The Door Girl, Part 7

Not being sure if mother was dead or alive, it seemed fitting to ride my bike to the hospital only a few blocks away.  I wasn’t going there for help. I was going there because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I didn’t know who to tell or if there was anything to tell at all. And so I sat in the hospital lobby and watched television. Unfortunately, there was never anything interesting on like Andy Griffith.  The evening news was all the receptionists ever had on, but I sat there just the same. 

There were four things I liked about hanging out in the hospital lobby and here they are in corresponding order:

1) The secretaries never asked me why I was there or where my parents were.

2) If I scrounged up enough change, there was a vending machine that sold Doritos (still my favorite, by the way).

3) The couches were semi-comfortable and the TV was always on.

 4) I seemed to always be the only one hanging out in the lobby.

The four things I didn’t like about the hospital were that:

1) I thought the secretaries should’ve been friendlier. That is part of their job description, after all. If I were a secretary, I would smile at people, especially children and give them suckers.

2) The news was the only thing ever on and it was dreadfully boring. Considering I was the only one who was watching it, you would think the secretaries would have asked me if I had a preference, like Family Ties or Fresh Prince of BelAir.

3) The place always smelled like piss. Always. I understand that it was a hospital, but they could have made more of an effort to mask the odor and make it not smell like a nursing home. And my mother had worked at a nursing home so I knew I was very accurate in my comparison of smells.

4) The gift shop closed at 6:00 pm and by the time I got there, the lights were always off so I couldn’t see what was inside of the windows.

The cafeteria was on the second floor, and so I would ride up the elevator to where the vending machines were, down the hall and to the left.  I could smell the leftover food and the smells of all the rehabilitating alcoholics that stayed on that floor, just like Mother had two years prior.  I didn’t know it before then, but depression and desperation had a distinct stench.  It smelled of meatloaf and dark rooms where dust settled on telephones.  It smelled of canned peas and mommies who did not check backpacks and husbands with folded hands and heads hung low.  All of these things seeped down in to my stomach.

I would plop down on the couch, a porous being soaking up sounds, sideways glances and doggedly training myself in to a white blur of emotion.  The women behind the counter would keep their heads bowed and were ever-so-careful not to make eye contact. 

            So, I sat there watching the news and eating Doritos and not knowing where my mother was. Looking back, I think of instinctual feelings in such a situation: fear, sadness, confusion, loneliness. But I didn’t feel much of anything. Just a numbness…a lack of feeling and ignorance of knowing what one should feel.

            The question of where my mother was barely entered my mind. I had learned long ago that she was vapor in my hands, always just beyond my grasp. Her physical presence was missing now, yes, but the idea of a mother had died long ago. The expectations of hugs and chocolate chip cookies were long gone. The desire for her to just show up in my little existence was a fantasy. The craving to be touched by her, loved by her…those feelings were, shovel by shovel, being buried in a deep black hole. Her missing body was really the last thing that was on my mind. Her heart was what I had craved.

            From the couch inside the hospital lobby, I watched people ambling off the elevators after visiting their loved ones, studied the pattern on the carpet of the floor, listened to the janitor humming as he emptied the trash. These are the things I thought about that night in the hospital.

            I witnessed the sun begin to slide its way down and wondered at how the streetlights flickered on just as the night began to swallow the light of day, letting me know that it was time to go home and get tucked in for bed.