Waltz of Her Life

As she sat on the edge of the Murphy bed to roll on her white hose, she noticed something with a square edge poking out from beneath her nightstand. She bent down to reach for it and discovered that it was a small writing pad. A chill ran up and down her arms and her spine. She realized that she had not dreamt lucid since the last time she saw Lauren, when she brought the little girl with her.

The notebook contained her own, barely legible, scratchy handwriting. She'd written in it during the small hours of the morning. The entry read: "I met the little girl who would be my daughter. Her name was Hannah."

Well, she was halfway there, since now she would have a husband. In two more weekends they would go away for a short trip to New York together, to celebrate their love.

They would spend time alone together, probably for the last time until they became married.

She would tell him then, about the dream.

At work she tried to keep her focus, her work life separate from her romantic life, but her friends kept reminding her. Over the past couple of years, Linda had gotten friendly with a nurse named Kit, who'd had a bad habit of becoming too close to her patients, until Linda helped her with it. That morning, Kit, who was younger, taller, and thinner than Linda said "So it's less than a month now, until the big day. Are you getting nervous?"

Linda was placing a line on Mrs. Lechowitz, an end-stage patient who was receiving mostly pain medication these days. She was more lucid than usual that day and croaked "What big day?"

"I'm getting married," Linda told her.

"That's wonderful," Mrs. Lechowitz said, smiling the first smile Linda had seen since she'd been re-admitted. "A nice, pretty girl like you should be married. You'd make an excellent mother. I tried to be the best mother I could, to my boys. I don't know if I succeeded."

Linda tilted her head. What was she talking about? Her two sons came to see her a couple of times a week, many times bringing their families. "But they love you," Linda said.

"A mother always worries," the patient said, and then she drifted off into sleep as the pain meds coursed through her body.

When she and Kit left the room, Kit picked up where she left off with the conversation about Linda's upcoming marital bliss. "So when you and Steve go to New York, that's when you're finally gonna give it up for him, isn't it?"