The Stranger in the Next Chair
“Nobody has said that to me since 1968,” Dad said. “A medic said it to me in a hole outside Cu Chi in February of that year, and I have never told a living soul that, not your mother, not you. And a kid I never met said it to me in a waiting room, as if he’d read it off my insides.”
“What did you do?”
My father looked at me. He had the bluest eyes in the county, and he did not look away from me once.
“I took his hand,” he said. “And he held it. And we sat there. And he told me it was the waiting, not the news, that does it to a man. That the waiting is always worse.” He closed his eyes. “I held that boy’s hand for four hours, Julie, and neither one of us said another word.”
That was the man who would not hold mine at my mother’s funeral.
I put my head down on the edge of the mattress, and he put his other hand on my hair, the shaking one, and for a while we did not say anything either.
Here is what two years of trying to find a stranger looks like. I know how many of you are already saying, “Why didn’t she just ask the hospital?”
I did. The next morning I asked everyone. Harvey apologized again, and told me that the volunteers, the nurses, and the front desk were all forbidden to give out a patient’s name or a visitor’s name to anyone, for any reason, and that he would lose his vest if he so much as pointed. The Voluntary Service office told me whoever the young man was, he was not a registered volunteer, and that they could not release the names of people who had come through the waiting room.
Duane, who has driven a grain truck for the co-op for thirty years, said one night at the kitchen table, “Honey, I think maybe the boy does not want to be found.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“He left the minute your car pulled in,” Duane said. “A man who wants thanks sticks around for it.” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. “Some folks do their good by leaving.”
The thing that kept me going was the chapel.
It was Chaplain Carl Eberly’s idea. I had stopped by his office the second week, still hoping. He was a big, slow-talking Lutheran with a gray beard who had been a Navy corpsman in his twenties and a VA chaplain for the last fifteen years. He listened to my whole story without interrupting once, and when I finished, he said, “Come with me.”
The chapel is a small room on the first floor, past the pharmacy, with eight pews and a wooden cross and a window that faces the one tree on the property. On a stand by the door sits a spiral notebook with a pen on a string. It is a book for prayers. He turned the pages for me. They were full of crooked handwriting, a lot of it shaking, and I read a few and had to stop.