So I stayed. I called my other client for the afternoon and canceled. I called my neighbor to get Willa off the bus. I sat in the hospital waiting room while they operated on Ms. Whitaker’s hip, then sat next to her bed in the recovery room while she slept.
When she woke up, it was dark outside. She looked at me for a long time without saying anything.
“You’re still here”, she finally said.
“Susan’s flight lands at six in the morning. I told him I
would stay.”
“You have Willa.”
“Willa is with my neighbor. She’s fine. She sent you this.”
I held up a piece of paper. Willa had drawn it that afternoon when I called her and told her what had happened. It was a photo of Mrs. Whitaker’s house. The forty-two windows. And in each window, she had drawn a little yellow light.
GOOD RECOVERY, it was written at the top, with a purple marker. YOU MISS HOME.
Mrs. Whitaker looked at him. She didn’t say anything. His chin was shaking.
Then she turned her face towards the wall.
I sat there in the dark and held his hand, and I didn’t say anything either.
She stayed in the hospital for a week and in a rehabilitation center for another five weeks. I went home every Thursday. I watered the plants. I dusted off the piano. I received the mail and placed
it on the hall table.
Now I understand what she meant by the house needs someone in it.
I went to see her at the rehabilitation center twice. Once with Willa. Willa brought a new drawing, a floor plan of the rehabilitation center, all the corridors, the dining room and the physiotherapy room. The nurses loved it. They stuck it to the wall of the nurses’ station’.
When Mrs. Whitaker came home in April, walking with a cane, Susan stayed with her for a month. Susan was about my age, maybe a little older. She had her mother’s straight back and her father’s kind face.
