“Okay. If you’d like a few minutes to look in on Alice, I’m sure that’ll be all right,” she said after looking at me for a minute. “It might help you sleep a little easier.”

I nodded gratefully, and without another word she stood and motioned for me to follow her. We headed a short way down the hall and into a little side ward, where Alice was in a glass-walled room by herself. “She was moved in here so she could be hooked up to the monitors,” the nurse told me. “That and it’s a bit more private. The waiting area where you’ll be sleeping is right off the side there,” she said, pointing. I tried to smile at her, but I’m not sure I made it. I was so damn tired I felt like I was floating…all I wanted to do was see Alice, and then maybe I could finally drift off for awhile.

The nurse was kind and left me alone after she opened the sliding door to Alice’s room, presumably to make up the sofa as a bed for me. I couldn’t really have cared less, though. I tied on one of the masks that was sitting right outside the door to prevent transferring germs to Al. It was just a precaution, I knew, since Al was in this area more for observation rather than any real fear of infection, but I wanted to do everything I could to keep her as healthy as possible.

When the nurse had moved completely into the waiting room off to the side and I was alone with Alice, I walked over to her slowly. I hated seeing her lying immobile like this, but even I had to admit that she looked a little bit better than she had before. Of course, there were bandages around her head now from the surgery, but her color was a lot better. She didn’t look like warmed-over death anymore, and it did me a lot of good to see it.

I had absolutely no idea what to do, though. I stood looking down at her for a little bit, just watching her. Nothing, aside from the gentle and nearly unnoticeable rise and fall of her chest as she drew breath, but even that helped my mood. She was breathing on her own; there was no respirator there. While she’d been breathing on her own before, knowing that she was still able to was nice.