I thought it would. Some part of me genuinely believed that once it was done, something inside me would settle. The part that spent the last week mapping floor wax and cross-referencing employee records and standing at that woman’s eyehole until my back ached. That part was sure.
Nothing settled.
I’m reviewing charts at the nurses’ station and I write the date at the top of a form and my hand pauses on the second digit. I know the date. I always know the date. But whether this is a Tuesday or a Thursday is gone. Just a blank spot where that information used to sit without effort.
I write the date and move on. Shouldn’t be a big deal.
Mrs. Adeyemi, Room 4. Post-op drainage. I read the numbers and they’re fine and I initial the box and flip to the next pageand somewhere between those two motions my brain offers me, unbidden:Leonard Garza didn’t feel any regret.
I set the chart down. Pick up the next one.
Mr. Torosian, Room 7. Elevated white cell count, pending culture results. My eyes track the lab values, column by column, and the thought comes back.
No regret.
He killed the woman who taught nineteen residents how to stabilize a tension pneumothorax, and his punishment is that he stopped existing. That’s it.
He got to juststop.
I flip the page.
There’s a water stain on the upper right corner of Torosian’s chart, a faint brown ring where someone set a coffee cup down. I stare at it. My mother would have written someone up for that.
I realize I’ve been staring at it for a while. I don’t know how long. Could be three seconds, could be thirty. The chart is still open in my hands and I’m standing at the station and the world hasn’t moved and nobody is looking at me, so it was probably three seconds.
Probably.
I close the chart and move on.
The looks start registering before I understand what I’m registering. A conversation dipping as I walk past. Someone mid-sentence trailing off, eyes sliding to me and then away. A nurse at the end of the hallway sees me turn the corner and adjusts her posture, softens her face, arranges herself into someone ready to be supportive. I watch the whole performance happen in real time like I can dissect every facial muscle she moves.
Everyone here knows.
My mother worked these corridors for almost two decades. Half the staff trained under her. And now they’re all watchingme with this careful, measured tenderness that makes my teeth itch, because what they think they’re looking at is a man barely holding it together.
They think I went home last night and stared at the ceiling.
I went home last night and sat on the bathroom floor and went through every step backward. The gloves. The door. The hallway. The stairs. Each surface I touched or didn’t touch. Each second I was visible or wasn’t. I found nothing out of place. My work was clean.
I amnotfalling apart.
I pull on gloves. Room 4. Mrs. Adeyemi is awake, slightly groggy. I check her drainage output. I press two fingers to the skin around the insertion site and ask if this hurts and she says a little and I nod and say that’s normal. My voice comes out exactly right.
“Your numbers look good,” I tell her. “We’ll check again at four.”
She thanks me. I make a note. Something about the way my hand moves across the page feels disconnected, like I’m watching it from slightly behind my own eyes. The letters are neat. The handwriting hasn’t changed. But there is a thin layer of something between my skin and everything I touch.
It must be fatigue. I haven’t slept much lately.
In the hallway I pass Dr. Reeves, who squeezes my shoulder and says hang in there, son. I say thank you with the right amount of eye contact and the right amount of restraint. After he turns the corner I stand still because the pressure from his hand is still sitting on my shoulder. I can feel the exact shape of his fingers, all four of them, the weight distribution, the precise boundary where contact ended and air began.
These sensations are goddamn annoying.
For the next hour I register more and more people paying attention to me. This is not the first day I came into work aftermy mother’s death, but somehow it’s the first day I notice so much of it.
Logically I shouldn’t be surprised. My mother spent thirty years in medicine. She trained the residents who trained the residents who are now saving lives in hospitals she’ll never set foot in. Everyone here knows her and will grieve her in their own way. They will miss her, the person.
So will I.
