Code Blue

The hospital vending machine gave me the only thing it had left: an orange soda. I cracked it open while Eleanor slept in the ICU, her breathing machine clicking like a clock counting down something I wasn't ready to lose.

Twenty years of marriage had made me stubborn as a bull, she'd always said. Not mean-stubborn, just set in my ways. Same breakfast, same route to work, same arguments about money we never quite resolved. Now those arguments seemed luxurious. I would have happily fought about credit card bills forever if it meant she could roll her eyes at me again.

A loose cable snaked across the hospital floor, and I nearly tripped over it twice. The orderlies kept promising to tape it down. They were busy though, always busy with people who were dying or people who were about to die. The cable kept tangling around my feet like I was being tethered to this place, this limbo.

In the waiting room, a goldfish swam endless circles in a too-small bowl near the reception desk. Someone had taped a sign to it: BETTY. DON'T TAP GLASS. The fish's mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and I found myself mimicking it, my own mouth gasping for air that felt too thin.

"Mr. Henderson?" A nurse appeared, her scrubs the same shade as Betty's water. "She's waking up."

I dropped the orange soda. It shattered on the linoleum, fizzing everywhere. Later, holding Eleanor's hand as she surfaced back to me, I promised her we'd change everything. No more routines. No more being set in our ways. We'd sell the house. We'd travel. We'd live.

She squeezed my fingers, whispered something about the goldfish in radiology, how absurd it was to keep one in a place of healing. We both started laughing, and I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight for years.

The cable was still on the floor when we left three weeks later. We stepped over it together, and I didn't look back.