The Chair in the Hospital Hallway
And then I looked at her face.
Underneath the flat calm, she was twelve years old, standing in the front room on Pruitt Road with the grown-ups all talking above her head and nobody asking what she wanted. She had spent the whole day watching the one man she had left slip away from her, and the only thing in the building she could control was a clipboard.
I could have fought her for that clipboard. I could have won, too, maybe. A wife of thirty years is a wife of thirty years. But I knew exactly what a fight would look like to the girl on the other side of it. It would look like proof, of every awful story she had told herself since she was fourteen, that the woman her father brought home was there to take something. And her father would lie behind those doors and hear it through the wall.
So I picked the chair by the window.
I did ask for one thing. On Monday morning I found Joyce at the desk, and I kept my voice as even as I could.
“I am not asking you to break a rule,” I told her. “I am not going to make trouble for you or this hospital. But if my husband ever wakes up, and he asks for me, will someone ask him plainly who he wants to see, and write down what he says?”
Joyce took off her reading glasses and let them fall on their chain.
“Mrs. Dole,” she said, “the patient’s own wishes come first, any time he’s able to express them. That’s his right. The agent speaks for him when he can’t. That much, I can do.” She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to. “I’ll tell the night shift.”
That was all I asked. I have never been so grateful for so little.
My friend Bev Tackett drove up that afternoon with a green bean casserole and a pillow and offered to call Brother Dale, or Harold, or both. “Either one would set that girl straight in two minutes.” I told her no. If Ed woke up I would be forty feet away, and if he didn’t I would have been forty feet away, and I would not give that girl one more reason to think she was right about me. “That’s the hardest thing I ever heard anybody decide,” Bev said. “It’s not hard,” I said. “It’s just slow.”
I prayed, because it was the only thing I could do with my hands. I did not pray that Kristen would change. It would sound better if I had. I prayed that Ed would not be afraid. And on the second night, around three in the morning, I prayed for myself, which I do not do often. I said, Lord, I can’t make this right, and I can’t make myself want to. Help me stay put.
The nurse’s name was Renee Gaddis.
She was a stocky woman in her fifties with gray roots growing out and rubber clogs that squeaked a little on the tile, fifteen years on that unit. She came off her Tuesday night shift at ten past seven, and I was sitting up with my hair flattened on one side and a cold cup of coffee in my hand.