hospital visits

The roads to the hospital wind around tight, clench through forests like a fist.

The paper map spread across my legs, clumsy and awkward in shorts. My mom shows me how to read the roads rippling across. Tiny black and blue and red lines, threading through mountains. Thin veins stretching across cities, around rivers.

“I can’t see.”

We’ve driven for hours. When the fog is too thick, my mom rolls the window down, sticks her head out, inches us forward with uncertainty. Cold coffee in a cup. Carole King on the radio. I feel the earth move under my feet. I feel the sky tumbling down. Tumbling down the way grief hits in hospitals, knocking over the chest like rocks, assaulting the heart until it cracks along one edge.

I keep my eyes focused on the towns passing by on our paper map. Houses flicking by outside the window, colorful dots of shapes and buildings. I fantasize about the people in those houses to kill time. Think about them and wonder if they’re fighting or sleeping or kissing or drinking or crying. I play a game and pretend that every fourth house is mine. That’s my red mailbox. That’s my wilting garden. My attic window.

It’s almost evening when we swing into the parking lot, half-full Milk Moon rising overhead. The hospital sits on the side of a mountain, a sprawling giant of antiseptic and white sheets. I feel it when I walk in. The constant hum of lives overlapping. Slipping over each other with grief that slides down walls, tangles phone lines. Fear that hovers around pacing relatives. Waiting in bleached out waiting rooms, stale coffee and Styrofoam. Tiny bleating noises of babies taking breaths, curling into the first arms that will hold them. Medications rattling in paper cups, translucent skin that creases like paper and bruises from IV needles.

“What floor?”

The woman in the elevator has unwashed black hair, eyes that sag from lack of sleep. Arms full of someone’s belongings. Slippers and books. Soup in a takeout carton. Her fingers flutter over the buttons, tiny prayers wishing for healing.

“Three.”

She presses three, then presses seven. The elevator ride is silent, stagnant. Strangers sharing sadness. My mom clears her throat once. I keep my eyes down on my shoes, tap them on the floor.

On the third floor, the doors slip open. The woman puts one arm out, holds the doors open for us with her thin wrist, half twist of a smile as we step out. I wonder what’s on the seventh floor, what keeps her up at night, keeps her fingers trembling and hopeful.

My mom takes me by the hand and walks me down the hall, counting room numbers.

The door to room 302 is open, and I can see the man lying in there. White nightgown shrouding his gaunt body, mouth gaping open as he sleeps. A young man huddled in the uncomfortable chair next to him, dozing on and off, keeping watch. A scatter of cards and flowers at the bedside table. We keep walking.

The next room is empty, the bed being stripped and made up with fresh linens. For a moment, I want to run and jump into that bed, press my body into the plastic mattress. Feel all of the stories of this place. Scratched onto my bones, stitched into my hips. Carved into one palm, dressed in gauze with lavender and neroli, scarred into a memory that loiters on collarbones, on ribs.

We played hospital as kids, old sheets pulled up to the chin. Bandages wrapped awkwardly around our legs and foreheads, prescriptions of candy, violet pastilles in a tin box. Chocolate milk from a teaspoon. We forgot to imagine the hushed conversations and sterile floors, the gravity of sadness stretching down hallways, the rides of morphine calming pain.

There must be a weight to last breaths taken in unison. A shape to the realization of loss, a sound to sutures mending rifts that rip families, twist along spines. A weight to somber hearts, hole-punched from hoping, prayers pitched like pennies.

“This is it.”

My mother guides me by the shoulders, turns me into the room. I half expect to see that white light slicing through the room, a silver road map. Maybe some unknown savior floating down, hands outstretched and steady. My mother says something to comfort me, says everything will be okay.

But the words catch in her throat, and I know that her shoulders are tense with the knowledge that we’ll still have to move on when it isn’t.

Anna Doogan is a writer, dancer, and mother of three living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Hip Mama, Mutha Magazine, and The Literary Kitchen. She was the winner of the 2015 Hip Mama Uncensored/Unchaste Readers Writing Contest.

For more work by Anna Doogan, visit her page on our Online Sundries site.