clothes that he had been wearing when he’d checked into the hospital for the last time.
The top nightstand drawer contained his watch, his wallet, and four paperback books. I put them in the suitcase.
I pocketed the butane lighter but left the candles behind. I never wanted to smell bayberry again. The scent now had intolerable associations for me.
Because I gathered up Dad’s few belongings with such efficiency, I felt that I was admirably in control of myself.
In fact, the loss of him had left me numb. Snuffing the candles by pinching the flames between thumb and forefinger, I didn’t feel the heat or smell the charred wicks.
When I stepped into the corridor with the suitcase, a nurse switched off the overhead fluorescents once more. I walked directly to the stairs that I had climbed earlier.
Elevators were of no use to me because their ceiling lights couldn’t be turned off independently of their lift mechanisms. During the brief ride down from the third floor, my sunscreen lotion would be sufficient protection; however, I wasn’t prepared to risk getting stuck between floors for an extended period.
Without remembering to put on my sunglasses, I quickly descended the dimly lighted concrete stairs—and to my surprise, I didn’t stop at the ground floor. Driven by a compulsion that I didn’t immediately understand, moving faster than before, the suitcase thumping against my leg, I continued to the basement, where they had taken my father.
The numbness in my heart became a chill. Spiraling outward from that icy throb, a series of shudders worked through me.
Abruptly I was overcome by the conviction that I’d relinquished my father’s body without fulfilling some solemn duty, although I was not able to think what it was that I ought to have done.
My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it—like the drumbeat of an approaching funeral cortege but in double time. My throat swelled half shut, and I could swallow my suddenly sour saliva only with effort.
At the bottom of the stairwell was a steel fire door under a red emergency-exit sign. In some confusion, I halted and hesitated with one hand on the push bar.
Then I remembered the obligation that I had almost failed to meet. Ever the romantic, Dad had wanted to be cremated with his favorite photograph of my mother, and he had charged me with making sure that it was sent with him to the mortuary.
The photo was in his wallet. The wallet was in the suitcase that I carried.
Impulsively I pushed open the door and stepped into a basement hallway. The concrete walls were painted glossy white. From silvery parabolic diffusers overhead, torrents of fluorescent light splashed the corridor.
I should have reeled backward across the threshold or, at least, searched for the light switch. Instead, I hurried recklessly forward, letting the heavy door sigh shut behind me, keeping my head down, counting on the sunscreen and my cap visor to protect my face.
I jammed my left hand into a jacket pocket. My right hand was clenched around the handle of the suitcase, exposed.
The amount of light bombarding me during a race along a hundred-foot corridor would not be sufficient, in itself, to trigger a raging skin cancer or tumors of the eyes. I was acutely aware, however, that the damage sustained by the DNA in my skin cells was cumulative because my body could not repair it. A measured minute of exposure each day for two months would have the same catastrophic effect as a one-hour burn sustained in a suicidal session of sun worship.
My parents had impressed upon me, from a young age, that the consequences of a single irresponsible act might appear negligible or even nonexistent but that inevitable horrors would ensue from habitual irresponsibility.
Even with my head tucked down and my cap visor blocking a direct view of the egg-crate fluorescent panels, I had to squint against the glare that ricocheted off the white walls. I should have put on my sunglasses, but I was only seconds from the end of the hallway.
The gray-and-red-marbled vinyl flooring looked like day-old raw meat. A mild dizziness overcame me, inspired by the vileness of the pattern in the tile and by the fearsome glare.
I passed storage and machinery rooms.
The basement appeared to be deserted.
The door at the farther end of the corridor became the door at the nearer end. I stepped into a small subterranean garage.
This was not the public parking lot, which lay above ground. Nearby were only a panel truck with the