She stood on the landscaped strip between the hospital and the emergency room entrance and wished for a cigarette. She had not questioned anything that morning. Jack had had a heart attack; she would go home. But now here, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do anymore. How long would she have to wait, what would have to happen, before she could leave again? Behind her in the parking lot, she heard the sound of a car door opening and closing – the woman going in.
The diner was a blur to her. She sat in a booth alone and ordered the kind of food – chicken-fried steak – that didn’t seem to exist in California.
She was thinking about this when a man directly across from her gave her the eye. She registered every detail of his appearance. It was automatic and something she didn’t do out west. While living in Pennsylvania after my murder, when she saw a strange man whom she didn’t trust, she did an immediate breakdown in her mind. It was quicker – honoring the pragmatics of fear – than pretending she shouldn’t think this way. Her dinner arrived, the chicken-fried steak and tea, and she focused on her food, on the gritty breading around the rubbery meat, on the metallic taste of old tea. She did not think she could handle being home more than a few days. Everywhere she looked she saw me, and at the booth across from her she saw the man who could have murdered me.
She finished the food, paid for it, and walked out of the diner without raising her eyes above waist level. A bell mounted on the door jingled above her, and she started, her heart jumping up in her chest.
She made it back across the highway in one piece, but she was breathing shallowly as she passed back across the parking lot. The car of the apprehensive visitor was still there.
In the main lobby, where people rarely sat, she decided to sit down and wait for her breathing to come back again.
She would spend a few hours with him and when he woke, she would say goodbye. As soon as her decision was made, a welcome coolness flew through her. The sudden relief of responsibility. Her ticket to a far-away land.
It was late now, after ten, and she took an empty elevator to the fifth floor, where the hall lights had been dimmed. She passed the nurses’ station, behind which two nurses were quietly gossiping. She could hear the lilt and glee of nuanced rumors being exchanged between them, the sound of easy intimacy in the air. Then, just as one nurse was unable to suppress a high-pitched laugh, my mother opened my father’s door and let it swing shut again.
Alone.
It was as if there was a vacuum hush when the door closed. I felt I did not belong, that I should go too. But I was glued.
Seeing him sleeping in the dark, with only the low-wattage fluorescent light on at the back of the bed, she remembered standing in this same hospital and taking steps to sever herself from him.
As I saw her take my father’s hand, I thought of my sister and me sitting underneath the grave rubbing in the upstairs hallway. I was the dead knight gone to heaven with my faithful dog and she was the live wire of a wife. “How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?” Lindsey’s favorite line.
My mother sat with my father’s hand in hers for a long while. She thought how wonderful it would be to climb up on the fresh hospital sheets and lie beside him. And how impossible.
She leaned close. Even under the smells of antiseptics and alcohol, she could smell the grassy smell of his skin. When she’d left, she had packed her favorite shirt of my father’s and would sometimes wrap it around her just to have something of his on. She never wore it outside, so it kept his scent longer than it might have. She remembered one night, when she missed him most, buttoning it over a pillow and hugging it to her as if she were still a high school girl.
In the distance beyond the closed window she could hear the hum of far-off traffic on the highway, but the hospital was shutting down for the night. Only the rubber soles of the night nurses’ shoes made sounds as they passed in the hallway.
