Well, they could breathe now. Riveted by the shock—
his fall flat to the pavement, his bloodied knee,
his wrenched pinky bent at a fearful angle
and disinclined to move in the normal way—
they had felt rattle-brained. But help had come
with reasonable dispatch, as it does in cities,
so here they were: the emergency department
of their good hospital, where they could count
on skillful care. Tall automatic doors
parted in welcome. She barely registered
such odd new features as the metal detector
guarding the ER entrance, dragonlike.
A minimal wait (the night’s expected mishaps
would pile up later on) and they were guided
into a room, with chairs and a hospital bed.
Draping her tailored coat and setting her handbag
onto a chair, she helped him to undress,
lamenting silently the rips and bloodstains
in his sharp-creased and silk-suspendered trousers.
Now would begin the measured waits, the strict
divisions of the teams and tasks: assessment,
X-rays, CAT scan, insurance verification.
All formal, by the book, a trifle chilly
but warmed by a practiced cheeriness of tone
kept up by each singsonging visitant.
Long silences between, and the hard brightness
of clinical fluorescence, stainless steel,
whites and off-whites, the tones of bone and ash,
the odor of antiseptic sanctity.
At last the actual care of knee and finger:
The nurse cleaning the wound. The doctor, stitching.
Exactly when the strange sound had intruded
was lost to memory. All she could recall
was that the sound was there, that it became
gradually more high-pitched, more intense,
more disconcerting. Someone, somewhere, keening.
A female cry, an edge of animal pain.
What kind? She leaned into the sound and listened.
Labor? This seemed a different kind of trouble,
grating, disordered, hopeless. She stood up
and peered out to the bank of nurses’ stations,
where not the slightest movement or expression
spoke to the bottomless misery of the sound.
Which changed in character every so often
but did not ebb. Pure wretchedness, then fury.
Now back to wretchedness, now fierce resistance.
And finally, and finally, some words
bled through the awful keening: No! Don’t take him!
Don’t take him! You can’t take him away! Don’t take him!
And the facts shaped themselves inside her mind.
The doctor finished, telling them to wait
for discharge orders, stop for antibiotics.
The nurse who reappeared tried to assure them,
with a bright smile, that all was under control.
Another wait. A nurse who helped him dress.
A space of time in which she realized
the keening was now gone, the space untroubled.
An orderly who came to push the wheelchair
and mouthed apologies for what he called
“so much distraction.”
—————————-—Then it was all over.
They waited in the cold for a yellow taxi
out at the drive-up, where light snow was falling.
In the bright glass of doors that shut them out,
she saw, reflected, her disheveled hairdo
and nursed a vulnerability that was new.
Something beyond the help of medicine
had happened. Something here could not be mended,
not with the best insurance in the world.
Maryann Corbett is the author of six books, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan). Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Contemporary Catholic Poetry. She lives in Saint Paul.
Photo by Jake Espedido on Unsplash
