Room 304

I froze before I even opened the door.

I was standing in the hallway outside Room 304 at 7:12 in the morning, holding a clipboard, reading the name on the chart for the second time because the first time had not fully registered.crsaid

Margaret.

It was a common name. There were other Margarets in the world besides the one I was thinking of, obviously. I told myself this while standing very still in the middle of a busy med-surg floor, nurses and aides and transport moving around me with the organized efficiency of a morning shift getting underway, and I stood there and told myself it was definitely not her.

Then I walked in, because I have been a nurse for sixteen years and standing in the hallway dreading a room is not something I can afford to do, and muscle memory got me through the door before certainty had fully arrived.

She was sitting up in bed in a pale blue hospital gown, one leg crossed over the other, phone in hand, reading glasses low on her nose. She’d aged — we all had, twenty-five years on — but the posture was the same and the energy in the room when she glanced up was the same and it was, without question, her.

“Good morning,” I said, because sixteen years of practice means the words come out level regardless of what is happening inside you. “I’m your nurse today. My name is Lena.”

She barely glanced up from her phone. “Finally. I’ve been waiting forever.”

The exact same bite.

My first thought, standing there with my clipboard and my professional smile, was: if I can get through the next few days without her recognizing me, I can do this. People like her tended not to think much about people like me. She had been the kind of person whose presence filled every room, who everyone tracked and responded to and feared. I had been the kind who kept her eyes down and her books close and tried to take up as little space as possible. She had never needed to remember me the way I needed to remember her.

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