and then, for the past nine months, I have had my son and my daughter. Long before I came to Valley Hospital I had narrowed my heart so that there was room only for them. Still, I was an excellent nurse, liked by everyone, and the medical staff came to appreciate the fact that I was happy to be assigned anywhere in the hospital that nursing was needed.
Even now, this job is a temporary change. I will return to the hospital when Mrs. McLaughlin no longer needs me. I have taken a leave of absence from my position at Valley; I have not quit. I remind myself that this, too, will end.
Lila says, “I would think this job would be boring as hell for you.” She is standing by the window, looking out. Mrs. McLaughlin is asleep.
“No,” I say. “I read the paper or my book when she sleeps. I have two young children, so this is a nice rest actually. And I enjoy doing all kinds of nursing work. I never wanted to be anything other than a nurse, since I was a small girl.” This makes me think of Jessie, and I wonder what she will grow up to be. At the age of six, she said she wanted to be a princess. I always saw myself in a white uniform helping people, and my daughter saw herself in pink tulle giving orders to her subjects. How could this child have come from my body?
“I didn’t want to be a doctor,” I add, because Lila looks like she is about to ask me another question, and this is the answer to the usual one. People assume that every nurse is yearning to become a doctor. I was never interested in taking on the great weight of knowledge every doctor must have. I prefer to help people more simply, and attend to their comfort. Comfort is a much underrated commodity in general, and it means everything to the sick.
Lila seems less nervous in the room than her relatives, perhaps because she’s in medical school and is more comfortable around illness. She looks the most like her grandmother, and I tell her so. She smiles with what looks like a combination of pleasure and suspicion.
“No one’s ever said that to me.”
“Maybe I can see it because I’m an outsider. There’s no doubt, though, that you resemble her. Your face is the same shape, and your eyes.”
Lila touches the curtain, which looks like it is made of lace doilies. “Can I ask you a question?”
I wonder why answering questions and making conversation seem to be the real work I do in this job, while Catharine McLaughlin peacefully rests. “Of course.”
“Has a boy named Weber been here to visit my grandmother?”
“Not while I’ve been here,” I say. “If you want, I can find out if he’s stopped by during the evenings.”
“No,” Lila says.
“I like him,” Mrs. McLaughlin says.
We both turn. She is sitting up in bed, her hands folded in her lap. She looks perfectly awake, as if she weren’t just lying down, her face to the wall.
“I wouldn’t have liked him if we’d met thirty years ago, or maybe even ten. But I like him very much now. I don’t want you to be as much of an idiot as everyone else in this family, Lila. When it comes to matters of the heart, every single person in this family is hopeless.”
I look from grandmother to granddaughter. Lila’s face appears bruised by Mrs. McLaughlin’s words, and I can tell from years of nursing experience that Lila is not getting enough rest these days, either.
“He doesn’t like me anymore,” Lila says.
“That’s a pity,” Mrs. McLaughlin says.
The old woman doesn’t look surprised or even sympathetic when she says that, and I find myself thinking, not for the first time, Boy, she’s a hard one.
AFTER TWO WEEKS, I am ready to climb the walls. Mrs. McLaughlin is slightly better, and I have revised my initial diagnosis. Not changed, but revised. I still believe that she has decided to die, but that it is not going to happen any day soon. There is something she is waiting for that is making her linger between recovery and death. She is fighting just hard enough to hold on, and no harder. She still sleeps a lot, but when awake she is more alert. Sometimes, though, she fakes unconsciousness when her family visits. One afternoon, after Theresa has left the room, I call her on this.