Stay Until I Fall Asleep
The call light for Room 4 comes on most nights at around two.
I’d been on nights at Bell County General for about three weeks when I first saw it. It’s a small hospital, twenty-eight beds, and on nights the medical floor runs on two nurses and an aide. That night it was me and Dolores, who’d been on nights at Bell County since before I was born. I was charting at the station and the board lit up, 4 – CALL, and the little chime went, and I stood up.
“Sit down,” Dolores said, without looking up from her own chart.
“It’s Room 4.”
“I know which room it is.” She finished what she was writing and capped her pen. “I’ll go. You watch the board.”
She was back in five minutes. When I asked who was in 4, because the census said nobody, she said, “Mrs. Avery,” and when I asked what she’d been admitted for, she just said, “She’s not admitted, honey,” and went back to her chart.
I asked around, the way you do. The day nurses rolled their eyes. “Oh, the Room 4 thing. Dolores tell you the rule yet?” The aide, a big gentle kid named Marcus, was the one who finally told me. He said it like he was reciting it, the way you’d tell a new hire where the fire exits are.
“There’s an old lady in 4 some nights. She’ll ask you to sit with her until she falls asleep. You sit with her. You hold her hand if she wants. You can talk to her, she’s real nice. But you leave before she falls asleep. Before. You always leave before.”
“What happens if you don’t?”
He thought about it. “Nobody knows,” he said. “Nobody’s ever stayed.”
The first time I went into Room 4 myself, Dolores was on her break.
It was a regular room. Bed by the window, the curtain half drawn, the parking lot lights coming in orange. In the bed was a very old woman, white hair spread on the pillow, a hospital gown, a thin blanket pulled up to her chin. No IV. No monitor. No wristband. She smiled when I came in, and she had the kindest face I’ve ever seen.
“Oh,” she said, “you’re new. Thank you for coming. Would you sit with me a while? I can’t seem to sleep.”
So I sat. She asked about me. Where I grew up, if I had a boyfriend, why I’d gone into nursing. She held my hand. Her skin was dry and cool and very soft, like a paper napkin that’s been folded and unfolded too many times. And after twenty minutes or so, her eyes started to get heavy, and her hand loosened in mine, and her breathing got slow, and I felt, I promise you, I felt, the whole floor go still.
Not quiet. Still. As if every patient in every room had stopped breathing at once to listen.
I got up and left. At the door I looked back. Her eyes were open again. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
That was the routine. Most nights around two, the light. One of us went in. We sat. We talked. And at the point where her eyes closed and her grip went soft, and that awful stillness started to come down over the whole floor, we stood up and walked out.
I asked Dolores once if she knew who Mrs. Avery was.
She was quiet for a while. Then she said that in 1961, a woman named Avery had been admitted to Room 4 after a stroke. She’d been in the hospital for nine months. Her family stopped visiting after the first few weeks. She couldn’t sleep, the nurses said, and every night she’d put on her call light and ask someone to sit with her. And they were busy, and it was a small hospital, and it was 1961, and one night, nobody came.
“She died sometime that night,” Dolores said. “Light on. Nobody answered.”
“So she just wants someone to stay.”
“She wants someone to stay,” Dolores said, “until she falls asleep.”
“Then why don’t we?”
Dolores looked at me for a long time over her glasses. Then she said, “Because she’s been trying to fall asleep in that room for sixty-five years, and I don’t know what she’s been keeping awake for. And I don’t want to find out what wakes up when she stops.”
Dolores retired in March. After that it was me and a rotating string of travelers on nights, and none of them stayed long enough to learn the rule properly, so mostly it was me who went into Room 4.
I’ll tell you the truth. It got harder to leave. She was so lonely. Every night she was so grateful, and every night I’d feel her hand go soft and I’d stand up and she’d open her eyes and say, Maybe tomorrow, and I’d go out into the hall feeling like I’d done something cruel. I started to think about her in 1961 with the light on, all night, with no one coming. I thought about how many nurses had sat with her since and walked out. All of us leaving. Every one of us, every night, for sixty-five years.
So two weeks ago, I stayed.
I held her hand. Her eyes closed. Her grip went soft. The stillness came down, and it was worse than ever, so heavy I could feel it on my skin, the whole building holding its breath. I could hear the monitors in the other rooms. I could hear them all, very clearly, every one of them, and every one of them had gone flat.
Then she was asleep.
And something under the bed sighed and turned over, like a very large animal settling, and the stillness lifted, and the monitors down the hall came back, one by one, beep… beep… as if nothing had ever happened.
She slept. I sat with her until it got light. When the day shift came on I went home, and I didn’t know what I’d done, and I still don’t.
Nothing happened that day. Or the next. The census was normal. The patients were fine. I thought maybe that was it. That she’d finally slept, and it was over.
Then, at two the following night, the call light came on in Room 5.
There was a man in the bed. Old, gaunt, with the kindest eyes. No IV, no wristband. He smiled when I came in, and asked if I’d sit with him a while, because he couldn’t seem to sleep.
Last night it was Room 6, too. A little boy. He wants a story.
I think I understand now what she’d been keeping awake for. I think, for sixty-five years, she was holding the door. Room 4 was the only one awake, and as long as she stayed up, nobody else had to. Nobody else could.
I’m still on nights. There are twenty-eight rooms at Bell County General. The board lit up four times last night. I’m the only one who knows the rule, and I’m the one who broke it, and I go in, and I sit, and I hold their hands, and before their eyes close all the way, I stand up and walk out, and I hear them say maybe tomorrow.
Tonight, when I came on shift, the call light for Room 4 was already on. When I went in, the bed was empty, and the covers were turned back, and on the pillow there was a little folded note in a shaky old hand that said, Your turn, dear. Thank you for staying.
The sheets are still warm. I have been standing beside the bed for a long time now, trying to work out how tired I am, and how long a person can stay awake if she has to.