“I know,” he added.
“You promised me you’d be there when I woke up. You promised on your life.”
He didn’t try to explain it away. He sat back down, leaned his forearms on his knees, and told me the truth.
He came to the hospital the morning after the surgery. The nurse at the desk told him there had been complications. Then he found my room, stood in the doorway, saw the machines, the tubes, my face, and told me he had never been that afraid of anything in twenty years.
He went back to the elevator. He sat in the parking garage for two hours. He drove home and couldn’t go inside, so he slept in the truck in the driveway.
The next morning he drove back. Made it to the lobby. Sat in a chair near the entrance for forty minutes and then walked back to his car.
He tried every day. Some days he made it further than others.
“Once I made it to your floor,” he said. “I could see the nurses’ station from the elevator. I stood there for maybe a minute, and then I left.” He stopped. “I bought the gifts on the third day. I thought if I had something to bring you, I could make myself go in.” He looked at the folded bags still sitting in the garage. “I couldn’t.”
I looked at his hands, tears slowly welling up.
“I knew it was wrong,” he went on. “I knew every single day it was wrong. But I couldn’t go back into that room and see you that way and not be able to do anything. So I did the only thing I could actually do.”
“Ro…”
He looked up at me. “I couldn’t stand the thought of you coming home and running out of time before any of it was finished,” he said. “We’ve been saying ‘one day’ for twenty years, Bev. I kept thinking What if this is it? What if there is no one day?”
I stood in the sunroom he had built in two weeks out of terror and love and the inability to sit still with the possibility of losing me. I thought about the yellow hallway and the reading nook sketch he’d kept since 2009 and the stuffed bear with the tag still on it in the garage.
