Choice Words

Day 1

I walked out onto the balcony and carefully shut the glass-framed sliding door behind me with shaky hands. My breaths percolated in my chest as I tried to calm down, but the emotions I built over the month spilled out of me. My eyes quickly scanned the neighborhood; due to quarantine, the streets remained eerily silent. My breaths spilled out of me and I screamed into the empty air. Tears dripped to my chin, discoloring the mahogany porch floor. I collapsed on the side of the banister and wept into my arms.

As I choked my cries into the crooks of my elbows, an almost ethereal voice called.

“Are you okay?”

I shot upright, quickly swiping the tear trail from my eyes. I looked out over the banister, searching for the source of the voice.

After several long seconds of searching, I asked into the empty air.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Over here.”

I turned to the source of the sound, to my left, and saw a large pine tree between my balcony and my neighbor’s. A head popped out from the other side of the tree – it blocked my earlier view. Or maybe I was too blinded by my emotions to notice the young man sitting on the other side balcony. He was too far away to see distinct features. I blanched.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think anyone else was out…” I struggled to keep the quiver out of my voice.

“Are you okay? I heard a scream.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I said, pulling the ends of my sleeve over my hand. I turned away, letting my hair veil my face.

“Are you sure?” he asked. I kept my head turned away, regretting my earlier display. I remained silent.

“I’m sorry if it seems like I’m intruding. It’s honestly just nice to see another person besides my coworkers…and my patients.” The young man said.

I processed what he said but remained silent. His patients?

“Anyways…I’ll leave you alone now.”

I waited at least thirty seconds. I carefully looked over my shoulder to see if he had disappeared. Confident that he was gone, I sighed. I inhaled deeply to cool my lungs, then stared up at the sky. The clouds looked like pulled cotton that trailed across the sky, reminiscent of the shoebox panoramas I made when I was a kid and started taking up again after the pandemic. I just watched the clouds.

Doo-da doo doo, doo-da doo doo, doo-da doo doo doo. My phone alarm vibrated in my pocket. My half-an-hour of designated outdoor time ended. I slowly stood up, letting the warm air and the cooling breeze calm my nerves before walking back into the house.

Day 2

The next day, I stepped out onto the balcony for my daily dose of the outdoors into the crisp 6 a.m. air. I set my alarm for 30 minutes as usual and draped my arms over the railing. I looked out onto the neighborhood, my eyes scanning for movement. The rest of the world was still asleep. Too afraid to cry out, I let silent tears fall down my cheeks. I watched, almost detached from my own emotions, as the tear drops fell down my face, trickled off my chin, and dropped onto the grass below the porch, feeding the soil far below.

I closed my eyes and soaked in the feeling of the wet tears on my lashes. Something about crying felt rejuvenating…and painful.

I don’t know how long my eyes were closed, or how long the sun warmed my eyelids, when I suddenly heard a voice.

“Fancy seeing you here again.”

I opened my eyes and peered over to see the young man leaning on the edge of the porch. I worried he saw me crying, but thankfully I was too far away for him to notice.

“Hi…” I said, veiling my face with my long blond hair.

A moment of silence.

“Sooo, how have you been handling the quarantine?” he asked.

I shrugged. Then, realizing he was too far away to see the subtle movement, said. “I’m handling it.”

His laugh was as crisp as the wind. “You don’t have to sugar coat it. It sucks.”

I stared at him, trying to discern details. He looked like he was staring off in the distance. He held a book in his hands against the railing. He had red hair and wore what appeared to be a black shirt and pants.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

I watched him look down at the book in his hands.

“Ethical Decision Making in Nursing and Healthcare.” He said. I blinked in surprise at the title. He laughed crisply again. “It’s not what I normally read, but lately I’ve had to make a lot of crazy decisions. Like, decisions you would usually only have to make in an ethics class. Things like the trolley problem have become reality lately.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Well…I’m a nurse.”

“Oh.” I had heard that nurses and doctors had to make many decisions regarding who to give a ventilator – deciding who lives and who dies… The black clothing he was wearing must have been scrubs.

Thinking back on those difficult decisions brought my eyes to tears again. I allowed my quiet tears to fall while he talked.

“Yeah, it’s a really scary profession to be in right now. Our supplies are so low we have to wear garbage bags in place of actual protective equipment. And we keep having to reuse masks. And I’ve seen so many deaths in the past week alone. Morgues are getting completely overrun with-“

“Can we please talk about something else.” I spat, despite myself. I bit my lip hard to keep it from trembling.

A moment of awkward silence passed between us.

“I’m sorry. I tend to ramble.” He laughed again, though it was more like a weak breeze. It was awkward. “I just can’t talk about this with anyone. Well, except my coworkers I guess. But work is usually too chaotic to talk about anything deeply.”

“What about your family?” I asked, barely restraining the quiver from my voice.

“They’re worried about me enough already. I don’t want to add fuel to the fire.”

Silence slipped between our balconies. He spoked to fill it.

“But enough about me. What about you? What do you do?”

I paused, debating whether to engage the conversation. But it felt rude to back out now.

“I…I used to work at the theater.”

The void of silence startled me.

“You’re kidding. Seriously?! But, no offense, you seem too shy to do something like that.”

I shook my head. “I’m not an actress. I work behind the scenes. With set design and stuff…”

“That makes a lot more sense.” He said. I could almost hear his humming thoughts. “What do you mean “used to?”

Silence.

“I was furloughed. I tried filing for unemployment…but I can’t get through the line.”

“Like I said yesterday. It sucks.” He said. He had no idea. The last word echoed silently in my head. Suddenly, his alarm chopped the silence.

“Well, time to risk my life again.” He laughed. It was dry and chapped. “But, it seems we may have a routine now. So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

I let the question sit in the open air. I watched him disappear behind the tree. I anxiously waited for my own alarm to break the chopped air before walking through the sliding door and transitioning to my neutral expression.

Day 3

Six in the morning. A new day. I walked out onto the balcony. I’d considered finding a new, quiet place to ruminate and let my feelings loose (somewhere where the young man couldn’t bother me) but I found myself too curious to change my habits. Perhaps he worked in the same hospital. Perhaps he could tell me something about it that I didn’t know.

I looked to the balcony next door. I thought I vaguely saw his outline from between the pines.

“Hello?” I asked. I waited. Maybe he left for work early today.

I was about to turn away when his head popped out from around the tree.

“Oh, hey! Sorry, I was reading.” He laughed a cooling breath. “It’s interesting you’re talking to me now.”

“What book are you reading now?” I asked, ignoring his remark.

I heard his dejected sigh. “Same one as yesterday. Not that it’s doing me any good. I can’t seem to figure out what the right choice was.”

I cocked my head curiously. “What do you mean?”

He sighed a long gust of air. It sounded remorseful. Guilty.

“I had to make a really hard choice a few days ago.”

“What was the choice?” I asked.

He paused, as if uncertain whether to tell me. As if whatever this choice remained in his mind and haunted him in its silence.

“You can tell me. I won’t judge you.” I said, reassuringly. He looked at me. I was too far away to guess what he was thinking.

“You know how I said the pandemic has caused the hospital staff to make crazy ethical choices.” He said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, we have so many patients who need ventilators but there are only so many ventilators. We have them on rotation.”

My thoughts trailed after his words. The situation he described was like the situation my mother, and so many people’s parents and grandparents, faced.

“So, a few days ago we had a new patient: A young girl --The youngest I’ve seen -- who caught the virus. She was, like, six. Maybe seven. But when she came in, we were out of ventilators. We were barely caring for the people already at the hospital, and she just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. We had to decide who got the last ventilator: a middle-aged woman or this new little girl.”

My heart skipped a beat. No. It was a big hospital. There was no way he was talking about…

“Our team debated it for hours trying to decide what to do. The little girl was young, which gave her a higher likelihood of survival, but she was also at risk due to her prior cancer treatments. Meanwhile, the woman didn’t have any underlying conditions, but she was older which also put her at risk. Neither could last more than a few hours without a ventilator. We were running out of time.

My attention was glued to his story. I had to know.

“So, we took a vote. I was the tie-breaker. It was a really hard choice, but…I chose to save the little girl. I really thought the middle-aged woman could make it, but…”

Tears spilled down my cheeks liberally.

“What was her name?” I whispered.

“What?” he asked.

“The woman. What was her name?” I asked again, but my voice betrayed my tears. He stared at me. Silence stood between us. I glared at it as I waited for his answer.

“Elizabeth.” He said.

When he said her name, I almost didn’t believe it. The odds. How did I become so unlucky to meet the man who killed my mother.

“You made the wrong choice.” I said. My anger flew out of me, like a strong wind that was waiting to be released.

“What?” he asked, this time in confusion. I tore into him.

“She was a beautiful woman and a loving mother. Her life was in your hands and you stole her from me.”

Silence passed between us. A broken silence.

“I’m sorry.” He said.

“Sorry doesn’t bring her back!” I yelled. Tears streamed down my cheeks. My angry gusts blew the air out of his lungs. He stared at me, his face obscured by distance. I ran back into the house and slammed the sliding door behind me. The glass shook in its frame.

Day 19

It had been a few weeks since I last saw the man. I was still mourning the loss of my mom, but the wound had scabbed over enough. I could talk to him again. I walked out onto the porch at 6 a.m. I looked over at the neighbor’s balcony hidden by the pine tree.

“Hello?” I asked.

No response. Either he wasn’t there, or he was ignoring me.

“Hello?” I asked again, a little louder.

Still nothing.

I assumed he was gone. But in case that he was there, I started talking to myself, loud enough so he could hear me. Or just to myself to get the words out of my mind and into the empty, open, unassuming air.

“I’m sorry for what I said a few weeks ago.” I said. I waited for the man to respond. Silence greeted me. The silence was suffocating, so I continued.

“I know you’ve probably had to make a lot of life-or-death decisions. I know it wasn’t an easy decision to make. It’s not your fault Mom got ill. It’s not your fault she died. It’s not your fault the hospital got overrun, and it’s not your fault it ran out of ventilators.”

A long strain of silence stretched after that. I continued, more for myself now than for him, if he were there.

“I’m sorry I blamed you for something you had no control of. It just…it really sucks.” Tears threatened my eyes, but I tired of crying. “I’m ready for it to be over.”

A sad sniffle poked a hole in the layer of silence. I turned and stared at the tree.

“Are you there?” I asked.

A moment later, he walked to the edge of his balcony. He rubbed his eyes.

“I appreciate that.” He crossed his arms over the balcony, his head angled down toward the grass. “I want it to be over too. But for now, I’m trying to adapt.”

I smiled a comforting smile.

“Maybe, once this is over, things will change.” I said. “Maybe things will be better, in case something like this happens again. And maybe you will never have to make another decision like that again.”

I was unsure whether I believed those words, but something fluttered inside me.

The man sniffled in the open air, lifting his gaze to the sky. Then, to my surprise, he laughed. His laugh matched the wind that whistled past my ear. He responded with just one word.

“Maybe.”