Then, on a Tuesday in February, the green Honda didn’t come.
It was snowing hard, the wet, heavy kind that snaps power lines. Bangor schools had announced a two-hour delay, so I figured that was it. He’d be sleeping in like every other kid in Penobscot County.
But the Corolla came, right on time.
That’s when the nurse rolled down her window and looked past me at the empty lot.
“Where’s my boy?”
He didn’t come Wednesday, or Thursday.
On Thursday, Kurt actually smiled. “Problem solved,” he said, tapping his stopwatch app. “Our average service time dropped eleven seconds.”
I didn’t answer him. I was watching the road.
On Friday, the nurse came through the line looking like she hadn’t slept in three days. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. Her hospital badge was clipped on crooked. For the first time, I could read the name on it: JOANNE PELLETIER, RN, CRITICAL CARE.
“Still no?” she asked.
I shook my head.
She gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
“I keep thinking something’s wrong,” she said. “I know that’s stupid. I don’t even know who he is. But I lie awake at night thinking about it.”
Then she hesitated, and her voice dropped.
“We had a kid come into the ICU Monday night. Car accident on Route 9, near the Hermon line. Black ice. Seventeen years old. He’s still not awake.”
She swallowed hard.
“I’m not on his case. I work the other unit, the cardiac side. I’ve only seen him through the glass when I walk past.”
“What did he look like?” I asked. My own voice sounded far away.
“Skinny. Brown hair.” She closed her eyes. “His things came in with him in a plastic bag. Patient belongings. They hang them on a hook outside the room. There was a gray hoodie in it.”
I felt my stomach drop right through the floor of that little red shed.
I pulled out my phone with my fingers shaking and scrolled back through my photos, past my granddaughter’s dance recital and a picture of a moose that wandered into the Irving lot. I found the birthday photo: the boy, the cupcake, the gray hoodie.
I turned the screen toward her.
She leaned halfway out of her car window in the snow to look.
Then she put her hand over her mouth.
“That’s him,” she whispered. “That’s the boy in bed four.”
Then she looked at the photo again, closer this time, and said something that made me grab the counter.
“Wait,” she said. “I know that face. I’ve seen it before.”
Kurt was in the back counting the cash drawer. There were three cars behind Joanne’s Corolla, honking. I didn’t care.
“Where?” I said. “Where have you seen him?”
Joanne stared at the photo. Snow was landing on her scrubs and in her hair.
“Two years ago,” she said slowly. “Almost two and a half. In the ICU. A woman came in with sepsis from a kidney infection that went bad. She was forty-one, a single mom. She worked at the Walmart on Stillwater Avenue, and she’d put off going to the doctor because she didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford it. By the time she came in, it was too late.” Joanne’s voice was shaking. “She was in my unit for nine days.”
“And the boy?”
“Her son. Fifteen. He sat in the family waiting room every single day for nine days. All day, every day. He slept in the chairs at night. Nobody came with him. No dad. The grandmother was sick herself and couldn’t drive.” She pressed her fingers against her lips. “He never cried. Not once that I saw. He just sat there in the same gray hoodie, doing his homework, waiting for somebody to tell him his mom was going to be okay.”
Behind her, the minivan with the twins laid on the horn.
Joanne didn’t even hear it.
“I brought him a hot chocolate,” she said. “From the vending machine on the second floor. The first night, because he looked so cold. A dollar twenty-five.” She laughed, and it came out as a sob. “Then I did it every morning when I came on shift. All nine mornings. It was the only thing I could think of to do for him. I’d hand it to him and say, ‘Drink this, honey, you need something warm.’”
She looked at me with tears running down her face.
“His mother died on the ninth night. I was holding her hand. He was in the waiting room. I had to go out and tell him.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Small hot chocolate,” Joanne whispered. “He always orders a small hot chocolate, doesn’t he?”
“Every single morning,” I said.
Joanne Pelletier sat in her car at my drive-thru window in the snow and cried like her heart was breaking. I reached through the window and held her hand. The minivan with the twins finally backed up and pulled around to the exit without their whipped cream.
Kurt came up behind me with the cash drawer.
“Ro, what is going on? We’ve got cars backed up to the road!”
“Kurt,” I said, without turning around, “take the window.”
“What?”
“Take the window. I’m going to the hospital.”
I’d never left a shift early in eleven years. Not when my husband, Hector, had his gallbladder out, and not the morning my granddaughter was born. I’d worked through two ice storms and a power outage and the winter my furnace died and I slept in my coat.
That Friday, I took off my apron, hung it on the hook, and walked out to my car.
Kurt stood in the window with his mouth hanging open. “Ro! You can’t just leave! Who’s going to work the window?”
“You’ve got two hands and a stopwatch, Kurt,” I said. “Figure it out.”
The medical center sits up on the hill on State Street, eight floors of brick and glass overlooking the Penobscot River. Joanne met me in the main lobby at 7:30 in her scrubs, with her badge still crooked.
“I can’t get you into the room,” she said quietly. “I’m not even on his case. Patient privacy rules are strict. But I can tell you his name now. It’s on the board at the nurses’ station.”
“What’s his name?”
She took a breath.
“Elijah Thibodeau,” she said. “Everybody calls him Eli.”
Eli. After more than four hundred mornings at my window, he finally had a name.
“His grandmother’s upstairs,” Joanne said. “She’s been here every day. She’s seventy-four, and she doesn’t drive, so she takes the city bus from Brewer. Two transfers.” Her voice caught. “She’s sitting in the same waiting room he sat in two years ago.”
We took the elevator to the fourth floor. Joanne walked me down a long hallway that smelled like hand sanitizer and floor wax, past a nurses’ station with blinking monitors, to a small family waiting room with blue vinyl chairs, a TV playing the Weather Channel with the sound off, and a vending machine humming in the corner.
An old woman sat in the chair closest to the window. She was small and thin, with white hair pinned back under a knit cap. A winter coat was folded in her lap, and a rosary was wound through her fingers. On the chair beside her sat a battered canvas tote bag stuffed with papers.
“Mrs. Thibodeau?” Joanne said gently.
The old woman looked up, and when she saw Joanne’s face, she went very still.
“You,” she whispered. “You’re the nurse. The one from before. When my Danielle…”
“Yes, ma’am,” Joanne said. “I’m Joanne. I was Danielle’s nurse.”
The old woman’s face crumpled.
“He talked about you,” she said. “Every day, for two years. The nurse with the hot chocolate. He said you were the only person in this whole hospital who saw him.”
