I like watching the curtain ebb and flow with the breath of the fan. The way it darkens almost to blackness until a crack opens, sending ribbons of light rippling across my bed. But sometimes, when I follow these patterns for too long, they make me feel so impossibly small—like a minnow or a bit of seaweed staring up at sunlight through clouded waters, watching it fracture and bend as it tries to find a way down to where I am.
When I was a girl, my grandmother told me that light was no different than the rest of us. We were sitting on the slatted chairs of her deck, pulling wool blankets across our laps. Just out of reach, hung the muddy smell of the lagoon, muffled by the blustering wind of late October. As I pointed out constellations with a fingertip, I listened to my grandmother talk about each of those dots suspended in space, how the light we saw was just an echo of all the fire and burning that had once been.
“In fact, some of them have already died,” she said, her voice crackling like a fireplace. “But at night we can still see what they’ve left behind.”
I never knew if she was telling the truth. I didn’t get to ask her before she died a few years later. But I still like to think about memories like this, like a few seeds of light trickling from the pockets of the past.
* * *
In the mornings, the nurses came in like roosters before sunrise, as if they couldn’t be bothered with our simple need for quiet in a hospital that ached with noise. They always seemed to be brandishing something—a chart of smiley faces, a stethoscope, or the curtains that divided our beds, flinging them open as if they were introducing some Broadway musical instead of just showing me Emily plugged into that IV stand.
Seeing her usually made it worthwhile though, if only for a bit of respite from the nurses and the septic smell of my sheets. Her sponge of pepper-gray hair and leathery cheeks, her eyes squinting open in the morning sun, searching for the photos on her nightstand or the small orchid that she watered with a plastic cup in the evenings.
Always, I tried to catch her eye, wanting to tell her a story or a dream—the two often seemed to blur together—of how beautiful she had looked with her husband at their son’s graduation, standing arm in arm, beaming like royalty; of how magnificent she had been gliding across the college track, her thighs bulging, her feet digging into the synthetic, as I screamed from the sidelines, “Emmm-Uh-Leee!”
But she was tired in the mornings and met my eyes with hesitation, as if she wasn’t sure what I was talking about or why. Then a nurse would come in to fuss with her tubes or to check on her vitals, telling me, “to give Emily some rest.”
Once more wrapped in solitude, I studied the curtains, thinking how pathetic they seemed in the daytime. Wondering how I’d ever compared the mystery of the ocean to such an empty, cartoonish blue.
“That blue, it’s just like all of the shit in here.” Emily explained one morning with a rare, impish smile. “The nurses, the trays, those curtains—it’s nothing but fake old Blue Razz.”
It was the only time I’d seen her laugh. I let it sweep me up too until our voices wrapped around each other like old friends, until the laughter sunk into our chests and became weeping, wringing me out like a sponge, rolling me across the stiff plastic of my mattress until I hit a red button with my knee.
“What’s going on here ladies?” The nurse’s voice cut through all that warmth.
“It’s… the curtains.” I stammered through joyful tears. “They’re just so… so blue.”
“And so beee-youuu-tee-ful,” laughed Emily. “Wait, Miss, do they match your scrub?”
I turned away, trying to hold back my trembling laughter, knowing the old nurse was not in the mood for wisecracks. I thought it was probably because she had realized that to us she was just an extension of those curtains, just another piece of a system bent on preserving life by shaving off its brittle quirks and knots.
“You know,” she snapped. “There are some people in here who have a lot more to worry about than the color of the curtains.”
As if to prove her point, she yanked them across the rod from which they hung, dividing us once more and shuffling out.
“Is the Blue Razz gone?” A voice came from the other side of the curtain.
“Blue Razz is gone.” I whispered back.
In the days that followed, I tried to breathe that moment back into being, hoping those two words might bubble up through the stale light of our room once more, cool and sweet. But as routines rolled on—the machines whining, the nurses prodding, the small packages of dehydrated food presented and discarded with the same indifference—I could feel the magic of Blue Razz begin to fade, its life stealing away like a bouquet of birthday balloons drained with time. Something dark had wormed its way into them and, lying next to Emily, I realized that to conjure them now was to give voice to the irony of our predicament, to let them echo its message across the empty walls of our room: this is your world now.
* * *
Though Emily and I didn’t talk much, I always looked forward to days like today, when Ezra and her grandchildren arrived, piling onto Emily’s mattress with their wide-eyed smiles and pudgy cheeks, glancing nervously toward Ezra as if to ask, what do we do now?
Emily laughed and pulled them to her with long arms, letting the feel of their skin and the bittersweet smell of their warm heads wash over her. From across the room, I inhaled deeply, trying to breath it all in.
Though I knew there was no one to blame but myself for my vacant bedside—that or God, or karma I suppose—I hated myself for waiting. I’d always been convinced that those years of children and family reunions were lying in wait off in the distance, somewhere after the boundless tours across the Southwest and the record deal in Nashville, after short romances and their abrupt severings.
When Bill had nosed his way in—following me with his gray-green stares, with his smoky breath and his simple heart—I told myself it would come. He had, after all, promised me a baby girl, and played his part in the process, shedding tears when I whispered the news, cupping the bulge of my stomach with long, rough fingers, holding my bones after my body was emptied of all that blood and life and the fleeting hope of motherhood.
Too much time had passed I suppose. But I resented Bill for all of it— for the persistent virility of men, for the decades of waiting, for the unrequited love he carried for me after all that had passed. I berated him for everything and nothing, until one day he just stopped showing up.
Another day I collapsed in the shower. Another day I found myself here. Another day, and another, watching, regretting how time seemed to rush in around my untended hopes like crab weed in an empty garden.
Back in our room, Ezra told Emily they should get a move on. The children nodded and kissed her with their small lips before waving goodbye. When they’d gone, I turned, searching for Emily’s usual, contented smile. But her eyes had fluttered closed, the life drained from her face.
The next day she was the same. Eyelids lolling open as if trying to peer through blind eyes, never fully awake or asleep. Sometimes she cried as she stared out the window in the evenings. Sometimes she looked back at me, and in the clouded panes of her eyes, I could see she had forgotten who I was.
* * *
I awoke staring at the drawn blue curtains. From the timbre of the uneven voices on the other side, I knew that there were too many nurses, too many tubes being pushed into holes, too many needles into veins. The beeps of the monitor slowed. I didn’t know if this was good or bad.
“Emily!” I yelled, my voice pushing through the curtain. “Wake up. It’s the Blue Razz. Emily!”
“Mrs. Thompson!” Came the voice of a nurse I’d never seen before, her head breaking the smooth wall of the curtains like a newborn, sweaty and red. “We need silence right now. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
The curtains closed. I stared up at the ceiling, seething. What moment? When?
After the footsteps of the nurses returned to the clamor of the hallway, I brushed back the curtain to find the outline of Emily’ tinged by the ghostly sheen of the moon. Pulling myself from bed, I walked over to her, but felt nothing on my hand—no breath, no beat, no quiver of life.
I hiked up my gown and crawled in beside her, pushing my cheek against the swell of her shoulder where it still harbored some warmth. I closed my eyes and tried to scrounge up any of the life I might have stored away, to let it soak into the bones of her thighs and the faint heft of her hip.
Hours later, when I woke, the night hung heavily around me. Somehow, I had returned to my bed. Where Emily had once been, there was only a tiled space and dust twisting in the moonlight. I closed my eyes—something I’d done as a little girl to shake myself from dreams—and searched for one last image of Emily. But there was only a face washed out by rain, only the two photos she’d kept on the table between us.
Though I’d known her for just a few weeks—I suppose known wasn’t even the word, for what can you really know from sharing a room with a stranger?—the loneliness of that moment spread across the dim light of the room like oil on a cold pond, and I could feel its weight.
A twist of nausea welled up in me, the room compressing, bearing down. I plucked off my hospital socks and let the chill of the dark tiles run up my legs as the IV tube popped from my arm, leaving a trail of saline fluid dripping in my wake. But no one noticed as I floated out to the red exit sign, leaving the on-call nurses to answer to the dying.
Pushing on the bar of the door, I felt the autumn air rush in to fill the space around me, pulling me out with the scent of rotting leaves and soil, of dampness and decay. The street light sent my shadow dancing across the luster of the parking lot until I stood still, letting my outline darken, harden, letting my shape settle in.
Above me flickered the faint glow of a plane. And I wondered how this small lot must look to its passengers. A golden raft on inky waters. An ember poking out from fields of ash. I tried to picture all of the miles and miles of darkness just lying there, hovering in the space between us.
And then I pictured nothing at all. Nothing between a winking plane and my small patch of light. Nothing between a sleeping girl flying past in the night and an old woman looking up for an answer.
# # #
After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Nonfiction Writing, Evan J. Coleman served as a high school literature and composition teacher for the past four years. Outside of that, he works as a freelance writer and bassist, and his short story “Grease” is set to be published this spring in The Write City Magazine.
Photo: angelo mercadante
