The Woman in the Hospital Photo Was Me · Mira Lang

Chapter 2: Somewhere To Be

I didn't say anything at dinner. I want to be clear that this was not a decision. It was more like a stair you don't take.

We had the chicken from Tuesday, which had become a casserole by Monday the way chicken does in our house, and Owen told me about the church in Attica, where the rooftop unit had been dying for two years and the trustees had voted three times not to replace it, and now it was October money instead of April money. He gets going on that kind of thing. He is not a complainer, he is a man who likes the shape of a mistake.

At some point I said, in a voice I had practiced twice at the sink, "Hey, what did I do last Tuesday?"

"Tuesday." He didn't look up. He was doing the thing where he separates the peas out. "Tuesday I was in Attica till nine."

"Right, but what did I do."

"You went out."

I said, "No I didn't."

"You went somewhere." He shrugged with one shoulder, still eating. "You weren't here when I called."

"When did you call?"

"I don't know, eight? Eight-thirty. Went to voicemail and I figured you were driving." Then, and this is the part I want down accurately, he looked up at me with absolutely nothing in his face and said, "Or you were in the shower. Either one."

"I was here all night, Owen."

"Okay."

That's it. That's what he said. Okay. And he went back to the peas.

I have been married to this man for nine years and I know that okay. It isn't agreement. It's the sound of a door being closed gently so that nobody has to hear it close. Owen does not argue. Owen concedes, immediately and completely, and then keeps whatever he thought in a drawer, and I have spent nine years being unable to prove that the drawer exists.

I got up and rinsed my plate and said, "You probably called Wednesday."

"Probably," he said. "Yeah. Wednesday you had your mom's."

Which is true. Wednesday I had my mom's.

So that was solved, and I felt the relief physically, in my jaw, and I loaded the dishwasher and I did not check my phone for a missed call from Tuesday, because I already knew there wasn't one, and if there had been I would have seen it, and there is no version of me that misses a call from my husband and doesn't call back.

I checked at ten forty in the bathroom with the fan on.

There was no call on Tuesday. There was a call on Wednesday at 8:12.

I stood there and thought, he got the day wrong, that's all, which was true, and which I had already known, and which somehow did not put anything back where it had been.

* * *

Yoli comes in Tuesdays. She's fifty-eight, she does our books, and she has a way of talking that requires nothing from you, which is restful. She was at the little table in the back with her own creamer and our bad coffee, doing the reconciliation, and she said, without any preamble at all:

"You didn't wave at me."

"When?"

"Out at the hospital." She was tapping through the statement. "Tuesday night. I was coming out of the east doors — Ray had his stent thing, I told you about the stent thing — and you were coming in, and I said hey, Margo, and you kept going. Which is fine, I figured you had somewhere to be."

The scanner was running. It's loud. That helped.

I said, "Tuesday?"

"Mm-hm." She wrote a number down. "Nine-ish. Ray was still in recovery."

"Yoli, I was home Tuesday."

She looked up then, and here is the thing about Yoli Prather, and about this whole week, and about, I think, most of what happens to people: she was not upset. She was not suspicious. She smiled at me the way you smile at a woman who has told you she doesn't eat sugar while holding a doughnut, and she said, "Okay, hon. Then it was somebody in a coat like yours. I don't have my far glasses on at night anyway."

And she went back to the reconciliation.

I want to be fair to myself here for one second. If she had grabbed my arm and said I know what I saw, I would have fought her, and I would have won, because I would have had something to push against. She didn't. She gave it up instantly and cheerfully, the way Owen did, and both of them went on with their evening, and I was left standing in a room where two people had just quietly decided that I was somewhere Tuesday night and that it wasn't worth mentioning.

That's the part nobody tells you. Nobody accuses you. They just adjust.

* * *

I have a lunch hour, so I used it.

I told myself I was dropping off Owen's paperwork, which was even true — he had a lien waiver for the hospital's purchasing office that had been in my bag since the eighth — and I drove to Merrick County General and I parked in the visitors' lot, in the far row, because that's where the shade is.

The east entrance in daylight is nothing. It's a canopy and two sets of automatic doors and a bench, and an ashtray with a sand top that has never once in my life been empty. I stood twenty feet out and looked up and found the camera, which is on the corner of the canopy, up and to the left, exactly where I knew it would be.

And I stood there and I did the honest thing, which was to imagine the picture.

From up there, at night, on a camera that costs the county four hundred dollars, at that angle, what do you get? You get a top of a head. You get shoulders. You get a coat. Everybody in Indiana between September and April is a gray shape in a coat. Yoli, who has known me nine years, saw a woman in a coat like mine at nine at night without her far glasses and said hey and got no answer, and then a week later that woman is in a photocopy on my desk and I looked at her and thought me, because I had already been told her name.

That's the whole thing, I thought. That's how it works. You show a person a blurry photograph with a name written under it and the person will see the name.

I felt so much better that my hands got warm.

I went inside to drop the lien waiver, and purchasing is down the left corridor past the gift shop, and on the way back out I stopped at the little desk by the doors, because there is always a volunteer at the little desk.

* * *

His badge said DALE and under it said VOLUNTEER, 12 YEARS. He was seventy-nine if he was a day and he had a red vest and a tablet on a swing arm, the kind restaurants use.

I said, "Can I ask you a dumb question? When people sign in here at night, is there somebody sitting here, or —"

"Depends," Dale said, delighted. Volunteers are always delighted. "Till eight there's me or Marilyn. After eight the desk is unmanned but the tablet stays on, and folks sign themselves in, and security pulls it in the morning." He turned the swing arm toward me like he was showing me a grandchild. "It's not hard. Watch."

"Oh, you don't have to —"

"Last name."

"Dyer," I said, because when a nice old man in a red vest asks you a question you answer it. That is all that happened. I want that understood.

He typed D-Y-E-R with one finger.

The tablet did what tablets do, which is fill in the rest, and Dale read it off the way he'd read a bingo number, cheerful, half to himself.

"Dyer, Margaret A. There you are, see, it remembers you." He squinted. "Ferris, right? That's a drive."

There was a line under my name in gray text. An address. Four-something on a street I have never lived on, in a town thirty-eight miles north of here, and a phone number with our area code and none of my digits.

"That's not my address," I said.

Dale looked at the screen, and then at me, and he did the thing. The small, kind, immediate thing that everybody in my life has been doing all week and that I did not have a word for until that moment.

"Well," he said, "you'd know better than me," and he swung the tablet back around and asked me if I could find my way out.