here she was, in her own basement.

It was a gray, industrial space, almost clinical. There were old pipes along the ceiling, dusty and utterly dry, bearing no beads of moisture; there was the same gray cement floor, stretched out from where she was standing. In rows stretching along the far walls, and then spaced neatly between them like library stacks, were banks of metal cabinets that looked like high school lockers, and between them aisles with enough space to walk. There was the thick smell of mothballs and also something else—a chemical scent she couldn’t identify.

It was surprisingly dry. She scoped her flashlight around again, looking for another lightbulb, and finally saw a switch on the wall. After she flicked it there was a pause, then a series of clicks and flickers and the overhead fluorescents went on, long bulbs in the ceiling, mostly out of sight beyond the tops of the cabinets. They cast a sickly, clinical light. She turned off her own. Other than the closed cabinets everywhere she noticed only one other element: sacks marked with printed words, lying along the tops of the cabinets and piled on the floor at their ends. She leaned down to the pile nearest her and read the words on the bags:
SILICA GEL MIXTURE. DESICCANT
.

Desiccant, she thought. Desiccant?