Four in the Morning Is Its Own Country

A retired appellate judge once ordered me out of her courtroom at four in the morning, along with the IV pole, and the pole and I both went.

I came back in ten minutes with a different pole and she swore me in. She was eighty-nine, she had a urinary infection, and by lunchtime she would be doing the crossword in ink. But at four she had jurisdiction.

I’ve worked nights on the fourth floor of St. Brigid’s for nineteen years, seven to seven, three on and four off. I took nights for a differential of $2.10 an hour and because I had a two-year-old and a theory about childcare. I figured I’d do it for two years. The two-year-old is twenty-one and lives in another state. My husband and I have overlapped about ninety minutes a day this whole time, which he claims is the secret.

The shift has a shape, and you learn it the way you learn a road. Eight to midnight still has some day in it. Families are leaving, somebody’s got a game on with the sound off, the residents are still being clever. At two the hall lights are down and the floor has settled. Four is different. Body temperature bottoms out around then, and I don’t need a study for that, I’ve written it down ten thousand times. The man who was 98.4 at eight is 97.1 now, and the staff are wearing sweaters that don’t belong to us. Bern Okafor, who was on this floor before I got here, keeps a fleece in her locker with the name of a nurse who retired in 2009 stitched on it. Nobody remembers how she came by it. Nobody would ask at four.

It has its own customs. It has its own money: a warm blanket buys a lot, and a graham cracker with peanut butter will get you almost anything. And it has no extradition, which is why people tell you things.

A deacon in 409 told me about a green two-door he stole in 1971. He said it flat, like reporting a symptom. Women tell you who they didn’t marry. A big man with a new colostomy asked me if I thought his brother knew, and I didn’t know what about, and I said I thought he probably did, and he nodded for a long time and went to sleep.

Then at seven the lights come up and the day shift arrives smelling of outdoors, and I go in for the last set of vitals. “Morning, Mr. Hale. Did you sleep?”

“Like a baby,” says the deacon, looking at the wall.

“Good,” I say. We both let it stand. I’ve never once brought it up, and I’ve never gotten a thank-you for that, and I would be alarmed if I did.

They also ask what time it is. They wake up in the dark with no idea whether they’ve been asleep an hour or a week, and they say, is it morning? I say, almost. Bern says, “It’s ten after four, honey,” every time, because she has not told a lie on this floor in thirty years. She thinks almost is cowardice. It might be. It’s also three hours off.

Here is what it does to me.

In March of 2014, around 4:15, I worked out a heparin drip for a woman named Mrs. Ferro. I did the math on the back of a glove box, I got an answer, and I felt wonderful. I want to be clear about that. I felt clear and quick and good at my job. Policy says a second nurse checks, so I carried it over to Bern, who was eating soup out of a mug. She looked at the number. She looked at me. She said, “You want to do that one again?”

I had moved a decimal. Mrs. Ferro weighed ninety-four pounds. She went home that Thursday and complained about the parking.

Everybody has a story like that, or has one coming. What stays with me is the feeling. The wrong answer felt exactly like the right one, only better. I’ve had a lot of years to think about it, and my conclusion is that at four in the morning the part of you that checks has gone home, and it didn’t tell the part of you that’s confident. So now I don’t do arithmetic at that hour without somebody reading it back to me, even when it’s simple, and especially when I feel great.

I take my break at 3:30 in the family lounge, under a painting of a covered bridge, and I write. I write on the backs of report sheets, once I’ve torn the names off, and I bring them home in my bag and put them in a shoebox. Four o’clock sentences arrive with tremendous authority. I’ve got one that says The ice machine knows. I’ve got one that says Every door is a kind of soup, and I underlined it twice.

I would like to tell you I’m being funny, but at the time I had chills.

Here’s the trouble. Every story I’ve ever finished started in that shoebox. About one sentence in forty is something I would have been too sensible or too embarrassed to get to on a full night’s sleep. There’s one about my mother and a bread knife that I have now built two stories on. It looked no different from the soup when I wrote it. It had the same chills on it. So I read the whole box back at two in the afternoon with coffee, slowly, with a pencil, the way Bern reads my drips, and most of it I throw out without any ceremony.

At twenty to eight I walk to the car. The sun’s up and it’s rude about it. People are out there jogging. I stop at the bakery on Dunmore for rolls, in my clogs with something on my sleeve, and the girl at the register, who is about nineteen and very kind, says, “Starting your day?”

I used to explain. I say yes now. Nobody at a border wants the whole story.