Chapter 42 Claire
Claire
At half past one in the morning, the taxi pulled up in front of the hospital. Claire grabbed a handful of cash from her wallet and thrust it at the driver.
“Se?ora, esto es demasiado.”
He tried to count out change for her, but she waved him off, already flinging open the car door.
“Keep it!” she shouted as she ran toward the hospital entrance.
But when she got there, Claire slammed into the glass door.
What? Why wasn’t it opening?
She looked for a handle somewhere, but no, these were sliding doors, ones she’d never even thought about on previous visits because they’d just parted as soon as she approached.
Claire tried to read the words etched into the glass. There was a range of times—8 a.m. to 8 p.m. —which corresponded with visiting hours. She didn’t understand the rest, though, so she pulled out her translation app to scan it.
For Emergencies After Hours, Please Go to the Emergency Department →
She sprinted toward the emergency room.
There was a security guard at the entrance.
Why was a guard there? The main entrance never had a guard posted out front. Was it just because it was the middle of the night?
“Buenas noches. ?Necesita ayuda, se?ora?” Good evening. Do you need assistance, miss?
“Sí,” Claire said. “Quiero…” She had to think word by word to say things coherently in Spanish, and that was incredibly difficult since the only thing she could hear in her head right now was Please be okay, Matías, please be okay, please be okay.
“Quiero visitar a mi novio,” she finally said. I want to visit my boyfriend.
“Disculpe, ahora no se puede.” He shook his head. “Puede volver a las ocho.” He pointed to his watch, then held up eight fingers.
“Eight o’clock? That’s six and a half hours away, I can’t wait until then!” Claire tried to look behind the guard, hoping she could get the attention of the woman stationed at the intake desk. “Um…es importante. Now…?ahora!”
He shifted to block her view of the emergency room and crossed his arms. “Se?ora. No.”
“But it’s an emergency!”
“ ?Usted tiene una emergencia? ” He pointed at Claire. Do you have an emergency?
Yes, she wanted to say. My boyfriend’s soul is trying to return to his comatose body, and I need to get inside to see if he succeeded or…
“Mi novio está…” But Claire didn’t know how to explain any of that in Spanish, nor did she want to use her phone to do it, because it wouldn’t make sense anyway, would it? Soledad and Aracely had reacted to Claire’s revelation about Matías’s soul in the way any sane person would. Why would this guard be any different? Part of his job, Claire realized, was to keep hysterical people like her away from the patients who actually needed care.
She clearly was not going to get into the hospital through the emergency room.
“Um, okay. Gracias,” Claire said, backing away.
The security guard eyed her suspiciously.
She held up eight fingers. “ A las ocho . I will come back a las ocho .”
He nodded once before she turned and went back toward the main hospital entrance.
But there must be another way in. Even though visitors could only be at the hospital for twelve hours of the day, the hospital itself had to run 24/7. They had patients to care for and to feed and clothe.
There’s got to be a back entrance for food and linen deliveries, Claire thought.
—
The loading dock at the back of the hospital was in full swing. As with other organizations, the wee hours were the best time for deliveries to be made because it interfered less with daytime business. Crates of milk cartons and vegetables were being unloaded from a massive refrigerator truck, and a laundry truck was backed up to a separate loading bay.
In the bustle of work being done, Claire grabbed a patient gown from a rolling rack of clean linen and dashed in through the laundry door.
Inside, she ducked between two giant hampers of dirty clothes—holding her nose because the hospital gowns were soiled in a very different way from ordinary clothes—and quickly slipped the clean gown on. Claire tucked her purse into her waistband against her stomach. An actual patient wouldn’t be walking around with a purse. But hers was small enough that if she hunched and let the gown’s fabric hang in the front, it could just look like a stomach bulge.
Dressed “appropriately” for the hospital, she darted in and out between the hampers, toward a set of double doors that seemed to lead into the main corridors of the hospital. Twice, someone almost caught her, but she dove and found cover behind adjacent rolling shelves and bins.
Finally, Claire made it through the double doors. She branched off that hallway as soon as possible and found an elevator.
It got her to the third floor, but the elevator was on the other end of the building from Matías’s ward. Claire was halfway there when a nurse exited one of the wards and frowned at Claire.
“?No debería estar en su cama?”
Claire had no idea what the nurse had said, but Claire had already prepared her story while she was sneaking through the hospital. “Ejercicio,” she said. Exercise . She had seen how the nurses encouraged the ambulatory patients in Matías’s ward to walk laps in order to get some exercise during their hospital stay. The nurses beamed at the patients slowly shuffling around, because they understood how hard it was for any of them to move, and how much easier it would’ve been to just stay in bed.
“Es un poco tarde,” the nurse said to Claire. That one, she understood: It’s a bit late.
“Un poco más,” Claire said. A little more. She pointed toward Matías’s ward at the end of the corridor to indicate her destination.
The nurse hesitated and thought it over.
“Vale,” he said, motioning her on.
Because what was he going to do anyway if Claire was already on her way back where she belonged? Make her stop exercising so he could go get a wheelchair for her? That would defeat the nurses’ goal of encouraging their patients to move on their own whenever they could.
“Gracias,” Claire said. “Buenas noches.”
—
Once in Matías’s unit, she ducked down so the nurses wouldn’t see her from behind their desks in the middle of the ward. Claire wouldn’t be able to pull the “patient out for a stroll” trick here because the nurses would either recognize her from her visits or not recognize her but know that she wasn’t one of the patients under their care. Claire removed her shoes and shuffled in her socks past ten different rooms before she reached Matías’s.
But then she hesitated. Her heart battered her ribs, and her whole body shook as she crouched on the linoleum.
Please be all right, Matías. Please please please be awake and smiling…
She didn’t want to open the door.
But she had to.
Claire took in a shaky breath, turned the handle, and slipped inside.
“No…”
Matías’s skin was gray and slack, his eyes sunken. He had lost so much weight, his chest hollow and collarbones sharp, no longer resembling the athletic man she’d just made love to. Even the beeping of the machines sounded more resigned than when Claire was last here.
“Oh, Matías.” She tiptoed to his side.
“I’m sorry.” Claire brushed some of the matted hair away from his forehead. She ran her fingers across his jawline, a rough, patchy beard now.
She wished she could climb into bed with him. Instead, she lay her cheek down lightly on one of the sole spots on his chest that wasn’t covered in bandages or monitor leads. “I am so, so sorry.”
“For what?”
Claire jumped back.
“Why…are you…sorry?” he rasped.
She let out a small squeak because Matías had cracked his eyes open. Just enough that she could see the glimmer of gold.
“Matías!” She flung himself onto him.
“Agh…gentle, churri.” He spoke slowly because his broken jaw was secured with wire.
“Oh god, sorry, sorry!” She immediately backed away.
“Please…stop…saying…you’re sorry,” he said, even though he was wincing from the pain she’d just caused.
Tears streamed down Claire’s face. “You’re awake.”
He coughed, and she rushed to his side. “Do you need water? Or do you want me to prop a pillow behind you?”
Matías grimaced and touched his ribs. “No…I’m okay. More than okay. Because of you.”
The machines in the background beeped, but the heartbeats were steadier now. The oxygen canula hissed, and Matías asked Claire to loop it off his head.
Tears spilled down her face. “You’re back,” she said. “You’re here. You’re—”
“Alive,” he said.
“Alive,” she echoed.
Matías tried to smile, but the jaw wiring made it only a wisp of a smile. Still, it was enough.
“Come here, churri . ”
She leaned against the plastic railing of the bed and held his hand. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
“Never,” Matías said softly, his voice still gravelly from disuse. “You were there for me even when I was lost and didn’t know who you were. And because of that, I had something to hold on to—Every word. Every look. Every time we almost touched.
“You slowly let me remember who I was, and you helped me return. And…even though everything hurts now, it will get better. I know that as surely as I love you.”
Her tears fell onto his bare chest, then rolled off, soaking into his gown.
“Matías, before you left New York—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. I found the ring, and I knew you were going to propose if I came with you. I was so relieved that I already had an excuse to cancel. I just…I thought we were too different.”
“Yes, but—”
“Please, let me finish.”
“I’m sorry.” Matías stroked her hand.
Claire took a deep breath. “But after everything that’s happened since, I get it now. We’re perfect together because we’re different. You push me to think outside of the ordinary and to try things I wouldn’t otherwise contemplate. And I get to be the eye of your cyclone, where there is predictability and order, so that you can whirl around as long as you need to, but still have a place to come home to.”
“You are the other half of my orange,” Matías said.
“What?” Claire laughed, through her tears.
“It’s a saying in Spanish— mi media naranja . In English, you just say that someone is your better half. But in Spanish—”
“We’re halves of the same orange.” Claire smiled.
The door flung open, and Claire threw herself over Matías to protect him.
But it was Abuela Gloria creeping through with her walker, followed by Soledad and Armando, then Luis and Aracely, who was shooing away the night nurse who was trying to tell them that visiting hours were over. Claire wondered briefly if they had also snuck in through the laundry delivery entrance, but then she remembered that Soledad could talk her way through any rules when her suffering son was involved.
“?Mati!” Soledad sobbed. Claire stepped back as his mother rushed in to hug him.
“?Ay, Matías! ?Has despertado!” You woke up! Aracely covered her mouth as she started crying.
Armando and Luis also approached, unable to speak, eyes red.
“Os dije que ella lo iba a lograr,” Abuela Gloria said. She was the first of the family who seemed to notice Claire was there. Not that there was a problem with that. Matías had just woken from a coma. Of course they should pay attention to him.
But whatever Abuela Gloria had said to them, they all looked over at Claire at the same time.
Soledad scrubbed away the tears from her face, even though more fell to replace them. “Claire, lo siento, we are very sorry. We treated you badly. We lost our faith. We prayed for a miracle, and when it arrived, we did not believe it. Thank for saving my son.” She burst into sobs, and Claire started crying, too.
Aracely walked around the bed and wrapped her arms around Claire, pulling her into one of her long, soft embraces. “I am sorry, Claire. I hope you can eventually forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Claire said into Aracely’s shoulder. “You were protecting Matías because you love him. He is lucky to have a family full of such love.”
“Sometimes our love is also smothering,” Aracely said wryly. She held on to Claire for a moment longer before she let go. “But you learn to live with it. Right, Matías?”
“They never gave me a choice,” he said, and that broke the last of the sadness in the room, because everybody laughed—one part relief, one part happiness, and one part semi-delirious exhaustion.
But there was still something left for Claire to do.
On the bedside table, there was a spool of blue medical tape the nurses had been using to attach Matías’s IV tubes to his skin. Claire reached over and picked it up.
She tore off a piece a few inches long and folded it lengthwise over itself several times, so it was a long, thin strip. Then she looped it into a circle and used another small piece of tape to stick the ends together.
“I am glad you’re here to be part of this,” Claire said to his family, who instinctively ceded the space next to Matías’s bed to her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Algo muy importante.”
Something very important.
“Matías,” Claire said, getting down on the linoleum on one knee. She held up the ring of blue tape. “I have lived most of my life without you, but I wasn’t really living until we met. You are the chaos to my order, the color to my black and white.
“These past eight days have been the worst time I’ve ever been through, but they were also some of the best because I see you—and us—clearly now. I am better when I’m with you, and I like to think that maybe you’re better with me, too.”
He nodded, his eyes glistening.
“So, I know you were going to ask me,” she said, “but I’m going to do it first, because let’s face it, I like being in control.”
He laughed.
“Matías de León—mi media naranja—will you marry me?”
A tear rolled down his cheek.
“Yes,” Matías said. “Without a doubt, yes. From my body to my soul, all of me belongs to you, Claire.”
She took his left hand in hers and slid the blue ring onto his fourth finger. Then she turned his palm up and kissed it, slowly.
“If we’re ever parted again, Matías, just press your lips here and imagine your kiss meeting mine…And I’ll be right there with you.”