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She sat down next to the entry door the paramedics closed behind her husband. Wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back and forth. This made the world go as unsteady as her mind until she was moving in time with it, bringing everything level again.
Her hands, her cheek, were sticky with his blood.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said again and again to the police standing above her. “He said he’d be flying by daylight.”
She complied limply as the police took photos of her. Stood with a female officer in the bathroom. Peeled off her bloody clothes, placed them in plastic bags the woman held out for her. Was briefly ashamed of the tattered condition of her underwear as the officer deftly zipped them in a bag.
They gave her permission to shower, to get dressed, to leave for the hospital they all knew she wouldn’t be allowed inside of.
Looking back, she must have explained some of it to her children. She must have gotten them ready, left down the front stairs and out the old front double doors so the children wouldn’t see the blood on the kitchen floor. She must have driven away. She knew she must have done all that because she found herself in the parking lot of the hospital, holding her children’s hands as they were told they couldn’t come in.
“Please. Can you please at least give us an update?”
She paced back and forth, the children’s hands gripped in her own until a man came out and introduced himself as a doctor.
The first thing he said was “I’m sorry,” and it buckled her knees until she was looking up at him from the concrete, thewooshof the hospitals automatic doors opening and closing and opening again with her weight.
The doctor sat down next to her as though sitting on the ground were a normal thing.
“We’d like to speak to you about organ donation,” he said.
For this, they were allowed into the hospital. In a small, private room, the doctor told her there were no miracles possible at this point. This was brain death. It wasn’t like the stories on the news of people waking up after years or decades. There were no stories, no instances of someone ever traveling back from the place her husband was now.
The children clung to her as this doctor took an ice pick to their reality. Daddy dead but not dead. Daddy gone but still here.
“I don’t need the speech,” she told the doctor. “He would want to be useful.”
She signed away her husband’s still-beating heart, his liver, his kidneys, the lungs that were filling and emptying on a breathing apparatus, his pancreas, tissues, corneas. His bone and skin and blood.
“Can we see him?” she asked the doctor. “Can the children see him? Before? To say goodbye?”
“No visitors are allowed on the patient floors. Because of the surge. But we’ve been doing video calls.”
She didn’t argue. She’d seen the news. She understood she wasn’t special, that she was now joining the legions of families kept from their loved ones to interrupt the furious spread of disease. On the screen her husband’s mouth was opened disproportionately wide to fit a tube. His head was partly shaved. His eyes were taped closed.
“Daddy’s left his body behind,” she told the children. “We need to say goodbye.”
“But he’s right there?”
“I’m sorry, loves. That’s just his body. His mind, his…everything else…is gone. But at least we can say goodbye to his body. At least we get to see him one more time.”
“We love you, Daddy,” her daughter said quietly. “I love you!”
“Air hugs,” her son called out, miming a hug. “I’m giving you air hugs, Daddy. See you soon!”
“Sweetheart, you won’t see Daddy soon. This is—he’s not coming home.”
“Okay, Mommy.” Her son nodded, humoring her.
The nurse holding the phone in her husband’s room was practiced. Talked soothingly before disconnecting, knowing they, the family, would never hang up.
During the drive home, she told the children a story, hoping to make it true by saying it aloud. Daddy hurrying down the steps in the dark, looking at his phone, so excited! So happy. Checking the weather, checking the time until sunrise. But he tripped, fell. It’s like turning off a light switch. He didn’t suffer. And most of all, he didn’t mean to leave you.
She didn’t tell her children that it was her fault, didn’t tell them about the long slow tick of time wasted.
The police were still at the house when they returned. She had the children wait at the old double front doors while she went around to the entry, went past the police, the pool of blood, and opened the latch, holding up the bar on its little nail that had swung down behind them when they left. Together they went up the front stairs. She put the children in her office with a TV show blaring on her computer. She instructed them in her strictest voice to not go downstairs.
“The hospital let us know,” the sergeant said. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I’m a father of young children myself.”
