Long Term - Chapter 2

As always, I took the streetcar to the hospital. It glided through unfamiliar streets on the edge of downtown, past closed rows of multi-story townhouses. The closer I got, the more I recognized the surroundings. I’d stayed in almost every remotely accessible hotel around here by now—only this time I’d booked so late I’d ended up further out than usual.

At the hospital, I was the only one getting off, walking as if I were still on rails, unstoppable. Down the familiar path to the entrance, between huge planters in the large courtyard, then through the automatic sliding doors and past the porter in his glass booth, who greeted me with a silent nod.

As I turned toward the staircase I replayed Adam’s first messages after the operation in my head. He had sounded accordingly—tired, confused. I was used to messages like this by now and still my heart had broken listening to his breathless words, assuring me he was fine and I didn’t need to worry. What exactly fine meant, Adam didn't reveal in the following days, as usual. Basically, I didn't know what to expect, except that over the last few days his voice had sounded stronger than I'd heard it in a while. I held on to that like a lifeline.

I forced myself not to take the stairs two at a time. My pulse accelerated anyway, the higher I climbed, and my palms felt damp. I turned sharply around the corner, passed through two open double doors, and greeted the ward manager on duty briefly as I swept past her desk.

A nurse who was stuffing bed linens into a laundry cart looked up as I marched through the hallway, trying not to run.

"Ah, hello, Rachel!" she called out. "He’s expecting you."

Nicole—she was almost always on duty on weekends. I nodded in greeting as I rushed past.

"Great to see you!" another nurse called from far down the hall as she approached me just before the door to Adam's room. I considered briefly, but her name wouldn't come to me. There were simply too many nurses on this ward, and they changed frequently. "We’re all so happy." She winked at me.

I smiled shakily back at her, wondering in slight confusion what their cheerfulness meant, but didn’t waste another second.

Room 174. My knock was pure habit; I pressed the handle down immediately after and threw the door open.

My eyes knew where to expect Adam, so when they couldn’t settle on him immediately my steps faltered, halfway into the room. His hospital bed in the far corner was empty, the sheets tangled. Icy panic rushed through my veins as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over me. My feverish gaze swept over the other beds, registering only that none of the pale occupants watching me looked remotely like Adam. Where had they taken him? What had happened?

“Rachel.”

I whirled around, my heart jumping into my throat in surprise. Although Adam had sounded confident in his voice messages, I hadn’t expected him to be anywhere else but in bed. For a second my brain couldn’t make sense of what I saw, and I stared, barely remembering to breathe. Adam was sitting in his powerchair, steering calmly toward me from the open entrance of the bathroom. When he lifted his head, the look on his face hit me like a physical shock. He wasn’t smiling, he rarely did—but everything else in his face lit up. Happy.

I didn't dare to blink as I swiftly closed the distance to him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, my knees hitting the armrest of his wheelchair roughly—I wasn’t trying to be subtle and I wasn’t capable of a more coordinated greeting, but more than anything I wasn’t used to hugging him in his wheelchair anymore.

Holding his frame tight, my face hiding in the crook of his neck, I tried to breathe through the dizziness that had seized me. What did all this mean? I'd firmly expected to find Adam in bed. That he was sitting was far more than I'd ever dared to dream. And the powerchair? The distances in the hospital weren't so far that I couldn't push him.

"Hi—" Adam’s voice right next to my ear sounded hoarse. He faltered on an inhale and didn’t continue, as lost for words as I felt.

Although I knew the duration of an appropriate public embrace had passed, I didn't let go. After a while Adam shifted and then I felt his hand on my back, placed with gentle pressure, his fingers closed in a loose fist. That was when the first sob slipped out of me. Weeks of waiting for this moment. Weeks of not wanting to imagine too clearly what it would be like if he got better, in case it broke me. Now that the moment had arrived, I felt my worry for him falling away like a ton of weight I hadn’t noticed I carried until now.

"There, there," Adam murmured, slightly alarmed and bewildered, as if he was completely unaware that he was the cause of all this, his hand sort of rubbing my heaving back.

It took me a while to be able to speak again, a time during which he said nothing, just continued moving his hand while I muffled sobs against his chest.

"Two weeks…” I sniffled finally and leaned back slowly, almost reluctantly, forcing my hiccuping breath to calm down. “… is a very long time, apparently," I tried joking, referring to my last visit, which he'd spent lying in bed, as usual. I laughed a little without knowing why, then blinked against the tears again.

It was true. Two weeks had changed everything. As my heart rate returned to a more bearable rhythm, I took the chance to inspect Adam more closely. He still looked worn, with bags under bloodshot eyes and hair that had slightly grown too long. But his skin had a healthy flush and I could see him breathing much lighter, sitting up properly.

He watched me quietly as I straightened up, brushed away more tears and blew my nose, in a futile attempt at getting myself together. I felt irrationally glad I had skipped a friend’s birthday party on a whim just to be here now, to sit at Adam’s bed and hold hands, as I had originally thought. I wouldn't have missed seeing him like this for anything in the world. At the same time something within me refused to unclench, some watchful, cautious part of me dampened my joy. I let my hands sink and searched Adam’s eyes without quite knowing what I was looking for. Then I did.

How are you really doing?

As infinitely glad as I was to see him like this, it was painfully clear to me how fleeting this happiness was. And how deceptive. Not only had the last two months taught me that, but especially the carefree months before. I'd been completely clueless, completely fallen for the illusion that it would always continue like that. But it hadn't. How much of what I saw now was just a facade maintained with difficulty? If I turned away, would Adam crumble again, with a gray face and cold sweat on his forehead?

"If the doctors had known you planned to strangle me,” Adam said weakly, “they probably wouldn't have let you in.”

In response, I wrapped myself around him once more, firmer this time, as if to make sure he was real. I felt his shoulders under my arms and how thin he'd become. Nothing had changed about that in recent weeks, and yet it seemed new to me every time; I just couldn't get used to it.

There were a hundred things I wanted to say, a thousand questions I longed to ask, but I knew he wouldn’t or couldn’t answer most of them and the rest I was hesitant to speak out loud while we were being watched by at least four pairs of eyes, as I was now acutely aware of.

Who initiated the kiss, I can't say; we were hungry for closeness and simultaneously shy in the public space, fumbling for each other as if we needed to get used to the verticalness of things again. His breath brushed past my damp cheek and I closed my eyes, let him hold me with a grip so weak it almost didn’t register, and at the same time strong enough to keep me together.

Far too quickly it was over. "Shall we?" he asked and rolled his shoulders back, a single, fluid movement so familiar to me. His arms disappeared from my back as he placed them on the armrests of his wheelchair instead. I wasn’t the only one in the room aware of just how much precise control this seemingly simple movement required. I quickly wiped my eyes again with my sleeve and nodded vigorously. I could well understand that he wanted to get out, now that he could. The sooner the better.

I stood up straight, smoothed my skirt while looking around the room and nodding to Adam's roommates, who were suddenly all very busy. Only Ronald in the bed directly next to Adam didn't avoid my gaze.

"Good evening, Rachel," he said, his eyes deep in his wrinkled face twinkling kindly.

"Good evening, Ronald." I managed to smile bravely at him.

"Hold down the fort for me, Ronald, okay?" Adam said to the 80-year-old who'd been admitted shortly after Adam and had by now spent just as long in the hospital. Ronald raised a loose fist in greeting like Adam and watched us leave with a grin.

Neither of us could leave fast enough. We were almost at the room door when Adam stopped the wheelchair so abruptly that I nearly ran into it. "Can you check if I have my medications? Front pocket."

His medications. It dawned on me then—the powerchair, the evening medications. My world tilted and I opened my mouth only to close it again. Outside. We needed to get outside. With slightly trembling fingers I felt for the small transparent bag in Adam’s backpack, pulled it out, and dangled it in front of his face. "Everything there?"

Adam briefly examined the collection of colorful pills of various sizes and nodded, whereupon I put the bag back and carefully closed the zipper, my fingers hooking in the large, familiar keyrings automatically.

"Do you need anything else?" I asked, but he shook his head. Only now did I wonder if my makeup had survived the emotional outburst earlier. "Hold on, I’m a mess, aren’t I?" I furiously dabbed at the skin under my eyes.

Adam looked up at me, a corner of his lips lifting. "Nope. You look stunning," he stated matter-of-factly, and I playfully punched him in the arm.

"Really," Adam confirmed, dead serious, and didn't tear his gaze from me. "You're beautiful."

I kissed Adam before he could notice me blushing and took a step into the spacious bathroom anyway, to hunch in front of the weirdly angled mirrors and rub away lingering mascara trails. Then I took a couple of breaths, staring at my own reflection with my hands holding on to the low, cold rim of the washing basin. Yes, I definitely looked like I had cried. I decided not to care.

“Alright.” With a final glance back at Adam I opened the door to the ward hallway. As we hurried along it, the nurses lined up as if by chance along our path, called out of rooms and closets as if someone had triggered the fire alarm. I could see Adam suppressing a grin as he steered the powerchair through. "Nothing to see here," he murmured. "Back to work."

I ducked my head and returned the occasional smile, and was glad when I could pass through the double doors behind Adam and the ward was behind us.

"So..." I said at the elevator, which Adam had called with his knuckles on the button. I started to feel a little less woozy by now, a little more like I didn’t totally fail at faking being put together. Walking next to Adam at a brisk pace had done that, even though it felt dangerously close to our old normal. And I couldn’t let myself believe that we’d reached anything remotely close to that. I needed to know how much to get my hopes up, though. "By car today, huh?" I cast a meaningful glance at the powerchair, which, as I knew well, could dock to the interior floor of his van.

Adam looked up at me with a sly expression. "Perfect deduction, Sherlock.”

I huffed but chose not to probe further. Where we were going wasn’t as relevant as the fact that we were about to leave. Leave the hospital. Not for long, probably, and not very far. But actually exiting the building.

When Adam had been still somewhat mobile during the beginning of the last two months, we'd left the ward. On some days we’d barely made it to the double doors. On others I pushed him in his manual wheelchair to the elevator, for a view of the park outside. Sometimes his health allowed us to reach the cafeteria on the ground floor, for a cup of coffee that tasted much better than it was allowed to. And on one particularly memorable day we stayed long enough to listen to the med student who occasionally played piano there. We never got close to that again.

I followed Adam into the open elevator and didn't ask him if he was sure it was a good idea to take the car. Sure, the most recent surgery in a row of many had been minor. He was obviously doing better than he had on all other days in the past two months combined. That counted for something, right? Still, everything was moving too fast for me. Adam had barely been able to get out of bed just recently. He'd driven the car himself for the original appointment two months ago and had definitely not touched it since.

When I looked at him, a warning forming on my lips, I knew I didn't stand a chance. In his stubbornly determined look, I could see that he was ready to dispel all my concerns. He wanted this so desperately it choked all concern I could come up with.

The elevator began moving smoothly and Adam leaned his head back against the headrest with a sigh.

"How's the incision site?" I changed topic on purpose, trying to gain ground on another carefully guarded landscape, while running my fingers over his upper arm. All I knew was that they had removed a device that used to control his bladder, but had ceased functioning years ago.

As expected, Adam shrugged and avoided my gaze. "It'll get better. But it's all bruised."

I flinched slightly and tried not to show it. I would have liked to immediately lift his shirt a bit to check. Watching his serious face I wondered—was his pain really better now, or was he ignoring it in my presence, just like before? For how long could he keep up the pretense this time, before reality came crashing down on both of us?

But already the elevator stopped gently, the doors slid open, revealing the sparsely lit underground garage. I contented myself with squeezing Adam's shoulder a bit before leaving the elevator ahead of him. When Adam didn't want to reveal something, the past had shown me, not even I could make him.

I knew I’d eventually find out anyway. Usually that didn’t serve to make me happy, though.