Stammos had said rather than vague stereotypes, but I had not endeared myself to my faculty colleagues as a result.
I continued to scan the room, but I didn’t see anyone else I knew, except a tall student working as a waiter. For campus cops, I knew there would be a duty roster for a big reception like this. Today, big gatherings were by definition security risks, and not just because free food and drinks were being served. The fact that the university hospital was spending so many millions on a fancy new building when health care services for the surrounding poor communities were almost non-existent was generating a lot of ill will and even protest, witness what was happening outside. I didn’t see any of the university teaching faculty I knew either. Not surprising though. The hospital circle and the teaching university circle did not often overlap and I doubted they’d socialize.
Besides, this was in the nature of a fundraising event and even the highest ranks of academics today don’t command the salaries they once did. I imagined the tickets for this event were in the neighborhood of $500 each. As Tom’s guest I hadn’t paid my own way, but I guessed the cost from the fact that both crab and shrimp were on the trays of the circulating waiters.
The tense guy was still hissing in Tom’s ear, so I turned slowly around to look at the shape of this building in the making. It was kind of interesting to see the bones of the thing before the actual plaster smoothed over all the innards. At the opposite side from the stairs Stammos had approached was another, obviously temporary staircase that led up to the first tier of the floors that surrounded the atrium. A crowd was gathering at the foot of the stairs and they were donning their hard hats. Probably a guided tour. Suddenly, Tom took my arm, startling me out of my reverie. The agitated man had disappeared. Tom looked where I was looking.
“I’d like for you to see this place, but not like that.” Tom nodded his head in the direction of the tour group, and I could see that Mandel Griffiths was preparing to lead it. I agreed. That was an item on the evening’s program to be avoided at all costs.
“You’ve seen it? When?” I asked.
Tom shrugged.
“I came through with the Dean last week. This operating room thing is a fiasco. How can we even think of doing Level One Trauma and have so few operating rooms? We have our operating suite cut in half, but have our own private elevator. It’s insane.”
Tom’s face was grim as he gazed at the upper tiers of the exposed building, obviously contemplating riding up and down in his private elevator with no place to operate on patients.
“Come on,” I said. I drew him toward the place where I’d seen Stammos head to another set of stairs, nearly hidden behind a roped off area with small machinery and tools. I gestured in that direction.
“Show me. Give me a private tour.”
I didn’t have to tug him very hard. We deposited our wine glasses, still mostly full, on the tray of a passing waiter, walked over to the roped off area, and quickly ducked under. Nobody stopped us, so we continued on up the stairs.
When we’d climbed halfway, I felt a tug on my cape.
“Let’s say hello as long as we’re up here,” said Tom, drawing me back down a step and into his arms.
“Let’s,” I agreed, leaning into his warm lips. This evening was improving by the second. When we freed ourselves, I took a second to retie his bow tie that had come completely undone. I felt a sudden pang for my dead husband, Marco. How many times had I done that for him? I turned, confused and curiously ashamed. I tried to shutter my face, smoothing it out so the pain wouldn’t show and hurt Tom. Even touching Tom had, at first, elicited the same jolt of guilt, but I was overcoming it. Gradually, I guessed, intimacy with Tom would seem normal. That would be the ultimate betrayal then. I shivered and tried to focus on climbing unfinished stairs in heels in the semi-dark.
“The surgery suite is on the third floor,” Tom said quietly as we continued our climb. I wondered if he’d seen my sudden discomfort. I could feel his eyes on my back.
We took a quick peek out of the stairwell as we turned to go up the next fight, but we didn’t stop. When we got to the third floor, Tom took my hand. Used coffee cups and fast food wrappers littered the floor along with loose nails and stray boards. This area had not been cleaned up for the tours, obviously. We probably shouldn’t be up here at all, but as long as we stayed near the outside where there was some light, I figured we were okay.
“Where exactly will your clinics be?” I asked, peering around the shadowy space that was punctuated by pillars that would contain not only the heating and air conditioning ducts, but with the addition of the extensive wiring and gas pipes that hospitals need. Duct work also radiated out overhead, looking like the intestines of the building, exposed for their own surgery.
Tom pointed over to the left and I could dimly see rooms framed in lumber that would eventually be the small examining rooms.
“But this is what I really wanted you to see,” Tom said, holding on to my hand and leading me toward the east end of the building.
I gasped in delight. There was framing for a huge, two-story picture window. The height of the building raised the window level above the surrounding buildings. Several blocks away, Lake Michigan stretched out like a silvery-gray invitation to infinity. If you stood back about twenty feet from the window, the line of the lake seemed to meet the bottom of the window and draw you toward the gray horizon. The sense of expanse was immense.
My respect for the reedy-little architect guy rose if he was indeed the one who’d designed this. There was a serenity to this design that might be of comfort to those who would spend anxious time in this lounge in the future, whether a patient awaiting treatment or a concerned family member or friend. I tried to empty my mind and let it move toward that horizon.
Tom came up and stood next to me and silently we just looked at the silver water blending into a silver sky.
The silence was broken suddenly, horribly, by a scream and then a sickeningly flat thud coming from somewhere behind us. Tom and I started. I know my mind had been so far away that it took me a minute to react. We turned and as another scream reached us, we started to pick our way as fast as we dared toward the direction from which the sounds had come. It was from somewhere in the middle of this floor. Even now we could still hear muffled groans and cries that were becoming more faint.
“Watch it!” Tom yelled at me as I darted ahead of him. “The elevator shaft is somewhere right near here.”
Since we were further into the center now, we’d lost a lot of the light. The sounds were growing even fainter, but I could still hear them. Clearly we were getting closer. I continued to speed up and I stepped on a small piece of pipe and almost fell. Tom grabbed my arm to steady me and took out his cell phone with the other. He turned on a spotlight app on the cell and a beam of light showed us more scattered pipe and lumber on the floor. And then I saw a huge black column with an even darker square in it about twenty feet ahead.
“I think that’s where the noise is coming from. Let’s take a look.” My voice was loud in the cavernous space. We held hands and advanced as rapidly as we could, stepping over or around the debris.
We got to the dark square open on one side of the concrete shaft that went up to the ceiling. The opening, where the elevator doors would be, was blocked by a single two-by-four railing nailed to sawhorses on either side. I kneeled down at the edge, oblivious to the sequins that scattered as the long dress was rubbed by the rough concrete floor. Tom shone his cell phone beam into the hole. It was the elevator shaft, and about
