Ryan

The room shouldn’t look like this. The colors are bright, loud, the painted prints scream under their price stickers. The walls are beige, not white. They should be white.

***

I’m sitting in a chair. It’s a decent seat; has some decent velour-like fabric that adds a slight cushion. It’s the kind of seat that’s a step above the plastic-and-steel moldings that are found in DEQs and Payday Loan stores.

***

Evening. I’m in the kitchen, boiling water for the noodles, cutting a link of chicken-apple sausage while its pan is heating up. Then ringing. It’s him. It’s always him, calling to tell me he’s almost home, asking me if there’s anything we need for dinner.
“Mrs. Anderson?”
Not him.
“You’re married to Ryan Anderson?”
He didn’t wait.
“Ryan has been in an accident. He lost control and fell down an embankment on Highway 14. He’s been flown to Southwest Medical Center. Do you need a ride to the hospital?”

I don’t remember hanging up. I don’t remember turning off the stove, unhooking the keys from their place next to the garage door, or locking the door. The drive was a haze of brake flashes, red lights and congestion.

***

I parked. I don’t remember where.
My subconscious carries me, following the arrows pointing down long, conservatively appointed corridors, toward the ER. I turn a corner and am met with a large counter, with three LCD computer monitors and three heads poking out from behind them. I’m drawn to the left-most head. She smiles genuinely.
“Ryan Anderson?” I ask, my voice creaking, lilting awkwardly.
She pauses.
She holds her previous breath for a slight moment, forcing her smile to broaden. She speaks carefully: “You’ll need to wait in the waiting room.” She points behind me. “A doctor will be in as soon as possible with an update.” Her smile has fades. “Is there anything you need?”

***

Judging by the absence of soda cans or coffee cups, I must have declined her offer. The room is bare, save for the chairs and the poorly framed pints with the calming landscapes: cascading waterfalls, majestic mountains and epic prairies.

Then, a sound: footsteps, echoing shrewdly off the lacquered hollow halls. Faint. Then louder, the intensity thundering through my chest as it gets closer. I look up, force my pale stare from my hands, and, with every ounce of my resolve, glare at the waiting room doorway’s right frame—the one closest to the ER.

Steps. Breath. Heartbeats. They’re closer now, ricocheting off walls and ceiling tiles, fluorescent lights and mechanized doorways. They’re closer now, small thunderclaps closing in. Outside.

They stop. The air buzzes. I can’t breathe, my heart’s paused, lungs suspended. My hands tremble, me right leg gyrates, up down, up down.

There’s no sound.

Footsteps again.

One.

Two.

Three.

The steps slowly transform into a person, appearing—wrinkle by wrinkle—in green surgical clothes. “Scrubs,” my brain says. “They’re made of paper.”

A weak smile appears, tired and hardened, but practiced in its frequency. Her arm raises to shake hands, her eye’s large. Sympathy. Her lips are moving, forming a code that I can no longer interpret. Then they form a familiar string, one that sparks a distant memory, a point of vague relativity:

“I’m sorry.”

___________________________________

Last night, a friend of ours lost her husband of barely one year, in a car accident. I didn't know what else to do. So I wrote.