Friends

The mother is in the chair beside the bed.

She has been in the chair for a long time. Long enough that she has forgotten what the chair is for. The chair is for sitting. She is sitting. The body does what the body does when there is nothing else to do.

Her coat is still on.

She came in wearing it three hours ago and has not taken it off. One of the buttons at the bottom is not fastened. She has not noticed. Her hand is in her lap around a small folded paper she was given at the nurses' station, and the paper has gone soft from the closing and opening of her fingers. She does not remember reading it. She does not remember being given it. The paper is in her hand because the paper is in her hand.

The machines are doing what machines do. The small light on the post blinks. The line on the screen moves the way it has moved for hours. The air in the room has the quality of a room where no one is going home soon.

On the tray by the bed there is a plastic cup of water with a bent straw. Someone set it there at some point. She has not looked at it. She will not look at it. The cup belongs to a world in which water is drunk, and she is not in that world this afternoon.

Her other hand is on the edge of the bed. Not holding. Resting. The hand has been resting there long enough that the blanket has taken the shape of her palm and will hold that shape after she has gone home, in three days or five days or never, and someone else folds the blanket and does not know whose hand was there.

A visitor arrives.

The visitor is someone who loves her. That has to be said first. The visitor is not a stranger. The visitor is not a chaplain assigned to her by a clipboard at the nurses' station. The visitor is someone who drove across the city because word had reached them that the mother was in the chair and someone ought to go.

The visitor sits in the chair across from her. The visitor has brought nothing but words.

The visitor speaks.

The first sentence is true. The sentence is from Scripture, or close enough to Scripture that no one in the room would think to challenge it. The sentence has been preached from pulpits for two thousand years. The sentence has consoled thousands of people who were not in this room.

The mother hears the sentence.

Something in her goes still.

The stillness is not new. The stillness has been in her since the first doctor came out of the room two nights ago and used the phrase we need to talk about what comes next. The stillness has been under everything since then — under the coffee she could not taste, under the hand that signed the forms, under the drive home to get a change of clothes she did not actually change into. What the visitor's sentence does is name the stillness. The sentence falls into it. The sentence does not fill it.