The Mortgage I Paid In Silence
I was thirty minutes into a trauma code when my daughter called.
I did not see it happen. I want to say that first, because for months afterward I punished myself for not being there, and it took me a long time to understand that not being there was not the failure. I was where I was supposed to be. I was in the Jonah Springs County Hospital emergency room on Christmas Eve, gloved up to my elbows, helping hold a nineteen year old boy together after a truck rollover out on Route 9. His name was on a wristband I will not forget, and his mother was in the waiting room in a Christmas sweater with reindeer on it, and for forty minutes he was the only thing in the world that mattered to me, the way every patient is the only thing in the world that matters to me for however long they need it. Someone has to be there on the holiday. For eleven years, more often than not, that someone has been me.
I am not complaining about that part. I chose this work with my eyes open. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over an ER on Christmas Eve between the drunk driving calls and the chest pains that are really just anxiety and the occasional true emergency, and I have come to love that quiet the way some people love the hush inside a church. It is a strange gift, being needed on the one night everyone else wants to be home. I have simply never let myself think too hard about what it costs on the other end of that gift, in a living room a mile and a half from my mother’s house, where my daughter has spent more Christmas mornings than I can count waiting for me to walk through the door still smelling like the hospital.
My name is Zelphia Rutledge. I am forty-four years old. I have been an ER nurse for two decades, and for the last eleven of them I have worked at least one shift on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, sometimes both, because I do not have a husband at home keeping a seat warm for me and because I have always told myself that the nurses with young children at home deserve the day more than I do. My daughter, Almeda, is sixteen. She has grown up watching me leave the house in scrubs on the mornings other kids are tearing open presents, and she has never once complained about it, which I now understand was its own kind of quiet grief that I did not look at closely enough.