Partners
by Steve Cushman

The mother was crying and the father was running his hands through his hair. The consultation room was too brightly lit for one o'clock in the morning. Dr. Swisher had left us alone after he told them their baby was gone, he assumed it was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, and there was nothing anyone could have done.
    I hadn't said much to the parents except that I was so sorry for their loss. As the hospital chaplain, my job was to listen to them and try to console them in anyway I could. The mother, Terry, said she'd gotten up to use the bathroom and when she went in to check on the baby he wasn't breathing.
    All three of us jumped when my beeper went off. Christ, I thought, what now? The mother looked up at me, hopeful, as if the message was for her.
    "Does someone else need you?" she asked.
    "It can wait." The call was from the fifth floor and wasn't followed by 911, our code that I was needed immediately.
    "Go ahead," the father said. I couldn't remember his name. It was the most he'd said since Dr. Swisher left.
    "You sure?" I asked. "It's not an emergency." The fifth floor was infectious disease—AIDS, Hepatitis, TB—a hodgepodge of slow death. I only visited the floor when I had to.
    "Yes, we're okay. We'll sit here for a few minutes and then." And I could tell he was stumped. But who could blame him? What do you do after your six month old dies silently in the bedroom next to yours?
    "Your parents are on their way," I said. I'd called Terry's mother for her. She reached over and hugged me. I could feel the warmth she gave off. "I'll be back in ten, fifteen minutes. If you need anything before that, just ask the nurse at the desk outside the door."
    They both nodded. "Thank you, Father," he said. It was a common mistake. Most people think that all hospital chaplains are priest or ministers. Some are but not all of us. A six-week course and a willingness to face people on the worst day of their lives was all that was required.

    The fifth floor had an eerie feel to it. It could have been the yellow isolation gowns in plastics bins outside each door, the beige nurses' station, or the few patients that walked the halls at all hours of the night, wearing masks and pushing their IV poles slowly beside them.
    Shelly, the unit secretary looked up from her People magazine as I walked toward her. "A family member in 5024 asked to see you."
    "Thanks," I said. "Do you have the patient's name?"
    She rifled through a couple charts.
    "Timothy Bundt."
    "Did they say what they wanted?"
    She smiled. "What do they all want? A second chance."
    I glanced through Mr. Bundt's chart. He was 42, single, had an extensive history of drug and alcohol abuse. He was in renal failure and infected with both HIV and Hep C. I wanted none of what he had. I was not a man cut out for this type of work, but here I was, night after night.
    I knocked and when I got no response, eased the door opened. "Hello, it's the chaplain."
    The room was dark, lit with shadows and the glow of his heart monitor. For a moment, I thought the bed was empty, but then he turned toward me. "Who the hell are you?"
    Timothy Bundt's face was pale and spotted with red sores. "The chaplain. Someone called me."
    "Mom."
    Then the bathroom door opened and a woman walked out, drying her hands with a paper towel. She was in her sixties, had that bone-skinny been smoking all my life look, wearing sweat pants and a T-shirt, a Miami Dolphins cap on her head.
    "Thanks for coming," she said. "My name is Janice." We shook hands. She turned to her son. "Timmy, I thought we could say a prayer."
    "Don't you think it's a little late for that?" he said, then pulled the covers up over his head.
    I smiled as kindly as I could at his mother.
    "Just say a prayer with me, Timmy."
    "Get him out of here," he yelled. "I want sleep."
    I could see her tears even in the darkness. "Perhaps we should step outside," I said. I held her hand and lead her into the hall. "I'm sure it's a rough time for him."
    "He's going to die tonight," she said. "I know it."
    A red-headed nurse walked by, sipping on a smoothie. Where the hell do you get a smoothie at one in the morning?
    "Would you like me to say a prayer with you?" I asked. "Out here." While I wasn't a priest, I did have a handful of stock prayers I used for different circumstances. I'd already figured I'd give him the 'forgive me my sins and accept my soul as it is' one.
    "How do they get like this?" she asked.
    I wasn't sure if she meant tonight, right now, or his whole life, each of our lives, the way they can fall forward into something you never would have expected.
    "I don't know," I said.
    "Mom." We both turned toward the door.
    "Thank you for coming," she said. "At least you came."
    "I'll check back," I said, wishing I hadn't said the words as soon as they left my mouth.
    "If you have time. It's okay, though," she said. "It doesn't matter."
    "Mom, I need you."
    She closed her eyes and shook her head before going back inside. I stood there in the hall for a few minutes, not sure what to do. Then, as if the answer to a question I hadn't asked, my beeper went off. There was a trauma coming in.

    But the trauma wasn't much of a trauma. By the time I got there he was sitting up in the stretcher, shaking his head as if he couldn't quite believe he'd rolled his truck three times out on I-4 and ended up here in the Emergency Department with nothing more than a fractured right wrist. I turned to Dr. Swisher. "You need me?"
    He shook his head. "His wife is already on her way."
    I headed over to the consultation room to see if the baby's parents needed anything. As I was about to knock, the triage nurse said, "They left a few minutes ago. Her parents came and picked them up."
    I walked outside and sat on one of the empty benches that faced the street. I was on my second cigarette when Dr. Swisher came outside and sat next to me. He was about my age, mid-forties. "What a night," he said.
    "They're all like this," I said.
    He smiled and pulled hard on his own cigarette. "Too damn many of them. How were the parents of that baby?"
    "As good as can be expected." Swisher and I usually met at least once a night at this bench to smoke. We didn't plan a time or anything. We just seemed to end up here together. I'd never seen him outside of the hospital but here we were like soldiers with this common thing—carnage and heartbreak, and the occasional happy ending—between us.
    "You have any kids?" I asked. He had never mentioned any, nor a wife for that matter. Our conversations were usually brief and about the dark space in the night we shared.
    "A boy, Evan. I guess he's not really a boy. Nineteen now. He lives in New Mexico. You?"
    Almost, I thought. "No."
    "Probably for the best. They'll break your heart."
    I know I could have, and perhaps should have, asked him more but I didn't. I had no desire to continue this conversation and knew I wouldn't have asked about children if it weren't for that baby.
    "He's in a band. He went out there to go to college but dropped out after a semester. My theory is that he had no intention of finishing school."
    "What does he play?"
    "Guitar."
    "Is he any good?"
    "Yeah, he is," Swisher said and though I didn't look at him I felt pretty sure he was smiling.
    We didn't say anything for a few minutes, just watched cars pass by on the street. Above us, a handful of moths buzzed a streetlight. A pair of ambulances pulled into the ED driveway. "Looks like it's back to work for me," Dr. Swisher said, standing and making his was toward the side entrance.
    Almost, I thought again. Another three months and I would have been a father. Caroline and I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. We'd decided to wait. We wanted to be as surprised as the baby when it caught its first glimpse of light in the world. I think sometimes now that it would be better if I'd known. Maybe it would have made my grieving more focused: a little girl named Cassie, a boy named Sam. But rarely, I've learned, do we get to pick what we grieve over.
    It happened eight years ago, August 11th. Caroline and I were driving home from a faculty party. Back then I was a professor in History, Southern History was my specialty. I'd had three beers and refused Caroline's offer to drive. I wasn't drunk. That much I'm sure of.
    We were two blocks from the house when the cat ran out in front of us. I swerved to the right and ran straight into a parked car. We weren't going that fast, maybe 40, but somehow it was enough. Caroline and the baby died instantly. I ended up with a femur fracture and head injury. While my mother never said it to me, she thinks the injured part of my brain, and not some sense of charity or greater appreciation of life, is why I took this job. Why else, I heard her say to her sister a few Christmases ago, would you give up a decent-paying teaching job for the peanuts-paying job he has now? And at night, she'd said, who in the world chooses to work at night?
    But I didn't expect her to understand. How could she? How could anyone unless you've looked over at your wife, the mother of your un-born child, moments after the crash, and saw her lifeless eyes staring back at you. How the fuck do you go back to work and act as if nothing happened? You don't. Instead, you move and you change jobs and you tell yourself that you want to help people that are going through the same thing you have, but what you are really doing is paying penance night after night to your own God of Guilt. You can tell yourself it wasn't your fault, and I have hundreds of time, or that there was nothing you could have done, but you know, deep down in that place only you get to see in those quiet moments before sleep that you were driving. And it was your fault. Who else's could it possibly be?
    I leaned back against the hard bench and closed my eyes, tried to catch my breath. When I looked up, there were so many stars in the sky. So damn many. And then another siren cut through the night. I breathed easier for a few moments because sirens have become a sort of comfort for me.
    I waited for my beeper to start again, to tell me that this new patient needed something I could give them. But when it didn't go off, I shook my head and walked back inside.
    I stopped at the nurse's station on 5000 and poured two cups of coffee. As I stood outside room 5024, unable to knock because each of my hands were full, that same smoothie-sipping nurse walked up and smiled. "You're a mess."
    "And you're an angel," I said.
    "Hardly," she said and winked at me as she opened the door.
    Janice turned back as I entered. She looked tired but smiled at me. Her son, Timothy Bundt, was asleep in the bed. The sheets were pulled up to his nose. "I brought you coffee," I said.
    "Thank you." She took the Styrofoam cup I offered. "Sit down."
    I dragged one of the empty chairs by the far wall over and sat next to her. The room was quiet. His breathing hardly detectable. The machines were all red and green lights, steady pulsing lines, but nothing more.
    "He could go at any minute," she said.
    We all could, I wanted to say.
    "He wasn't always like this," she said.
    "None of us are," I said.
    "Timmy liked to bowl." This, for some reason, made her laugh.
    I couldn't picture him bowling but it had become hard for me to picture someone so close to death doing anything besides dying.
    "He actually won a scholarship to state to bowl on their team."
    "What was his major?" I asked.
    "Business," she said. "He didn't finish though. Sophomore year he met that girl, Veronica. He changed after that. The drugs, everything. That's how he got this stuff."
    "Did he ever bowl a 300?"
    She smiled. "Twice."
    "Wow."
    "He was a natural with that big ball in his hand." She turned to me. "I'm sorry. You don't have to listen to this."
    I set my hand on hers. "It's okay. That's why I'm here."
    She smiled again. "He used to rake our neighbor's leaves. She was in her eighties and should have been in a nursing home. He would go over there every Saturday in the fall and rake her leaves while my husband did our yard."
    "I'm sure she appreciated it."
    "I doubt it. She was probably too crazy to even notice."
    "What else did he do when he was a boy?"
    "He played baseball and soccer. Oh, but he loved to ride his bike. Timmy and this neighbor boy, Adam Cook, built a ramp and they put it in our driveway. The thing scared me half to death. They would jump off their bikes and land in the grass. I can still remember the grass stains on his pants. I would wash them over and over but I could never get them clean."
    I squeezed her hand.
    "When he was a thirteen, he told me he wanted to be a dirt bike racer. I tried to tell him that you couldn't make a living doing that, but you know how kids are," she said.
    "Yes," I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the red line on the monitor change patterns, start to flatten out. "Did he have a lot of girlfriends in high school?"
    "Boatloads," she said.
    And the two of us laughed there, together, partners in grief, in those last quiet moments before the alarms started and the door opened and everyone else arrived announcing that the end was here.



About the author:
Steve Cushman has worked as an X-ray Technologist for the last fifteen years. He is the author of the novel, Portisville, and forthcoming short story collection, Fracture City. For more information on Steve, and his writing, please check out his web site www.stevecushman.net


© 2009 Steve Cushman