9. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
Hospitals at night are a particular kind of hell.
I woke to fluorescent lights and the beep of machines and a nurse who smiled too brightly while she adjusted my IV. My head was pounding. A tight band circled my forehead, a bandage, I realized, when I tried to touch it.
“Easy there,” the nurse said. “You’ve got a pretty good cut on your head. Twenty-three stitches. Try not to move around too much.”
“The baby,” I said. Or tried to say. The words came out slurred and strange.
The nurse’s face changed, a flicker that might have been concern. “The doctor will be in to talk to you soon. Just rest for now.”
“Please.” I grabbed her wrist. My hand was weak, my grip barely there, but I held on anyway. “I’m pregnant. Is the baby okay?”
She hesitated. Then: “Your vitals are stable. The doctor will have more information. I’m going to let your husband know you’re awake.”
My husband.
Right. Wade, my emergency contact. The man who’d ended our marriage three hours ago and was now, apparently, here in this hospital, waiting to see if I survived.
The irony was almost funny.
The nurse left. I lay there, staring at the ceiling tiles, trying to make sense of the fragments. The car, the light, the impact. Blood in my eyes and hands on my stomach and please, please, please let the baby be okay.
The door opened.
Wade looked like he’d aged ten years. His face was gray, his eyes red-rimmed, his hair sticking up in the way it did when he’d been running his hands through it obsessively. He was still wearing the same clothes from the gym, had he really not changed? Had he been here the whole time?
“Lu.” His voice broke on my name. “Oh God, Lu.”
He was at my bedside in three steps, his hands finding mine, his forehead dropping to rest against our joined fingers. I felt him shaking.
“I’m sorry,” he was saying. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. I told you not to drive, I should have stopped you, I should have-”
“Wade.”
“I should have taken your keys. I should have physically blocked the door. I never should have let you-”
“Wade.”
He looked up. His eyes were wet.
“You’re crying,” I said.
“Of course I’m crying. I thought you were dead. I got the call and they said there’d been an accident and I thought-” His voice cracked completely. He pressed my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles, and I felt tears drip onto my skin. “I thought I’d lost you.”
I stared at him.
This was the man who’d stood in our living room three hours ago and told me, in that cold flat voice, that he chose Dolores. That we should end it. That things weren’t the same anymore. And now he was here, crying into my hospital bed, shaking with relief that I was alive.
It didn’t make sense.
None of it made sense.
“I’m okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. “They said it’s mostly bruises.”
“Mostly bruises.” He laughed, a broken, hysterical sound. “Your car is totaled. The whole driver’s side is caved in. The paramedics said if the impact had been six inches to the left-” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“But it wasn’t.”
“But it wasn’t,” he repeated, like he was still trying to believe it.
He was still holding my hand. Still pressing it to his mouth like he needed to feel my pulse against his lips to believe I was real.
I pulled away.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Lu-”
“Don’t pretend you care about me.”
“I’m not pretending. I do care.”
“You ended our marriage tonight. You told me you chose her. And now you’re here crying at my bedside like-”
“Like what? Like I’m terrified? Like I’ve been sitting in that waiting room for two hours imagining you dead?” His voice was rising. “I made a mistake, Lu. I know that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t-”
“Don’t what? Love me?” I laughed, and it hurt, my ribs, my head, everything hurt. “You don’t get to say that anymore. You lost that right when you threw away our marriage for her.”
He flinched like I’d hit him.
“The doctors say you’re going to be okay,” he said, changing the subject with obvious desperation. “No internal bleeding. Nothing broken. They want to keep you overnight, just to be safe.”
“Good for them.”
“I talked to the nurse, and the cop in the hall. They said-” He stopped. Swallowed. “They said you’re lucky to be alive.”
“Lucky.” The word tasted bitter. “Is that what this is?”
“Lu-”
“Why are you here, Wade?”
“Because you’re my wife.”
“No, I’m not.” I held up my left hand, bare now, the ring somewhere on our living room floor. “Remember? We should end it. Your words.”
The pain on his face was almost satisfying. Almost.
“I didn’t mean-” He stopped. Started again. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. The things I said-”
“Were true, apparently. Since you said them.”
“I was scared. I was-” He ran his hands through his hair again, that nervous gesture I knew so well. “Something happened, and I panicked, and I said things I didn’t-”
“Stop.” I held up my hand. “I can’t do this right now. I can’t listen to you make excuses.”
“They’re not excuses. I’m trying to explain-”
“I don’t want explanations. I want you to go.”
He froze. “What?”
“Go.” The word came out harder than I intended. “Go, Wade. You made your choice. Live with it.”
“Lu, please. I can’t just leave you here.”
“Yes you can. You were pretty good at leaving me a few hours ago.”
“That’s not-”
“Go.”
He stood there watching me with the eyes that had promised me forever in a boathouse in Nantucket, and they still worked on me, which was deeply unfair. I made myself look away.
“I’ll stay in the waiting room,” he said finally. “In case you need anything.”
“I won’t need anything from you. Not anymore.”
He didn’t argue. Just nodded, his jaw tight, and turned toward the door.
He was there all night.
I knew because I could hear him, his footsteps in the hallway, his voice talking to the nurses, the occasional creak of a chair as he shifted position in the waiting room.
Every time I started to drift off, I’d hear a chair scrape or a cough, proof that he was there, just outside, keeping vigil over a wife he’d already decided to leave.
It was infuriating.
It was heartbreaking.
It made me want to scream.
Morning came slowly. Gray light seeping through the hospital blinds. The beeping of machines. A new nurse checking my vitals, offering me water, telling me the doctor would be in soon.
I was staring at the ceiling, counting the tiles for the hundredth time, when I heard his phone ring.
The sound carried through the door. His ringtone, the default one, because he’d never bothered to customize it, and then his voice, low and urgent, answering.
I couldn’t hear the words. Just the tone, the way his voice dropped and softened into what sounded almost like tenderness.
The door opened. Wade stepped inside, phone still in his hand, and I saw his face before he could school it into neutrality.
“Is it her?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Which was answer enough.
“It’s six in the morning, Wade. And she’s already calling you.”
“I should have turned it off. I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.” I turned my head away from him, staring at the wall. “Get out.”
“Lu-”
“I mean it. Get out. And never come back, Wade.” My voice cracked on his name. “You’re dead to me.”
He stood there for a long moment. I could feel him looking at me, could feel the weight of everything he wasn’t saying pressing against the silence.
“I’m glad nothing happened to you,” he said finally. His voice was thick, wet. When I glanced at him, I saw tears on his cheeks. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
I didn’t respond.
“Take care,” he whispered. “Please. Take care of yourself.”
And then he was gone.
The door closed behind him with a soft click. I heard his footsteps retreating down the hallway, heard the elevator ding, heard the silence swallow him whole.
I didn’t cry.
I’d run out of tears.
The doctor came an hour later, a tired woman with kind eyes and a clipboard full of information. She told me about my injuries (concussion, bruised ribs, twenty-three stitches, nothing broken). And how lucky I was (there was that word again, lucky, like any part of this was lucky).
She told me the police believed the man who’d hit me had been drunk, a stranger who ran a red light, already in custody. Wrong place, wrong time. A random, senseless thing.
And then she told me about the baby.
“The pregnancy is stable,” she said, watching my face carefully. “We did an ultrasound while you were unconscious. No signs of trauma. Everything looks normal.”
I pressed my hand to my stomach. Still flat. Still unremarkable. Still holding the only piece of Wade I was going to keep.
“The father-” the doctor started.
“There’s no father.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“There’s no father. It’s just me.” I looked at her, daring her to argue. “I want it noted in my file that I’m not accepting visitors. Not him, not anyone.”
“Mrs. Buckley-”
“That’s not my name anymore.”
I held out my hand. The doctor frowned, confused.
“I need a pen,” I said. “There’s a form I need to sign.”
She handed me one. I pulled the intake form from the bedside table, the one I’d only half-completed last night, when I was still groggy and bleeding and not sure if my baby was alive.
I found the signature line.
And I signed it with my maiden name.
Luisa Erickson.
The doctor looked at the form. Looked at me.
I stared back.
“Luisa Erickson,” I said. “That’s who I am now.”