Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
Ellie is back in a cold, slippery chair. Only this time, she’s in a different room in another part of the hospital, away from where her mother sleeps. Jonah’s body looks like it’s sprouted new limbs. There are cords and tubes connected to every part of him—his mouth, his arms, his chest, just everything. Nearby, a half dozen ominous-looking machines hum and beep. Ever since the accident, his eyes have remained closed. She doesn’t know what this means.
A swath of white gauze taped to her own forehead, she’s watched for the last twenty minutes as nurse after nurse has hurried into the room doing things to Jonah’s body that she fails to understand. She doesn’t need to question them to know that everything they do is urgent. Ellie can feel it in the way they move (fast) and the way they speak (direct). She doesn’t even know if she’s supposed to be in here, if visitors are allowed in this hall. She hasn’t asked. So far, no one has told her to leave.
For now, Ellie sits and watches and waits.
There’s nothing else she can do right now except wait.
A dream. The two of them at home in their bed. The sunlight through the window. The feeling of soft cotton. Morning. Both of them are smiling.
Her chin hits her chest, waking her from her unintentional sleep. Another team of nurses, another new doctor at their helm. Ellie quickly wipes the dribble from her chin, rubs her eyes.
“What?” Ellie asks, her voice panicked. Frantic. It doesn’t matter. She knows they’re used to reactions like this. “What is it?” She can tell by the looks on their faces that either something has changed or nothing. It’s impossible to say which scenario is worse.
No one answers. They don’t have an answer to give.
There is not a clock in the room. Not in the hallway. Not anywhere.
Time—precious time—keeps moving forward while also standing still.
Ellie needs to leave. That’s what one of the nurses said a few minutes ago. They need the space. They have work to do. Also, what is your relationship to the patient? Are you his ...
Ellie is lost. Why are hospitals always so confusing? They’re like white, sterile mazes made of infinite wings, all of them looking almost exactly the same. But they’re not. Each wing, really, is built around an emotion, a particular mood it evokes. Panic in the ER. Worry and despair in the ICU.
Ellie keeps walking, her back throbbing from the impact of the crash, from everything—she needs to ask one of the nurses for something she can take for the pain—hoping to find her way. Outside the windows in the corridors that connect each different section of this place, she sees the night sky is black. Inside here, though, everything is illuminated by bright-white light. Artificial. Fake. And yet as real as it comes.
She stops. Her breath catches in her throat, like it’s trapped there by a powerful net. Up ahead, a familiar wing—the only one she really knows. Beyond the automated glass doors that lead into it is a security desk. An officer with a gun on his belt sits and drinks a to-go cup of coffee and listens to the quiet hum of music.
She doesn’t move at first, just stands absently in the middle of the hallway and watches through the glass doors, waiting. For what, she doesn’t know. Maybe to see if a younger version of herself in her slippers and pink hospital gown, her lower back and abdomen trembling from the contractions, walks past.
“Are you looking for something?” the officer asks, this man with a gun whose job it is to protect all the new mothers from having an intruder come and take their precious cargo away, all those women too early in the game to understand that one day those sweet babies will stand up and walk away all on their own.
“N-no,” Ellie stammers. Through the glass doors, Ellie sees a woman slowly walk by, carting an IV pole at her side, as her partner walks next to her and rubs her back. Right now, Ellie’s back aches, too. She breathes deeply, lets herself feel it. Really feel it. This pain that is also, strangely, a reminder of love. Of life. “I—I’ve already been here. A long time ago.”
The officer nods— Nothing to worry about here —and looks down at his desk.
Her one unruly back muscle still contracting, Ellie turns to walk away.
One step. And then another.
She has to let go of this part. She has to keep going.
She knows it’s time.
“Dad?”
Frank is asleep in his chair. He holds Bunny’s hand, which is already bruised from the IVs. He startles at the sound of his name and quickly lifts his head, like a puppet on a string.
“I’m up! I’m up!” he proclaims. He lifts his reading glasses, which sit crooked on the tip of his nose, onto his thin bed of hair. “You’re back. Is it visiting hours already? What happened to your head?”
Ellie lifts a hand and touches the gauze. She’d nearly forgotten it’s there. “I got into an accident,” she explains.
“Another one?” He attempts to bolt from the chair, but it takes more than one attempt. He’s not so young anymore. “Nurse! Nurse! My daughter! She’s been in an—”
Ellie holds out a hand, a signal for him to stop. “They already know, Dad. They’re the ones who gave me the gauze. I’m fine.” She motions for him to sit back down. “Really.”
Frank heaves out a heavy breath and follows her orders. His body settles into the chair. Behind him, Ellie leans herself against a windowsill.
“How’s she doing?” Ellie asks.
In the bed, Bunny is still asleep. The skin on her face appears as thin and crinkly as old paper. Her chest rises and falls, but the movements look shallow.
“Her fever’s come down a little bit,” Frank answers, and adjusts her blankets. “She’ll be all right.” He gently pats her black-and-blue hand. “She’s a tough cookie.”
In the hallway, a group of nurses walk past, talking. Ellie can overhear from the pieces of their conversation that float into the room that their shift has ended.
“What happened, Dad?” she asks. “Why did Mom show up on my porch the way she did on Monday?”
Frank’s lips settle into a subtle, downward slope, not quite a frown, but close. “I knew she wasn’t going to leave, Ellie,” he says. “Not really. Not for long.” He adjusts his posture. “That’s why I was so shocked—so hurt—that day in church.” All around them, the machines spit out a symphony of white noise. “I didn’t believe she’d ever really go through with it. I just went along with things because I knew—I thought—she just needed time to process some stuff.”
“Like what, Dad?” Ellie asks, confused. “What did she need to process?”
“The truth, Ellie,” Frank begins, “is that your mother has been in horrible grief for a while now.”
“Grief?” Ellie poses.
He sighs. As he does, Ellie wonders if maybe this is why the air in these places feels so stale. It’s all the heavy emotions people here are constantly expelling.
“Your mother just ... saw a different life for you, I think,” he states. “Before you even say it, I know what you’re thinking,” he continues, even though Ellie herself isn’t quite sure of what’s happening inside her head. “You girls these days, you can do anything. You can be anything. And you should,” he insists and then points one long, crooked finger in the air to prove he means it. “You should have every choice available to you and have the whole world at your fingertips.” He stops himself for a second, considering his ideas. “But sometimes, Ellie, I think your mother feels that people get all wrapped up in the notion that their life has to be so big, so earth shattering, that they forget how significant a simple and quiet life can be, too. How meaningful love and commitment are in such an unpredictable world.” Frank exhales through his nose. “To your mother, marriage is the most important thing out there, which is more or less how I knew that, no matter what, she wouldn’t go through with any split between us.” His chest rises and falls. “Maybe her sentiments are old fashioned.” He shrugs. “Maybe not.”
Beneath Frank’s soft touch, Ellie sees her mother’s fingers start to move. She wonders if Bunny can hear him, which of the two women in this hospital room his message is truly intended for.
“Marriage isn’t for everyone,” Frank acknowledges. “It’s hard. And it takes a lot of work. More work and fine-tuning than most people can imagine.”
“Then why do it, Dad?” she asks, genuinely wanting to know. “Why get married? Why stay married? If a person can have or be anything, why choose that? Especially if it’s so difficult?”
Frank softly squeezes Bunny’s hand. As he does, one of her machines releases a different beep. Something inside her has shifted. Ellie considers if it’s the pure and simple fact that she feels her husband here with her.
“Because in a world where everything is always changing, sweetheart,” Frank says, “where nothing is certain, sometimes it’s nice to have at least one thing that feels constant. To know that wherever you are in life, wherever your journey might take you, when you have this other person at your side, you’ll always feel like you’re at home.”
On her walk back to Jonah’s room, Ellie sees that one of the small hospital cafés is open. She has no idea of the time, only the fact that it is so late that it has become early again. She buys herself a coffee and takes a seat at a table.
“Mind if I join you?” a familiar voice asks from behind her.
She turns to peer over her shoulder and finds Jack in his white medical coat. Ellie gestures at the empty seat across from her. “I’d say I’m surprised to see you here, but ...”
Jack sits. His peridot eyes land on his tan coffee. He takes a sip, looks up, and meets Ellie’s gaze. “I saw your mother’s name come up in the system when I checked in for my shift.”
Ellie feels her body pull forward, inching across the table, desperate to know what secrets he’s read. “And?”
“She’ll be all right, Ellie,” he assures her. “I popped into her room a little bit ago and checked on her. She’ll likely need to stay for a few days so they can make sure her sodium levels remain balanced, that she doesn’t get dehydrated or anything like that. But she’ll be okay.”
A rush of relief pulsates through her.
“It looks like you’ve had a tough night yourself,” Jack points out, nodding at the gauze on her forehead. “I saw your name when I logged in, too.”
Her hands are wrapped around the paper cup so she can feel a bit of warmth in this cold place. “I was in an accident earlier,” she explains. Jack’s blond eyebrows lift in question. “With—with my friend,” she offers. “He’s upstairs. He’s—not doing so great.”
“What’s his name? I’ll check on him for you.”
“Baker,” she says. The name she knows is meant to belong to her, too. “Jonah Baker.”
Jack drops his head toward one shoulder. “Your friend?” he questions, clearly reading some message that’s written all over her face. “From yesterday?”
Her eyes close, like curtains. “It’s so ...”
“Complicated,” Jack adds, completing her thought.
Ellie’s eyelids part back open. “Yes,” she agrees.
Jack takes another sip of his coffee. He spots someone beyond Ellie’s shoulder—a colleague?—and waves. “You’ll never believe who I ran into after I saw you yesterday.”
“Hmm?” she questions, as if she does not already know.
“Kristin,” he says, his lips trapped somewhere between a smile and a frown.
“And?”
His shoulders rise as he inhales. A moment passes before he lets it all back out again. “We had a cup of coffee,” he explains. “We talked a little.” He sighs again. “We can just never get our timing right together, though.” His face shifts, and he looks at some indefinable spot on the ceiling. “It turns out she just got out of a relationship this week.”
“I’m sorry about that,” she states.
He flips his hands upward. “What can you do?”
Outside the café’s windows, the shades of darkness in the sky are starting to slowly change. Midnight. Navy. Denim. There’s no light yet, but it’s coming.
“Do you ever wonder, Jack, what might have happened if we never dated?” She lets herself laugh a little. “Or if we never dated again, I guess.”
Nearby, a few more hospital employees stroll in, ready for this new day and whatever traumas await them to begin.
“I have sometimes,” he admits. He delays the next part, his chest moving fluidly beneath his white coat. “I hope you won’t take this personally,” he says, and she nods to communicate to him that whatever he’s about to tell her is okay. “It’s just, sometimes I’ve wondered if I made the wrong choice. If I should have gone rushing to her back then, moved home instead of staying here. If maybe we would have gotten married, had kids, made a whole life for ourselves together, you know?”
“I do.”
He shakes his head at himself. “I don’t know. It’s my own fault. My parents got divorced when I was a kid, and, well, I guess I’ve been a little funny about commitments and relationships ever since then,” he admits. He smiles at a different colleague.
“I didn’t know that about you,” she admits. “You never once told me that in all the months we dated. Not that I can remember, at least.”
Jack’s cheekbones rise in a smile. “It’s hard when you’re young to talk about hard things,” he explains. “It’s hard to talk about hard things when you’re old, too, but here we are,” he says, and they both laugh. “Anyway, my dad was a great guy. He just—he made some mistakes along the way.”
“Was?” Ellie echoes, pointing out Jack’s use of the past tense.
Jack wraps his hands around his carry-out mug. Maybe he’s looking for a source of warmth, too. “He died a few years ago,” he explains.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Jack says, even though, of course, it’s not. He takes one final sip. “Anyway, whoever knows what’s possible when it comes to love, right? Maybe it’ll still happen one day. It’d certainly make my mother happy.” He laughs again, thinking of this woman—his mother—who, in the time they spent together in their younger years, Ellie never once met. “No matter how successful I am in my career, all she ever asks is, ‘Johnnie, have you met a nice girl yet?’”
Ellie’s face scrunches into the shape of a question. “Johnnie?”
He chuckles. “Right. It’s this silly Irish Catholic thing,” he explains. “I have absolutely no clue why, but if you’re an Irish American kid and your first name is John, at a certain point in your childhood, everyone just starts calling you Jack.” A corner of his mouth lifts. “Well, everyone except for my mother.” He waves a hand. “Shelia,” he says. “She’s a real hoot.”
The pieces all fall in front of Ellie like dominoes. The cream puffs. The trace of a New York accent. “Shelia,” Ellie echoes. “Your mom.” In any given instant, the world can feel both infinitely vast and comfortably small. “And where is she now?”
“Probably at home, looking at some dating app for me,” he jokes. “She still lives in Westchester,” he explains. “She always said she’d eventually retire to someplace warm, but she never did.” He shakes his head. “I guess she wanted to stay up north, so I wasn’t alone, even though we live an hour from each other.” He smiles. “Who knows? Moms, right?”
“Right.” Ellie stuffs a paper napkin into her empty cup.
But she’ll get there, Ellie thinks to herself. Which means you must have gotten yourself somewhere good, too.
“Speaking of which,” Ellie says, “I’d better get back. Not that I know which room to check in on first.”
Jack nods his empathy. “I promise I’ll keep an eye on both of them for you, Ellie.”
“Thank you.” Out in the hallway, more people begin to appear, the quiet shuffle of feet on cold, hard flooring. “What time is it?” Ellie asks.
Jack flips his wrist to look at his watch. “A little after four,” he says. “Still a bit of a stretch before the sun rises.”
She pushes out her chair and stands. “It was nice running into you these last few days, Jack.”
He smiles. “It was nice running into you, too, Ellie.” He pauses, processing a thought. “Not literally, though,” he says with a laugh. “We probably could have done without that little fender bender, huh?” He rubs his temple, a physical sign that he still feels terrible about this event. “I’ll get on the phone with my insurance company on Monday,” he assures her. “We’ll get it all squared away. Okay?”
She nods. “Okay.”
Outside the window, the sky remains mostly dark, though some new hues begin to yawn themselves to life.
“Take it easy, Jack,” Ellie says and then takes a step.
“Thanks, Ellie,” he says. “You too.”