Three Nights Under His Window

Sunday

On Sunday morning I did not go up to the doors. I went to the chapel instead.

The chapel was on the first floor past the gift shop. It was small, with six short pews, a plain wooden cross and a window of colored glass in blues and golds.

I sat in the back pew and did not say anything for a long time. Then I said, out loud, quietly, “Please let him live. And please don’t let me hate her.”

I am not sure which one I meant more.

When I came out, the chaplain was in the hallway. She was a gray-haired woman named Karen with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she asked if I wanted to talk.

I told her some of it. Not all. She listened the way good people listen, without hurrying you.

“Monday,” she said, when I finished. “Social work comes in at eight. I’ll walk down with you myself if you want.”

“Thank you.”

“Mrs. Strand,” she said. “Is the mother all right? Does she have anybody?”

I opened my mouth to say she did not deserve anybody. And then I thought of Arlene in the same sweater for two days, her hair flat on one side, sitting in that vinyl chair alone.

“No,” I said. “She doesn’t. Walt’s gone, and she’s never been one for friends. She’s just got Rick.”

That afternoon, walking back to the van, I passed Arlene’s Buick in the parking ramp. There was a pillow in the back window and a box of crackers on the dash. She had been sleeping in her car too, at least part of the time.

I stood there and looked at that box of crackers for a long time.

The third night

Sunday night the wind died down and the sky cleared, and it was the coldest night yet. The stars came out hard and bright over the hospital, and the frost came up on the van windows faster than I could run the engine.

I called the kids at nine. Emma had gone to church with Deb’s family that morning. The whole congregation had prayed for her daddy, and Pastor Neil had called her up front, and the women’s circle had given her a card with eighty dollars in it.

“For gas,” she said. “For you, Mom. They said you’d need gas.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

Caleb got on. They had finished the north quarter. He and Jeff ran it until eleven Saturday night with the lights on, and the beans went thirty-eight bushels, and he wanted his dad to know that.

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

“When you see him,” Caleb said.

“When I see him.”

He was quiet. Then he said, “Mom. You don’t have to tell me what Grandma did. But I’m not stupid.”

“I know you’re not, honey.”

“Dad would want you in there.”

“I know,” I said. “I know he would.”

I could not sleep that night. I sat with the quilt over my lap and the door cracked open a few inches to let the stale air out, and I watched the light, third from the corner.

Around one o’clock the light got brighter. All at once, like somebody had turned on the big overhead. Then shadows, two and then three of them, crossing back and forth.

My whole body went cold. I put my hand on the door handle. I had my shoes on. I was ready to run.

But where would I run? Up to the doors where they would not let me in?

So I sat there and I prayed the only prayer I had left, which was just his name, over and over.