Three Nights Under His Window

The kids

Emma was at volleyball practice at the school. She was thirteen, and she had heard the helicopter go over, and she had already guessed. When I came into the gym she was standing by the bleachers with her coach, and her whole body was shaking.

“Is it Daddy?”

I held her. I could feel her heart going like a bird’s through her practice shirt. I told her what I knew, which was almost nothing, and that he was alive, and that I was going to him.

Caleb was harder. He was seventeen, and he had been running the combine on the north quarter when it happened. Jeff had called him on the radio. By the time I pulled into our yard, Caleb was standing in the shop with his hands black with grease, staring at nothing.

“I’m coming with you,” he said.

“I need you here, honey.”

“Mom, he’s my dad.”

“I know he is.” I took his face in both my hands. He was taller than me by six inches now, and I had to reach up. “And Emma is your sister, and she’s scared out of her mind. I can’t be in two places. You can be here.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded, once, the way Rick nods.

I drove them both to Deb’s. Deb had a pot of chili on already, because that is what Deb does. She took Emma by the shoulders and steered her to the kitchen table, and Jeff came in from the field still in his boots.

“He was talking, Tammy,” Jeff said quietly, at the door. “When I got to him. He was asking about the cart. Whether he’d spilled the beans.”

I almost laughed. It was so much like Rick that I almost laughed.

That was why Arlene got to the hospital before me. She lived on the home place a mile up the road, and Jeff had called her first, because her number was the one written on the board in the farm office. She had driven straight to Sioux Falls while I was getting my children to a safe kitchen.

I have never been sorry I did it that way. I want that understood.

The hallway

So there I was, at a quarter to eight, on the fourth floor, being told I was a danger to my own husband.

“Can I at least know how he is?” I asked.

The charge nurse hesitated. “His mother set a password for information. Do you know it?”

I did not.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can tell you he’s here, and he’s being cared for. That’s all I’m allowed.”

I asked for whoever was in charge that night. She paged the house supervisor, a tired woman in a cardigan who listened to me with her arms folded.

“I hear you,” the supervisor said. “But when a family member reports a threat, we follow the safety process. We don’t decide who is lying in a hallway at eight o’clock on a Friday. Social work will sort it out Monday. I’m sorry.”

“Monday,” I said.

“Patient relations opens at eight Monday morning. You can leave them a message tonight.”

I left the message by the elevators, and I tried to keep my voice steady, and I did not quite manage it.

Then I stood in front of the ICU doors again and looked through the window. Arlene was still in the chair. She was not looking at me anymore. She was looking at her son.

I thought of how easy it would be to push past that nurse and say every true thing I had ever wanted to say to Arlene Strand.

But there were people in those rooms. There was an old man two doors down on a breathing machine, and a girl about Caleb’s age with her mother crying beside her. Somebody’s whole life was hanging in every one of those rooms.

And if I made a scene, they would call security, and security would walk me out past Rick’s door. If he could hear anything at all, the last thing he would hear of me would be a fight.

I was not going to let that be what he heard.

So I walked out on my own.