He Gave Her My Hospital Wing novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Monday Nights
On her first night shift in the Pavilion, Della raises a blind for a new mother who sees the sky from her window, and at two a.m. Camille arrives with coffee and wins the whole night staff. At dawn the manager hands Della a folder from Colt: a letter resigning her as foundation chair, to be signed by Friday.
On Monday at seven I badged into the Pavilion by the staff door, and the reader blinked green.
Colt's office had moved my return date, but nobody had touched my badge.
The night nurse manager met me at the station with a stack of scrubs and a look I could not read.
"You're sure," she said.
"I'm sure. My father has Junie until morning."
"Then you're in the East hall. Twelve beds, two charge nurses, and everybody here knows who you are."
"I'd like them to know me as the new night nurse."
"That one's going to take longer," she said, and handed me my assignment sheet.
The wing was quiet at that hour, and I stood still in the main corridor for a minute and let it be.
The old unit had been one long room with eighteen cribs and a curtain between each, and mothers asleep in vinyl chairs.
This hall had forty-eight private rooms, each one with a pull-down bed for the parent and a window.
Real windows, floor to ceiling, facing the harbor.
I had fought the architects for those windows for fourteen months.
At nine I checked room twelve.
The mother in the chair-bed was about twenty-two, and her son lay in the incubator, born at twenty-seven weeks, eleven hours old.
She had the blind pulled all the way down.
"Do you want some light?" I asked.
"They said I should rest."
"You can rest with the sky on, too," I said.
I raised the blind slowly, and the harbor came into the room.
The bridge was lit up blue, and there were boats at anchor, and above them a handful of stars the city had left alone.
She sat up very slowly and put both hands over her mouth.
"I didn't know you could see it from in here," she said.
"That's the whole point of the room."
I stayed with her until she stopped crying, and then I checked her son's oxygen, and then I went out into the hall and had to lean on the wall for a moment.
Whatever else was true about the name on the stone, that mother was looking at the sky.
At two in the morning the elevator opened, and Camille walked out of it with a cardboard tray of coffees.
She was in jeans and a gray sweater, with her hair pulled back, and she looked tired.
"I brought the good kind," she said to the whole station. "Not the machine kind."
The night nurses took the cups out of her hands.
She knew every one of their names, and the name of the charge nurse's cat.
In room nine, a father who had not spoken to anyone since Friday let her sit with him on the end of the pull-down bed, and in ten minutes he was telling her about his wife's c-section.
I stood at the door with a chart in my hand and watched her listen.
She was good at it.
I had known that for years, and it had never bothered me before.
She came out at four and found me at the supply cart.
"Della," she said. "I wasn't sure you'd let me stay."
"It's a hospital. Anyone can bring coffee."
"I know what it looks like. Believe me, I do." Her voice shook. "I haven't been able to sit in that house alone since Dean. I thought if I had somewhere to be, I might remember how to be a person."
"The beach house is mine too," I said. "Since March is a long time to need a room."
"A room, Della. A room with a bed in it." She touched my forearm. "I never asked him for the name. You have to believe that."
Her phone buzzed against her hip, twice, with the short chime a bank app makes.
She turned it face down on the cart without looking at it.
"I should go," she said. "I'm no good at this hour."
"Thank you for the coffee."
"Anything for the wing," she said, and squeezed my arm, and went down the hall on silent soles.
At six-fifty I finished my last set of vitals and went to the station to hand over.
The day manager was already waiting for me with her coat on.
She held out a plain brown folder.
"Mr. Heyward's assistant brought it by last night," she said. "He asked that it reach you personally."
I opened it at the counter.
It was a single page on the foundation's letterhead, already typed, with a yellow flag at the line where I was supposed to sign.
I, Della Heyward, resign as chair of the Pavilion Foundation, effective immediately.
Under it, in Colt's handwriting, he had written: Please sign this by Friday.
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