Us (2 page)

They pulled the gurney blanket up to her neck to cover her up, but they left her arms out. It looked as if she were holding them out to me.

One of them moved me out of the way with his arm. They both rolled the metal gurney with my wife on top of it out of our bedroom, back down the hallway, and out the front door. They carried her down the front steps, rolled her down the front walk, and lifted her up into the back of the ambulance.

I followed them out of our house and down the front walk, but I could not have climbed up into the back of that ambulance. They would have had to lift me up into it too.

One of them climbed up into the back of the ambulance with my wife and the other one pushed the two back doors closed and climbed up into the front. He told me to follow them to the hospital and he drove away from me with my wife. They left me out there on the sidewalk in front of our house. They left me out there in the nighttime with their ambulance lights flashing red all around me. They didn't turn their siren on.

I went back inside our house and then back out through the back door to the driveway. I backed our car out of the driveway and drove away after the ambulance. I could see the red lights flashing up ahead of me and flashing high up on the sides of the buildings and the tops of the trees that lined the streets. The streetlights blinked off and on and off and on all the way to the hospital. I followed the blinking and the flashing lights after my wife. I didn't want to lose the ambulance.

I didn't want to lose my wife. I wanted to see my wife lying down in a hospital bed. I wanted to see my wife breathing again. I wanted to see her get up out of bed again. I wanted to see her get up out of our bed again. I wanted my wife to come back home and live there with me again.

I parked our car next to the emergency room entrance and left the engine on. I thought that might somehow help keep my wife alive. The ambulance that had had my wife inside it was parked there too, but there weren't any people inside it anymore. The hood of the ambulance was still warm and it made me think that my wife must still be alive.

I went through the emergency room's sliding glass doors to look for the two people who had carried my wife out of our house and driven her to the hospital, but I couldn't find them or the metal gurney that had my wife on it. I asked the people at the informa tion desk where my wife was, but they couldn't find out what bed or room she was in. The people at the admissions desk didn't know if she had been admitted yet.

They all looked for her by her first name and by her last name, but none of them had her name in their computers or on any of their clipboards. The admissions people said that she might be inside the hospital even though she wasn't in the computer yet. They didn't have anybody who had our last name.

I went to other departments in other parts of the hospital. I asked for my wife at other desks on other floors of the hospital. I gave everybody her name and I gave them my name too. I tried to describe what she looked like, but none of them had seen a woman who looked like what I said.

I walked along the long hallways looking for her on any metal gurney that I found. I looked through hospital rooms. I looked through open doors and opened doors that were closed. I called her name up and down the hallways and through the doorways and behind those curtains that circle hospital beds, but she couldn't hear me or couldn't answer me and I couldn't find her.

The hallways and the hospital rooms were filled with people who weren't my wife. There were people sitting down in their wheelchairs and other people walking behind them pushing them. There were people trying to walk with their IV bags even though they couldn't really lift their feet up off the floor.

There were people inside the hospital rooms who were propped up in their hospital beds and watching the television up on the wall. Some of them were eating food off trays and some of them had to have their food spooned into their mouths by other people who could stand up and move their arms. Some of the hospital rooms were quiet with machines and with somebody dying in the hospital bed. Some of the people didn't move or look at me when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were dying in different ways and at different speeds.

There were other people who looked back at me as if they were expecting me. They looked almost hopeful when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were mostly probably waiting for somebody to come to see them. They were probably waiting for a doctor or a nurse or maybe they were waiting for a husband or a wife.

I wasn't a doctor or a nurse who could help them get any better or tell them that they were ready to go home. I didn't have any pills or needles or bandages or salve. I didn't have any instruments to heal them. I didn't know what the numbers or beeps or counts on any of the machines were supposed to mean. I didn't understand their kind of medical pain. I couldn't offer any comfort to them or say anything to them to make them feel any better. I couldn't somehow help them. I didn't bring them any flowers or a get well card. I didn't bring them a bathrobe or anything else from home. I wasn't their husband or father or brother or son or even their friend and none of them were my wife.

Everybody who I found anywhere inside the hospital was still alive, so I thought that my wife must be too. I went back down to the emergency room to look for her. I found the ambulance driver and the one who rode inside the back of the ambulance with my wife, but they didn't have my wife with them anymore.

I went back outside to find our car. It was still parked there. Nobody had moved it or towed it away and nobody had turned the engine off either. I saw the exhaust coming out of the exhaust pipe of our car and it made me think that my wife must still be breathing somewhere back up inside that hospital.

I waited in the hospital lobby until I heard them call my name over the hospital intercom. They called my name again and it sounded as if my wife were calling me from another room from somewhere inside our house. Her voice was sort of fuzzy and distorted, but she was calling me back up into the hospital. I went back up to the floor and to the desk that I thought she said and the woman there said that they had a woman there who might be my wife.

She walked me down a hallway and into a hospital room. She took me past an empty hospital bed, behind a curtain, and past a bank of machines. They had most of her body covered up with sheets and blankets and she seemed too small to be my wife. Her head was propped up with a pillow and they had laid her hair out on it, but her hair looked too thin and too gray to be my wife's hair. Her arms were laid outside the sheets and the blankets and her skin seemed to be colored with the colored lights from the machines that seemed to be keeping her alive. Her eyes were closed and another part of her face was covered up with an oxygen mask. She didn't look like my wife like that, but I had never seen my wife dying before that night and I didn't know what it was going to look like.

The nurse handed me the clipboard with the forms on it and sat me down in a chair next to my wife's hospital bed. There were other doctors and other nurses inside the hospital room. They seemed to be taking some kind of care of my wife, but they all also seemed to be waiting for me to fill all those forms out before they did anything else for her.

I wrote my wife's name down while they watched over my wife and me. I gave them our address and her birthday and her social security number. I skimmed over the medical history list. I checked asthma and cancer, allergies to certain medications, and recent surgery. I filled all the blanks in. I wrote my name in for her emergency contact and I signed a line that said that they could treat her to keep her alive. I gave them my insurance card, my credit card, my driver's license, and another card with my name and picture on it.

One of the nurses took the clipboard with the forms on it and the cards that I gave her and left some charts with my wife's name on them on another clipboard in a plastic holder at the end of her hospital bed. Another nurse picked the clipboard back up, took my wife's temperature and then her pulse, and then wrote them down on one of the charts. Another nurse measured her blood pressure and how much my wife could breathe in without the machine on and then she turned the machine back on and wrote those things down too.

They found a vein in my wife's arm so that they could hook an IV up to it and drip the bags of fluid into her. They said that the IV might wake my wife up, but it didn't stop her from sleeping either.

They found another vein in my wife's other arm and took some blood out of it. They said they needed to check her blood to see what was in it. They wanted to know if her blood had enough sugar and enough minerals in it. They said that they would know if her kidneys and her liver still worked.

One of the nurses took the blood away for the tests and then two other hospital workers came in and took my wife away for other tests. They rolled her out of her hospital room and down the hallway on her metal gurney with her IV bag and her respirator alongside her. They were going to test her heart and also her brain. They were trying to find out how much of her still worked.

My wife wasn't very alive then. She couldn't keep herself alive, but there were doctors and nurses who could. There were machines that could feed her and that could help her lungs to breathe and her heart to beat. But one of the doctors told me that since her eyes didn't open, and she didn't seem to hear anything that he said to her or move any on her own, that my wife probably wouldn't be alive without the machines and that she might not be alive in the morning with them.

I felt as if I were already in mourning. I looked at the nurse and the nurse put her head down. I looked back at the doctor and the doctor looked back down at the charts on the clipboard in his hands. I looked away too. I tried not to cry. I lifted my hand up to my face and held onto my jaw so that it wouldn't shake. I thought that they might not leave me alone with my wife if I started to cry.

The doctor said something else and the nurse did too. I couldn't hear them anymore, but I nodded at them both. I didn't say anything more. I kept looking at my wife.

They didn't move for a long time. They were quiet too. Then the nurse said that she would come back to check on my wife. The doctor left the clipboard in the plastic holder at the end of the hospital bed. He left the hospital room and the nurse did too.

They left me there even though I wasn't supposed to stay inside the hospital room with my wife. It was too late and the hours weren't right, but they left me sitting down in the visitor's chair next to my wife's hospital bed.

I watched my wife try to stay alive for that night. I turned the visitor's chair so that I was facing my wife's face, but she didn't open her eyes up to look back at me. It didn't look easy for her to breathe even though she had all those machines trying to help her to do it.

The machines and the wires made her look so tired. I was tired too. I wanted to get into the hospi tal bed with my wife and go back to sleep with her. I wanted to sleep her sleep with her.

The nurse who kept checking to see if my wife were still alive kept me up through the night. She brought me a pillow and a blanket and I made a kind of sitting bed in my visitor's chair. I still didn't sleep. I thought that it might help my wife to stay alive if I stayed awake. I thought that she might open her eyes up if I kept looking at her. I turned the lights on inside her hospital room so that she might think that it was morning and might wake up.

I had fallen asleep, but my wife hadn't died. I had woken up, but my wife hadn't woken up too. She hadn't moved either.

I whispered into her ear that it was morning, but she didn't seem to hear me. I nudged her at her shoulder and touched her upper arm, but she still didn't open her eyes up, so I opened the blinds on the windows up. I turned her head to face the light coming in through the windows.

I whistled bird sounds, but she didn't open her eyes up or put a pillow over her ear or turn her face away or roll over away from the light. My wife hadn't shifted her body since she had been in that hospital bed. She hadn't kicked the bedcovers off her legs and her feet or pushed the pillow onto the floor. She hadn't tossed or kicked or turned over in her sleep like she did when she would sleep in our bed at home.

She didn't wake up for the morning as she had on every other day of our marriage, but we ate breakfast together that day anyway. One of the nurses brought a tray of food into the hospital room and placed it on top of the table that swung over the hospital bed. I told the nurse that my wife couldn't eat or drink or swallow or chew, but the nurse didn't take the tray of food away when she left the hospital room.

The nurse came back in with an IV bag for my wife. She hung the IV bag up on the IV stand and made sure that the drips worked. I watched the IV bag drip for a while before I took the tray of food off the table and set it on my lap and started to eat too.

We ate breakfast together, but it still wasn't morning for my wife, so I tried to make it into more of a morning. I decided to wash up. I pushed myself up out of that chair and stood up. The blood seemed to rush out of my head and I couldn't really breathe right. I had to use that chair's armrests to hold myself up. I was bent over until I got my breath back. I stood up straight again and my head cleared up.

I took my hat off and left it on top of the back of that chair. I took my jacket off and hung it around the shoulders of that chair. I pulled the sleeves of the jacket around to the front of that chair and left them resting on its armrests. I wanted to make it look as if I were sitting there, or at least make it seem as if I were nearby, if my wife woke up.