A nurse shot something else into the IV. A doctor ordered a drug, something I couldn’t quite understand.
The monitor on our side showed a steady rhythm.
“Move him to ICU,” the doctor said. “Page Dr. Manchester.”
He turned around and saw me and nodded. “We’ll figure out what caused the arrest,” he said. “He’s stable for the moment.”
“Thank you,” Layla said. “When will we find out more?”
“He’ll be assessed in ICU,” the doctor said. “Then they should have more information about his prognosis.”
Layla nodded. Two aides lifted the sides of Albert’s bed and began the process of prepping him to be moved. Both Layla and I moved forward to touch his cool, unmoving arm while they worked.
We wouldn’t get access to him in ICU, not without an escort. Just the depressing waiting room. My heart felt wrung out with despair. It might as well be the end.
“The last time he talked to me was several days ago,” Layla said, her voice quivering. “He said, ‘Take care of Tina.’” She wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
I tried to think what his last words to me had been. I hadn’t known at the time we were so close to the end.
What had he said?
My eyes burned as anger flushed through me. Why couldn’t I remember? It was important!
The bed moved forward, and Layla and I were forced to the side as they pushed it out the door. We followed like a funeral parade, Darion stepping alongside us once we were in the hall.
No walk had ever seemed so long or so terrible. Not the one from the hospital after I lost Peanut. Not the one up to my apartment afterward, abandoned by my boyfriend now that I wasn’t pregnant and he wasn’t stuck with me.
Not the one home after the doctors patched up my sliced wrists.
Nothing was like this.
At the hub of the ICU, one orderly turned back to point us to the waiting room while they headed on through to the stations. I didn’t turn there, didn’t look for a chair. I just watched them roll Albert away. I couldn’t help but feel I would not see him again, and I had to burn this image in my mind, this last moment I might see him before he died.
When the doors slid closed behind them, Darion led me and Layla to the chairs. My legs didn’t seem to know what to do, how to sit, so Darion pulled me into his lap. “Hang in there, my love,” he said, cradling my head against his shoulder.
Layla probably sat somewhere, but I didn’t look up. The image was seared into my mind, and I tried to hold it. I wanted to paint it, make it permanent. Paint your pain, Albert had told me so many times. Get it out of your soul and onto the page. I would paint this pain. But I did not believe it would ever leave my soul.
Hours passed. Darion did not move me, did not let me go. I held the image of Albert in my brain until my head throbbed. Finally, I asked Darion to go fetch a sketchbook from the therapy room.
All through the night I drew, madly flipping through page after page with a soft pencil, trying with earnest to get my pain on the page and out of my heart. Sometime in the early morning hours, Layla left to check on her dogs and change clothes.
I sat in my black dress, Darion next to me. I couldn’t leave while she was gone. I couldn’t leave at all.
The shifts would change at 8 a.m. Doctors would start their rounds. Sometime after that someone would talk to us, tell us how he was. Tests were probably run during the night. We would have answers, and an idea of what to expect.
I began to hold on to that, waiting for that moment. It eased the pain of sitting there, the ends of my fingers black from smudging the pencil sketches.
A nurse I didn’t recognize came out and sat beside me. “Tina?” she said gently.
My head snapped up. I looked at her, trying to figure out what she was about to say. Nurses didn’t deliver news. They took you to conference rooms where people told you things. I braced myself for her words.
“He’s stirring a little,” she said. “If you want to see him, this is a good time.”
I jumped up, letting the sketchbook fall. “Text Layla,” I told Darion.
I followed the woman through the sliding doors. I had not been in ICU much, as my patients had to have a certain level of stability to come to therapy. But I knew the rough layout. We went down the hall and passed the first ICU bay, then turned into the second.
Several beds were separated by curtains. Albert was on our end, his mass of gray curls lit up by a small light near his head.
His eyes were open.
I lunged for him and grabbed his hand. “You scared us,” I said.
He nodded, just barely, but enough for me to see it. Then he tilted his head a little, as if to say, “I’m sorry.”
I glanced at the setup. Tubes going into his gown. An oxygen line into his nose. Nothing too crazy. His heartbeat slid across the screen.
Maybe this was just a hiccup.