The rain was hitting the asphalt outside the emergency doors like handfuls of dry beans when they wheeled me into St. Agnes. My chest felt like someone had tied a tow strap around my ribs and ratcheted it down three clicks too tight. I was seventy-one years old, living alone in a two-room trailer outside Cairo where the oil heater rattled every time the wind came off the river. I kept telling the triage nurse it was just bad heartburn from a salt pork sandwich, but she didn’t look up from her screen when she slapped the yellow wristband over my thumb.
They put me in room 412, a narrow box that smelled of bleach and cold lemon cleaner. A plastic water pitcher sat on the rolling tray with a red bendy straw sticking out of the lid. I laid there staring at the drop ceiling where one of the white squares had a brown water stain shaped like the state of Arkansas. I didn’t have nobody to call. My brother Earl had gone down in a logging accident back in ’11, and the woman I lived with for ten years over in Paducah packed her Sears luggage while I was out at the lumberyard.
About twenty minutes past four, the door squeaked open on its brass hinges. I figured it was just the kid coming in to take another vial of blood from the crook of my arm. But she wasn’t carrying trays or needles. She had a blue plastic badge clipped to the pocket of her scrub top, and her brown hair was pulled back into a clip the way girls do when they mean business.
I didn’t recognize her face at first because the skin was fuller and she had that tired line between her eyebrows that people get when they work twelve-hour shifts on concrete floors. But she had the exact same way of holding her shoulders, squared off like she was bracing against a draft. She set the metal chart down on the rolling stand without making a sound.
A small plastic visitor badge lay face down on the white counter next to the sink. The corner of it was flipped up, showing the blue lettering printed by the label maker at the front desk. “Nurse Claire Bell.” My thumb twitched against the cotton blanket. Claire. That was the name her mother, Martha, used to write in the margins of her church hymnal before everything went sour and I walked out the screen door with my duffel bag in the back of the Ford.
She reached out and tapped the plastic handle of the chart against her knuckles once, twice, three times. That was the rhythm. Fast, then a little pause, then fast again. Her mother’s exact habit. I used to watch Martha sit at the kitchen table doing the Sears bills with her hand moving just like that while the coffee pot hissed on the burner.
My throat felt dry as corn husks. I tried to clear it, but it came out sounding like a dog coughing up a burr. “Claire,” I said.
She stopped tapping the metal. She didn’t look at my face right away. She picked up the plastic badge from the counter, turned it over between her thumb and forefinger, and then clipped it properly onto her left pocket. The metal snap made a tiny click that sounded louder than it had any right to be in that small room.
“You’re Arthur,” she said. Her voice didn’t have any shake in it. It was flat and level, the way nurses talk when they’re dealing with someone who won’t take their pills.
“I didn’t think I’d see you here,” I said, and my voice sounded old, thinner even than I knew it was. “They told me downstairs who was on the floor, but I thought maybe it was just a name like yours.”
“There aren’t many Barrows around this county anymore,” she said. She reached out and straightened the corner of my blanket, her fingers moving with a professional neatness that didn’t leave room for arguing. “Heart is acting up?”
“Just a squeeze,” I told her. “Nothing a couple of days on the couch won’t fix.”
“Doctor says you’ve got fluid at the base of your left lung,” she said, finally looking straight at me. Those brown eyes didn’t look like mine and they didn’t look like Martha’s either. They were just cold, clear water behind glass. “They’re keeping you over the weekend for observation.”
I wanted to tell her about the trailer, about how the roof leaked right over the kitchen table whenever the spring storms came up from Tennessee, but the words felt too heavy to drag out into the light. I had spent twenty years convincing myself she wouldn’t even remember what I looked like if she passed me in the aisle at Kroger. I told myself kids at six years old don’t keep scars deep enough to matter. I told myself Martha’s folks took her in and gave her a clean porch and a Bible school education, so my getting out from under the weight of it was practically a favor.
“I sent money,” I said, and as soon as it left my mouth I knew how small it sounded. “For three years. I sent what I could scrape together from the yard.”
“One hundred and twenty dollars,” she said. She wasn’t angry. That was the part that made my chest tighten back up. If she had started yelling or throwing the chart at me, I would have known what to do with it. I could have gotten mad back. “Except for the months you missed when the truck broke down.”
“How do you know about the truck?”
“Grandma kept the receipts in a shoebox behind the flour canister,” she said. She walked over to the window and looked out at the parking lot where the rain was turning the oil slicks into rainbow swirls on the blacktop. “She kept every single postal money order with your name scrawled on the line in blue ink. Even the ones for thirty dollars when you were working the seasonal harvest over in Mound City.”
“She shouldn’t have kept those,” I muttered.
“She kept a lot of things,” Claire said. She turned back around, her hands folded over the front of her white scrub skirt. “She kept the church bulletin from the Sunday after you left, too. The one where the preacher talked about men who put their hand to the plow and then look back over their shoulder.”
The room got very quiet except for the hum of the small refrigerator under the counter where they kept the ginger ale and the paper cups. I looked down at my hands on the blanket. The skin on the back of my hands looked like old parchment paper left out in the sun, spotted with brown freckles and blue veins knotted up like fishing line.
“I was twenty-one,” I said, and I hated the way I sounded like I was begging for something I hadn’t earned. “I didn’t know which end was up. Your mother and me, we weren’t even dry behind the ears. Every time you cried, I felt like I was standing at the bottom of a well with nobody dropping a rope down.”
“You were twenty-one,” she repeated. It wasn’t a question. It was just a measurement, like checking the tread on a tire before a long haul.
“I left because I was scared I was going to break you,” I said, and my voice cracked right on the middle of the word. “I didn’t have nobody to show me how to be a father. My own old man used to take his belt off if we left the gate unlatched.”
She didn’t move toward the bed. She stood right there by the window with her hands still folded, looking at me the way she must look at half the old men who come through this county hospital with ruined livers and bad tickers. “Lots of people are scared, Arthur. Most of them stay anyway.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to look at a kid and see all your own mistakes staring back at you before she can even tie her own shoes,” I said.
“No,” she said softly. “I don’t. I only know what it’s like to sit on the front porch waiting for a Ford truck that stopped coming down the gravel road in the summer of 2004.”
A nurse outside in the hallway pushed a cart with squeaky wheels past our door, the metal instruments rattling inside the drawers like dry bones. Neither of us moved while the sound faded toward the nurses’ station at the end of the hall.
“I tried to come back once,” I said, and the lie came out thin and gray before I could stop it. “About four years after I left. I drove past the house on Elm Street. There was a red tricycle on the grass.”
Claire tilted her head just an inch. “We moved out of that house in 2005. Grandma sold it to pay for the roof after the hail storm. There wasn’t a red tricycle there.”
My mouth stayed open for a second. I couldn’t find anything else to say. The lie had dropped down between us like a wet blanket, heavy and smelly and impossible to kick under the bed.
She reached down and picked up her metal chart, sliding it under her arm. “Your vitals are stable. Doctor will be in around seven to talk about the blood thinners.”
“Claire,” I said.
She paused with her hand on the metal push-bar of the door, her fingers tapping that same rhythm against the painted steel, fast, pause, fast.
“Are you working tomorrow?” I asked.
“I’m on the floor all week,” she said, looking straight ahead through the little wire-mesh window in the door. “If you need another pitcher of water, press the red button on the wall. One of the aides will bring it in.”
She pushed the door open and walked out into the hall without looking back once. The latch clicked shut behind her, solid and final, leaving me alone with the yellow stain on the ceiling and the sound of my own breathing rattling in the dark.
