Chapter 5 - The Glass Partition
By Thursday evening, the rain had set in—a cold, persistent drizzle that turned the Cleveland streets into mirrors reflecting the harsh neon signage of storefronts and pharmacies.
I didn't go home after my shift. Instead, I drove to St. Vincent Medical Center, parked in the multi-level garage where three years ago I had loaded a dying child into a car seat with shaking hands, and took the elevator up to the fourth-floor hematology unit.
The corridor was quiet. It was past visiting hours, but the night nurse on duty—a tall, broad-shouldered man with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses—recognized me as I stepped out of the elevator.
“Ms. Pierce,” he said, putting down a chart on the central nursing station. “Dr. Sterling is inside the isolation suite right now. They’ve started palliative management. The marrow suppression is complete.”
I stopped by the counter, my hands resting on the cool laminate surface. “Is my mother still here?”
“She left about an hour ago,” the nurse said, shaking his head. “Security had to escort her out after she tried to bypass the gown-and-mask protocol to get into the room. Your father’s sitting down in the cafeteria. He hasn't moved from that corner booth since Tuesday.”
“Can I see him?”
The nurse looked at me for a long moment, studying the dark circles under my eyes and the rigid, unyielding line of my jaw. Then he nodded slowly. “Gown, mask, gloves at the station. Don't touch the ventilation seals.”
Five minutes later, I stood behind the double-paned glass of Room 412.
Daniel looked unrecognizable. The robust, slightly arrogant thirty-two-year-old architect who had smiled down from his newly purchased porch under a silver bow had been hollowed out by the ravenous fury of his disease. His head was completely bald, his skin the color of wet cement, and his chest rose and fell in shallow, jagged hitches beneath a white hospital gown. Tubes ran from his arms into a bank of electronic monitors that beeped with a soft, monotonous regularity.
He wasn't sleeping. Through the thick glass, his eyes—hollow, dark-rimmed sockets—turned slowly toward the door as my shadow fell across the observation window.
For a long time, neither of us moved.
Then, with an effort that looked like it cost him every remaining ounce of his physical substance, Daniel raised his right hand. His fingers pressed flat against the inside of the glass pane.
He wasn't begging. He wasn't crying. There was a strange, terrible peace in his expression—the look of a man who had finally looked at the bottom of the column of figures and realized that the math didn't care about his excuses either.
I walked closer, until my nose was inches from the cold glass. Slowly, deliberately, I raised my right hand and pressed my palm flat against the outside of the partition, directly opposite his.
The temperature difference was startling. His side was warm from the fever radiating through his skin; my side was ice-cold from the air conditioning circulating through the corridor.
Through the double layer of glass, his lips moved. I couldn't hear the sound over the hum of the air handlers, but I could read the syllables clearly enough.
I’m sorry.
May you like
I didn't nod. I didn't smile. I simply held my hand against the glass, letting the chill sink deep into the palm of my hand until the nurses behind the station began to murmur and drift toward the doorway.
Three years ago, when the coordinator in Boston had handed me the clipboard with the rejection stamp, I had pressed my hands against the windshield of my car and screamed until my throat bled into the upholstery. There was no screaming left in me now. There was only the quiet, heavy realization that some debts are so large they can never be collected, and some accounts are settled not with money, but with the silence that remains after the ledger is burned.
