The Chair in the Hospital Hallway
“There you are,” Ed said.
His voice was barely there. It was gravel and breath.
“Here I am.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hand in both of mine and put my face down on it. “I’m sorry I took so long.”
“Hush now. You never took long. They told me you were out in the hall.”
“I was.”
“Four nights.” He closed his eyes, and opened them. “Renee told me. Said you didn’t make a peep.”
“I didn’t want to disturb anybody.”
His mouth did something that was almost his old grin. “Marcie. You’ve never in your life disturbed a soul.”
I laughed, and it came out wet. I took the reading glasses out of my coat pocket and put them on his nose, crookedly, and he said, “I can’t read nothing in the dark,” and we both laughed, as quietly as two people can in a room with a monitor beeping.
I held up the anniversary card, and he squinted through the crooked glasses.
“Thirty years,” he said.
“Thirty years on the twelfth.”
He turned his hand over in mine and held on, hard, harder than I thought he had left in him.
“I’m not scared,” he said. “I was scared on the steps. I was scared in the ambulance. But I’m not now. I just want you to know I knew it. All of it. Every day.”
“Knew what?”
“Everything you did.” He looked right at me. “The hinge. The porch light. The plate. I saw every bit of it, and I never said, and that was wrong. A man ought to say. Thank you, Marcie. For staying, and for not making her choose.”
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded, and nodded, and he patted the back of my hand with his thumb, a slow rhythm, the way he used to settle a nervous colt on his uncle’s farm.
Kristen came through the door at ten minutes to five.
I heard her first, a quick step and a catch of breath, and Renee’s low voice saying, “He’s awake, honey. He’s been asking for you, too.” And then she was in the doorway in her wrinkled blouse with sleep pushed into one side of her hair, and I was sitting on the edge of her father’s bed with his hand in both of mine.
I saw her see it.
I watched her take in the whole picture at once: me in the room she had sealed, her father awake, the chart at the foot of the bed, Beth Cook in her blazer by the sink. I saw a word start up in her throat. I think it was going to be my name, in that flat, calm voice.
I stood up.
I did not do it to challenge her. I did it because it was the only thing I knew to do. I stepped back from the bed, and I pulled the good chair with the arms around to the side nearest her father’s face, and I held it there with one hand.
“Come here, Kristen,” I said. “He’s been waiting on you.”
She didn’t move.
“Kris,” Ed said, from the pillow. “Baby girl. Come sit with me.”