Three Nights Under His Window

Room 412

The hallway looked different at night. Quieter. The machines beeped soft and steady behind every curtain.

Rick was lying in the bed with his head raised a little and his face swollen and bruised down one side. There was a tube in his mouth taped to his cheek, and lines going into both arms, and a brace on his neck.

He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

His eyes found me in the doorway. They followed me all the way across the room. When I took his hand he squeezed it so hard it hurt.

“Hi, honey,” I said. “I’m here. I was right outside. I was under the light pole. Just like you said.”

His eyes filled up. He could not talk, so he squeezed my hand three times, which is what he has done since we were dating. Three squeezes. I love you.

I squeezed back three times.

Then I told him about the beans. Thirty-eight bushels on the north quarter. Caleb ran it till eleven at night with Jeff Halvorsen. Rick closed his eyes, and the corner of his mouth around that tube moved like it was trying to smile.

Arlene was in the corner chair. She had not moved. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the floor, and she looked older than I had ever seen her look.

I did not say anything to her. Not yet. That night belonged to Rick.

The chapel

The doctors took the breathing tube out on Monday morning. His throat was raw and his voice came out a croak, but the first whole sentence he got out, after asking for ice chips, was for his mother.

“Mom,” he rasped. “You go home now.”

Arlene’s face crumpled. She stood up and went out of the room without a word.

Rick looked at me. “Find her, Tam,” he whispered. “Please. She’s got nobody but us.”

I found her in the chapel.

She was sitting in the second pew from the front under the colored window, in the same sweater, three days now. Karen the chaplain was sitting beside her with one hand on her back.

I sat down next to Arlene. We sat there a long time, not talking. The light came through the blue glass and lay across our laps.

“I sat in this same pew eleven years ago,” Arlene said finally. Her voice was small. “When Walt was up on the fourth floor. Same floor. I think it might have been the same room.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Nobody knew. I never told anybody.” She twisted the strap of her purse. “They let me sit with him four days. Then the doctor came in and said there was nothing left to do. And I sat right here and asked God why He’d take the only person I had.”

She was crying now, quietly, the way women her age cry, without making any noise.

“And then Friday, Jeff Halvorsen calls and says Richard’s been flown to Sioux Falls. And I’m driving up that same highway, past that same grain elevator in Madison, and I’m thinking, not again. Not again. I can’t do it again.”

“Arlene.”

“Let me finish.”

“When I got up there, he was all mine for an hour and a half. Just mine. Like when he was little and had the croup and I’d sit up with him all night. Nobody to tell me to step back. And then I saw you through that window, coming down the hall, and I thought about Christmas. About what you said.”