Visiting Hours

At 3:40 in the morning I heard a woman in 412 complaining about the soup, which was a problem, because the woman in 412 had not spoken in twenty-three days.

Alda Medeiros, eighty-six, left-sided stroke. The chart said global aphasia, and under that, in the hand of a neurologist who had given her six minutes, poor prognosis for meaningful speech. She lay in the window bed and looked at a ceiling tile with a water stain on it. She took thickened juice off a spoon. She turned when we turned her. I told her what I was doing every time I did it, which you do whether anybody’s home or not, and she gave no sign, and I had stopped looking for one.

Her son came every evening. Paul was sixty-one, sold commercial heating systems, and wore a fleece vest with the name of the company on it in case he forgot. He showed up around 7:15, just after I took report, and stayed until I ran him out at eight. The first week he sat by the door and answered email. By the second week he had pulled the chair up to the bed rail, and when I passed in the hall I could see his mouth going, low and steady. I figured he was praying. I had thirty things to do at 7:30 and none of them was listening to Paul.

So, 3:40. I went down the hall thinking somebody’s TV, or a confused patient wandering into the wrong room. The door was half closed. Inside, Anselmo from housekeeping was sitting in the visitor’s chair with his bucket parked beside him, eating a sandwich out of wax paper, and Mrs. Medeiros was talking to him.

It wasn’t clean. The right side of her mouth dragged, and she stopped to hunt for words the way you hunt for keys. But they were sentences, in Portuguese, with a rise and a fall to them, and the fall was contempt.

She saw me and stopped. The good eye went back to the ceiling tile. I have watched a lot of people pretend to sleep, and that was the best I ever saw.

“Anselmo,” I said.

He finished chewing. “The soup,” he said. “She says it isn’t soup.”

“How long has she been doing this?”

“Second week. I said good night in Portuguese, to be polite. She told me I missed the corner.” He pointed the sandwich at the baseboard. “I did.”

I worked it out standing there. The neurologist had tested her in English, because the chart said English, because Paul told admitting his mother had spoken English since 1961, which she had. Whatever the stroke took, it took the newer language first and left the old one underneath. It happens. There are papers about it. Our speech therapist would have wept with joy and brought a colleague.

“She understands me? English?”

“Everything. She can’t get it back out, that’s all. Only this.”

“Anselmo, somebody has to be told.”

“I said this to her. She says no.”

“She says no.”

He turned and said something to her, gently, the way you would raise a matter with a landlord. She answered without moving her eye from the tile, four or five words. He considered how to put it.

“She says when she talks, he talks about the weather.”

I waited.

“Sixty-one years,” Anselmo said. “The weather, the car, did you take your pills. Now he comes, he thinks nobody’s home.” He began folding the wax paper into quarters. “He left his wife in March. The wife thinks it’s a girl. It’s not a girl. He’s scared of what the doctor said about his heart. He’s the one who broke the window on Cutler Street in 1973, and the other boy got the belt for it. And last week he said he forgives her about his father. She doesn’t know if that’s true. So she listens for if he says it again.”

The radiator ticked. Mrs. Medeiros said one more thing to the ceiling.

“She says your hands are cold and you do the pillow wrong.”

I know what I was supposed to do. I have a license with a number on it, and there was a phone on the wall behind me. This was a woman with a working mind and a family meeting coming, and a fair person would say I owed her a neurologist and an interpreter by breakfast. I stood there for what I would guess was a full minute, which on nights is a long time to stand anywhere.

Then I asked whether she was in any pain. I asked whether anybody was treating her badly, and whether she wanted anything I could get her. I said she knew she could change her mind about all this, any night, and she should tell Anselmo if she did. He translated. She took her time.

“A different soup,” he said.

At 0400 I charted: Resting, eyes open, no acute distress. Repositioned. Every word of it would hold up. Before I left the room Anselmo showed me about the pillow, lengthwise under the bad shoulder, and I have to tell you it’s better. I do it that way for everybody now.

The next evening I came down the hall at ten of eight with the med cart. Paul had his elbow on the rail and his head low. He was saying something about a boat, or about a man named Boat, I didn’t stop to find out. Behind him his mother was staring at her tile with tremendous concentration, doing her job.

He looked up at me like somebody interrupted on a long-distance call. His eyes were red. He checked the clock over the door, which said 7:58.

“Is it time? Any change today, or?”

They all ask. I’ve answered that question for nineteen years, and I have told a great many people that visiting hours were over.

“She had a quiet night,” I said. “And that clock’s fast.”

I went and counted the narcotics, which can take a while if you do it carefully, and I didn’t come back until twenty past.