“What can’t hold her anymore”

“What can’t hold her anymore” (the prompt for 03/20/09)

The nurses have given up on trying to enforce the hospital’s visiting hours policy. Little Miss Candace Lane holds court in her hospital room from daylight to well past dark. Candy is six and a half years old, as she will tell you herself, and she has scads of brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and first-grade school friends, and, of course, her Momma and Daddy.

Her Momma is there in the room most of the time, monitoring how Candy feels, how much energy she has, whether or not she’s enjoying the visitors, whether she needs a nap or just to rest. That’s when her Momma shoos everyone out of the room and they go hang out in the hallway, irritating the nurses, or go the run-down lounge at the end of the hall, or perhaps to the cafeteria on the floor below. But not too far, because they’ve been told it might not be much longer. Everyone here wants to be there at the end. They don’t know exactly why, but somehow it seems right. The other ones who used to visit but who can’t face this winding-down have long since deserted the hospital, scurrying back to their real lives that don’t include a little six and a half year old girl winding down. But Candy’s family has made a vow to each other that she will not come to the end alone. That she’ll be surrounded by love and caring and that perhaps it will make it a little easier for her. They know it will make them feel better about themselves, and that’s something.

It’s hard to believe that Little Miss Candy is near the end. True, she’s lost some weight, and there are bluish shadows under her hazel eyes, and sometimes she just lies in bed and looks at the ceiling, seemingly oblivious to the chattering cousins and the hovering adults. Because at other times she sits up in her hospital bed and drinks her diluted orange drink through a straw and begs someone to read her Goodnight Moon just one more time. And someone always does. It’s not usually her Momma, who is finding it hard to read now without her voice breaking, or her Daddy who often comes in the evening after she’s gone to sleep and sits on her bed holding her small hand with his big one. But one of the aunts or the older cousins will volunteer and Candy will lie back and listen so intently, softly saying the words along under her breath.

The nurses wait until Goodnight Moon is finished to give Candy her evening pills and to get her ready to sleep for the night. Eventually, all the visitors go home and just her Daddy stays. He sleeps beside her in her bed which is against hospital policy, but he’s not really sleeping anymore. At any little twitch from Candy he’s wide awake waiting to see if she’ll wake and call out…”Mommy” or “Daddy” or “water.” No one wants her to be unattended for a minute.

But today is different. Candy doesn’t sit up in bed. She doesn’t eat her lunch or her dinner either. She sleeps, mostly, and she doesn’t ask anyone to read Goodnight Moon. Shortly before dark, while everyone was still debating whether to go home or to stay, Candy opened her eyes, looked around at everyone, and said clearly “This room isn’t big enough.” And closed her eyes again. Everyone stayed, even though the room wasn’t big enough to hold them. And so, sometime before dawn, Candy left the room that couldn’t hold her anymore and went somewhere else, where there aren’t walls and ceilings and floors and limits on how many times a six and a half year old girl can listen to Goodnight Moon.