Us (3 page)

I didn't want her to wake up without me there with her. I didn't want her to be awake and alone at the same time.

I went into the bathroom inside her hospital room to take as much of a bath or a shower as I could. I smelled like sleep and I wanted to wash the sleep off me. I took my clothes off and hung them up on the back of the bathroom door and laid them out on all the handles and bars that are supposed to help people get up or stand up inside a hospital bathroom. I turned the water faucet on and washed myself off with wet paper towels. I dried myself off with dry paper towels, but it didn't really make me feel clean. I felt dry and tired. I felt as if I had shrunk.

I turned my underwear and my undershirt and my socks inside out. I wanted to have the clean side of them touching my skin when I put them back on. I shook the rest of my clothes out. I tried to get the sleep off them too. I tried to move some air through them too.

I got dressed again, but my clothes felt sticky and thick on me. It was difficult to move in them. My pants could almost stand up on their cuffs on their own and my shirt seemed to keep its own shape around my shoulders. My clothes looked stiff and wrinkled and so did I. But my clothes also helped me stand up. I needed something else to hold me up.

I stood over the bathroom sink and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked smaller and older too. I turned the water faucet back on and splashed water on my hair and on my face. I pushed my hair down with my hands and combed it back with my fingers. I wet one of my fingers again and brushed my teeth with it until my teeth felt smooth to my tongue.

I straightened myself back up and stood back away from the bathroom sink and the bathroom mirror. I tried to straighten my clothes out some more, but they didn't seem to fit right anymore. My clothes and everything else seemed bigger than me. I tucked my shirt further down into my pants and tightened my belt a notch. I took a long breath in and tried to fill my clothes out with myself. I was going to need all of me for this morning.

The doctors and the nurses monitored her lungs and her heart and her brain. They kept checking her to see if she would open her eyes up or respond in any way to anything they said. They kept checking her for her blood pressure and for how much oxygen her lungs could process. They kept testing her for how much blood was going into and out of her brain and for how much pressure there was on it. They kept measuring parts of my wife so that they could find out how much she was alive.

The doctor told me that the numbers were getting worse and that my wife wasn't getting any better. There wasn't enough oxygen going into or out of her lungs or enough blood moving through her brain and the doctor told me that my wife probably wouldn't gain consciousness again.

But I thought that there had to be something that would wake her up again. I thought about snoring or making some other kind of noise from our sleep. I thought about kissing her on the forehead or on the cheek. I wanted the telephone to ring or for somebody to knock on the door to her hospital room. I wanted her to have a nightmare or even insomnia. I wanted the alarm on the alarm clock to go off. I wanted it to be morning again.

The doctor started talking about unhooking the IVs and unplugging the machines, but I didn't want them to undo any of her treatment. I wanted them to do more of anything that might make her wake up, but the doctor told me that they couldn't do anything else medical for her. The doctor said that we had to wait for her to be more conscious before they could do anything else for her.

The doctor told me that if she did anything again that she would be able to hear again first. He told me to talk to her. He told me to ask her for small things.

I asked her to open her eyes back up. I asked her to move her eyes back and forth under her eyelids so that her eyelids would tremble some. I asked her to smile or move her lips even a little bit. I watched her eyes and her lips for a twitch or for any other kind of change in the way that her face looked. I held onto her hand and asked her to move her fingers, but she didn't move them or seem to touch my hand back. I asked her if the bruises on her arms from the needles and the tubes hurt.

I told her that the skin on her hands was soft and that I liked the age spots on the backs of her hands. I told her that she had a soft dress with polka dots on it that she liked to wear. I told her about where we met and about the hospital room where we were then. I told her that she was lying down in a hospital bed and wearing a hospital gown that she probably would not like. I told her that she probably would not like the hospital room either. I told her that we should go home soon.

My wife didn't say anything back or seem to hear anything that I said to her. The doctor told me that I should go home and come back with some things from home that would remind my wife of being at home. The nurse told me that I should go home for a change of clothes for my wife and for myself. The nurse told me that I should take a shower and get some rest and come back fresh. The nurse told me that I should pack up enough clothes so that I could stay at the hospital for a while.

I was afraid to go back home and pack up our clothes. I was afraid that my wife might die if I did not stay there with her. I felt as if I were somehow keeping my wife alive by being there with her.

My legs felt heavy and sleepy when I tried to stand up to walk out of her hospital room. I stumbled a couple of steps forward toward my wife. I had to stop and hold myself up over her hospital bed with my arms. My back tingled and spasmed. I couldn't feel the back of my head. I needed help to breathe too.

I waited until I had enough breath to talk. I leaned over her in her hospital bed and whispered into her ear. I told her to wait for me to come back to see her. I kissed each of her eyelids and touched her hair and her ear and her cheek.

I walked along the side and the foot of her hospital bed with my arm holding onto the edge of it to help hold me up. I straightened my back up and held my head up. I walked away from her hospital bed, past the empty hospital bed, to the doorway and out of her hospital room.

It was so hard for me to walk out of that room. I didn't know how she was going to get up out of her hospital bed and leave too.

I stopped outside the doorway. The hallway was so much brighter than her hospital room was that I had to close my eyes. I turned around to look back inside her hospital room at her, but it was already too dark inside there for me to see my wife anymore.

I walked away down the hallway, got on the elevator going down, and went down to the hospital lobby. I got my legs back under me and walked through the sliding glass doors and out into the parking lot. I had parked our car under one of those tall lamps out in the parking lot, but it had been so many days since then that I couldn't remember where or which one.

I looked up at the different lamps and watched the insects that were flying around the lights up there. I walked from lamp to lamp through the parking lot until I found our car. I opened the car door up and started to get inside, but my body wouldn't bend enough for me to get into it. I held myself up with the car door and sat down sideways into our car. I backed myself into the driver's seat and lifted my legs up into our car with the rest of me. I was too tired to drive and I was almost out of gas, but I thought I had enough to get me back home.

I tried to drive home, but I couldn't keep my eyes open. I kept falling asleep and then waking up afraid. I kept pulling over to the curb to sleep, but I could never sleep once our car was parked there. I would start driving back home again. I would pull back out into the street and then wake up blocks later. There seemed to be two grooves worn down into the street that seemed to keep the left set of tires and the right set of tires rolling me back toward home. I didn't even need to hold onto the steering wheel and I was almost back home.

I drove by the front of our house and saw that I had left all the lights at the front of our house on. It made me think of the lights on my wife's machines inside her hospital room and it made it look as if somebody were at home and living inside our house.

I drove around to the side of our house, drove back up the driveway, and parked our car there. I had left the front door and the back door open too. I walked into our house and down the hallway and into our bedroom. Our bed was still unmade and the shape of my wife was still marked out in the pillows and the blankets and the sheets.

I walked up and down the hallway and through the rooms of our house—our bedroom, the bathroom, the spare bedroom, the guestroom, the other bathroom, the study, the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room – but I knew that I wasn't going to find my wife inside any of those rooms.

I didn't know what to do without her there at home with me. I held onto my head, but my hair was dirty and it was slick. My skin itched too and my clothes felt sticky on my skin and kind of hard. I took my clothes off and let them fall down my body and into a pile of dirty laundry around me.

I walked into the bathroom, turned the hot water and the cold water in the shower on, got into the shower, and pulled the shower curtain along the length of the bathtub. The water hurt and the shower made me tired. My skin tingled and my back spasmed some more. My eyelids got heavy and covered up most of my eyes too.

I needed to go to sleep too. I wanted to lie down in bed with my wife and go back to sleep with her so that both of us could wake up again. I fixed the pillow on her side of our bed. I fixed the sheets and the blankets and pulled them up over where she would have been sleeping if she would have been there with me.

I got into my side of our bed and lay my head down and my cheek deep into the pillow. I turned over so that I was facing her part of our bed. I reached my arm out to hold onto the place where she usually was and I kept thinking that we would both be sleeping and that we might see each other in our sleep.

I have been hoping you would come back to sleep with me. I didn't mean to keep you up so long. I didn't mean to make you so tired too. I have been too tired to wake up yet, but I will wake up soon. You should too. I want you to wake up so you can come back to the hospital and come back up to me. Bring my hairbrush with you when you come back up to me. Bring my slippers with you too. Wake back up and come back up and I will wake up too.

It was still nighttime outside when I woke up. I couldn't remember where I was in the dark. My wife wasn't in our bed with me and I couldn't remember where she was even though she had just been talking with me. I rolled over and looked at her empty side of our bed. I remembered her hospital bed where she was and how she was laid out in it.

I turned the bedside light on the bedside table on and looked at the date on my watch. I had been asleep for too long too. I called the hospital up with the telephone on the bedside table, but my wife hadn't died or woken up yet.

I got up out of bed and went into the kitchen. I wanted to eat until I was so full that the food pushed how I felt out of my stomach. I opened the refrigerator door up, but there was so much food inside the refrigerator that had gotten old and started to rot. The blood had drained out of a package of steaks and turned the meat a gray color. The milk was lumpy and sour and had this crusty skin floating on it. The bread had a spotty mold growing on its crust and the vegetables in the crisper had gotten soft and lost their color too.

I closed the refrigerator door and filled a water glass up from the faucet tap, but even the water tasted old and flat. I put the water glass down into the kitchen sink and saw the bananas on the countertop. They had brown age spots on them and little flies flying around them, but I couldn't throw any of that rotten food away. I didn't want my wife to die.

I wanted to go back to the hospital. I wanted to be with her even if she couldn't be with me. I pulled two suitcases out of the closet and laid them out on our bed. I packed one suitcase up for her and the other one up for me. We didn't live that far away from the hospital, but we were both going to be away from home for a while. I packed up my toiletry bag up, along with enough days of clothes for me to change into until she got better or died.

I packed clothes up for her too—nightgowns and a housecoat, slippers and almost her whole drawer of underclothes. I packed clothes up that she could wear out of the hospital too. I packed the things on her bedside table up—an alarm clock, a reading lamp, the book she was reading, her reading glasses, and her glass for water. I packed her make-up kit up, which had the things for her to fix her hair up with inside it—a hand mirror, her good hairbrush, and a can of hairspray.

I packed her pillow up along with a blanket from our bed. I brought other things from our house for her too. I cut flowers from the front garden and put them in water so that they looked as if they were still alive. I picked out some music that she liked and I brought back other sounds from our house for her too.

I recorded the sound of the water running from the kitchen and the bathroom faucets. I recorded the sound of the latches from when I opened and closed the doors on the cupboards. I recorded the furnace heating up, the water heater coming on, the dishwasher washing dishes, and the washing machine washing clothes and the dryer drying them. I put the tape recorder on the wood floors and walked over them where they creaked. I recorded the sound of our house settling on its foundation at night. I recorded the back door closing shut and my shoes walking over the gravel in the driveway.

I set the tape recorder on top of our car and opened the trunk up, packed the suitcases in it, and closed the trunk back up. I opened our car up and set the tape recorder on the seat next to me. I closed our car, started it up, and drove everything that I had with me back to her.