The Chair in the Hospital Hallway
She crossed that room like a person walking across a frozen pond. She stopped by the chair. She looked at me, and in her eyes was something I had never seen there in thirty years, not a wall and not a challenge, only a question, wide open, with no bottom to it.
“I didn’t think,” she started. “I didn’t think you would…”
“Sit down, honey,” I said. “Sit by your daddy.”
She sat. She took his other hand. I stepped back toward the wall to give them the room, and Ed turned his head very slowly on the pillow and looked from her to me and back.
“Both of you,” he said. “Come close. Both of you.”
I do not know how long we stayed that way. Renee dimmed the lights. Outside the window the black was turning to the gray of early morning, and a rooster started up somewhere across the hayfield. Ed held Kristen’s hand in his right and mine in his left.
“I want to say a thing to you, Kris,” he said finally. His breath came in short pieces. “And you’ve got to hear it all the way through.”
“Daddy, you should rest.”
“I’ll rest in a minute.” His gaze held her, steady and gentle. “Your mama loved you with her whole heart. Not a day goes by I don’t see her in your face. That’s never going to change, and nobody ever tried to change it. Nobody.”
Kristen’s face broke. A sound came out of her, small, like a door giving way.
“But I got a second thing to tell you, and it’s the thing I never had the nerve to. Ask Marcia about the yellow roses.”
Kristen’s brow furrowed. “What yellow roses?”
“Ask her.” Ed’s eyes slid to me, and in them was a kind of tender, tired mischief. “I promised her I’d never tell. I’m breaking it. She’s forgiven me worse.”
Then he said the last clear words my husband spoke in this life. He looked at his daughter and he looked at me, and he said, “Take care of each other. That’s the only thing I want.”
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed, and slowed, and evened out, like a man sinking into a good sleep after a long day of work in the sun. Renee came and stood quietly at the foot of the bed. The monitor drew its green line across the dark glass, and at twenty minutes past six, with the first light coming up pink and plain over the hayfield, it drew it straighter, and then it stopped.
Kristen made a sound I will carry until I die. She dropped her head onto her father’s chest. I came around the bed without thinking and put my arms around her shoulders, and she did not pull away. She turned in my arms and held onto me as if I were the last solid thing in a flood, two women who had spent thirty years at opposite ends of one kitchen, with a good man’s hands lying quiet on the blanket between us.
Later, in the hall, Renee put my tote bag in my hands and wiped her eyes with her wrist. “Fifteen years on this floor,” she said, “and I have never seen one person sit in a hallway four nights and not say a single ugly word. Go home and sleep, Marcia. Eat something.”
An hour later, Kristen found me in the chapel on the first floor, a small room with six pews and a stained-glass window of a shepherd. I was sitting in the second pew with my hands in my lap, not praying, just sitting. She stood in the doorway a long time before she came in. Then she sat down beside me, not close, but not at the other end, either.