The ICU floor was quiet the week before Christmas. Patients slept peacefully in rooms that lined the corridors, and doctors and nurses moved around on thick-soled shoes, checking vital signs and charts as they hummed Christmas songs to themselves. The elevator slid to a stop on the third floor and the doors opened. A tall, red-headed man in a navy blue sweater stepped out and looked both ways.
The man approached the nurses’ station, ducking under a bough of tinsel as he tried to get the nurse’s attention.
“Excuse me,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was wondering where I could find Daniel Girch’s room.”
“Family?” the nurse asked, glancing up at him from the keyboard she’d been typing on.
“Friend of the family,” he said, considering for a moment that he should just lie and say that he was Daniel’s uncle or something.
The nurse glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. “Visiting hours are over, and technically they’re only for family in the ICU.”
“But I really need to see him,” the man said, placing his open palms on the counter as if this would make her see the urgency in his situation.
She slid a clipboard across the counter at him and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Name and phone number on this line,” she said, tapping a blank line on the sheet. She handed the man a ballpoint pen and went back to her typing.
He picked up the pen and stared at the paper.
Roger Napoleon, he wrote and added his phone number after it.
Coming here was weird--or at least had the potential to be weird. Before writing his name, Roger had taken a moment to think through the potential repercussions of showing up in Daniel’s hospital room thirty years after they’d initially met. Would Lisa think it was odd seeing the guy she only knew as a childhood next door neighbor after all these years? Would it even make sense for him to show up at Daniel’s bedside to offer his support as a family friend?
Roger thought back to the last time he’d seen Lisa; it had been a good fifteen years. His mother had just died and his father was selling the family house next door to the Girch’s. He’d gone over to help his dad pack up one Sunday, not sure what to expect as he’d rolled into the driveway.
In the Girch’s front yard was a tricycle and a small boy in shorts and no shirt. The boy had waved at the car and gone back to playing with his toys. Daniel, he’d thought, eyeballing the toddler and trying to wrap his head around the fact that he was seeing his best friend as a three-year-old in the yard of the house he’d lived in as an eighteen-year-old in 1986. He stared at Daniel for another minute before Lisa had come out of the house, calling her little boy’s name.
The nurse pulled the clipboard back across the desk and read his name. “Room 314.”
Roger tapped the desk twice and walked away. The tinsel floated on the air as he brushed past it and made his way down the empty hall.
At the door to room 314 he paused, wondering whether he’d catch Daniel alone. Roger put his hand on the doorknob and exhaled deeply. This was going to be unsettling. Seeing his best friend as an eighteen-year-old again, only this time in a hospital bed in 2016, seemed surreal. What had happened between then and now? What tricks could time play that would make Roger even comprehend the possibility that the eighteen-year-old Daniel he’d known in 1986 (at that time alive and in love with Jenny) and this eighteen-year-old Daniel were the same person? The boy in the hospital room was merely a shell, hovering on the brink of death and floating somewhere in the universe, but the Daniel he’d known had been alive and well.
As quietly as possible, Roger opened the door. The room was empty except for Daniel’s unmoving figure in the hospital bed. As it had been when Lisa had first set foot in the room, the only sounds were the beeping and humming of the machines. The only light was the one above Daniel’s bed, illuminating his figure like the proverbial white light that supposedly beckoned people to their final destinations.
There was no sign of Lisa or any other visitor, so Roger closed the door softly and walked across the room to stand next to his friend’s bed. Daniel’s face was placid and still, his dark hair stark against the white pillow beneath his head.
“Hey,” Roger said, looking down at Daniel. The words caught in his throat as he realized the full impact of seeing his old friend recovering from a bullet wound to the head. He looked at the bandages on Daniel’s skull, imagining the trauma of being shot and undergoing brain surgery. For a moment, he felt eighteen and helpless there, wanting to do anything he could to save his best friend.
Roger cleared his throat and tried again. “Hi, Daniel. It’s Roger,” he started, reaching out a hand to tentatively feel the steady rise and fall of Daniel’s chest, aided by a life support machine. “It’s 2016, man,” he said, finding that a laugh was ready to escape him at the absurdity of it all. “Last time we saw each other, things were…” He wasn’t sure if he should go on. How much of what had happened that weekend in 1986 was worth repeating to a comatose Daniel who might have no idea what he was even talking about?
Daniel’s unblinking eyes and still mouth were pointed at the ceiling as Roger took a deep breath and watched him. So much had happened in the years they’d been friends, and he had no idea what to say to Daniel now that he was standing here at his bedside in a trench coat, his face lined from years of raising children, hair grayed by the loss of a business and both parents. The eighteen-year-old in Roger wanted to grab Daniel and shake him, to tell him anything and everything he could. But the grown man in him knew that Daniel wasn’t really there. And that this Daniel wouldn’t even know what he was talking about.
“Thank you for trusting me,” Roger said to his old friend. “You told me your secrets and asked for my help when you didn’t have to.” He ran a hand over his unshaven face, the sound of whiskers against his palm like sandpaper on rough wood. “I don’t know if we made a difference or not, but we had some good times, didn’t we?”
Daniel said nothing, of course. The silence in the room prompted Roger to continue.
“I’ve thought about you over the years, man. I wanted to see you, but...if you could just open your eyes and see me, you’d know why I couldn’t just drop by and say hello.” Roger imagined the horror on Daniel’s face if he’d opened his eyes at that moment and seen a man of almost fifty standing next to him. “And I wasn’t sure how this worked, like, would you remember coming back to 1986? Do you remember Jenny?”
Daniel’s eyes moved beneath his lids, but there was no other obvious response to Roger’s words.
“Jenny was really something, wasn’t she?” Roger chuckled to himself, remembering his friend and the girl they’d spent New Year’s Day 1986 tracking all over town. “And you two were--”
The door to the room opened and a doctor in a white coat stuck her head in.
“Visiting hours are over, sir,” she said, stepping all the way into the room. “The patient needs to rest, but you can come back and see your son tomorrow.”
Roger was about to correct her, to say that Daniel wasn’t his son. Couldn’t she see that just by looking at them? They were contemporaries, not--but wait...of course he looked like Daniel’s father. Why wouldn’t a man his age be there visiting his teenage son?
He took one more look at Daniel and then stepped back from the bed. “Take care, buddy,” he said to Daniel. The machines beeped in response.
Roger brushed by the doctor as she stood near the door. She gave him a close-lipped smile as he passed.
“Have a good night,” she said.
“Night.” Roger stepped back into the hallway and the door shut behind him. The tinsel in the hallway waved overhead as he walked towards the elevator.