Chapter 6: The Story They Brought to the Hallway
My husband asked to speak with a supervisor.
Patricia told me this the way she told me everything — plainly, without drama, like information I deserved to have.
"He's saying you have a history of making things up," she said.
"He used the word 'episodes.' He said the pregnancy has been hard on you emotionally and that you sometimes confuse things."
"He's been practicing that," I said.
"I know." She straightened the blanket across my legs.
"The charge nurse told him that your care team would determine your condition and that he was welcome to wait."
"Did he accept that?"
"He asked for the hospital's patient advocate number.
He wrote it down very carefully." She paused.
"His mother is still in the waiting room.
She hasn't said anything since they arrived.
She's just sitting there."
That was more frightening than my husband's noise.
He performed when he was scared.
She went quiet when she was calculating.
Lin arrived forty minutes later.
I heard her before I saw her — her voice in the hallway asking which room, not waiting for a full answer, already moving.
She pushed the door open and stopped when she saw me.
For a moment neither of us spoke.
Then she crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed and put both arms around me, carefully, the way you hold something you thought you had lost.
"I should have come sooner," she said into my hair.
"I didn't call sooner."
"I know.
I'm not blaming you." She pulled back and looked at my face with the focused attention of someone taking inventory.
"Are you hurt?
The baby?"
"The baby is stable.
I'm all right."
"You're not all right."
"I will be."
She held my face in her hands for a moment, then let go and turned to Patricia.
"What does she need?"
"Rest.
Monitoring.
And someone to stay with her tonight."
"I'm staying," Lin said.
It wasn't a question.
She sat in the chair beside the bed and reached into her bag.
She pulled out a small notebook and a pen.
"Tell me everything," she said.
"From the beginning.
I want to write it down."
"Harmon has the recordings."
"I know.
I want to hear it from you." She opened the notebook.
"Not for the case.
For me.
So I understand what you lived through."
I looked at her.
Eight months of silence between us, and she had driven four hours and arrived with a notebook and a pen, ready to listen.
I started talking.
I talked for a long time.
Lin wrote and didn't interrupt.
Patricia came and went quietly.
Outside the window the light changed from afternoon to early evening, and I kept talking, and Lin kept writing, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped feeling like I was reporting something that had happened to me and started feeling like I was finally setting it down somewhere outside my own body.
When I finished, Lin closed the notebook.
"Forty-one recordings," she said.
"Yes."
"And the phone still works."
"The battery is almost gone.
Harmon has it now."
Lin nodded.
She looked at the door, then back at me.
"He's still out there," she said.
"In the waiting room."
"I know."
"His mother too."
"I know."
Lin set the notebook on her knee.
"Do you know what she said to the intake nurse when they first arrived?
I heard it on my way in." She paused.
"She said, 'My daughter-in-law has always been fragile.
We do our best for her, but some women simply cannot cope.'"
The word fragile sat in the room between us.
I thought about every morning.
The porch post.
The cold air.
The marks in the dirt.
Forty-one recordings.
A four-year-old pushing a key through a fence.
"She picked the wrong word," I said.
Lin looked at me for a long moment.
Then she almost smiled.
The door opened.
Harmon stepped in with Carol behind him.
Carol was holding a printed document and her expression had shifted into something that looked like controlled urgency.
May you like
"We need to move quickly," Carol said.
"His attorney just called the hospital's legal department."
