The Chair in the Hospital Hallway
“You can wait in the lobby with the vending machines, Marcia, like everybody else who isn’t blood.”
Kristen said it on the fourth floor of Cutler’s Ford Memorial Hospital, at ten minutes past six on a Sunday evening, in front of a charge nurse, a janitor with a mop, and an old man in a wheelchair waiting on the elevator. She said it quietly. My husband’s daughter has never needed to raise her voice. She learned young that a flat, calm voice cuts cleaner than a loud one.
Forty feet behind her, through a set of double doors with a red button on the wall, my husband Ed lay in a bed with a machine breathing part of every breath for him. We had been married thirty years that very month. The anniversary card was still in my tote bag, in the envelope I had licked shut on Friday.
“I’m his wife,” I said.
I said it the way you would tell somebody what time it was. I was not trying to win anything.
“I’m his health care agent,” Kristen said. “It’s on file. I’ve given the unit a visitor list. It’s family only. I’m sorry you’re upset.”
She did not look sorry. She looked like a woman who had been awake since before dawn and had found one thing in the whole terrible day that she could hold in her hands and control. I understood that even then. I want you to know I understood it, because the rest of this story would be a different story if I had not.
The charge nurse, a tall woman named Joyce with reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked at the floor tiles. She had stood in a lot of hallways while families came apart, and she was not enjoying this one.
“Mrs. Dole,” she said, very low. “I am so sorry. The agent’s list is what I have.”
I stood there with my purse on my shoulder and Ed’s reading glasses in my coat pocket, the ones he would want when he woke up, because Ed cannot read a menu without them and he likes to read the menu.
I did not argue. I did not cry, not there. I asked Joyce where the waiting room was, and I walked down the hall to a window that looked out over the parking lot and a hayfield beyond it, gone silver under the lot lights, and I sat down in a vinyl chair the color of old mustard.
I sat in that hallway for four nights.
It did not end the way I expected. There is a girl in this story I misjudged for a long time, and a nurse I will pray for until I die. But first you need to know how a woman ends up on the wrong side of a double door from her own husband, and why I kept my mouth closed.
My name is Marcia Dole. I am sixty years old. I live outside Cutler’s Ford, Kentucky, in a white house with green shutters on a gravel road, a mile past a burley barn that has leaned a little further toward the creek every year since I was a girl. I ran the cafeteria at the elementary school for twenty-six years. Ed ran a crew for the state road department for thirty-eight. He retired with a bad knee, a good pension, and a plan to put in a bigger garden.
I married him in October of 1996. I was thirty. He was thirty-six, and he was a widower with a fourteen-year-old daughter.