had told his wife privately that the biggest incentive to his recovery was the prospect of getting away from the living corpse in the room’s second bed. The steady whisper of the poor guy’s respirator made it hard to sleep, he told her. After a while it got so you didn’t know if you wanted it to go on whispering or stop. Stop dead, so to speak.
The TV was on when Allison came in. Mr. Starret was sitting up in bed with his control button in one hand. ‘Today’ had ended, and Mr. Starret had not yet decided to blank out
‘My Back Yard’, the cartoon show that followed it. That would have left him alone with the sound of Johnny’s respirator.
‘I’d about given up on you this morning,’ Mr. Starret said, looking at his breakfast tray of orange juice, plain yoghurt, and wheat flakes with no great joy. What he really craved was two cholesterol-filled eggs, fried over easy and sweating butter, with five slices of bacon on the side, not too crisp. The sort of fare that had, in fact, landed him here in the first place. At least according to his doctor – the birdbrain.
‘The going’s bad outside,’ Allison said shortly. Six patients had already told her they had about given up on her this morning, and the line was getting old. Allison was a pleasant girl, but this morning she was feeling harried.
‘Oh, sorry,’ Mr. Starret said humbly. ‘Pretty slippery on the roads, is it?’
‘It sure is,’ Allison said, thawing slightly. ‘If I didn’t have my husband’s four-wheel drive today, I never would have made it.’
Mr. Starret pushed the button that raised his bed so he could eat his breakfast comfortably. The electric motor that raised and lowered it was small but loud. The TV
was still quite loud – Mr. Starret was a little deaf, and as he had told his wife, the guy in the other bed had never complained about a little extra volume. Never asked to see what was on the other channel either. He supposed a joke like that was in pretty poor taste, but when you’d had a heart attack and wound up in intensive care sharing a room with a human vegetable, you either learned a little black humor or you went crazy.
Allison raised her voice a little to be heard over the whining motor and the TV as she finished setting up Mr. Starret’s tray. ‘There were cars off the road all up and down State Street hill.’
In the other bed Johnny Smith said softly, ‘The whole wad on nineteen. One way or the other. My girl’s sick.’
‘You know, this yogurt isn’t half bad,’ Mr. Starret said. He hated yogurt, but he didn’t want to be left alone until absolutely necessary. When he was alone he kept taking his own pulse. ‘It tastes a little bit like wild hickory….
‘Did you hear something?’ Allison asked. She looked around doubtfully.
Mr. Starret let go of the control button on the side of the bed and the whine of the electric motor died. On the TV, Elmer Fudd took a potshot at Bugs Bunny and missed.
‘Nothing but the TV,’ Mr. Starret said. ‘What’d I miss?’
‘Nothing, I guess. It must have been the wind around that window.’ She could feel a stress headache coming on – too much to do and not enough people this morning to help her do it – and she rubbed at her temples, as if to drive the pain away before it could get properly seated.
On her way out she paused and looked down at the man in the other bed for a moment.
Did he look different somehow? As if he had shifted position? Surely not.
Allison left the room and went on down the hall, pushing her breakfast cabinet ahead of her. It was as terrible a morning as she had feared it would be, everything out of kilter, and by noon her head was pounding. She had quite understandably forgotten all about anything she might have heard that morning in Room 619.
But in the days that followed she found herself looking more and more often at Smith, and by March Allison had become almost sure that he had straightened a bit – come out of what the doctors called his prefetal position a little. Not much just a little. She thought of mentioning it to someone, but in the end did not. After all, she was only an aide, little more than kitchen help.