My Wife Sent Me to a Psych Ward, So I Gave Her a Big Surprise novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Ninety-Eight

Maura pins the cuffs of his old suit and takes his pulse, and tells him not while he is her patient. The administrator announces that Brooks has been approved for a private visit at ten tonight.

My mother had dropped off the charcoal suit at the desk on Wednesday with a note that said ALTER. Maura carried it into my room at seven that night.

"The desk wants to know why a patient needs a suit," she said. "I told them it was for the family photo."

"They bought that?"

"The administrator bought it. He bought a lot of things this year." She hung the jacket on the closet door and held the trousers up to my waist. "Hold still."

I held still.

The trousers had fit me three years ago. Now there were two fingers of slack in the waistband.

Maura frowned at them, then took a card of safety pins from her scrub pocket.

"You keep those on you?" I said.

"I keep everything on me. It's a night shift."

She knelt on the floor and began pinning the cuffs.

The room was small. A bed, a desk, a window that opened four inches. My bag sat under the bed with its strap showing.

She glanced at it once and said nothing.

"You could stand on the chair," she said. "I'm a nurse, not a tailor."

"You're doing fine."

"I'm doing a crooked hem. Stand on the chair."

I stood on the chair.

She pinned the left cuff, then the right, and then she stood up and looked at me from a distance, her head tilted.

"The jacket," she said.

I put it on.

She stepped in close and tugged the shoulders into place, and her knuckles brushed my neck under the collar.

It was a plain touch, and it went through me anyway.

I had gone three years with nobody's hand on me except to take blood or hold a pill cup.

"Your collar's folded under," she said, quiet. She fixed it with two fingers.

Neither of us moved.

"Pulse," she said suddenly. She took my left wrist, turned it over, and set her thumb on the inside of it.

"Is that on the schedule?"

"Everything's on the schedule." She watched the second hand on the wall clock. "Ninety-eight."

"Is that bad?"

"It's the stairs."

"I didn't take any stairs."

"Then it's the chair." She kept her thumb where it was. "People get nervous standing on chairs."

I looked down at her.

She had green eyes and freckles that went all the way up under her hairline, and she was not looking at me.

"Maura," I said.

"No."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to." She let go of my wrist and stepped back, and her voice went flat and professional. "Not while you're my patient, Mr. Ostrow. I mean it. I've worked here nine years and I've never done it."

"Then I'll leave the building."

"Friday," she said.

She said it fast.

Then she knelt again and unpinned the left cuff, because she had pinned it a quarter inch too short.

I got down off the chair and sat on the bed.

"Why do you still do this?" I asked. "Pins, the drive, the laundry door. You don't owe me anything."

"I owe the person who gets out of here to be someone who deserved the help." She sat back on her heels. "That's all I want to see on Friday."

"What do you want to see after Friday?"

She stood up, took the trousers off the chair, and folded them over her arm.

She did not answer.

At the door, she said without turning, "Your pulse is still ninety-eight."

"How can you tell from there?"

"I can't," she said. "I'm guessing."

She smiled to herself, and then somebody knocked on the open door behind her.

It was the administrator.

He was a soft, pink man in a blazer, and I had never seen him in my room. In three years he had sent memos.

"Mr. Ostrow," he said. "Nurse Garvey. Sorry to interrupt the fitting."

"What do you need?" Maura said. She had gone very still.

"A courtesy call. A visitor has requested a private visit with Mr. Ostrow tonight, after hours. I approved it."

"After hours is after hours," Maura said. "Visits end at eight."

"It's a special case. Family." He tugged his cuff, and I saw a new steel watch under it, much heavier than anything on a hospital salary. "Mr. Teller. He'll be here at ten."

Maura turned around.

I had never seen her face go that hard.

"I'll be on the floor," she said.

"That isn't necessary, Nurse Garvey."

"I'll be on the floor," she said again, and left with my trousers still over her arm.

The administrator looked at me, and for a second his smile slipped.

Then he put it back and shut the door.

At ten o'clock I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, with the door unlocked, when I heard Brooks's good shoes in the hall.

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