She did not sleep well that night. The next day was so sunny and warm, like the long winter was actually over, she went out for that walk with an aide. She had asserted her right to handle her own wheelchair, and suddenly, with the slope of a curb cut up ahead, she saw in her mind the tweed jacket of the author, the white of his teeth as he smiled. She heard him all over again saying “training manual,” and she was back at the back of his talk, panicking, needing to flee.
So she began to speed up, surprising herself at her success. She had to get back to her room, get out of that chair, fast. She might have closed her eyes in the moment before she had to make a slight turn. She was not wearing the chair’s seat belt. She was sitting on it. She remembered everything of her fall, which seemed to take place in slow motion, although of course it happened quickly. She had been afraid her kneecap was shattered, the bones in pieces that could never be put together. But it was still there, in one piece. She had rejoiced about that.
Then she became trapped in a hospital bed, having dreams she did not describe—dreams brand-new to her. She would ring for a nurse to bring her something to help her sleep, but she didn’t like to take pills. Sometimes, the pills made her feel that a pillow of sleep was being placed on her face, like someone was smothering her, when she knew that no one was there.
Sometimes, she would wake with a picture at the backs of her eyes of herself in old age, as she was, frantically stooping to gather together the pieces of something scattered all over a floor, and the something, she would know, was her soul. Trying to pick up the pieces was like trying to scoop in her hands the dappled bits of sunlight all over the carpet in her room at the assisted living place, pouring in on bright mornings through her window blinds, which she never closed tightly when she went to bed.
I sat there. Why couldn’t I be a good witch in a magical story, waving a magic wand, saying, “Look! There’s your clot in the act of disappearing! And here are the bits of the light of your soul, jumping back together to be whole?”
The weight of my silence was terrible to me. I bowed my head as if praying. I was an actor alone on a stage in a spotlight, looking left and right to the wings for a cue, knowing that no one was there.
All the talking had really strained her. I saw that as she waited for me to say something, her eyes were becoming half-lidded, closing into sleep.
I went into the hall and found an aide to adjust her bed and turn off her light. I would have done so myself, but I was too afraid she’d wake up, turning her eyes to me once again, trusting me.
The aide told me everyone who worked in that unit admired her, and did I know that she felt she was lying in luxury, in her new nightgown, when she had never allowed herself a purely luxurious thing in all her life, and now she’d never go to bed again in anything but silk?
I said I was happy to hear that. Then I set off to see the surfer.
Ten
Stepping out of an elevator, I nearly collided with an intern I had nearly collided with a few nights before. He was a zoomer around the halls. Since he went many, many hours without sleep, he tended to make you worry, when he was stopped in his tracks and had a moment to be still, he’d fall asleep standing up, eyes still open, like a zombie in scrubs and a lab jacket.
Once again when we almost bumped, he swore quietly in Spanish, and I pretended I didn’t have enough of the language from high school to know what he was saying. Then we looked at each other and laughed, again.
He wasn’t rushing to a patient this time. He was on a break, and that was how I found out there’d been an elaborate and extremely well-catered social event that evening: a reception in honor of the medical center’s latest new wing.
On the buffet table was a lot of leftover food the caterers hadn’t taken. There were paper plates and napkins too. I thanked him.
“Buen provecho!” I said.
“Right back at you, Reverend!” he replied.
Next I had to turn a corner. As I approached it, I saw Bobo Boy.
He was coming around that corner at something between a trot and a run, a phantom Bobo Boy, nails tapping the floor, tail straight out like the rod of a propeller, head high, tongue lolling, ears waving a little. He didn’t notice me, as if I were the one who wasn’t real. I looked at his spots. I looked at the shine of his eyes and his little legs and his owl-like face, and I saw all over again how he looked so wrongly put together, and so absolutely right.
“Hey, Bo. Slow down.”
No one was near enough to hear me talk to the air. I gave myself a shake, not quite the way he used to love coming back inside the medical center from doing his business in rain or snow. He would wait to shake himself dry until he ran into someone he’d have the chance to get wet, often one of the doctors who had dogs at home. They would laugh and laugh with him, as if raindrops or melted snow flying off the fur of a dog and hitting a target was the best thing to happen that day.
He never fooled me. I’d always sidestep him.
“Ha, you missed me!”
Then I realized I had to give myself a warning. No talking to ghosts. I’d never had to do that before.
Eleven
Ask me what’s holy.
Two surgeons in scrubs were sitting at a café table in a side extension of the big public space called the atrium. The broad plates of windows behind them had been cleaned a little while ago. The smell of washing fluid still lingered. Nothing was on the other side of the glass but the night. The cleaning people could have coated the windows with black ink.
No one else was around. The area was for overflow of a lunch crowd. I was taking a shortcut through here.
The two men had not heard me approaching. They must have come straight from operating—those scrubs weren’t clean. The older man looked up at me wearily, too tired, perhaps, to pretend that I had not just seen him caressing the side of the younger one’s face, his fingers folded in, his fisted hand the opposite of the hand of someone throwing a punch. They were sitting very closely. I didn’t know either of them except as familiar faces I had spotted now and then on the day shift, never before together.
A silver thermos was on the table between them, with its one cup. Probably, what looked like unmilked coffee was not merely coffee. The surgery they had come from might not have gone well. I noticed both men wearing wedding rings. It was clear to me they weren’t married to each other.
“Hi, Reverend. How’s your night so far?” said the younger one.
Their age difference was maybe about ten years. The younger surgeon was trim and smooth beside the shagginess of the elder, and he was completely at ease about being discovered. He was letting me know, with a smile, he took it for granted that a chaplain is not a carrier of gossip.
“My night,” I answered, “is having its ups and downs.”
The older surgeon looked up at me and I remembered that a couple of months ago I’d seen him in a restaurant, where I was having dinner with the man I had thought I would marry. The restaurant was some distance from the medical center, like all the places we went to. We had loved taking long drives to be somewhere alone.
Uh-oh, I had thought, spotting the surgeon.
He was hurrying by our table. He’d arrived late for a gathering across the restaurant, where several tables were pushed together for what was obviously a family event. Recognizing me, he briefly paused, saying hi, as medical-center people always do when we notice each other in the outside world. His eyebrows went up a little, I remembered. I think it surprised him I was having dinner with a good-looking man I was so plainly in love with.