Old Providence
by Hassan Riaz
While her husband helped her sit against the flattened pillows in her bed on the second day after her second surgery, she looked through the blinds of the window to her right, the same ones the nurses had had drawn for weeks now, and saw the single hanging bulb a dozen yards away in the building across from her. She saw the bulb and the vacant room and the old concrete building containing both. She saw the alley between her own building and the one across from hers, noticed the sun, imagined the weather as being warm and nourishing, and for a moment could picture herself in that empty space, floating away, going home and returning to a normal life. Her husband would tell her several months later while they sat at a conference table across from each other that she couldn't have seen the light bulb in the daytime because of the glare off the window, but she did, just as clearly as she saw the branch of the graying oak outside and the straggle of wilting leaves clutching it. The morphine was breaking and she'd seen a single bulb in the building across from hers.
"Nuns used to live in that building," her mother said, when Penelope told her of it that day during lunch, the time her mother came to see her. "Kind of like a hospice."
"They were dying?" Penelope said.
"I guess so. On the first floor. The hospital used to let them stay in the old building if they were terminal. Volunteers helped them out."
Her mother might have mistaken her silence for sadness or distress because when she was done rubbing Penelope's legs, she closed the blinds to the room's only window. "The floor you see, the third floor, was always empty," her mother said. "Only the first floor had nuns."
She found out from her night nurse, a middle-aged woman who was younger than her mother but reminded her of her anyway, that the building across from her was the old hospital, the one that had shuttered to patients thirty years ago. Nurses from the hospital used to volunteer their time and the hospital used to donate supplies to make the nuns comfortable. They didn't have families to visit them, no husbands or mothers. The makeshift hospice had closed years ago because the hospital hadn't had a license to operate a place like that. "We won't let you end up over there," she said, and patted her bony knee.
Penelope stayed awake, watching the television on mute and thinking about stretchers of dying nuns in the old building who waited for strangers to care for them. She reached for the small comb the hospital had provided and ran it through her hair, disentangling the stringy knots. She pictured the nuns sleeping in neat rows on beds like her own, their bodies permanently propped to an angle. She saw them with tubes in their arms and milky medicine dripping into them. She felt calmer thinking of them, less panicky, less alone. When the nurse checked on her at 2 a.m., she was still awake, still picturing the tented, falling chests of the nuns. The nurse gave her medicine through her IV, and she fell asleep.
#
Her husband came in the mornings, before he went to work, to drink his burnt coffee beside her bed, and again in the evenings, after work, to read headlines from the newspaper to her. He spent less time with her now than before, when he used to stay until she fell asleep after her nighttime medications. But he came.
She remembered the belly pain that had started a day before he'd brought her to the emergency room, the way she hadn't wanted to mention it to him but finally did when she couldn't tolerate it any more, the way it'd suffocated her despite the morphine they'd given her in emergency. She remembered two surgeries, the feelings of panic before each one, and the crunching pain, no better afterwards. When she woke up from her fragmented and dreamless sleeps, she reached out of habit for her husband's hand, and when he was there, she felt momentarily relaxed despite the pain, and when he wasn't, which was most of the time, she became anxious, and knew that she was losing herself more and more each day to a tangle of sweaty sheets in a white room.
He was older than she by ten years, established. He wore blue suits on weekdays and jeans on weekends, which is how she tracked time. The nurses wrote the date and day of the week on the whiteboard on the wall at her feet but she couldn't make sense of the scribbled words. He'd been in jeans, ones that she'd picked out for him at the start of summer, three times so far, which meant that she'd been here for at least three weeks, which in turn gelled with what he'd been telling her lately. "Today is day number twenty-two," he'd say. She knew that he wasn't just talking to her but to himself as well.
Her mother, who had her own life, her own new husband and own new house away from her and nearer the coast, didn't come on Fridays or weekends. She probably spent those days growing into her new life or maybe recovering from her old one. Penelope had had her own life as well before she'd come here. She wanted to go back to it, back to her husband, resume wherever they'd left off, watch movies and share dinners, and on those few times when her pain was controlled and she did dream, she dreamt of no more problems, everything becoming okay.
#
She saw the bulb again a couple of days later, this time at night, a single point of hazy illumination, through the crick in the blinds that appeared after her husband had leaned his chair against the window. She'd lost the old building behind shades and her clouded memory for a period of time she couldn't define but now that she'd glimpsed it again, she wanted to hold on to it. She reached out for her husband. "Can you open the blinds?" she said.
He stopped reading, and for a moment looked at her like he did when he was tired or angry, and she couldn't figure out which one he was. She wanted to know but didn’t ask because she was afraid that he was both, tired of her being sick, angry at her for everything. "Sure," he said.
He left, and she felt lonely again. The thud in her belly returned, stronger. She looked at the single bulb, watching it flicker, and almost felt better, as if someone, a nun, was there across the divide of the two buildings, keeping an eye on her. She remembered going to church as a kid with her mother and father before her father had left east, away from them. Their church was small, more social than religious, a place where the adults gossiped about people who weren't there, and the kids, like herself, played video games and table tennis in the youth room. They had no nuns there, no one committed to being alone.
She and her husband didn't go to church and hadn't been married in one. They'd gone to the courthouse on a plain Friday morning, after a month apart, because they were finally done with the anger. Growing up, she'd imagined a wedding, a white dress and flowers and friends and maybe her dad coming back and making things right and giving her away, but hadn't cared about those things that Friday morning because she'd been happy to unite their lives into a single one.
While she tried to sleep, she thought that maybe she and her husband could start going to church when she got better. Maybe they could find a place that fit into their lives.
#
The doctors told her to walk, get out of bed and start gaining strength, and sent a therapist to her that afternoon to help her step around the room and down the hall. She walked hunched over, her swollen belly hanging over her skinny hips as if she were falsely pregnant. She leaned on her IV pole, tangles of hair covering her cheeks, while the therapist held onto the back of her gown to prop her up.
Her husband came that night. She was tired from the walk but had stayed awake for his visit. "The nurse tells me that you're getting better," he said. "You walked."
"Am I?" she said.
He told her that he would see her in the morning for coffee but that he might take the next night off to collect himself, make himself a homemade meal, go to bed early.
"What day is tomorrow?" she said.
"Wednesday," he said.
She wanted to tell him to come, not to miss a day now, he'd been doing so good and she still needed him, she wasn't better despite what they said, but she remembered his expression of fatigue and anger from before. She looked past him, at the bulb in the old building, and said, "Yes, rest."
#
The next evening, she hoped that he would visit despite what he'd said, but as the night stretched past the shift change, he didn't come. She tried to watch the news on the television with the volume up but couldn't understand it the way she did when her husband read headlines from the newspaper to her. She'd walked today again with the therapist, and wanted to walk now as well. People were falling off around her, forgetting about her, and she would make herself well. She would get rid of the infection so that she could get stronger and leave. If the doctors couldn't fix her, she would fix herself. She would walk her way out of the hospital day by day, away from her single-windowed room on the third floor of Providence, and back to her life, her husband, the house he'd bought for them in the hills of Paso Robles and the bed she'd picked out for them.
She paged her nurse. "Can I walk?" she said.
Her nurse got her out of bed and led her around the hallway of the nursing station. She leaned on her IV pole and shuffled, feeling squeezing pain shoot from her belly to her back with every step, but continued until she couldn't anymore, until her side and chest hurt. When she told the nurse that she was tired, the nurse led her back. She helped her into bed and started to close the blinds.
"Leave them open, please," Penelope said, and the nurse did. She felt the nun across the way, could picture her sicker than herself, unable to walk, no physical therapist coming by, no mother rubbing her legs four days out of seven, no husband updating her on the real world and wearing the clothes that she'd picked out for him. "I'm here for you," Penelope said.
#
During morning coffee, her husband picked at his cell phone. "I have a meeting tonight," he said. "Something I've been delaying but can't anymore."
"Are you coming tonight?" she said.
"Tomorrow. I'll come tomorrow."
"What day is tomorrow?"
"Saturday."
"Okay." She could feel him about to leave. He shifted his leg and leaned forward, looking at his watch and the clock in the room. She could feel him focused on a schedule to which she wasn't privy, a life that was happening away from her. "How are you doing?" she said.
"Surviving," he said, and left.
#
Her mother didn't visit during lunch, and so Penelope ate alone from the tray of broth and juice, taking only a few sips of each before ringing the nurse to take it away. She'd lost weight and was losing more. She thought about dinner with her husband, cooking at home in her kitchen, which she'd arranged to her own order, the pans and lids lined up according to size, and she thought about dinner out with him at restaurants, places they liked to go.
Growing up, her mom had told her that during her marriage to her father, she'd gained weight as she and he had grown into a life of homemade meals and dining at new restaurants. Her mother always looked sad when she told her this but laughed anyway. She never mentioned it lately, not since remarrying. Penelope hadn't gained weight. She'd stayed the same, slim for her height, and she sometimes cared about this failure to adhere to matrimonial tradition, but mostly didn't, because even though her mother had gained weight, 'become happy' as she'd said, her husband had left her five short years into their marriage. Although Penelope was skinny and becoming more a stick every day, she was still married.
#
When her husband didn't show that night, she paged the nurse to walk, and was told to wait. Penelope did, watching news on the muted television, but still no one came. She reached for the walking socks from the tray table and put them on. She stood up, unplugged the IV machines from the red outlets, and wound the cords around the top of the pole. She couldn't wait for others to get her well.
She held onto the IV pole and lurched forward, feeling familiarly wobbly, but continued walking until she was out of the room. She turned right, away from the noise of the nursing station, and walked down the hall. She approached an enclave with a sitting bench and wide window, and pushed her IV pole to it. She adjusted her weight, and sat down on the wooden bench. She could see the building across the alley, the old hospital, its side facing the side of Providence. Except for the single light on the third floor, it was dark. She wanted to see the first floor, where the nuns had lived and died, and twisted to try to glance at it but the angle of the window was wrong and she saw nothing. That light is for both of us, she thought. A companion to the nun and signal to me to get better.
She pulled herself up and walked to her room a few steps at a time. When her nurse came to ask her if she was ready to walk, Penelope waved her off, closed her eyes, and asked for her sleeping medicine instead.
#
Her husband came wearing jeans. He'd skipped drinking coffee at her bedside during breakfast for the first time but she didn't mention it to him. He read her the news, something about financial troubles at the faire in Santa Maria, a place they'd gone for the first two years of their marriage but had missed this year. He was telling her that attendance at this year's faire was low--they weren't the only ones who'd stayed away--and the city and organizers were unsure if they would have the resources to stage it again.
She remembered the smell of red oak coals burning at the faire those first two times. But she couldn't remember why they hadn't gone this year, what had kept them from continuing a ritual so newly started, and wished now that they hadn't let themselves fail. She didn't care about the faire itself--the booths selling clusters of nothing, the food that tasted like char, the heat that burnt her legs--but going had been a shared experience, something that they did together, and she was confused why they'd let it die so quickly.
He finished reading her the news, and left.
#
He skipped morning coffee again but called her on the hospital line during lunch. She could hear the grind of the car engine in the background, could imagine it grunting, pulling him away from the hospital each night. She remembered how he'd bought it a short time after they'd married, a big luxury sedan for trips, and how for those first few weeks they rode in it late at night to pick up donuts from an always-open shop near the coast, both of them taking turns driving while the other played with the moonroof and loaded music onto the stereo. During this time, she'd felt relieved, because their relationship was finally real, cemented by marriage, secured against their habitual breakups.
"Can you spend extra time tonight?" she said. "Since you've taken some time off of visiting me?"
"I might not make it tonight," he said.
"Why?"
"Things are piling up."
"Like what?"
"Everything that happens away from the hospital. Everything that happens out here in the real world."
She cried when he hung up. A daytime nurse, a man wearing a gold watch and bracelet, came to see what was wrong, but she felt uncomfortable with the way he watched her, and pulled the sheet and woven blanket over her shoulders to shield herself. He fixed her IV, and left. She shuddered, her body shaking with chills, but didn't page the nurse because she didn't want him back in here. She wasn't supposed to be here, a woman with every part of her life ahead of her.
#
She woke up in the middle of the night with the television tuned to a show she didn't recognize but had seen before she'd come to the hospital. She felt heavy in her chest and limbs. She ran her fingers along the skin of her lower back, felt the oily sweat there and the way her heart seemed to be beating through it. She looked to her side and saw that the light in the room across the alley in the old hospital was off. She'd woken up for a reason and now knew why: whoever was over there in the old hospital, whoever was guiding her to her own health, was fading and needed her.
She pumped her calves to make the heaviness in them go away, and stood. After a few steps, she realized that she hadn't put on her socks but continued walking because she didn't have the strength to sit down and get out of bed again. She walked down the hallway, over the slippery floor, feeling the cold wax, and past full rooms and art prints on the wall. She walked to the elevator, where she leaned against the IV pole with one hand and held her pulsing belly with the other, breathing through her fatigue like she saw people on television do. She pushed the button to go down in the elevator.
When the elevator doors opened on the first floor, she walked through them and into the empty lobby. She felt too shaky to continue but knew that going forward would be easier than retreating. She walked to the automatic sliding doors in front of her but they were locked afterhours and remained shut. She hadn't entered through the lobby the day of her admission but through the emergency room on the other side of the hospital, away from the old building. She felt disoriented, warm, and vertiginous. She walked to the side exit at the far end of the lobby. She pushed the door open and stepped into the alley. The IV pole got stuck on the doorjamb and she had to use both hands to lift it up from off the ground. She closed her eyes when the pain from the movement jolted through her. The weather had still been warm on the day that her belly pain had begun, but the air was different now, colder. She figured that it was fall for real and not just by the calendar.
A long tarmac pathway flanked by grass on both sides divided the length of the alley before leading into a sidewalk that twisted left, and she walked along the pathway now. She looked up towards her right and saw the rows of lit rooms and hallways of the new hospital, and located her own room, which from here looked like any other, just a window and dull light. She passed by the gray oak that she used to mark her room, and looked up towards her left at the old building, and again saw darkness where a bulb should've been. After several slow minutes, she reached the sidewalk, still leaning against the IV pole to balance her, and turned left, continuing straight until she reached the entrance of the old building.
The old hospital was stout, compacted into three floors, and lightless. She wondered how many people in the forgotten building needed her. She stepped towards the entrance doors, trying to make them slide open with her steps, but they didn’t. She looked around, hoping to find another way in, but the pain in her back worsened and the vertigo turned to lightheadedness. She leaned her back against the dark door of the shuttered entrance and let her body sink. She saw that her feet were wrinkled and scratched. She heard crackling from the other side of the glass that reminded her of cellophane being crumbled, and let herself fade.
#
She felt callused hands on the back of her neck and another pair on her calves. She felt herself being lifted, floating away with effort, and still too warm. She felt cold sheets on her back as she was placed on a bed or stretcher or bench, she didn't know which, and another cold sheet being pulled onto her legs. She knew she was in the old hospital even though she saw nothing, just darkness, and didn't know if her eyes were open or closed. She felt sick, worse than this morning, worse than a month ago when she'd first come.
"You're not going to die," a woman said, her voice scratchy and old, much older than any voice she'd heard in the hospital, older than her mother's and nurses' who cared for her.
"This isn't the place for you," another woman said, her voice lighter, younger, more like her own.
"Who needs me here?" Penelope said.
"Who do you have, honey?" the woman with the scratchy voice said. "Children? Husband? Mom and dad and brothers and sisters?"
"Husband," Penelope said. "Mother."
"You have more than that," the younger woman said. "You don't need this place."
"We'll take care of you tonight," the older woman said. "And then you're going to go back and get well."
"Who needs me?" Penelope said again. "Who needs me on the third floor?"
"No one needs you here," the older woman said.
Penelope felt another layer of weight lowered onto her body, heavier than a sheet, thankfully cool. "I want to walk to her," she said. "Help her get better like she's helping me."
"You wouldn't make it upstairs," the younger woman said. "That room doesn't belong to you."
"The third floor stays with us," the older woman said. "You go back."
Penelope tried to sit up but she felt sandpapery hands, more than before, against her chest and legs, forcing her down, and she couldn't move. She heard more voices, more women, in the background. She strained, telling her muscles to work, push, stand up and walk and help the person on the third floor, but the hands belonging to the voices remained pressed against her, and she remained where she was.
#
A guard found her at dawn outside on the walkway, lying against the sealed doors of the old hospital, and a group of nurses took her back to Providence on a stretcher and hooked bags up to the lines in her arms. They gave her fluids and drew her blood and transfused her. The doctors scanned her and took her back to surgery, her third one, that afternoon. As the door to the staff elevator closed, she saw her husband turn his back and cry into his fist.
#
She went to the post anesthesia care unit, where she saw faces of doctors she'd never seen before, and then to the intensive care unit. She tried to get out of bed at night to walk back to the old hospital, to find the person with the bulb, but the nurses restrained her every time she swung her legs over the bedrail and finally they tied her wrists and leg to the bed and sedated her. She alternated between fragmented sleep and half-consciousness. Her husband visited her with blue gloves on his hands and yellow gowns over his clothes. He didn't read her the news anymore. He sat in a chair beside her bed. She further lost sense of time because she couldn't tell if he was wearing suits or jeans beneath the gowns. Her mother came during her lunch according to her same schedule as before, also wearing those same gloves and paper gowns, always leaving after rubbing her legs.
They took her back to the floors, away from intensive care, to a regular room, different from the one she'd been in before, but a regular room, and they undid her restraints, stopped sedating her, and brought back physical therapy to get her to walk.
#
She was in a different wing of the hospital, on the opposite side from the old building, and when physical therapy came by in the mornings and afternoons, she saw nothing relating to the old hospital out the hall windows, just a round plaza with a fountain and a grassy stretch that was dotted with flowers. She continued to feel an urge to return to the other side of her hospital, the part near the old building, to look for the single bulb, but wasn't sure how to get there and was too tired from her walks to figure it out.
They let her eat real food, solids and sugary sodas, not just gelatin and broth, and although she wasn't hungry and felt nauseous at times, she ate as much as she could, because she felt more and more every day that it was time for her to move on.
"You could've died by leaving the hospital," her husband said while drinking his burnt coffee, no longer wearing a gown or gloves. "Why would you do that?"
She wanted to tell him about everything but knew that the time to do so, the opportunity to share experiences with him, had long passed. She couldn't remember what she and he had fought about the night before her belly pain had started and didn't care anymore. "I was sick," she said. "I don't remember."
"At least you'll be out of here soon."
"Yes."
#
She stopped thinking about the nun with the bulb in the old hospital. Even though she was walking on her own, better than she had at any point since she'd come to the emergency room those several weeks ago, she wasn't supposed to return there. She was supposed to move, get well, restart rather than resume her life.
Her husband didn't come in suits anymore, and she told him that he didn't need to come on weekends either, but he continued to visit her in jeans. On a day that she recognized as a Sunday from reading it on the whiteboard on the wall, she told him that she was okay with the divorce.
"We don't have to rush," he said.
"It's what you wanted," she said. She didn't want to remember their arguments anymore. She didn't want to continue to rely on him when he didn't want her to. "I don't remember what we fought about all the time. But I remember you wanting us to go our separate ways for a while now and I'm okay with that."
He cried, the second time she'd seen him do so since she was admitted to Providence. He reached out for her, and she took his hand. He stopped crying, and left a short time thereafter, and she stood up on legs that were getting stronger by the day, and walked.
by Hassan Riaz
While her husband helped her sit against the flattened pillows in her bed on the second day after her second surgery, she looked through the blinds of the window to her right, the same ones the nurses had had drawn for weeks now, and saw the single hanging bulb a dozen yards away in the building across from her. She saw the bulb and the vacant room and the old concrete building containing both. She saw the alley between her own building and the one across from hers, noticed the sun, imagined the weather as being warm and nourishing, and for a moment could picture herself in that empty space, floating away, going home and returning to a normal life. Her husband would tell her several months later while they sat at a conference table across from each other that she couldn't have seen the light bulb in the daytime because of the glare off the window, but she did, just as clearly as she saw the branch of the graying oak outside and the straggle of wilting leaves clutching it. The morphine was breaking and she'd seen a single bulb in the building across from hers.
"Nuns used to live in that building," her mother said, when Penelope told her of it that day during lunch, the time her mother came to see her. "Kind of like a hospice."
"They were dying?" Penelope said.
"I guess so. On the first floor. The hospital used to let them stay in the old building if they were terminal. Volunteers helped them out."
Her mother might have mistaken her silence for sadness or distress because when she was done rubbing Penelope's legs, she closed the blinds to the room's only window. "The floor you see, the third floor, was always empty," her mother said. "Only the first floor had nuns."
She found out from her night nurse, a middle-aged woman who was younger than her mother but reminded her of her anyway, that the building across from her was the old hospital, the one that had shuttered to patients thirty years ago. Nurses from the hospital used to volunteer their time and the hospital used to donate supplies to make the nuns comfortable. They didn't have families to visit them, no husbands or mothers. The makeshift hospice had closed years ago because the hospital hadn't had a license to operate a place like that. "We won't let you end up over there," she said, and patted her bony knee.
Penelope stayed awake, watching the television on mute and thinking about stretchers of dying nuns in the old building who waited for strangers to care for them. She reached for the small comb the hospital had provided and ran it through her hair, disentangling the stringy knots. She pictured the nuns sleeping in neat rows on beds like her own, their bodies permanently propped to an angle. She saw them with tubes in their arms and milky medicine dripping into them. She felt calmer thinking of them, less panicky, less alone. When the nurse checked on her at 2 a.m., she was still awake, still picturing the tented, falling chests of the nuns. The nurse gave her medicine through her IV, and she fell asleep.
#
Her husband came in the mornings, before he went to work, to drink his burnt coffee beside her bed, and again in the evenings, after work, to read headlines from the newspaper to her. He spent less time with her now than before, when he used to stay until she fell asleep after her nighttime medications. But he came.
She remembered the belly pain that had started a day before he'd brought her to the emergency room, the way she hadn't wanted to mention it to him but finally did when she couldn't tolerate it any more, the way it'd suffocated her despite the morphine they'd given her in emergency. She remembered two surgeries, the feelings of panic before each one, and the crunching pain, no better afterwards. When she woke up from her fragmented and dreamless sleeps, she reached out of habit for her husband's hand, and when he was there, she felt momentarily relaxed despite the pain, and when he wasn't, which was most of the time, she became anxious, and knew that she was losing herself more and more each day to a tangle of sweaty sheets in a white room.
He was older than she by ten years, established. He wore blue suits on weekdays and jeans on weekends, which is how she tracked time. The nurses wrote the date and day of the week on the whiteboard on the wall at her feet but she couldn't make sense of the scribbled words. He'd been in jeans, ones that she'd picked out for him at the start of summer, three times so far, which meant that she'd been here for at least three weeks, which in turn gelled with what he'd been telling her lately. "Today is day number twenty-two," he'd say. She knew that he wasn't just talking to her but to himself as well.
Her mother, who had her own life, her own new husband and own new house away from her and nearer the coast, didn't come on Fridays or weekends. She probably spent those days growing into her new life or maybe recovering from her old one. Penelope had had her own life as well before she'd come here. She wanted to go back to it, back to her husband, resume wherever they'd left off, watch movies and share dinners, and on those few times when her pain was controlled and she did dream, she dreamt of no more problems, everything becoming okay.
#
She saw the bulb again a couple of days later, this time at night, a single point of hazy illumination, through the crick in the blinds that appeared after her husband had leaned his chair against the window. She'd lost the old building behind shades and her clouded memory for a period of time she couldn't define but now that she'd glimpsed it again, she wanted to hold on to it. She reached out for her husband. "Can you open the blinds?" she said.
He stopped reading, and for a moment looked at her like he did when he was tired or angry, and she couldn't figure out which one he was. She wanted to know but didn’t ask because she was afraid that he was both, tired of her being sick, angry at her for everything. "Sure," he said.
He left, and she felt lonely again. The thud in her belly returned, stronger. She looked at the single bulb, watching it flicker, and almost felt better, as if someone, a nun, was there across the divide of the two buildings, keeping an eye on her. She remembered going to church as a kid with her mother and father before her father had left east, away from them. Their church was small, more social than religious, a place where the adults gossiped about people who weren't there, and the kids, like herself, played video games and table tennis in the youth room. They had no nuns there, no one committed to being alone.
She and her husband didn't go to church and hadn't been married in one. They'd gone to the courthouse on a plain Friday morning, after a month apart, because they were finally done with the anger. Growing up, she'd imagined a wedding, a white dress and flowers and friends and maybe her dad coming back and making things right and giving her away, but hadn't cared about those things that Friday morning because she'd been happy to unite their lives into a single one.
While she tried to sleep, she thought that maybe she and her husband could start going to church when she got better. Maybe they could find a place that fit into their lives.
#
The doctors told her to walk, get out of bed and start gaining strength, and sent a therapist to her that afternoon to help her step around the room and down the hall. She walked hunched over, her swollen belly hanging over her skinny hips as if she were falsely pregnant. She leaned on her IV pole, tangles of hair covering her cheeks, while the therapist held onto the back of her gown to prop her up.
Her husband came that night. She was tired from the walk but had stayed awake for his visit. "The nurse tells me that you're getting better," he said. "You walked."
"Am I?" she said.
He told her that he would see her in the morning for coffee but that he might take the next night off to collect himself, make himself a homemade meal, go to bed early.
"What day is tomorrow?" she said.
"Wednesday," he said.
She wanted to tell him to come, not to miss a day now, he'd been doing so good and she still needed him, she wasn't better despite what they said, but she remembered his expression of fatigue and anger from before. She looked past him, at the bulb in the old building, and said, "Yes, rest."
#
The next evening, she hoped that he would visit despite what he'd said, but as the night stretched past the shift change, he didn't come. She tried to watch the news on the television with the volume up but couldn't understand it the way she did when her husband read headlines from the newspaper to her. She'd walked today again with the therapist, and wanted to walk now as well. People were falling off around her, forgetting about her, and she would make herself well. She would get rid of the infection so that she could get stronger and leave. If the doctors couldn't fix her, she would fix herself. She would walk her way out of the hospital day by day, away from her single-windowed room on the third floor of Providence, and back to her life, her husband, the house he'd bought for them in the hills of Paso Robles and the bed she'd picked out for them.
She paged her nurse. "Can I walk?" she said.
Her nurse got her out of bed and led her around the hallway of the nursing station. She leaned on her IV pole and shuffled, feeling squeezing pain shoot from her belly to her back with every step, but continued until she couldn't anymore, until her side and chest hurt. When she told the nurse that she was tired, the nurse led her back. She helped her into bed and started to close the blinds.
"Leave them open, please," Penelope said, and the nurse did. She felt the nun across the way, could picture her sicker than herself, unable to walk, no physical therapist coming by, no mother rubbing her legs four days out of seven, no husband updating her on the real world and wearing the clothes that she'd picked out for him. "I'm here for you," Penelope said.
#
During morning coffee, her husband picked at his cell phone. "I have a meeting tonight," he said. "Something I've been delaying but can't anymore."
"Are you coming tonight?" she said.
"Tomorrow. I'll come tomorrow."
"What day is tomorrow?"
"Saturday."
"Okay." She could feel him about to leave. He shifted his leg and leaned forward, looking at his watch and the clock in the room. She could feel him focused on a schedule to which she wasn't privy, a life that was happening away from her. "How are you doing?" she said.
"Surviving," he said, and left.
#
Her mother didn't visit during lunch, and so Penelope ate alone from the tray of broth and juice, taking only a few sips of each before ringing the nurse to take it away. She'd lost weight and was losing more. She thought about dinner with her husband, cooking at home in her kitchen, which she'd arranged to her own order, the pans and lids lined up according to size, and she thought about dinner out with him at restaurants, places they liked to go.
Growing up, her mom had told her that during her marriage to her father, she'd gained weight as she and he had grown into a life of homemade meals and dining at new restaurants. Her mother always looked sad when she told her this but laughed anyway. She never mentioned it lately, not since remarrying. Penelope hadn't gained weight. She'd stayed the same, slim for her height, and she sometimes cared about this failure to adhere to matrimonial tradition, but mostly didn't, because even though her mother had gained weight, 'become happy' as she'd said, her husband had left her five short years into their marriage. Although Penelope was skinny and becoming more a stick every day, she was still married.
#
When her husband didn't show that night, she paged the nurse to walk, and was told to wait. Penelope did, watching news on the muted television, but still no one came. She reached for the walking socks from the tray table and put them on. She stood up, unplugged the IV machines from the red outlets, and wound the cords around the top of the pole. She couldn't wait for others to get her well.
She held onto the IV pole and lurched forward, feeling familiarly wobbly, but continued walking until she was out of the room. She turned right, away from the noise of the nursing station, and walked down the hall. She approached an enclave with a sitting bench and wide window, and pushed her IV pole to it. She adjusted her weight, and sat down on the wooden bench. She could see the building across the alley, the old hospital, its side facing the side of Providence. Except for the single light on the third floor, it was dark. She wanted to see the first floor, where the nuns had lived and died, and twisted to try to glance at it but the angle of the window was wrong and she saw nothing. That light is for both of us, she thought. A companion to the nun and signal to me to get better.
She pulled herself up and walked to her room a few steps at a time. When her nurse came to ask her if she was ready to walk, Penelope waved her off, closed her eyes, and asked for her sleeping medicine instead.
#
Her husband came wearing jeans. He'd skipped drinking coffee at her bedside during breakfast for the first time but she didn't mention it to him. He read her the news, something about financial troubles at the faire in Santa Maria, a place they'd gone for the first two years of their marriage but had missed this year. He was telling her that attendance at this year's faire was low--they weren't the only ones who'd stayed away--and the city and organizers were unsure if they would have the resources to stage it again.
She remembered the smell of red oak coals burning at the faire those first two times. But she couldn't remember why they hadn't gone this year, what had kept them from continuing a ritual so newly started, and wished now that they hadn't let themselves fail. She didn't care about the faire itself--the booths selling clusters of nothing, the food that tasted like char, the heat that burnt her legs--but going had been a shared experience, something that they did together, and she was confused why they'd let it die so quickly.
He finished reading her the news, and left.
#
He skipped morning coffee again but called her on the hospital line during lunch. She could hear the grind of the car engine in the background, could imagine it grunting, pulling him away from the hospital each night. She remembered how he'd bought it a short time after they'd married, a big luxury sedan for trips, and how for those first few weeks they rode in it late at night to pick up donuts from an always-open shop near the coast, both of them taking turns driving while the other played with the moonroof and loaded music onto the stereo. During this time, she'd felt relieved, because their relationship was finally real, cemented by marriage, secured against their habitual breakups.
"Can you spend extra time tonight?" she said. "Since you've taken some time off of visiting me?"
"I might not make it tonight," he said.
"Why?"
"Things are piling up."
"Like what?"
"Everything that happens away from the hospital. Everything that happens out here in the real world."
She cried when he hung up. A daytime nurse, a man wearing a gold watch and bracelet, came to see what was wrong, but she felt uncomfortable with the way he watched her, and pulled the sheet and woven blanket over her shoulders to shield herself. He fixed her IV, and left. She shuddered, her body shaking with chills, but didn't page the nurse because she didn't want him back in here. She wasn't supposed to be here, a woman with every part of her life ahead of her.
#
She woke up in the middle of the night with the television tuned to a show she didn't recognize but had seen before she'd come to the hospital. She felt heavy in her chest and limbs. She ran her fingers along the skin of her lower back, felt the oily sweat there and the way her heart seemed to be beating through it. She looked to her side and saw that the light in the room across the alley in the old hospital was off. She'd woken up for a reason and now knew why: whoever was over there in the old hospital, whoever was guiding her to her own health, was fading and needed her.
She pumped her calves to make the heaviness in them go away, and stood. After a few steps, she realized that she hadn't put on her socks but continued walking because she didn't have the strength to sit down and get out of bed again. She walked down the hallway, over the slippery floor, feeling the cold wax, and past full rooms and art prints on the wall. She walked to the elevator, where she leaned against the IV pole with one hand and held her pulsing belly with the other, breathing through her fatigue like she saw people on television do. She pushed the button to go down in the elevator.
When the elevator doors opened on the first floor, she walked through them and into the empty lobby. She felt too shaky to continue but knew that going forward would be easier than retreating. She walked to the automatic sliding doors in front of her but they were locked afterhours and remained shut. She hadn't entered through the lobby the day of her admission but through the emergency room on the other side of the hospital, away from the old building. She felt disoriented, warm, and vertiginous. She walked to the side exit at the far end of the lobby. She pushed the door open and stepped into the alley. The IV pole got stuck on the doorjamb and she had to use both hands to lift it up from off the ground. She closed her eyes when the pain from the movement jolted through her. The weather had still been warm on the day that her belly pain had begun, but the air was different now, colder. She figured that it was fall for real and not just by the calendar.
A long tarmac pathway flanked by grass on both sides divided the length of the alley before leading into a sidewalk that twisted left, and she walked along the pathway now. She looked up towards her right and saw the rows of lit rooms and hallways of the new hospital, and located her own room, which from here looked like any other, just a window and dull light. She passed by the gray oak that she used to mark her room, and looked up towards her left at the old building, and again saw darkness where a bulb should've been. After several slow minutes, she reached the sidewalk, still leaning against the IV pole to balance her, and turned left, continuing straight until she reached the entrance of the old building.
The old hospital was stout, compacted into three floors, and lightless. She wondered how many people in the forgotten building needed her. She stepped towards the entrance doors, trying to make them slide open with her steps, but they didn’t. She looked around, hoping to find another way in, but the pain in her back worsened and the vertigo turned to lightheadedness. She leaned her back against the dark door of the shuttered entrance and let her body sink. She saw that her feet were wrinkled and scratched. She heard crackling from the other side of the glass that reminded her of cellophane being crumbled, and let herself fade.
#
She felt callused hands on the back of her neck and another pair on her calves. She felt herself being lifted, floating away with effort, and still too warm. She felt cold sheets on her back as she was placed on a bed or stretcher or bench, she didn't know which, and another cold sheet being pulled onto her legs. She knew she was in the old hospital even though she saw nothing, just darkness, and didn't know if her eyes were open or closed. She felt sick, worse than this morning, worse than a month ago when she'd first come.
"You're not going to die," a woman said, her voice scratchy and old, much older than any voice she'd heard in the hospital, older than her mother's and nurses' who cared for her.
"This isn't the place for you," another woman said, her voice lighter, younger, more like her own.
"Who needs me here?" Penelope said.
"Who do you have, honey?" the woman with the scratchy voice said. "Children? Husband? Mom and dad and brothers and sisters?"
"Husband," Penelope said. "Mother."
"You have more than that," the younger woman said. "You don't need this place."
"We'll take care of you tonight," the older woman said. "And then you're going to go back and get well."
"Who needs me?" Penelope said again. "Who needs me on the third floor?"
"No one needs you here," the older woman said.
Penelope felt another layer of weight lowered onto her body, heavier than a sheet, thankfully cool. "I want to walk to her," she said. "Help her get better like she's helping me."
"You wouldn't make it upstairs," the younger woman said. "That room doesn't belong to you."
"The third floor stays with us," the older woman said. "You go back."
Penelope tried to sit up but she felt sandpapery hands, more than before, against her chest and legs, forcing her down, and she couldn't move. She heard more voices, more women, in the background. She strained, telling her muscles to work, push, stand up and walk and help the person on the third floor, but the hands belonging to the voices remained pressed against her, and she remained where she was.
#
A guard found her at dawn outside on the walkway, lying against the sealed doors of the old hospital, and a group of nurses took her back to Providence on a stretcher and hooked bags up to the lines in her arms. They gave her fluids and drew her blood and transfused her. The doctors scanned her and took her back to surgery, her third one, that afternoon. As the door to the staff elevator closed, she saw her husband turn his back and cry into his fist.
#
She went to the post anesthesia care unit, where she saw faces of doctors she'd never seen before, and then to the intensive care unit. She tried to get out of bed at night to walk back to the old hospital, to find the person with the bulb, but the nurses restrained her every time she swung her legs over the bedrail and finally they tied her wrists and leg to the bed and sedated her. She alternated between fragmented sleep and half-consciousness. Her husband visited her with blue gloves on his hands and yellow gowns over his clothes. He didn't read her the news anymore. He sat in a chair beside her bed. She further lost sense of time because she couldn't tell if he was wearing suits or jeans beneath the gowns. Her mother came during her lunch according to her same schedule as before, also wearing those same gloves and paper gowns, always leaving after rubbing her legs.
They took her back to the floors, away from intensive care, to a regular room, different from the one she'd been in before, but a regular room, and they undid her restraints, stopped sedating her, and brought back physical therapy to get her to walk.
#
She was in a different wing of the hospital, on the opposite side from the old building, and when physical therapy came by in the mornings and afternoons, she saw nothing relating to the old hospital out the hall windows, just a round plaza with a fountain and a grassy stretch that was dotted with flowers. She continued to feel an urge to return to the other side of her hospital, the part near the old building, to look for the single bulb, but wasn't sure how to get there and was too tired from her walks to figure it out.
They let her eat real food, solids and sugary sodas, not just gelatin and broth, and although she wasn't hungry and felt nauseous at times, she ate as much as she could, because she felt more and more every day that it was time for her to move on.
"You could've died by leaving the hospital," her husband said while drinking his burnt coffee, no longer wearing a gown or gloves. "Why would you do that?"
She wanted to tell him about everything but knew that the time to do so, the opportunity to share experiences with him, had long passed. She couldn't remember what she and he had fought about the night before her belly pain had started and didn't care anymore. "I was sick," she said. "I don't remember."
"At least you'll be out of here soon."
"Yes."
#
She stopped thinking about the nun with the bulb in the old hospital. Even though she was walking on her own, better than she had at any point since she'd come to the emergency room those several weeks ago, she wasn't supposed to return there. She was supposed to move, get well, restart rather than resume her life.
Her husband didn't come in suits anymore, and she told him that he didn't need to come on weekends either, but he continued to visit her in jeans. On a day that she recognized as a Sunday from reading it on the whiteboard on the wall, she told him that she was okay with the divorce.
"We don't have to rush," he said.
"It's what you wanted," she said. She didn't want to remember their arguments anymore. She didn't want to continue to rely on him when he didn't want her to. "I don't remember what we fought about all the time. But I remember you wanting us to go our separate ways for a while now and I'm okay with that."
He cried, the second time she'd seen him do so since she was admitted to Providence. He reached out for her, and she took his hand. He stopped crying, and left a short time thereafter, and she stood up on legs that were getting stronger by the day, and walked.
