Riley H. Welcker

No Longer Mourn

 

 

The automatic doors leapt out of Travis’s way as he charged into the emergency room. He fixed his eyes on the receptionist behind the intake desk and covered the space between them in two strides. The receptionist was staring in a small mirror, drawing on an eyebrow.

 

Travis planted his hands on the narrow counter and leaned over it. “Where is my wife? I need to see her.”

 

The receptionist drew a brown line across her temple and dropped her mirror. It clattered on the desk in front of her. “When was the patient admitted?” she asked. Her pencil rolled as she stretched across the desk and fumbled for a stack of forms.

 

“Just now,” Travis said.

 

I stood behind Travis. I was holding you over my shoulder. You were two. You began to stir. I tugged your pink blanket tighter around you and rocked you and patted your back.

 

“And why was the patient admitted to the emergency room?” she asked. Her ergonomic chair popped up as she reached for a yellow flower among a cluster crammed in a cup of rocks.

 

“Why do you think?” Travis said.

 

The woman stared back at him with one horrid eyebrow, laid a form and a green pen with the flower on the end of it in front of him and bounced her chair as she sat back down. The second receptionist was now closely watching their exchange.

 

“She was in a car wreck,” Travis said.

 

The woman looked at her computer and began to type. “Is this a new health problem or one that just got worse?”

 

Travis looked back at me, his brows jammed together. He leaned farther over the counter. “A new health problem? My wife was just injured in a car wreck. Of course it’s a new health problem.”

 

“Please, stay calm, sir. We have plenty of people admitted here every day. I need to find out who the patient is and what happened so that I can help you. Now, what were you doing just before you came to the emergency room?”

 

“I don’t believe this,” Travis said. “I was shopping for flowers. I need you to tell me where my wife is right now.”

 

“What is the patient’s name?” she asked.

 

I laid my hand on Travis’s shoulder and drew him back. Travis threw his fingers through his hair and stepped away. “Her name is Cara. Cara Bradley Phillips,” I said.

 

“And what is your relationship to the patient?”

 

“I am a friend of the family.”

 

“Was the patient a walk-in?”

 

“My wife was just brought in by the ambulance,” Travis said over my shoulder.

 

“I’ll need you to fill out these forms,” she said. She pushed a number of forms over the counter: patient information, medical information, consent for treatment, insurance provider. “Who is your insurance?” she asked.

 

I looked back at Travis. “Blue Cross Blue Shield,” I answered.

 

“And who is legally responsible for the patient?”

 

“I am,” Travis said, bursting upon the counter.

 

“Are you authorized to sign for the patient?”

 

“I am her husband.”

 

“Do you have a power of attorney or other document that shows you are authorized to sign for the patient?”

 

“No. I don’t have any such document.”

 

“Then I am afraid, sir, there is not much I can do for you.”

 

“I don’t understand. Why do I have to fill out all this paperwork and go through all of this when all I need is to see my wife?”

 

“I am sorry, sir, but you really should have filled this paperwork out before you came to the emergency room.”

 

“Before I came to the emergency room?” Travis turned to me. “How was I supposed to know this would happen?” He slapped the counter, readdressing the receptionist, “No one expects something like this to happen. So how was I supposed to have the paperwork filled out before I came?”

 

A police officer walked into the lobby. “Is there a problem here?” he asked with his hand on his gun.

 

Travis turned and frowned at the officer. “Yes, Officer; my wife was involved in a car wreck and was just brought in by the ambulance.”

 

“Who was driving the car?”

 

“She was.”

 

“And where were you?”

 

“I was buying flowers. I never saw the accident,” Travis said.

 

“Then how do you know she was in an accident?” the officer asked.

 

“I saw the accident,” I said. “Cara was t-boned by a furniture truck at the intersection. The baby was with her, but the EMT said she was okay and that I could take her. They wanted to focus on Cara. They said she was in critical condition.”

 

“And where did they say they would take her?”

 

“Here.”

 

“The best thing to do then is to remain calm. Fill out the paperwork the receptionist has given you.”

 

“Can’t,” Travis said. “She says we need proof of my authority to sign for the patient.”

 

“Do you have proof?”

 

“I am her husband.”

 

The officer scratched his forehead, his hand still on his gun.

 

“What I am supposed to do?” Travis asked.

 

“Be patient. Take a seat in the waiting room,” the officer said. “I will find a nurse, and see if we can’t get this straightened out for you.”

 

The waiting room was nearly full. Most of the patients were clustered closest to the intake desk. We took the two furthest chairs. Travis dropped in his seat and stared out the window.

 

It began to snow.

 

A woman was reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to a small girl she held on her lap: “‘It is winter in Narnia, and has been for ever so long, and we shall both catch cold if we stand here talking in the snow.’” The little girl looked ill. She was as white as a sheet. A man was reading a Sports Illustrated Magazine. The center table was littered with magazines: Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health, People, Ladies’ Home Journal, Newsweek. Someone had committed suicide. Another had been murdered. An old white couple was sitting beneath the window holding hands. They spoke in Russian. The old man held a bandage to his balding head. Every now and then he removed it, glanced at it, and placed it to his head again. His head had a gash in it. An oriental lady three chairs down from us couldn’t stop coughing. She held a hanky to her mouth and leaned into her knees. I switched you from my right shoulder to my left, trying to keep you as far from everyone in that room as possible. There were other people in the room as well: a young black man with a stud in his left ear slouching in his seat with his arm folded over his chest talking on a cell phone, children playing with a rollercoaster toy on the floor, a woman tapping her foot and looking at her watch.

 

A framed slogan on the wall read: Don’t catch your death of cold. Wear a coat.

 

Travis’s jaw flexed and released. Flexed and released.

 

When the police officer came into the entrance hall again, he was standing beside a nurse. He pointed in our direction and walked away. “‘It’s she who makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!’” read the woman with the little girl on her lap. “‘How awful!’ said Lucy.”

 

The nurse approached us. “Please, come with me,” she said.

 

“This is boring,” I heard a boy say. He looked like he was seven. He stood up from the rollercoaster toy and sat beside his mother. I wanted to slap him. How dare he say something like that at a time like this, I thought. I wanted to take him outside and beat him with a stick. Another small boy with swollen eyes was holding a teddy bear. He squeezed it and clapped its paws.

 

The nurse brought us to a private room and told us to wait there. She closed the door behind her.

 

We waited thirty-seven minutes.

 

Travis was sitting on the checkup bench, back to the door, head between his shoulders, when a physician entered the room. I was sitting on a hard chair. The physician knelt down beside me. “Are you the husband?” she asked.

 

“I am,” Travis said, facing the physician.

 

The physician stood and Travis stood. “Your wife is dead.”

 

“Dead? When?”

 

“She was dead before she reached the emergency room. The paramedics lost her in the ambulance.”

 

“How did she die?” Travis asked.

 

“Your wife suffered severe trauma to the head.” The physician then said something about internal bleeding. “There is some paperwork that you will need to fill out.”

 

“I don’t want to fill out any paperwork,” Travis said. “I want to see my wife.”

 

“I understand this is difficult,” the physician said. “Please, follow me.” The physician showed us through the emergency doors and down the hallway to Cara’s room. When we reached her room, the physician said, “Take all the time you need.”  She then turned to me and said, “We can leave the paperwork for later, but you’ll eventually need to come to the office.”

 

I nodded, and the physician left.

 

 

When Travis saw Cara for the first time, she was singing on stage. Travis had invited me to a musical he was required to attend for a Shakespeare theater class he was taking as an elective. Hamlet: A Musical. It was appalling. It was an embarrassment. It was an outright violation of Shakespeare. The writer should have been shot; the script, torn to pieces. Travis and I would have left had it not been for Cara.

 

By that time, Travis and I were rooming together. Travis was in his second year in college. He had been accepted to the School of Business at Rick’s in Rexburg and drove to school from Idaho Falls thirty-five minutes there and back every day. He had become a Viking. Cara was a Viking, too, but not only in school spirit. She was a Viking in the literal sense.

 

Cara broke every cliché attached to a Viking woman singing on stage. She wasn’t large. She didn’t wear braids or a horned helmet or carry a spear or sing opera. She was tall and thin, her hair, as blonde as an apple, pulled back in ringlets. She was beautiful. She was an angel.

 

She was Ophelia.

 

Travis could not take his eyes off of her. When she left the stage, he whistled and gave her a standing ovation. When she remained off stage, he booed the other singers and demanded her return. “Where is Ophelia?” he shouted. “We want Ophelia.” When she reappeared on stage, he whistled again and gave her another standing ovation. He turned to me, his eyes still on her, and said, “I am going to marry that girl.” But how he would ever meet that Norwegian goddess he had no idea at all.

 

When the play was over, Travis attempted to search her out, but he never found her. “She’s gone, Bane,” he said. “How shall I ever find her?”

 

All at once, Travis became a pensive Norwegian pram without oars set adrift on a wild sea in search of Ophelia.

 

Whenever he was behind the wheel, it was obvious he wasn’t looking at the road. He was looking for Ophelia. I told him to look in Denmark. He said that wasn’t funny. I told him to keep his eyes on the road or he might get us in a wreck and die and never find her.

 

One day he was swinging his fist in the poise of mighty victory, making bold declarations of winning his beloved Ophelia; the next he was dragging his feet, bracing himself against walls, holding his chest, grief stricken at the possibility of her rejection. He never even knew her name. I told him he was an idiot more than once. He told me he was a man in love and that he could not control his feelings no matter how he tried and begged me to believe he had tried.

 

I took him by the shoulders. “I pray, sir, tell me, is it possible that love should of a sudden take such hold?”

 

“‘O Bane, till I found it to be true, I never thought it possible or likely; but see, Bane, I burn, I pine, I perish, Bane, if I achieve not this young modest girl. Counsel me, Bane, for I know thou canst; assist me, Bane, for I know thou wilt.”

 

When I told him I thought I could get them together, he grasped my arm and said, “Would you, Bane? Would you?” And I said I would. And he said, “My life is in your hands, Bane. You are a true friend.”

 

I slapped his chest and reassured him I would, and adjured him to get control of himself. I told him her name was Cara. Travis was thunderstruck. He was so taken with this new revelation that he never even asked me how I knew but continued to repeat her name in distant, dreamy tones. If Travis had only looked at the program he would have seen both her name and her email. I don’t know who puts an email on a musical program but it was there. The stupid scriptwriter, I suppose.

 

I investigated the drama department and found her almost immediately. I learned where and when she practiced, got off of work, and sat in on one of her rehearsals. When the stage director loomed over me in my seat and told me I couldn’t be there, I shook his hand and informed him that I was a Broadway talent scout. He then apologized gratuitously and graciously allowed me to stay and watch. Throughout the rehearsal, he kept glancing up at me and waving. When the rehearsal was over, I asked to see Cara. I took her aside and told her there was a dashing, debonair young man who was desperately in love with her and would like more than anything to meet her. She squinted at me, questioning my strange request. I told her it had nothing to do with me in the slightest but that I was sent on his behalf and if she was but willing to give him the chance, he would win her heart and she would never regret it.

 

I then asked her if I might give him her number. She thought about it, and I offered her a notepad and pen from my top pocket, and she left her number with me. I thanked her and shook her hand and told her he would call her tomorrow and walked away. But before I exited the auditorium, I told her if her stage director asked how our interview went to let him know she had been offered a position on Broadway upon graduation and that I said his production had potential.

 

Travis soon learned she was an international student from Norway. Cara’s was an interesting story. She wasn’t born in Norway. Her mother was an international student at BYU. Her father was from Texas. They met, married, had Cara, graduated together, decided to move to Norway to be close to Cara’s mother’s parents, and eventually applied for dual citizenship.

 

Cara was interested in literature, Shakespeare, drama, the arts. And suddenly so was Travis. It took a number of strong reminders to keep him on track to finish business school, but I was proud of him when he graduated. He graduated on time as planned and with a double major: one in Business and the other in English Lit.

 

Travis and Cara frequently invited me to help them study, and I took a serious interest in their classes. I found myself identifying with Theodore Roethke—especially with his poem “My Papa’s Waltz”; Travis, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and Cara, with Emily Dickenson. When Travis and Cara took Shakespeare together, I helped them study for that, too. We read and acted out plays. Cara enjoyed Shakespeare. Travis enjoyed Cara. And I enjoyed watching the both of them—their unfolding romance, their blossoming love—while immersing myself in the work of a man who I believed was a genius; Shakespeare’s work consumed me.

 

Travis and Cara were the perfect couple. They dated just two years and were married.

 

 

Cara’s body was laid out flat on a gurney. The physicians had moved her into a nearby room to allow the family privacy. Above the bed behind Cara’s head there was a painting on the wall of a sad clown holding a large flower.

 

Travis slowly walked toward her and leaned over the side bar and took her hand. I could not see his face, but it was not a moment later and he was hanging from the side bar, his back heaving. He could barely hold himself up.

 

I quickly laid you in a chair and grasped Travis around the middle. Travis sank to the floor. He still held the bar of the gurney with one hand. The other was draped over my shoulder. His fingers slid up over my head and kneaded my hair. His fist shook.

 

C.S. Lewis wrote, “If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you-you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”

 

That was how it was for Travis.

 

I looked back at you. You were asleep. Your face was pink and round. You had no idea what was going on. You were entirely oblivious to everything but your own tender dreams. You were at perfect peace.

 

When Travis got the hospital bill, the trauma admission was well in advance of $21,000.00; the E.R. physician charge, over $800.00; and the medical imaging, another $172.00.

 

Cara was categorized as DOA. How do you like that? DOA—as if she was never a living human being, just flesh and tissue and organs.

 

I hate hospitals.

 

The paperwork was endless. In addition to the emergency department record, Medical Examiner’s report, belongings list, body release form, death certificate, autopsy permission and anatomical donation forms, we were provided forms for medical history, emergency care general consent, and, finally, consent for payment.

 

As Travis filled out the paperwork, a nurse pushed a bereavement brochure into my hand. Every last document viewed, filled out, and filed was an impassable gallstone.

 

When we left the hospital, the automatic doors stepped back. I held you tightly in my arms. Travis was silent.

 

 

 

Riley Welcker has many stories, essays, and poems bulging from his briefcase. He holds a B.S. in Business, a B.A. in English, and he is currently a graduate in Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has appeared in numerous publications including the Montréal Review, Passages North, Writing Commons, Blast Furnace, Menacing Hedge, BlazeVOX, Grey Sparrow Journal, Oklahoma Review, Mindful Word, Mandala Journal, Kansas City Voices, eLectio Publishing, SNReview, San Juan Record, Hippocampus Magazine, and, now, DM.