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So she started to sing for the surgeon. “Any idea when the surgeon’s coming, any idea when I’ll be discharged?”
“Really?” asked a friendly nurse. “If it was me, I don’t know if I’d want to go back without help. Let alone go back to where all that happened.”
“I called a locksmith. And an alarm company,” she said. “If I do a subscription service, if I let them run electricity outside, they can put cameras everywhere, alarms on every window.”
“That’s not what I mean, hon. All that with your husband? I don’t think I’d be comfortable sleeping where I knew someone’d passed.”
“Maybe,” she said, wondering how this nurse had managed towork in a hospital where people died as part of the job, managed to live her sixty-odd years believing someone hadn’t died in most homes. “Maybe,” she said, surprised anyone would suggest she leave the only place that still held memories of her husband, the only place where he still existed.
“Maybe you’re right,” she told the nurse.
This was what she said to everyone, the thing all human beings wanted to hear. “You’re probably right, what do I know? Aren’t you smart, what a great suggestion, you’re so right, right, right.”
“Your kids are doing fine,” the sergeant said on the phone. “One of my people saw them yesterday. A caseworker was there this morning. Hasn’t she called you? Why don’t you call her? You left her a message? Well, she’ll call you back. Be patient.”
Finally he told her with a brittleness she knew meant he was serious, “You need to stop calling me about this.”
“This” being her children. The injustice of it, the proof of her father-in-law’s awful possession, made her sob into the thin hospital pillow. A new woman came into the room, interrupting her tears.
“Are you a nurse?”
“I’m a PA.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The physician’s assistant? For your surgeon.”
She had no idea what the hospital ranking system was, but at the word “surgeon” she wiped her face and sat straight, knowing she had to appease this extremely young, extremely blond person. The woman had her lift arms, squeeze hands.
“Sorry I assumed you were a nurse,” she said. “A friend of mine? A doctor? She says that happens to her all the time. But not to male doctors.”
She had no such friend, but didn’t see this story as a lie. Because of course that’s how things would be.
“Yeah,” the PA sighed. “It happens a lot.”
“Are you the one able to sign off on discharging me?”
“Yep.”
“Great! So great. I’m ready to go.”
“Do you have a place to stay?”
“Sure, of course.”
“It’s just”—the PA gave her a sympathetic shrug—“the police said you couldn’t go to your house without their sign-off. Your exams are good, so we’re ready to discharge you, could do it tomorrow, but you need a place to go. And a ride home.”
She called the sergeant. He answered with a curt “What?” assuming, she guessed, that she was calling about her children again.
After you’ve been so good, after you haven’t called him at all for two whole days. About your own children.
“They say I’m being discharged, but said something about you needing to give me permission to go back to my house?”
“Oh, right,” he said, voice relaxing. “We’d like to walk through the house with you before you move back in there. It might trigger memories, or else you might notice things that are out of the ordinary, moved or missing or different.”
She was exhausted at the idea of going through it all again, the endless questions, having to walk through those violated spaces with the sergeant.
Maybe bravery is just enduring.
