Toby Olson: Tampico

“Did she every marry?”

“No. She became a public person, a kind of matriarch. Most of the men her age had died, and she took charge of the younger men and women. She kept busy with their economy, in touch with Joaquín Sánchez on the legal-political side of things. It’s a wonder the village lasted at all. But she managed it, and it did.”

“Such a simple story,” I said, laughing lightly, knowing it was only the bones of the matrix.

“Yeah. But in the spaces,” Carlos said. “That’s where the real thing got played out.”

Renovations at the Manor were finished in the second week of September, and I received my formal invitation to the open house and lawn party on the Monday before the Saturday of the event. Carlos had called earlier with the date, on the very day I received notice that I’d passed the civil service examination and had heard from the chief that I was reinstated and could start work on the first of October.

They’d repaired the rutted road that ran in from the highway, and when I reached the last rise and entered the stone parking area I could see balloons bobbing at the railing of the wheelchair ramp leading up to the ambulance dock. Carlos was there, in the doorway in his fedora and a white summer suit, and I saw him touch his brim, then wave, as I pulled in beside the other cars, two with MD plates, Cadillacs, and a half dozen more modest vehicles lined up to the side of them. I saw the pickup truck with the PAL sticker on the back window, and knew Warren was already there.

I’d been in the Manor only once, years ago when I’d been called there officially about some disturbance or other, and I didn’t remember the layout of the place, but once Carlos had handed me a glass of champagne and I’d followed him in and across the short hallway and into the small doctor’s office, I thought I remembered being there. It was still a doctor’s office, though they’d replaced the asphalt tile with hardwood, and where diplomas had hung behind the desk was now a large painting of the lighthouse at the cliff’s edge, and I recognized the work of a local artist. There was a glass instrument cabinet against the wall, gussied up with a Mexican serape that hung down into fringe at the cabinet’s sides, and Carlos told me it was the best they could do. The room was for the on-call doctors, when they came to see the one remaining patient, and they thought they’d continue to leave it this way, even after he was gone. “For the rest of us,” he said, “if necessary.”

Once we had left the room and stepped down the hallway, I could hear voices that grew clearer when we made the turn into a broader hallway and were heading for what had been the Manor’s central spine.

“The place is shaped like a cross,” Carlos said. “The long part’s the solarium and ward, with the nurse’s station, bathroom, storage closets, and a kitchen at the end. Well, they were that, but we’ve made changes, added another crossbeam and a few rooms.”

He was whispering, though there seemed no reason for it, leaning close to my shoulder, and the wine sloshed in my glass as he brushed against me. Then we reached the small foyer at the building’s center, open doorways to the left and right, and when we turned into what had been the solarium, I saw the profile of Erica Plummer as she looked out the row of windows and down into the meadow beyond. A heavy, old man stood at her side, the face of a bulldog when he heard us and turned around, and I soon found out he was her father-in-law, a man named Frank. Erica had heard us and turned too, smiling, and she came across the room to join us, reaching up to kiss me on the cheek. She looked fine. The frosting on her hair was gone, as well as the heavy makeup, and she wore a flowery summer dress, light and loose, that allowed for a freedom of movement that was evident in her quick steps and broad gestures.

“That’s where I lay,” Carlos said, pointing to the room’s side, but I could see no evidence of a place for him. The space was decked out as a kind of game room or lounge, hardwood tables, one with a chessboard set into its laminated surface, another holding a carousel of poker chips and decks of cards. The chairs were soft recliners, end tables beside them, and a refrigerator and sink and bar, all in a dull, brushed stainless steel, lined the wall where Carlos had pointed. The room had been painted in a warm, dusty grey, and the window frames were bright white, announcing the view, and a couch had been placed before the windows, and there were bowls of dips and chips on the new ledge that covered the cold radiators below the frames.

“You had to see it before,” Frank said, as we shook hands. Then I saw him take Erica’s hand, and she smiled up at me.

“We live here now!” she said.

Her face held the pleasure of a teenager, and I thought at least I’d done something right as a private citizen detective, though I knew I’d had only a small part in her redemption, and that just at the very start of it.

“You’ll see,” she said. “Everything’s open today.”

I could see out the window beyond them, the play of wind in the yellow canopy tent near the meadow’s edge, tables under it and a few people standing and talking beside them. I saw men in white uniforms, carrying platters heavy with food, and a photographer in strange clothing working at his tripod, out under the sun to the tent’s side. Carlos touched me on the arm then, and we turned, and the four of us left the room and headed through the doorway and into what had been the open ward.

It was still open, a long graceful rectangle, but there were no beds now and what had been a low ceiling had been cut away to show the freshly sanded beams that rose in the cathedral space. Couches and easy chairs rested in various arrangements, and there were rich oriental carpets in the spaces between them, and at the end of the room a large stone fireplace had been constructed, a heavy brass fender and a peacock screen on the brick apron before it. The room had the feel of a hunting lodge or a common room in some hotel. There was even ash wainscotting along the walls, a dozen or more tall brass urns holding cattails and thin, feathery reeds.

“It’s a little weird,” Carlos said, and Frank laughed and said, “a community effort,” and Erica laughed too and said, “but we like it.”

“That’s Carolyn, and the suits are two of the asshole doctors,” Frank said, almost loud enough for them to hear.

“Easy,” Carlos said, and Erica laughed uncertainly, and when I looked over at her I saw she was blushing.

The men were small and soft, both balding prematurely, and the woman in the crisp white A-line was at least a head taller than both of them. They were standing beside the fireplace, talking, and I could see her white stockings and tennis shoes and the black pager hung at her hip and thought I could hear a faint shushing as she turned in conversation and her thighs brushed against each other. She wore a little white hat, pinned at the top of her head, holding her blond hair up, and I could see wisps of it that had fallen to brush her neck, and when we reached them she turned and grinned at us and the two doctors smiled and lifted their glasses and complimented Carlos and Frank too on the renovation. One of them was slightly fish-eyed, a pupil dancing and distorted through his thick glasses. We left the transformed ward then, glanced in at the modern kitchen, then came to the new wing, a row of rooms off a gracefully curving hallway, all the doors, but the one at the far end, open.

“This is mine,” Erica said, when we got there, a quiet and spare little room with windows looking out on a field of wildflowers and scrub oak, light flooding in to bathe shapes in the wallpaper, a geometric mural of open fans and fabric swatches like figures in a New England quilt.