Michael Kimball: Us

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.

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.