The main doors are heavy and made from oak, as if to stop the weak from leaving or tempt the grieving to turn away. The nurse behind the reception desk smiles at me. Her dark red hair matches the sunset in the painting behind her.
‘Hi, Theo. What have you done with the weather?’
I fake a smile of my own, the type anybody with social skills would apply when the weather suddenly becomes the topic of
conversation. ‘Tomorrow I’m organising sun. God owes me a
favour.’
She nods, maybe agreeing that yes He does. ‘Flowers for me
this time?’ she asks, like she always does.
The nurses and doctors are always nice, always friendly, always professional, their questions and pleasantries always cliched. The alternative is unthinkable. You’d ask how their day was going and they would tell you the truth and you’d never come back.
‘Next time,’ I say, which is what I say every time. ‘How is she?’
‘She’s doing fine, Theo. But what about you? Is that you I saw on the news?’
“Yeah, it’s been one of those crazy days.’ A fairly accurate summation, I feel.
She nods. ‘Every day this city shows us a little more how things don’t make sense.’
‘Sometimes I think Christchurch is broken,’ I say, ‘and nobody is ever going to fix it.’
I walk down the corridor, passing empty seats and closed
doors and a nurses’ station that looks empty but most likely isn’t.
The entire floor is speckled green linoleum, the sort that is easy to clean blood and vomit and shit off and will last two hundred years. The day is cold but the air in here is comfortable. It’s always comfortable, and so it ought to be. Some of the people in care here don’t know how to complain, and some who do know simply don’t have the ability any more. There are more paintings with water and sunsets, peaceful scenes that are perhaps supposed to help calm the residents here before they move on from this world and into the next. There are pots full of artificial plants.
And there are decorations for the people who come here who are on the verge of losing it.
I climb a flight of stairs, and halfway down another corridor I stop at Bridget’s room. The door is open. She is sitting by the window, looking out at the misty rain and the trees and the lack of good weather that the nurses mention every time I arrive. She seems interested in all of it. I don’t know whether she hears me come in. I close the door behind me. She keeps staring outside.
‘Hey babe, I’ve missed you,’ I say, but she doesn’t answer. I take yesterday’s flowers out of the vase and put today’s flowers in. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice as I shuffle them around in an attempt to make them look nicer. I sit in the chair next to her and take her hand in mine. It’s warm. It’s always warm, no matter how cold the room gets. I’m glad for it, because it helps remind me my wife is still alive.
She occasionally blinks as I tell her about my day. There is no expression on her face as I run a brush through her hair, stroking it over and over, searching for the recognition that isn’t there. She does not laugh when I tell her how I slipped into the water. She doesn’t chide me for not telling Patricia Tyler that her daughter has been dead the entire time she has been missing.
Other noises, the shuffling of patients, the squeaking of caster wheels, come from the care home which, for the last few years, I have quietly nicknamed ‘Death Haven’. I’m not sure why I’ve come up with the name. I’m not sure whether thinking of it as Death Haven has made it more personal to me or less. Every day I have this romantic notion that I will come in here and Bridget will look up at me and smile. Every day. But she doesn’t. I hold onto the hope, I have become attached to it sentimentally, in the same way Mrs Tyler has become attached to the idea her daughter has run away and is living the perfect life in a perfect town and is so perfectly happy she just hasn’t had the chance to call.
I keep talking until my throat is sore and I’m out of words.