Regulars
Ellen sits in one of the greasy vinyl chairs in the visiting alcove outside the hospital ward. A book is open on her lap, but she’s too restless to read. To while away the time she looks around at the afternoon visitors. A man in a business suit stalks up and down, shooting his cuff to glance malevolently at his watch. Another man, this one in a cowboy hat and boots, sits hunched over, twisting his fingers as though trying to jerk them loose from the palm. A teenaged girl in jean shorts hanging precariously from her hipbones sighs impatiently, and with each sigh her belly button winks like a third eye. Usually the visitors are there for a day or two and then vanish. Ellen wonders whether the patient has died or the ailment was trivial—a new baby, a broken leg—hardly worth the fuss, the time lost from work.
When a haggard blond woman and a little girl in crisp overalls come into the alcove, Ellen closes her book and stands up. “I’m just leaving,” she says. She heads for the swinging doors to the ward. Sometimes she can go in a few minutes early.
***
The Intensive Care nurse sits at a wall of computer screens and machines, reading the vital signs of the three patients. Henry is in the bed nearest the door, his eyes closed, his mouth ajar. Tubes dangle from his nose, his mouth, his arm, from under the sheet. There’s a glistening trail of spit from the corner of his mouth down his chin. He would hate that. Ellen pulls a tissue from the packet she carries and carefully wipes his mouth. She kisses him on his lips and rests her head against his. There is no response. She knows he is dying and that there is nothing the nurses, the doctors, the machines can do. Nothing she can do.
***
As she enters her condo she picks up a box left between the screen and the front door. Godiva Chocolates. Good, she thinks. No wilting flowers and stagnant water to throw out, no soured chicken salad to shove down the disposal. When Henry first had the stroke, their friends came to the hospital to spend long hours with her. But when they held her hand and sympathized and talked about Henry, it took all her energy to control her emotions and not cry. She doesn’t want to cry. Even though she knows it’s futile, when she goes into the ICU she wants to be upbeat and hopeful, not red-eyed and depleted. It is much easier when she’s surrounded by strangers.
After the first three days, she told her friends she needed to be alone at the hospital, and her friends had understood. So now they leave casseroles and salads and flowers at her door. She sets the Godiva box on the coffee table. She’ll write a note of thanks later. For now, she just wants to go to bed and try to sleep.
***
The weather turns overnight, and it is drizzling by the next morning. After her first visit to Henry, Ellen goes into the empty alcove. She picks up an old National Geographic with the corner torn off—the contribution of some doctor not wanting to expose a home address—and starts to read an article on chimpanzees in the Congo.
Soon a man comes in and drops like a heavy sack of flour into a chair. She recognizes the cowboy hat with its stain of sweat around the crown. He was there yesterday and, yes, the day before that and perhaps the whole twelve days that she has been there. About her age, early sixties. Cheeks and chin in need of a shave, light blue shirt in need of a wash. Large bones, leathery skin, shaggy reddish-brown hair hanging below the ludicrous hat. A coarse, ugly man—cousin of a chimp.
She lowers her eyes and tries to read, but the print slips and slides across the page. Why isn’t that oaf lying in there instead of Henry? Why isn’t he the one dying? What good is he to the world? Her breath catches and her heart begins to beat into her throat. Stop it, she says to herself, get control of yourself. It does Henry no good for her to thrash about at everything. She puts her hand on her thigh and squeezes.
Slowly her breath settles, and after a minute she says, “We seem to be the regulars.” It is her way of apologizing for her anger and scorn.
The man looks up. “Yeah, the regulars,” he says, with a wry snuffle.
***
For lunch Ellen buys a ham sandwich and a can of V8 juice and sits at a corner table in the hospital cafeteria. When she sees the man in the cowboy hat at the hot food counter, she ducks her head and turns away. But he has seen her, and after he pays for his lunch, he comes up to her table with his tray.
“Remember me?” he says. “One of the regulars?” He plops into the chair across from her and holds out his hand. “Sid Bowen,” he says. “Looks like the both of us are in for the long haul, so we might as well get acquainted.”
Ellen says her name and they shake hands. Sid picks up his knife and fork and saws off a piece of the pot roast on his plate. He smears the meat with mashed potatoes and gravy and jams the mess into his mouth so that the gravy bubbles up around his teeth.
She waits a few moments and then pats her lips with the shredded paper napkin, and pushes back her chair. “Well, I better be off.”
Sid looks puzzled. “But you ain’t finished your sandwich,” he says, pointing his fork at her sandwich as though she wouldn’t have noticed.
She gathers the paper plate and the V8 can and the paper napkin. “I’ve had enough.” She goes over to the garbage bin at the door and drops in the debris. She glances back. Sid is looking after her, puzzled and annoyed. She shouldn’t have spoken to him in the first place.
***
It’s time for Ellen’s last evening visit, but there has been an emergency in ICU—no doubt someone has died—and she must wait in the empty alcove. After a few minutes, Sid Bowen comes in. When he sees her, his expression turns wary, suspicious. She feels ashamed at having been rude to him and she smiles and says, “The regulars.”
He sits down across from her. He says it’s funny there ain’t nobody else in the alcove but the regulars, and she says that most visitors come in the late afternoon and early evening and then go home. He laughs and says he wishes he could go home instead of staying at that crummy motel up El Camino, the Honolulu Inn. He says sometimes he thinks the trucks are right in the room with him and the bed is made of rocks and it takes twenty minutes to get any hot water. “It’s a sight worse than it was even six months ago, when me and Louise came down first time to see the specialists at the hospital.”
When Ellen says, “So you’re not from around here,” Sid answers that he has a cattle ranch over near Bodie that his son is taking care of while he’s down here. His daughter lives up in Coeur d’Alene, he says, coming down in a day or two to see her mom. “What about you?” he asks.
The exchange of inconsequential personal information, she thinks, that passes for conversation. Well, but what else could they talk about? Politics? Religion? He is probably an evangelical gun owner. They’d be shouting at each other within minutes, raising the nearly dead down the hall. She tells him she lives a few miles from the hospital, that she works for Habitat for Humanity and Henry teaches at the university.
“Kids?” Sid asks.
“No,” she says. Sid ducks his head and looks embarrassed, as though he had inadvertently touched a wound. She won’t tell him it’s by choice. Keep to the surface. “I’m afraid I don’t know where Bodie is.”
“You ain’t alone in that.” Sid laughs. “It’s the other side of Yosemite. You ever been to Yosemite?”
Is there anyone in California who hasn’t? she wonders. “A few times,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”
Sid nods. “I got a special feeling for that place,” he says. And then he launches into the story of meeting his wife at some church doings in Yosemite and getting married in six weeks though they were only nineteen and eighteen and how fast Louise took to the ranch and raising the kids and then the first symptoms about a year ago and two weeks ago following the ambulance over the mountain.
“It was going lickety split like it was the Indianapolis 500.” He chuckles. “It’s a wonder Louise lived to tell it.” And then he sucks in his breath and his face collapses. “Only she won’t,” he says in a clotted voice. “She won’t have a chance. Cancer’s gone into her brain. She didn’
t even recognize me this morning. It like to broke my heart.”
Ellen has not bargained for this. So much for the inconsequential. Serves her right for being too friendly. But she is trapped. She can’t just get up and leave, not while the man is so upset. What on earth is she supposed to do?
“Um,” she says, shaking her head, hoping that conveys her sympathy. Anything more would be too banal, too false.
An orderly comes through the swinging doors and stops near her. “All clear.” He jerks his head back toward the ICU. Ellen doesn’t immediately react. Should she leave this poor guy? “Now or never,” the orderly says. “ICU closes in five minutes.”
“So he’s in the ICU,” Sid says. “You better go on.”
***
When she enters the ICU, the nurse looks up and shrugs. The blipping machines keep blipping, the blooping sound like air bubbles rising through water keeps blooping, the intravenous drip keeps dripping. Ellen pulls a chair over to Henry’s bed and picks up Henry’s limp hand. His hands are elegant, the fingers long and well shaped. She raises his hand to her lips and kisses the palm and whispers, “I’m here.” As she sets his hand back on the cover, she notices that his fingernails have been cut straight across. The corners are very sharp, and she fears that he might scratch himself. As though he would feel a scratch. But she will bring an emery board and smooth out those edges. That is something she can do.
***
After her first visit to Henry next morning, Ellen goes into the alcove. Sid is there and pats the empty seat beside him and she sits down. His face asks if everything is okay, and she nods and raises her eyebrows and he nods. She’s brought the morning newspaper with her and she pulls out the innards and offers him the front section. He says if it’s okay he’d like the sports. Henry always looked at the front first.
The alcove slowly begins to fill up. A wispy old man in a hospital gown opened down the back comes through the swinging door from the ward, dragging an IV behind him. He sits down in a chair, his bare buttocks pressing into the slimy green vinyl cushion. No wonder they’re slimy.
Sid knocks Ellen’s elbow with his and gestures with his shoulder at the old man and wrinkles his nose. Ellen rolls her eyes and they exchange furtive grins of distaste. A few minutes later, a nurse pushes open the swinging door and motions to Sid. He gets up and follows her back down the hall.
Sid doesn’t return to the alcove, but as Ellen enters the cafeteria for lunch she sees him talking to a cluster of men in white jackets, and in late afternoon she sees him standing at the bank of telephones, probably talking to his children, telling them the sad news.
***
Late that evening Ellen passes by the alcove on the way to her last visit of the day. She glances over and there is Sid, sitting alone, his head down, the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. She hurries on but then she goes back. He looks up at her and says, “Louise is gone.”
She puts her hand on his shoulder. For a minute or two they stay like that without speaking. Then a large woman with a round pink face comes bustling through the swinging doors, waving a sheaf of papers like a flag. She says Sid should come with her to sign the documents, the releases. Sid looks at Ellen with a question, and Ellen nods and points at the floor. Sid follows the woman through the swinging door.
Ellen goes to the window and leans her head against the glass and looks out. The rain is coming down hard now. Car lights flash over the wet pavement, and the trees are swaying in the wind. Minutes tick by, and then it’s too late for Ellen to go in to see Henry tonight. Henry won’t know it, but he’d think she is doing the right thing, waiting for this poor man.
When Sid returns to the alcove, he smiles a weak smile and says, “Well, that’s it. I guess I better start for Bodie.”
Ellen imagines the long ride over Pacheco Pass and down Interstate 5, the slashing rain, and the oncoming truck lights, Sid blinded by tears. “You don’t want to go back to Bodie tonight.” She points toward the window. “It’s really raining now, and it wouldn’t be safe.”
“Safe.” He dismisses that with a flip of his hand. “I’d rather be bleeding like a stuck pig in a wet ditch than at that motel one more night without her.” The tears start down his face and his massive shoulders rise and fall and his belly pumps in and out and he is howling like an animal. His nose begins to run and tears and mucus pool around his lips and on his chin.
“I ain’t ready for this,” he shouts, dragging his hand across his nose and mouth. “I ain’t even got a hanky.” He doesn’t duck his face or try to silence himself.
Ellen reaches into her handbag and takes out the packet of tissues and hands it to him. She has never witnessed such utterly unguarded grief. She feels uneasy, even embarrassed. Yet in a way she envies him. If she let her emotions loose like that, perhaps she wouldn’t feel so hard and alone.
“You can stay in our guest room,” she says. “You don’t have to go back to whatever that motel is.”
“The goddam Honolulu,” he says in a cracked voice. He begins to mop his face with a tissue. After a minute his crying subsides, and then as if Ellen’s words have finally arrived, he says, “What do you mean, your guest room?”
“I mean you can stay in our guest room tonight and drive home tomorrow when it’ll be safer.”
Sid looks at Ellen, mulling over her offer. “You sure?” he asks.
Well, now she isn’t so sure. A stranger in her house? She’s been rash, downright foolish, but how hard-hearted it would be to take back her offer now. “Of course I mean it,” she says, smiling. And then as though to prove that she does really mean it, she adds, “You’ll have plenty of hot water right off.”
Sid cocks his eyebrow. “Us regulars helping each other, huh?”
***
Sid parks behind her in the driveway, and they run through the rain to the condo. She turns on a lamp and leads him down the hall to the guest room. He looks around the room and nods his appreciation. She shows him the adjoining bathroom and the closet where he can hang his clothes. And then she brings sheets from the linen closet.
“I can do that,” Sid says, taking the sheets from her.
“Would you like anything to eat?” she asks. “I have some chicken salad that may still be okay.”
“I think I’ll take one of them hot showers you were talking about and then just flop,” he says. “I’d probably of fallen asleep and be dead on the highway without you being so nice.” He smiles. “At first I thought you were a real snoot.”
***
She lies in bed, waiting for sleep, dozing, waking, spinning on images of Henry lying on the hospital bed, tied down by tubes. In half sleep, she moves across the bed, seeking Henry’s warmth. “I’m here,” she says. He jerks out his respirator and stands up. “I’m okay now,” he says. “See?” He is wearing a tuxedo and he dances a little jig and makes a clown’s face and she laughs. His eyes glow in the dim light. He rests his hand against her cheek.
“You awake?” he whispers.
It’s Sid, outside her door. If she doesn’t answer, perhaps he’ll go away and she can slide back into her dream. It had been such a nice one. It might have ended in making love, as her dreams sometimes do. But she’s wide-awake, and she knows she won’t get back to sleep for a long time. She glances at the clock. 2:18. Her irritation rises. Hadn’t she done all she could for this man? But then she remembers that anguished face and that howl of pain. “Give me a minute.”
She puts on her robe and slippers, and she and Sid go down the hall to the living room. Sid sits on one of the chairs, and she sits opposite on the sofa. In the dim light of the lamp she sees that he has on boots and jeans and a sleeveless old-timey undershirt. The crown of his hat has left a crease in his pale red hair.
“I bet I woke you up.” He looks sheepish, apologetic. “I should of taken those damn pills like the doctor said. Louise used to say sleeping was my best talent, but ever since she went into the hospital I don’t sleep good at all. I just lie there and ba
wl.” He shakes his head. “If I do get to sleep, I’m just climbing all over the bed, looking for her. It’s a wonder I don’t wear out the bed clothes.” A little rueful smile runs across his face. “How about you? You sleep okay?”
“I sleep fine,” she says. “Are you sure you won’t have something to eat?” She glances across the coffee table. His expression is a little hurt, and she knows he feels rebuffed. The snoot. “To be honest, I don’t sleep very well at all,” she says. “I always seem to be moving in and out of some kind of half-sleep, thinking about things, maybe the hospital or maybe from years ago and then I’m dreaming or I’m drifting halfway in between.”
Sid smiles. “We’re always thinking about them, ain’t we?”
“He removed his respirator in my dream last night and did something funny. Maybe dancing. I can’t remember exactly what it was but it made me laugh.” And she laughs. “Even when I was furious, he’d do something funny, maybe make a face like a little kid who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and I’d have to laugh. And that would be the end of it. He didn’t like to fight, at least not with me. He could always make me laugh.” She pauses. “And now he’s just lying there, tied down by all those tubes.”
Sid reaches over and pats her knee. “We’ll remember the good stuff, not all that awfulness.”
She looks down at his hand. The skin is rough and hardened and the nails are ragged and chipped. A rancher’s hands. Not at all like Henry’s. And then she remembers she had wanted to smooth out Henry’s nails so he wouldn’t hurt himself. “I forgot the emery board.” Her voice breaks and her eyes fill and the tears begin.
“It’s about time you let up.” Sid swings over to sit beside her. He pulls the tissues from his hip pocket and hands her one. “Go for it,” he says. “Just go for it.”
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