The waiting room in the hospital was not Pam’s favorite space. It was a little cramped; yesterday had apparently been a low-traffic day, for some reason, but now there were people coming in and out constantly, and other families huddled in corners worrying about their respective relatives in the other rooms besides Jim’s. There was a coffeepot in the corner, but she didn’t really like coffee. It had a hot water dispenser, of course, and there was tea in a little box beside it—tea she was currently nursing extremely slowly—but it was basic Lipton, in two flavors: caffeine and no caffeine. Larissa was sitting beside her with a hot chocolate—Swiss Miss, not even with any sugar added—and each of them was fighting the fidgets. They were, in short, bored, and the blaring TV (was that really here yesterday? Pam thought. I must have been really exhausted after the night I spent here not to notice it. Of course, I was) was showing reruns of Judge Judy. Normally, of course, Pam would actually have relished the chance to sit in a chair sipping tea and watching manufactured courtroom drama, but the anger and volume on display within the screen was simply grating right now.
It didn’t help that she and Larissa had nothing to actually do. Jim’s nurse had quietly insisted that he needed real rest, and suggested subtly but firmly that Pam’s presence in particular, while on the whole beneficial to Jim’s desire to heal, made it very difficult to get her patient to accept the necessity of sleep. He’d smiled over at her and admitted that he couldn’t bear to spend a moment with her asleep when he’d only just gotten her to himself—so, of course, that had meant that she felt obliged to leave so he could actually sleep (despite the soaring in her heart when she remembered him saying it). She wasn’t hungry after lunch, her phone was running out of battery, and she hadn’t thought to bring a deck of cards or anything. Larissa was the sort of person who could zone out in a public space, so she was staring straight ahead, but Pam was constantly distracted by each patient brought in, each family member who shifted, each nurse who was paged. She tried her usual distraction technique of looking for subjects to sketch, but she was presented with simply too many options: there, the man sitting with his head in his hands, his face gaunt and his mustache drooping whenever he looked up to the board that told him how long it would be until his wife came out of surgery, his long legs tucked under him in a gesture that reminded her achingly of Jim, and making her wonder what it would be like to grow that old with him; there the young couple holding each other’s hands tightly and touching foreheads as they struggled not to cry about a child who had been admitted an hour earlier with his arm and leg at two different alarming angles, their bodies making a perfect heart shape; there the various blotches of color comprising a large family swirling around their matriarch, a regal-looking woman in a bright orange dress who sat stock still in the midst of their chaos, as if holding herself together was a sympathetic magic that allowed her to guarantee that her daughter’s body and soul would hold together just as well, but in whose oval face Pam could see the incipient flush of distress that mirrored or even exceeded that of her vast clan in constant motion around her. She longed to paint them all, but there were too many for her to concentrate on any one—and she was all too aware of the limitations of pencil and paper to capture the subtle variations of color that were most appealing to her.
She and Larissa had taken the only two seats together available in the room, sitting directly underneath the monitor that told the families whose relatives were out for surgery when they might return. By a cruel irony, of course, Jim was not on this list, because he was not out for surgery. Pam, in her quieter moments, was grateful for this, because she knew he was just resting in his room, not under any particular additional danger from an operation. But all the eyes glancing towards her—not at her, but above her, near her, skimming her personal space with their eyes—made her at the same time feel obscurely robbed of the opportunity to experience this common bond, to look where they looked, see what they saw. She knew this for the irrationality it was, but wished she could have sat somewhere else, where the centrality of the big board was not as firmly impressed upon her senses.
At length she pulled out her sketchbook anyway. Maybe she could at least make a start on one sketch, even if she had to leave it incomplete in order to do justice to it by coloring it in later. As she pulled out the pad of paper, something clattered to the floor. As she bent to pick it up, she caught Larissa giggling out of the corner of her eye, and quirked an eyebrow at her. Larissa gestured to the floor and Pam bent down to pick whatever it was up…only to stop in surprise as she saw a new set of colored pencils that she was sure had not been in there before.
“I slipped those in there in the car this morning,” Larissa said through her giggle fit. “I had a little bet with Jim over how long it would take you to notice.”
“Thank you!” Pam impulsively gave the other woman a hug. “How did you…when did you…”
“I saw the sketch yesterday, remember? And I noticed the shapes were right but you said you thought in colors too. So I thought as a thank you for making my brother so happy I could do something for you.”
“I don’t…thank…I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just enjoy them, and maybe let me see what you do with them.”
“Deal. But when did you make a bet with Jim?”
“During lunch. I stole a moment when you were talking to your mother to whisper in his ear.”
“You Halperts.” Pam grinned. “Thanks.”
Larissa shrugged. “I said, you’re family. We do nice things for family.”
