Crisp, cold mid-February air whistles through the slightly opened window of my car as I tap my menthol cigarette after each puff.
I’m on my way home from work—my job that takes up my time from the crack of dawn until the early night. My job at the hospital nearly seven miles south. My job where I help people—or I fail. Sometimes this happens, where I fail to save a life, and it takes a huge toll on me. It’s always my job to tell parents, children, husbands, wives… I couldn’t save them.
Today, I couldn’t save him. Emergency surgery on his heart, the transplant failed. His elder sister was horrified. The younger one went into shock.
On my way home every night, I crossed a small bridge over a major highway that bisected the valley beneath my hometown. Before the smearing of headlights and taillights below, I saw a figure of a man much larger than myself sitting on the railing and peering down to the stretch of road below.
Naturally, as someone whose job is to save people, I pulled to the side of the bridge. Killing the car and getting out, I brace myself against the brisk air. I approached the man, smashing snow with a satisfying crunch beneath my shoes, flicking my cigarette into the frozen fluff. He turned his head slightly to acknowledge me.
“Hello?” I prompted. The wind seemed to take my words and run with them. “Are you all right?”
He turned his face back toward the highway, many stories below us. I climbed onto the rail beside him, bracing my hands onto the slick, frozen metal. I stared down below at the cars racing toward us, below us, and away from us.
“I’m all right,” he responded with a puff of vapor. “I come here to think sometimes. I’m red-green colorblind. I like to imagine what the colors look like down there.”
“I’ve never seen you sitting here,” I said, admiring the whooshing sounds of the mid-evening highway and the colors streamlining by. “I always cross this bridge when I come home from work.”
“I’m never here at the same time,” he said shortly. He turned his gaze from the highway and faced some houses nearby. “The beige one with dark brown shutters?” he prompted without checking if I’d followed his gaze. “That one’s mine.”
I did know the house. I’ve seen it every single day since I moved into the large, beautiful house my wife chose many years ago only two houses down the street. I knew he had a dog, a tiny black puffball that barked incessantly at 6 a.m. I knew he had a daughter that was born maybe three years ago. I knew he had a beautiful wife who was tall and blonde. I saw him mowing the lawn in the summer but I never saw him leave the house. Although, I am rarely ever home.
Some silence came between us. He turned his face back to the road. I swayed my feet in the wind. I could no longer feel my fingers, and I could almost swear that they had become one with the railing of the bridge. I sighed, watching the clouds of my breath cascade from my nostrils and disappear into the frigid air.
“Are you all right?” He asked me.
With a furrowed brow, I thought, I remember when I was. I peeled my hands from the railing, rubbing them vigorously together, trying to gather warmth from the friction. Sitting on the railing became part of a balancing act. It’s been a few years. I left no response.
“I should get home to my wife,” he said, throwing his legs back over the railing behind us, reviving the satisfying crunch of snow beneath boots. “I’m sure she’s waiting on me.”
“Mine, too,” I responded after he was out of earshot, still rubbing my hands, eyes fixed on the road below, heart thumping as fast as the cars racing by. “She’s been waiting for a while.”
Cancer. I’ve seen plenty of men, women and children—no hair, sunken eyes, with or without hope—with cancer of various types, all that kill. My wife had cancer that killed her quicker than a blink of my eye. I remember when her bones began to get brittle, when the brightest eyes I’d ever seen went dark, hopeless. I remember when she’d cry into my shoulder until her wracking sobs nearly broke her brittle bones. I remember her thick, blonde hair becoming thin until it all disappeared. I remember snaking chunks of it out of the shower when she was at chemo so she wouldn’t see how much she had lost. She was afraid to die.
I started smoking about eight days after she had died. Funny how I pick up cancer sticks these days despite the despair I face every day without my wife.
I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid I’ll die and never see her again. Now, when I get home every night, I sit on the bed and stare at her photograph on the nightstand. A photograph from our wedding ages ago, her hair done up in careful ringlets. I burn her image into my memory. I feel her kiss on my lips, and I hear the wedding bells still ringing. I see her. In my dreams, I see her when she was healthy. I remember her so well.
The highway below calls my name, the whooshing sounds like the simple syllables she used to call me. The smears of yellow, red and white invite me; but despite everything, I know too well what the pain of losing someone is like.
I turn around and slip down the small slope of snow. I revive the car again and make the two-minute trip back home to fall into bed and hold her picture until I fall asleep, seeing her, feeling her in my dreams until the morning comes.
Britney Buterbaugh is a sophomore communications major at Penn State Harrisburg.
