The Fox in the Waiting Room

Elena adjusted the brim of her husband's fedora, the wool still faintly smelling of his pomade and the cigarettes he'd promised to quit three times this year. The hospital waiting room was painted that particular shade of beige designed to calm, but mostly it just reminded her of uncooked pasta.

"You should eat," her mother said, pressing a damp Tupperware container into Elena's hands. "I made that spanakopita you like."

Elena opened the container. Spinach leaves glistened with oil, feta crumbled white against the deep green. Her stomach turned. The last meal she and David had shared was at that Greek place in Logan Square, the night before the car accident. He'd had spinach in his teeth all through dinner, and she hadn't had the heart to tell him. She'd just watched him laugh, mouth full of green, thinking how she'd tell him tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, until they were eighty.

Outside the window, a fox trotted across the parking lot, its rusty coat bright against the gray asphalt. It paused, looked directly at her through the glass, something knowing in its golden eyes. Then it slipped behind a dumpster and was gone.

"Did you see that?" Elena asked.

"See what, honey?"

"Nothing."

The surgeon entered, tired-eyed. The surgery had been successful, but there were complications. David might wake up different. Memory problems, personality changes. There was no way to know until he woke up.

Elena thought of David's hat in her lap, of the spinach she couldn't eat, of the fox that had watched her with ancient, weightless eyes. Some part of her understood—with the terrible clarity of grief—that the man who had worn that hat was already gone. Whatever woke up in that room would be someone new, someone she'd have to learn to love or not.

She set the food aside. She would stay, of course. She would sit by his bed and wait. But as she adjusted the fedora on her head, breathing in the ghost of another woman's husband, she felt something wild and nocturnal wake in her chest, slipping away into the dark, sleek and impossible to catch.