I’d never left a shift early in eleven years. Not when my husband, Hector, had his gallbladder out, and not the morning my granddaughter was born. I’d worked through two ice storms and a power outage and the winter my furnace died and I slept in my coat.
That Friday, I took off my apron, hung it on the hook, and walked out to my car.
Kurt stood in the window with his mouth hanging open. “Ro! You can’t just leave! Who’s going to work the window?”
“You’ve got two hands and a stopwatch, Kurt,” I said. “Figure it out.”
The medical center sits up on the hill on State Street, eight floors of brick and glass overlooking the Penobscot River. Joanne met me in the main lobby at 7:30 in her scrubs, with her badge still crooked.
“I can’t get you into the room,” she said quietly. “I’m not even on his case. Patient privacy rules are strict. But I can tell you his name now. It’s on the board at the nurses’ station.”
“What’s his name?”
She took a breath.
“Elijah Thibodeau,” she said. “Everybody calls him Eli.”
Eli. After more than four hundred mornings at my window, he finally had a name.
“His grandmother’s upstairs,” Joanne said. “She’s been here every day. She’s seventy-four, and she doesn’t drive, so she takes the city bus from Brewer. Two transfers.” Her voice caught. “She’s sitting in the same waiting room he sat in two years ago.”
We took the elevator to the fourth floor. Joanne walked me down a long hallway that smelled like hand sanitizer and floor wax, past a nurses’ station with blinking monitors, to a small family waiting room with blue vinyl chairs, a TV playing the Weather Channel with the sound off, and a vending machine humming in the corner.
An old woman sat in the chair closest to the window. She was small and thin, with white hair pinned back under a knit cap. A winter coat was folded in her lap, and a rosary was wound through her fingers. On the chair beside her sat a battered canvas tote bag stuffed with papers.
“Mrs. Thibodeau?” Joanne said gently.
The old woman looked up, and when she saw Joanne’s face, she went very still.
“You,” she whispered. “You’re the nurse. The one from before. When my Danielle…”
“Yes, ma’am,” Joanne said. “I’m Joanne. I was Danielle’s nurse.”
The old woman’s face crumpled.
“He talked about you,” she said. “Every day, for two years. The nurse with the hot chocolate. He said you were the only person in this whole hospital who saw him.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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