When they open again, they open on quiet.
Most of these hospital floors, wherever you are, are the same: nursing desk faces the traffic. Nursing desk faces the elevator.
I approach and state my name.
The place is so very quiet I can’t help being aware that this is the floor where the heart patients sleep or lie awake listening for things like their pulses. Sign in, please, Miss Wiggins, I’m told and I sign a sheet on a clipboard and note the time: one fifty-two. He’s in five-oh-nine down the hall, I’m instructed. “The door’s open, it’s a semi-, but he’s all alone.”
I turn and face the dim hallway.
One of THOSE MOMENTS when walking seems surreal, when the force propelling me forward seems to exist somewhere outside my body, when what I am doing seems to be at the behest of some other me, a me who is watching all this and cursing her shoes for the sounds that they make, the only sounds I can hear that might be described as sounds that are human, the only sounds audible over the beeps that percuss through the doors like the pings of lovelorn dolphins’ code. And the rhythm, the steady rhythm of my steady steps keeps me from stopping outside his door, keeps me going for fear of breaking the spell and then I’m there in the room, in the weak light, facing him. His eyes are closed and there’s no comfort in watching an unconscious human attached to his guardian monitors, no sense at all of who he might be on his own, inside, behind the closed eyes and the lax-jaw expression. His arms are placed on top of the sheet and I lean down to look at the name on the blue plastic strip on his wrist and notice he’s wearing a thin yellow-gold wedding band.
I pick up my pace heading back to the nurse and I’m sure now my footsteps sound louder. She’s waiting for me but she doesn’t stand up.
“You know,” I remind her, “I’ve just driven all night to come here all the way from L.A.”
She has steady eyes, which I reckon might come with the job.
“Don’t you think you might have mentioned to me when you called that your John Wiggins is a black man?”
Those steady eyes do not flicker.
“And I know this is the twenty-first century and we don’t make these racial assumptions anymore about parents and children,” I say, “but that is a very old black man in there and when he was born and when I was born it was the previous century and people in hospitals were not as cool as we are today about mixed race families so I just think somebody might have asked me oh by the way aside from being dead was your father by any chance African American?”
“So what you’re saying is—?”
“The guy’s not my father.”
“But he has your father’s name. And your father’s date of birth and Social with you listed as his closest relative.”
As she speaks she takes a transparent plastic bag from the lower shelf of a rolling cart behind her and withdraws a brown leather billfold from it and lays it on the desktop between the two of us. On one side is a Nevada state driver’s license with a picture of the slightly younger-looking man down the hall identified as John F. Wiggins and on the other side is an organ donor card with the word Daughter and my name written in the space following Nearest Living Relative. From within the billfold itself she withdraws a yellowed newspaper clipping.
“—you, no? — once upon a time? I can still see the likeness…”
“—jesus,” I can’t help muttering.
The clipping is from a 1965 Lancaster New Era article announcing a production of the play Our Town at Manheim Township High School and there are two thumbnail pictures of the play’s leads, me (EMILY WEBB) and Dennis Landis (STAGE MANAGER), a kid I went to high school with.
“—how the hell?”
I make a point of memorizing the street address on the license before she snaps the billfold closed and seals it back up in the plastic bag.
“I’m really sorry,” I tell her. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how this man came to have that picture of me in his wallet.”
“Well maybe Mr. Shadow can help shed some light on this.”
I blink.
“—Mr. Shadow.”
Maybe she’s been talking to the dying for too long.
“He’s down the hall.”
“—Mr. Shadow is?”
“Yes.”
“—is that your way of saying Death?”
“My way of saying ‘death’ is d-e-a-t-h but if you want to find out more about our Mr. Wiggins you should go and talk to Mr. Shadow down there on that bench at the end of the corridor. The Indian. He was with our Mr. Wiggins when he had his cardiac event.”
I stare down the hall and notice for the first time a single figure sitting upright on a bench against the wall, presumably asleep.
“Hasn’t budged for hours,” she whispers. “Won’t leave. Some sort of tribal thing…”
At my approach the man doesn’t move and I’m convinced that he’s asleep so I kneel down to where our faces are parallel and touch him lightly on his sleeve. “—Mr. Shadow?”
Immediately his eyelids open and I’m instantly his focus. “Lester,” he tells me. I introduce myself and we shake hands, his more callused palm engulfing my smaller, softer one.
“Are you the daughter?”
“—no, but he seems to be using my father’s old identity.”
Lester frowns as if the concept makes him sad.
I sit beside him.
“I understand you came in with him,” I say.
“The medics wouldn’t let me in the ambulance. I followed in my truck.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
He looks at me and says, “He’s going to die.”
I hold his gaze for a long moment and there is nothing uncomfortable about it, merely two unrelated strangers recognizing an apparent binding truth.
“How long have you known him?”
I can see him count: “Sixteen hours.”
“I presumed you were—”
“He came into my daughter’s store just after ten o’clock yesterday morning — the first customer. My daughter and her husband run a native craft cooperative in a building on Sahara that used to be a pawn shop. People come in with their pawn because they think my daughter’s place is still a trading post.” He grins. “I came across from Tuba City to mind the store while my daughter and her husband are in Teotihuacán, Mexico. She’s working on her Ph.D. in indigenous societies.”
“You’re Navajo,” I venture.
“What gave it away—?”
He flashes another grin and pulls his single silver plait forward from his neck so that it falls across the placket of his denim shirt. Then he lets his hand drop to an object wrapped in jeweler’s felt beside him on the bench which he moves onto his lap and carefully unwraps. “He came in and I could tell he was there to try to pawn or sell me something and the first thing he puts in front of me is this. Museum quality,” he says and with both hands holds up a headdress made of beads and quills and silver coins.
“I’ve seen one of these before,” I say and he, again, focuses his dark eyes on me. “In a photograph. By Edward Curtis.”
He starts playing Indian, looking ancient and severe which kind of creeps me out but then he lowers the headdress onto the square of felt again and touches it. “No one in my family will ever trade in tribal pawn, we will not touch it, most of all the pieces that you see in jewelry stores in Santa Fe and Phoenix have been stolen one way or another, sometimes from burial sites. They tell you in those stores that native people have brought the pieces in for cash to purchase liquor or to make the next support payment but that’s not the truth. A piece like this — how much do you think the Heald Museum would offer? I’d have to ask my daughter but I think this is Plains Indian, perhaps Chinook or Nez-Percé, from the 19th century. But — touch it — it feels as if it’s just been made. Someone’s taken expert care of it. When I looked at it I had to ask myself what is this elder Negro gentleman doing with this artifact? He saw me hesitate and I think he thought I had no interest in it so he quickly showed me this.” He unwraps a second item from the felt, a bracelet. It’s made of very high standard molded silver but the square stone in the center, two inches on each side, is unlike any that I’ve ever seen.