Three Nights Under His Window

Jolene

At ten after two in the morning, someone came out the side door of the hospital and started walking across the lot toward me.

It was a nurse. I could tell from the way she walked, quick and flat-footed, like someone nine hours on her feet. She had navy scrubs on and a fleece jacket zipped up to her chin, and she was carrying two paper cups of coffee, one in each hand.

I opened the van door all the way and got out, and my knees nearly went out from under me.

She saw my face, and she understood right away what I was thinking. She was a nurse. She had seen that face a thousand times.

“No, no, no,” she said, from twenty feet away. “Honey, no. He’s all right. He’s all right.”

I sat back down in the driver’s seat hard. She came up and crouched beside the open door so we were eye to eye, and she set one coffee on the dash.

Her name tag said Jolene. She was maybe fifty, with reading glasses pushed up in her hair and a little pin of a cardinal on her jacket.

“I’ve been on nights since Saturday,” she said. “I’m sorry it took me this long. I saw that hold on his chart the first night and something about it didn’t sit right.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s no paperwork with it,” she said. “Nothing from him. Just a family member’s word.”

“Every morning at report, the day nurses say the wife came to the doors again and asked how he was. Dangerous people don’t do that. And I’ve seen a gray minivan under this light pole for three nights.”

I could not say anything.

“They lightened his sedation this afternoon,” Jolene said. “He’s still got the breathing tube in, so he can’t talk. But about an hour ago he woke up. Really woke up. Knew where he was. Squeezed my hand when I asked.”

I was crying so hard I could barely see her.

“Then he started motioning,” she said. “Pointing at the whiteboard on the wall. The one where we write the date and the nurse’s name. So I took it down and held it for him and gave him the marker.”

She reached into her jacket pocket and took out her phone.

“I took a picture,” she said. “Because I thought you’d want to see it with your own eyes.”

She turned the screen toward me.

The writing was shaky, the letters big and wobbly, the way a man writes with an IV in his hand and a tube down his throat. But I would know that hand anywhere. I had seen it on nineteen years of grocery lists and birthday cards and notes on the kitchen counter that said Back by supper.

It said TAMMY.

Just my name. The first thing my husband wanted in this world when he came back into it.

And under it, smaller, crowded at the bottom of the board where he had run out of room:

parked by the light pole?

I made a sound I had never made before in my life. Jolene put her hand on my knee and kept it there.

“I asked him what that meant,” she said. “And he pointed at the window.”

He knew. Four floors up, with a tube down his throat and three broken ribs and a head injury, he knew exactly where I was. Because nineteen years ago he made me promise, and he knew I had never once broken it.

The mother

“His mother was in the room,” Jolene said, after a while.

I wiped my face on the quilt. “What did she do?”

“She read the board,” Jolene said. “And then she sat down in the chair and put her face in her hands. She hasn’t said a word since.”

Jolene stood up, her knees cracking. “I’ve called the house supervisor and the doctor on call. The patient is awake and has told us in writing who he wants. That hold is coming off tonight. You can come up right now.”

She held out the second cup of coffee.

“This was supposed to be yours,” she said. “But you might want to give it to somebody else later.”

I did not understand her then. I understood her later.