Pam scribbled down and threw out draft after draft. Jim, I’m just so sorry, but…nope. Jim, you need to know that I love you. I’ve always loved you, I…nope. Jim, I miss you. Well, I have missed you? It’s kind of weird because now I’m here but you don’t know I’m here and…nope. Jim, Jim, Jim…nope. Her little notebook got emptier and emptier and the pile of crumpled up balls of paper on the little table in the Relaxation Room grew bigger and bigger. She found herself procrastinating from another letter (and why wouldn't the words come? She felt almost pregnant with these emotions, like this was some kind of emotional labor and she just needed to be like one of those women on a TV show with the sheet perfectly positioned to show nothing more than a PG-13 rating can accept and just push push push!) by stacking the balls of paper higher and higher. And then it hit her. Words aren’t her medium. Art is.

She put the last crumpled piece of paper on the pile and sat back to look at it. She slid her chair over a couple of feet, so the lighting was better and the pile of papers was framed against the window, which was almost entirely black except for a slight reflection of her to the upper right of the paper. She flipped the notebook—which doubles as a sketchpad, because she wasn’t going to spend what little money she had left after cancelling the wedding and getting a new apartment and a new car and everything else on materials that didn’t have dual uses—ninety degrees, and pulled out a sharper pencil from her purse. She deftly sketched lines—some straight, mostly varieties of curve—and then darkened them in with the duller pencil where appropriate, giving a sense of the room. The pile of papers served as the centerpiece, framed by the shocking black of the huge window behind. That black shaded to a light gray as it grows closer to the light (off-screen, as it were, to the right) and in the brightest portion of the window she decided to include the little self-portrait she'd been looking at reflected in the glass. She was too tired and too worried about Jim to care about the drooping eyelids or the bags under her eyes, too concerned with more important matters to strategically omit the way that half of her curls are matted down from having slept in the chair by Jim’s room, or to soften the pain in her eyes. So she just drew it, in sharp dark lines against the light pencil gray of the window. She showed herself staring not at the viewer, but at the pile of paper on the table—marking ownership, she thought, or maybe just admitting failure, given the obviously crumpled and discarded nature of the pile. A line from Shakespeare flitted into her head—“this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”—and she wasn't sure what play it’s from or what the context is for it but it seemed appropriate.

She briefly considered titling the sketch that—“This Thing of Darkness,” Pam Beesly, 2007, graphite and notebook paper—but realized that’s probably not the ideal message to be sending if, as she now plans, she were to give this to Jim. Instead she wrote in firm, blocky capitals across the left top:

TOO MANY WAYS TO SAY I’M SORRY

And, in a fit of honesty at the bottom right

BUT NOT ENOUGH TO SAY HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU

She signed it simply “Beesly,” in the right between the letters and her face.

Glancing at her phone, she realized it was suddenly almost 6, and she hastily pushed all the paper into the recycling bin by the door and rushed down towards Jim’s room. She’d never forgive herself if he’d woken up alone—and anyway, she needed to put this somewhere in his room before she lost her nerve.

When she got to the room, it was just as she left it. Ellen  then stuck her head in to say that nothing’s changed, Jim’s still stable, and they expect his first doctor to come by around 7—the pulmonologist, she added, saying at Pam’s blank look that she’ll be checking Jim’s lungs. Pam thanked her and sank into the chair again, setting her notebook on the little table that she thinks is intended to hold gifts or flowers. She popped up, stuck her head into the next room (thankfully, the occupant was asleep—she realized only after she’s done it that there was a little too much Jack Torrance in that moment given how addled she looks after sleeping in a hospital chair), and saw that her instinct was right. The next-door neighbor had a vase of flowers and a few cards propped up on the equivalent table. So she propped her notebook up properly, so that it displays the picture like real artwork, and sat back down in the chair, giving Jim a kiss on the forehead before she settled back down to wait for the doctor—or Larissa, whichever comes first.