Three Nights Under His Window

The guard

Around one in the morning a flashlight played across my windshield. I sat up fast, my heart pounding.

It was a security guard, an older man in a heavy black jacket with a reflective stripe. He tapped on the glass, and I rolled it down a few inches.

“You all right, ma’am?”

“My husband’s in the ICU,” I said. “I’m just waiting.”

He looked at my face, then at the quilt, then up at the hospital. He did not ask why I was not inside.

“There’s a family lounge on two,” he said. “Has a couch.”

“I’d rather be here,” I said. “I can see his window.”

He followed my eyes up. Then he nodded, like that made perfect sense to him.

“Bathrooms by the emergency entrance are open all night,” he said. “Coffee machine works if you hit the side of it. I’ll swing by once in a while. You lock your doors.”

His name tag said Jeff. That made two Jeffs looking out for my family in one day, and for some reason that was the thing that finally made me cry, alone in the van after he walked away.

Saturday

In the morning I washed my face in the bathroom by the emergency entrance and brushed my teeth with a toothbrush from the gift shop. Then I went up to the fourth floor and asked again.

The day nurse was different, a young man with a buzz cut. He was polite and firm and very sorry. The hold was still in place. The password was still the password.

“Is he awake?” I asked.

“I can’t share that, ma’am.”

“Is he alive?”

He looked at me then, a real look, and something gave in his face. “He’s still our patient,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”

I took it. I took it like a cup of water in a desert.

Arlene came out of the unit while I was standing at the doors. She was wearing the same sweater as the night before, and her hair, which she has set at the beauty shop in town every Thursday, was flat on one side.

For a second we were face to face, with nothing between us but four feet of tile.

“Arlene,” I said. “Please. Whatever you think of me. He’s my husband.”

Her chin came up. She is seventy-two, and she is a small woman, but when her chin comes up she seems taller.

“You said it yourself at Christmas,” she said. “He’s not mine anymore. Well, right now he is.”

Then she walked past me to the elevator, and the doors closed on her.