Us (4 page)

I drove back to the hospital in the dark, but it was almost morning. People were starting to wake up and get up and turn the lights on in the bedrooms and the bathrooms and the kitchens of their houses. There were more and more cars with their headlights on driving up and down the streets on my way back to the hospital.

The hospital parking lot was still lit up with those tall lamps. They gave off a false morning light for that soft hospital world.

There were a lot of people walking both toward and away from the hospital and their cars. There was a change of shifts at the hospital. There were doctors and nurses and other hospital workers going home to go to sleep and even more of them who had already gotten up to come back to work.

There were also all of us people who walked back and forth between the hospital and the parking lot before and after visiting hours. We looked different than the people who worked at the hospital. We were carrying things—flowers and clothes and books and food—and many of us were looking up at a particular floor of the hospital to see if the light in a particular window were on.

We nodded our heads to each other or said hello in some other quiet way. Our hair was brushed or combed. Our clothes looked neat and seemed clean. We looked as if we had slept but were still tired. We looked anxious and walked fast. We were all hurrying into the hospital to see if there had been any change in our husband or wife or mother or father or son or daughter. We wanted to know if anything had happened to them while we were at home or asleep. We wanted to get up to their hospital room before they woke up or before they died.

I carried our two suitcases into the hospital through the sliding glass doors, through the lobby, and waited for the elevator to take me back up to my wife. There were other people waiting for the elevator with me and all of us looked old. It could have been any one of us dying too.

We rode the elevator up together, but we got off at different floors. There were different floors for heart attacks and for strokes. There were different floors for organ transplants and for the cancer ward. I got off the elevator at the floor for the intensive care unit. The elevator's mechanical doors opened up onto a hallway that looked so bright that it looked as if the sun were coming up inside.

I picked our two suitcases up and carried them down the hallway toward her hospital room. I pushed the door to her hospital room open, but I couldn't really see through the darkness inside there. It seemed as if it were nighttime all the time in that hospital room.

I set our two suitcases down inside the doorway and looked down through the low light toward her hospital bed. My wife was still there, but she just looked like a blanketed shape. My eyes adjusted to the darkness enough for me to see her face, but I couldn't see that anything had changed in her face. All of the machines and the IVs were all the same as they had been when I had left. My wife was still alive, but she was still asleep.

I told her that we had seen each other in our sleep and that she had told me to come back to her. I told her that I wanted her to come back to me too. I told her that it was almost morning and that she should wake up so that we could eat breakfast together again.

I told her that I had brought her some clean clothes so that she could change her clothes and we could go back home. I told her that I had brought her some flowers for her. I asked her if she wanted me to brush her hair for her. I asked her which one of her nightgowns she wanted to wear and if she wanted to change her underwear and if she wanted to wear her housecoat over everything.

I didn't know what else to tell her or to say. I looked away from her. I looked down at the floor and then I looked back up at her face and her face had changed. Her eyebrows were somehow a little higher on her face. It looked as if she were trying to pull her eyelids up so that she could open her eyes up to look at me. Or maybe she was asking me why I had stopped talking. Or maybe she was asking me where she was and why she was there.

I answered her questions back. I told her that she was in a hospital bed and that I was standing next to it. I told her that she had had a seizure in our bed at home and that she had been sleeping ever since then. I told her that they were feeding her through IVs and that she was feeding herself with sleep. I told her that I was going to unpack our two suitcases so that I could stay there with her.

I set our two suitcases down on the empty hospital bed next to her hospital bed and opened them up. I let the locks snap open and it sounded as if we were on vacation. I unpacked our changes of clothes and put them away in a little set of dresser drawers that was next to her hospital bed. I laid a nightgown and the housecoat out over the armrest of the visitor's chair. I set her slippers down under her hospital bed. I set the reading lamp, the book she was reading, and her reading glasses out on the bedside table. I put her make-up kit inside the bathroom. I set the flowers from our front garden on the windowsill.

I lifted the back of her head up off her hospital pillow and slid her pillow from home back under her head. I unpacked the blanket, unfolded it, and laid it out on top of the other blankets that covered my wife up. I got the alarm clock out and plugged it into a wall socket. It blinked the time off and on and I set the time and set the alarm. It was almost morning and she was almost awake. I wanted to see if this would wake her the rest of the way up.

There were two hospital workers who rolled a metal gurney with another woman on top of it into my wife's hospital room. The doctors and the nurses rolled her machines and her IVs in after her and made sure that everything was plugged into the wall sockets and turned on and working right. The two hospital workers took what must have been a few of her things out of a plastic bag that was on the metal gurney and laid them out on her bedside table. One of the doctors looked at the machines, wrote some things down on her medical charts, left them in the plastic holder at the end of her hospital bed, and left the hospital room along with the rest of the doctors and the nurses.

Another hospital worker brought some flowers into that hospital room for that other woman. He left them on the table at the end of her hospital bed and then he left too.

There were nurses who visited the hospital room throughout the day to check on the machines and the IVs and to fill out the medical charts for both of the women in both of the hospital beds. Other hospital workers brought in trays of food, but these seemed to be for me since nobody else inside that hospital room could eat any food that wasn't dripping from IV bags and flowing through tubes.

Nobody else came into that hospital room for that other woman until one of her machines went into a long beep. It sounded like an alarm clock going off and the doctors and the nurses all came back into that hospital room. That other woman in that other hospital bed was dying, but they were trying to keep her alive too.

They checked her IV lines and her eyes. They tapped on the glass of the machines and they checked the plugs of the machines at the outlets. They checked her blood pressure and her heart rate. They wheeled another machine into the hospital room and shocked her with paddles on her chest that made her body seize up off her hospital bed. They pressed down on her chest with their hands and pushed the air out of her lungs. They pulled her jaw down and her mouth open and held onto her nose. They pushed air back into her mouth and her lungs with their mouths and their lungs and then let the air rise back up out of her.

That other woman wasn't really doing anything anymore and the doctors and the nurses stopped doing anything else to her. They looked at each other and looked down at the floor. One of the nurses looked over at my wife and me and walked over to pull the curtain that separated their two hospital beds into alive and dead sides across that hospital room.

I heard all the doctors and all the nurses leave the hospital room and I heard the door being eased shut. I pulled the curtain back and saw that they had left that other woman's body in that other hospital bed. I thought that she might still be alive, but they had turned off and unplugged all her machines. There weren't any beeps or numbers or lights anymore.

Two more hospital workers came back for that other woman's body. They pulled the sheets all the way down off her hospital bed so that they could pick her up. One of them picked her body up under the arms and the other one picked it up around the ankles. They lifted her body up off the hospital bed and set it down inside a long bag that they had laid open on a metal gurney. They tucked her feet into the foot of the bag and they pulled the top of the bag up around her shoulders and the sides of the bag up around her arms. They zipped the bag up and rolled the metal gurney and the bag with her body inside it out of that hospital room and away down the hallway.

One of them came back to pick up the few other things that she had with her—some worn clothes, some old magazines, some wilted flowers, and a toiletry bag. He gathered everything up, put all of it inside a plastic garbage bag, and tied the top of the garbage bag into a knot. He stripped the pillowcases off the pillows and the blankets and the sheets off the hospital bed. He cleared the food tray away and wiped the table down where the tray had been. He wiped the bedside table and the handles on the sides of the bed down too.

He made that hospital bed back up and pulled the side handles back up, but they didn't put anybody else back in that hospital bed. They were waiting to see if my wife were going to wake up and get up out of her hospital bed without dying too.

I moved into my wife's hospital room with her. I lived with her inside her hospital room and ate hospital food. I took my baths inside that hospital room's bathroom and changed my clothes inside there too. I slept in the empty hospital bed next to her hospital bed and I kept the curtain that separated our two hospital beds pulled back so that there wasn't anything else between us but her sleep.

The nurses who came into the hospital room to check on my wife started to check on me too. They would touch my shoulder to wake me up to let me know that they were there and they would sometimes bring me an extra tray of hospital food or the things that other people didn't eat or drink—those little boxes of cereal, a cup of crushed ice, a little bottle of apple juice, or a small bowl of jello with fruit inside it that was wrapped up in plastic. I didn't have to go down to the hospital cafeteria to eat. I didn't have to leave that hospital room or my wife.

The nurses let me help them with my wife too. I would hold onto my wife's body for them when they would move her so that she wouldn't get any bedsores. I would hold her body up on one side when they rolled her back and forth to change the sheets or change her clothes. They would leave me a bowl of soapy water and a hand sponge and a hand towel so that I could give my wife a sponge bath and then dry her off.

I was more of a husband when I could do these things for my wife. But my wife had started to shrink. The clothes that we changed her into were too big on her and she looked smaller and more wrinkled in them. Her chest seemed to sink in. She was breathing too much of herself out and not enough back in.

The nurses showed me how to move my wife's arms and her legs for her. I started every morning with her arms. I held onto her hands, bent her arms at the elbows, and then straightened them back out. I pulled her arms out away from her body, raised them up over her shoulders, and then brought them back down to her sides. I moved her hands back and forth at the wrist. I bent her fingers back and then curled them back in so that she would be able to hold something in her hands again. I opened her hands back up and put my hands into them. I held onto her hands to see if she could hold my hands back yet.

I lifted her leg up at her ankle and then bent her leg in at the knee. I bent her ankles up and down and back and forth. I wanted her to be able to stand up and not wobble or fall down when she woke up and could stand up and I wanted her to be able to walk again.

I got onto the hospital bed with her and pulled her upper body up until she was sitting up. I pulled her eyelids up with my thumb so that she would be able to open her eyes up again. I turned her head to each side so that she could look out through the doorway and then look out through the window. I opened her mouth up at her jaw so that she would be ready to talk again after she woke up again.

I whispered things into her ears so that she would remember how to talk and remember me and the things that we did together. I would say that we were going for a walk when I moved her legs and I would say that we were holding hands when I held onto her hands. I would tell her that she was taking a bath in our bathtub. I would tell her that she was sitting up in a chair or looking out the window or brushing her hair.

I would play the tape with the sounds from our house on it for her. I would tell her that she was getting a glass of water from the kitchen sink or that we were making lunch. I would tell her that the door latch and the sound of the door closing was the sound of her coming home. I would tell her that we had put everything down and that we were walking back down the hallway to our bedroom and that we were going back to bed and back to sleep.

My wife didn't wake up again for so many more days, but the way that she slept started to get restless. She started to move a little bit. Sometimes her body shifted during the nighttime. Sometimes I saw that her arms and her hands or her legs had moved some in the morning. One afternoon I watched her fingers twitch and on another day I watched her toes curl and uncurl under her bedcovers. Sometimes her eyelids would flutter a little bit and I would go to the end of her hospital bed and stand there so that she would see me if she woke up and opened her eyes up.